After the Rain

2025: The Year That Broke Women

By Founder & Creative Director, J.James

If you’ve felt that this year has been heavier than most, you’re not alone. Every conversation I’ve had lately has carried a similar thread. 2025 has been a year of endings.

Breakups. Burnouts. Layoffs. Heartbreaks both quiet and loud.

So many of us appear to have lost something familiar and it’s not just our relationships. At first glance 2025 looked like a year of failure. On top of this we’ve been dealing with the cost of living rising at an astronomical rate, climate anxiety, the pressure to overachieve while scrolling through social media feeds filled with overnight success stories. Not to mention a political shift unsettling enough to keep anyone up at night. The fact of the matter is this: 2025 nearly broke us.

But maybe that was the point.

2025 is a nine year. In numerology, nine marks the end of a cycle. It’s the closing of one chapter before the next can begin. A discerning woman may have already noticed shifts in the fashion landscape, in gender roles, in women reclaiming voices in rooms that once silenced them.

And I think that’s because we did what women always do. We adapted.

We made the best of bad situations by striving, battling and making things work. The cost of that kind of resilience is the loss of things that no longer align. Sometimes by choice, sometimes by what we can only call divine timing.

So maybe 2025 was not a year of breaking, but of shedding.

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The Moment After the Rain

More recently, when I have listened to these same women speak, there has been something different in their voices. It seems the dark and gloomy clouds have cleared and what’s left is clarity.

Perhaps you haven’t reached your moment of clarity yet. But I promise it comes.

You might feel it walking home after the rain, when the city lights are reflected in the slick pavement. The air smells cleaner. You catch your reflection in a droplet-speckled window; poised, structured, wiser. You realise you have survived what once felt like your undoing. That’s a moment worth holding onto.

Building Structure from the Storm

When I founded ARLO it wasn’t just to design beautiful accessories. It was to build something for myself and for others.

ARLO is a brand for women who have rebuilt themselves. The clean lines, the quiet strength, the minimalism; all are metaphors for who and what we are becoming. Something more intentional, more refined.

We know what matters and we can cut away what doesn’t.

What Comes Next?

2025 wasn’t meant to be a year of winning. It was a year of alignment.
The year we stopped chasing and started to trust our own timing again.

So, if you find yourself walking through the city tonight, coat wrapped tight, the air cold against your skin, remember this: the rain has already done its work.

What needed to be washed away has gone. You are no longer falling behind.
You are arriving.

Love, JJ xx