If you’ve ever felt trapped in a beige wardrobe (or brand) wondering how to break free without losing your nerve, this episode is for you. Eva & Brigitta dive into how the messy overlap of style and branding influence the way you show up online as a personal brand .
We unpack why the beige default is holding you back, how to start sprinkling colour into your wardrobe without ending up saying “I have nothing to wear!”, and why your personal style is one of the ultimate expressions of your values, and personality. From cybersecurity to fashion, Brigitta is living proof that leaning into what makes you YOU is how you create your unmistakable brand.
Expect history lessons, nerdy tangents, and a spicy take that’ll have you rethinking everything about what “professionalism” looks like.
Every guest has to go through the audition process, and Brigitta came prepared:
She grew up immersed in fabrics, fit, and the understanding that what works for one body doesn't work for another. Fashion wasn't frivolous — it was functional, creative, and deeply personal.
Oh, and plot twist: English is her third language. Romanian was the official language, but she grew up in a Hungarian-speaking family. She worked hard to lose her accent when she moved because she just wanted to blend in (again with the blending in theme). But now? She wishes she'd kept a little bit of it.
Because the parts we try to hide about ourselves — our accents, our quirks, the way we look or dress — often end up being the things that make us us.
Brigitta sees her brand as sophisticated, playful, and grounded — and that's a direct reflection of her personal style. For her, style is how she makes her values visible when someone experiences her in real life or on camera. It's not decoration. It's not performance (though it can be when we're not sure of ourselves).
Style expresses something we connect with that's important to us. And when we show up as the true version of ourselves, not using clothing as armour to put up a front, that's when we let our guard down and actually connect with people.
The moment she started connecting clothing with how she wanted to feel instead of how she wanted to be seen? That's when she stopped looking for approval.
And here's the thing I've been thinking about since this conversation: approval is linked to self-trust. The more we look at external voices for what's "right" or how things "should" be, the harder it is to build that self-trust. Because self-trust is a muscle you flex — it doesn't just show up one day.
But we're so surrounded by media telling us how we're supposed to show up, what we're supposed to wear, how we're supposed to look. And that makes self-trust feel shaky. It feels vulnerable.
Yesterday, I saw a piece of content that said: "If you're using your favourite colour in branding, stop right there. You're just making it about you, and you should be making it about how you want your clients to feel."
I had a visceral reaction.
Let me be clear: you're not going to start with colour. If you're looking at your brand identity thinking, "I like blue, so I'm going to use blue" or "I think my audience likes blue, so I'm going to use blue," both of those approaches are missing the strategy underneath.
Colour is impactful. It has a strong presence. But it's just one piece of the puzzle.
Before you make any visual decision — colour, type, photography, graphics — you need to do the hard work of brand strategy. Who's your ideal audience? What are they coming to you for? What do you believe in? What makes you different from every other person selling what you're selling?
Only then can you make visual decisions. And sometimes that means following patterns (like banks using blue because it signals trust). Sometimes it means purposefully disrupting those patterns (like a fast-food brand using green instead of red because they want to be seen as the healthy choice).
The same applies to style. There's so much talk about colour analysis right now — like it's going to solve all the world's problems. But Brigitta's take is that people are just going to be confused in a palette. You might look good in pink, but which pink? And what if you look good in pink but don't even like pink?
It's not about manipulation or crafting this neatly packaged look. It's about trusting yourself.
One question I had for Brigitta: Where do you draw the line between what's the business, what's the personal brand, and what's just... the person?
Because no one's walking around their house in a full brand outfit 24/7 (or maybe you are, I don't know your life).
Here's what she said: We're not inventing new personalities. It's still one person. You establish your personal style — what's important to you, who you are, how you want to show up — and that acts as the common thread. Your through line.
Then you look at the different contexts of your life. And as a personal brand, there are SO many contexts. Who are you when you're working on your laptop at home? What energy do you bring to a client call? What about co-working with other business owners? What about stepping on stage versus vacationing and showing up on content anyway?
You're still you in all those contexts, but what gives you energy on a work-from-home day is completely different from what gives you energy on stage.
