The Beyond the Rush collection launched in December. Six silhouettes with eighty-two variations. The most complete expression of what Paciencia has been building toward since Joy Fache James founded the brand in 2021 with a name, a philosophy, and the specific kind of stubbornness that serious things require.
Five years later, the stubbornness has a record behind it. The fashion shows, the grants and recognitions, and her initiative, the She Creates Fashion Initiative, now in its second year. And now this collection that arrives when a brand has finally built everything it needs to build something at scale without anything breaking.
I wanted to talk to Joy about all of it, what the collection required, what five years actually feels like from the inside. I also wanted to know what she would say to the woman who is thinking about buying a Paciencia piece for the first time.
La Mode: The Beyond the Rush collection. Eighty-two variations. That is a significant step up in ambition. Where did it come from?
Joy: It came from a question I had been sitting with for a while: how do you grow a handcraft brand without the growth becoming the thing that kills what made it worth growing?
Most accessories brands at this stage would have two options. Scale the production by compromising the craft, bring in machines, reduce the handwork, make the process faster and more replicable. Or keep the craft and stay small, accept that the handmade ceiling is the business ceiling. I did not want either of those options. So there was a third option which I had gone for.
The third one turned out to be the collection architecture. Six core silhouettes; disciplined, coherent, each one fully resolved, expressed across eighty-two variations in different leathers, different finishes, different colourways. The silhouettes hold the design identity. The variations serve the market. You can offer genuine range without fragmenting the brand because the range is in the surface treatment, not in the design thinking underneath it.
The design thinking underneath it is consistent across every one of the eighty-two pieces. That is the thing that cannot be compromised. And because it is not compromised, because every piece in this collection holds the same standard, the growth is possible without the thing that made the brand worth growing being lost in the process.
La Mode: How do you actually verify that across eighty-two pieces? How do you know each one is what it needs to be?
Joy: the honest answer is by holding it, but it is not as simple as it sounds. I hold every piece before it goes. I’m holding it to find out if everything that needs to be there is there and nothing that should not be there is present. Whether the weave has the tension it needs, and the edge finishing is correct. Whether the hardware sits the way the design requires it to sit.
Most of the time the answer is yes, and the piece goes. Sometimes the answer is not yet, and the piece goes back. In eighty-two variations, that happened more than I would have liked and exactly as many times as it needed to.
The standard is not a number of pieces or a production target. The standard is the standard. Everything that leaves the studio meets it. That is the only rule that does not have an exception.
LA Mode: The collection title, Beyond the Rush. It is also a statement of where the brand positions itself. Do you ever feel pressure to operate differently? To move faster, release more, be more present in the content cycle?
Joy: if I must be honest, I do feel that every day. The pressure is not from outside the brand, or not only from outside the brand. It is structural. The platforms that are most effective at building visibility for consumer brands are designed for frequency. They reward consistency of output in a way that is genuinely in tension with what Paciencia is and how it works. The algorithm does not care that the weaving takes as long as it takes. It cares that you posted yesterday and are posting again today.
So there is a real tension. And I navigate it by separating the brand communications, the content, the storytelling, the community building, from the production timeline. I can communicate more frequently than I produce. I can tell the story of how something is being made while it is being made, without releasing it before it is ready. The content and the collection do not have to move at the same pace.
But I will not pretend the pressure is not there. It is. And holding the production standard against it requires a specific kind of daily recommitment to what the brand is and why it exists.
La Mode: Who is the Beyond the Rush collection for? Specifically, who did you have in her mind when you were building it?
Joy: The woman who has stopped apologising for knowing what she wants. Yes, she has been through the stage of buying things to signal, to fit in, to communicate something about herself to rooms she was not yet sure she belonged in. She is past that. She knows which rooms she belongs in. She is not dressing for the rooms anymore. She is dressing for herself and for the specific satisfaction of reaching for something in the morning that she knows is right, that feels right in the hand, that carries the evidence of its making in a way she can feel even when nobody else can see it.
She is not easy to sell to, in the conventional sense. She is not moved by urgency or scarcity or the anxiety of missing out. She is moved by quality. By the specific, honest, unperformative quality of an object that was made correctly, from the right materials, by someone who cared about the same things she cares about.
I made this collection for her. All eighty-two of them.
La Mode: Five years in. What did you get wrong in the first year that you would not get wrong now?
Joy: I underpriced. Not dramatically, I knew enough, with the MBA background, to avoid the worst mistakes. But I underpriced in the specific way that most Nigerian luxury brands underprice, which is: I priced for the customer I was afraid to lose rather than for the product I was actually making.
The product I was making in 2021 was worth more than I charged for it. The leather was real. The weaving was handmade. The lining was leather. These are not the materials or the construction methods of a mid-range accessories brand. But I priced it like a mid-range accessories brand because I was not yet confident enough in the customer who would understand and pay the correct price.
The correct price is the price that reflects the actual cost of making something correctly, plus the margin required to keep making it correctly. When you price below that, you are subsidising the buyer’s acquisition with your own sustainability. And that arrangement does not hold.
I know this now. I price correctly now. And the customers who are with Paciencia at the correct price are the customers who understand the brand. Which turns out to be a better business and a better relationship simultaneously.
La Mode: What does the next five years look like?
Joy: A house with an address in more than one country.
The international presence, the UK, the US, Canada, the UAE customer base that has been building through the direct-to-consumer platform needs physical infrastructure in the next phase. Stockist relationships. Retail partnerships. The kind of presence that allows a customer in London to hold the leather before she buys it, rather than trusting the image and waiting for the shipping.
That is the next stage. Building it requires the kind of institutional relationships and the kind of capital that the grant wins, the Wema Bank grant, the Jerry Eze Foundation grant are beginning to provide access to. The institutional credibility that comes with those recognitions opens conversations that were harder to open before them.
She Creates Fashion Initiative needs to grow too. It is in its second year and it is doing what it was designed to do, training women in the complete toolkit, the creative and the commercial together. But it is still operating at a scale limited by the resources of one brand running a parallel programme. It needs its own infrastructure eventually. Its own funding and institutional partnerships. That is the longer horizon.
And the bags. Always the bags. Every year, a collection that is more completely Paciencia than the one before it, deeper into the design language, wider in the range it can serve, more confident in the conviction it was built on.
La Mode: What would you say to the woman who is looking at a Paciencia piece right now, online, holding her credit card, still not sure?
Joy: Put your credit card down. Go and read about how the bags are made. Understand what the leather lining means and why it is there. Understand what the weaving requires and how long it takes. Understand what the silhouette was designed to be and how it will hold that form across years of use.
And then decide. Not on the basis of whether the bag is beautiful. It is, but beauty is easy to find. Decide on the basis of whether what this bag is made of, and how it is made, and what it was designed to do over time, is worth what it costs.
If the answer is yes, and if you are the woman I made it for, it will be yes. Then pick up the credit card. The bag will be there for the next ten years, so will Paciencia.
