The future belongs to what’s built from within
The February comes with a big shift - a rare astrological moment that marks a collective reset, a break from outdated systems, and a push toward originality, independence, and truth. It’s the kind of energy that exposes what no longer works and amplifies what is real. And it mirrors exactly where many of us find ourselves now.
It is discernment.
Recently, I found myself in a small upholstery studio, surrounded by fabric, wood, horsehair, and quiet concentration and women. I went there intuitively, for healing. After more than twenty-five years in the food industry, building brands, communities, and purposeful businesses around food, I needed something different. Something tactile, creative but not food related, after two challenging intense years of loses and transition.
I did not realise that this course would bring me back to the same principles that have guided my entire life and work.
Upholstery is transformation. You dismantle the old structure completely. You remove the outer layer. You look at what is inside. And only then do you rebuild - from the inside!
After restoring an old chair, an armchair, and a small sofa, I understood something I will never unsee. When you open mass-produced furniture, you find shortcuts. Synthetic fillers. Fragile internal structures. Built for speed. Built for scale. Built for disposal. But when you open a piece that was made properly decades ago, you find solid wood, natural materials, thoughtful joinery, craftsmanship that assumed longevity - the strong core.
The difference is invisible from the outside, but undeniable once exposed.
In that small studio, I also noticed something else. Most of the women ( only women in fact ) there were not simply learning upholstery. They were recovering - either from illness, rom broken relationships, from abusive partners, from burnout, from work or businesses that drained them. Some had been coming for two years, quietly rebuilding their lives while restoring furniture. Creating beauty out of what seemed ruined. Reclaiming value from what others would discard. Rebuilding slowly, properly, without shortcuts. Most talented Lisa - our teacher, who happened to be learned the trade years ago, and can create magic with her hands, well beyond upholstery, but with her paintings and art projects.
And I realised, this is not about furniture.This is about everything.
We are living in an era of unprecedented excess. There is no shortage of anything anymore. We are spoiled. There is abundance of products, brands, experts on any topic, books, courses, opinions, content. A lot of noise! With AI accelerating production, it has never been easier to create something that looks polished. But polish is not substance.
We do not need more of the same. We do not need more copy-and-paste identities, or more noise, confusion and overwhelm. We do not need more businesses built on borrowed language and replicated formulas. What we need now is depth and individuality.
How many more identical nutrition accounts does the world require? How many more beautifully filtered but hollow promises? There are extraordinary wholesome practitioners whose work is grounded in lived experience, gained life knowledge and expertise with years or practice, and refined over decades. People like my dear friend Olga Bonde, whose holistic, delivering results, sincere multilayered approach to nutrition and well-being cannot be manufactured by trend or algorithm or a few years spent in nutrition school. This degree of depths cannot be “copied and paste”, or created in a few weeks, supported just by finances or status.
Books - everyone writing a book these days, because we can! How many more of the same books do we need? Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of books, and have extensive library, especially around food. But most of them never get open. So, lets us not to copy and create more of the same trends, but be more purposeful. My friend and long-time customer Hillary Cottam wrote several books this world need- one of them The Work We Need not as performance, but as a serious attempt to reimagine working systems so they serve people and our future. That is substance born of commitment, many years of research and work in this direction.
In contrast, imitation may appear successful for a moment. Ideas are borrowed. Brands are replicated. Aesthetic is copied. But without the originating creative meaningful force, something is missing. The inner engine does not exist.
I have seen this closely. My beautiful friend Amber Rose in New Zealand built a stunning fermentation brand, Wild Delicious. It carried her essence, her lived experience, her creative intelligence. After a painful outcome, involving the “helper”, she lost that brand. And yet, creativity and inner knowing cannot be stolen. After few years, she rebuilt, more aligned, more sustainable, more powerful. Meanwhile, what was taken lost its vitality, because authenticity cannot be duplicated. Amber’s new creation is Live Wild is gorgeous.
This is the truth of the new era: soul-led, with good intention work outlasts imitation.
The same applies in healing and spirituality. We are witnessing a flood of wellbeing models promising transformation through standardised templates, with big names or gurus leading them. But real healing does not follow a copy-and-paste script. The most profound guidance often comes from those who have walked through darkness themselves and continue to evolve, they hardly seen, and found mostly by word of mouth. I’ve done quite a bit of different healing work over the years and still do.
Just as the true quality of a chair is revealed when you strip away the fabric and look inside, real healing reveals its power beneath the surface in the internal architecture we don’t always see.
My work with Dearbhla Reynolds reflected this truth so clearly. Her Resonance Mapping doesn’t impose anything from the outside; it unveils what is already within. Through intuitive and somatic depth, she helps you recognise misalignments you’ve been carrying quietly, and the feeling afterwards is unmistakable, as if your inner structure has been reassembled with more clarity, a sense of returning to your own centre, an inner spaciousness that shows you the next step without forcing it. In a world full of ‘healing,’ her grounded, personalised, deeply human presence is rare.
Even in art and creativity, where AI now produces astonishing visuals in seconds, the question is not what can be generated, but what carries human presence and energy. My talented friend Patricia Shea experienced disruption when AI art entered the market. But technology cannot replicate the subtle transmission of energy through real hearts and hands, through lived experience. That is becoming more precious, not less.
And then there is food. The way we grow and distribute it. Centralised, extractive systems have reached their limits. We need more detailed purpose that sustains future, people and Earth. The future belongs to localisation, to soil health, to community-based production, to thoughtful preservation. To models that nourish rather than exhaust. Everything connects.
And the business world reflects this same split. Many traditional structures were built for hierarchy, maximum extraction from people, separation and speed - not for creativity, fulfilment, humanity, or community. These systems leave people unfulfilled, unheard, and energetically depleted. They do not nurture originality; they suppress it. And when creative integrity is suppressed, the entire structure begins to fracture from the inside.
Over my work with Puntarelle & Co, and brands London Fermentary and now Fermary, I’ve used that different approach simply because I’ve build this way my self. The core values - integrity, creativity, curiosity community, and soul. Always best quality. Serving people, stay human, be your unique self.
The product or brand without soul - never the goal.
When values are compromised, when people without depth or honesty attempting to shape what they do not understand or feel - the whole concept goes down.
The upholstery studio simply confirmed what I already knew.
When you dismantle cheap furniture, you see what it is made of. When you dismantle outdated systems, shallow brands, or copied identities, you see their foundations too.
The next creative era will not be won by volume, or “copy paste” model. It will be led by those who are willing to build slowly, uniquely, thoughtfully, honestly.
Authenticity is becoming the only sustainable currency.
As spring approaches, the true new year in nature’s calendar, we are invited to choose differently. To create from our core. To stop imitating or diluting, stop chasing visibility for its own sake or just to gain financially.
The future belongs to those who build with soul, and at the same time, help to heal those around them.
With love,
Elena