Clothing is a tool. Brigitta thinks of clothes as levers you pull on. Your personal style has different facets, and depending on the context, you crank certain levers up or down.
When you're on stage, you're really cranking that modern, professional, put-together lever. But you still have the playful, relaxed lever because you're still you. You're not putting on a pantsuit if you'd never meet a client in a pantsuit. You're reading the room while staying true to yourself — maybe that's flowy pants with a cool graphic top and heels because you love wearing heels and you feel like you're strutting when you're in them.
But you're probably not wearing heels to a co-working session at a cafe. Unless that's your style. The point is: the entire wardrobe should feel like you, and the way you style it for a certain context is how you draw the line.
So let's say you've beige-ified your way through life thus far. You're not in the "I have nothing to wear" camp anymore, but now you want to play a little. You want to introduce colour without tipping into overwhelm.
Brigitta sees this a lot: people go from all black & white to buying green & red, and suddenly they don't know who they are anymore.
Her advice: Use neutrals as your foundation. Neutrals paired with pops of colour let you infuse personality into your wardrobe without feeling like you're in the deep end. Plus, neutrals ground the colours. In branding, you're never going to see a colour palette without at least a light and a dark neutral — because the best way to create contrast is to highlight something by juxtaposing it next to something opposite.
And here's where a lot of us go wrong: we look at primary colours or really bright colours because they pop. But Brigitta's recommendation? Start with muted tones. Earth tones. Deeper shades like mustard or moody burgundies.
These colours still feel like colours, but they pair easily with neutrals (and with each other) without looking costume-y. They look modern, creative and even luxurious.
I have shiny object syndrome when it comes to clothes. I walk into a store, fall in love with the standout piece, buy it, and then get home and think, "Now what?"
Brigitta does this too, so she created herself guardrails.
First: everything is a trend. Some have shorter lifespans, others longer. Even classics get reinvented every five to ten years. The white button-down in the 2010s was cinched at the waist with tighter sleeves. Now? It's boxy and loose.
You can't predict what's going to have a long lifespan. But you can reinvent a trend in your closet as long as it aligns with you.
Here's the question Brigitta asks her clients when they're torn about buying a trend: If no one else was wearing it, would you still want it?
That'll tell you a lot about why you want the thing.
Sometimes we want to inject excitement into our wardrobe. We want to have fun. And when something resonates with you, you instantly think, "Who would I be if I wore this?" That's a good sign.
But if it's coming from a place of "I'm going to look like I belong" or "This will create the illusion of status," it's going to feel weird when you wear it — especially when the validation you were hoping for doesn't come.
Before investing in a trend, Brigitta looks at it from three angles:
For that last part, she uses a style matrix — three words that define her personal style (current, relaxed, elevated). For each word, she breaks down the fits, textures, and colors she associates with it. Then she runs the trend through that mental checklist.
Barrel-leg jeans? Loose fit = relaxed. Playful shape = current. Denim = elevated. Slam dunk.
We had to talk about this.
The rise of quiet luxury, old money, and tradwife aesthetics — to me, it's all about repackaging conformity as tasteful. And I wanted Brigitta's take on who benefits from keeping women in this neutrality environment.
Her answer: These are conservative aesthetics. And we have to look at the undercurrent causing them.
These aesthetics are about association to social status and the values that come with that status. We romanticise old money & quiet luxury because we see it on TV, on our feeds. We start to think this is how normal people dress. But it takes effort to plan a wardrobe like that — even if getting dressed looks effortless afterward.
We're sold the idea that you can achieve this ease, and this is the bar you should aspire to. If you're not sure what you want your wardrobe to represent, it can represent wealth & status.
But the more we consume that content, the easier it is to get distracted. We lose sight of what's truly important to communicate with our outfits. We lose sight that clothing can be a tool to stand firm in what we believe in.
And there's a lineup of corporations ready to assign you this identity so they can sell you more stuff.
When we look at bestsellers on H&M or Mango, it's the same neutrals, the same quiet luxury aesthetic that sold well last year and the year before. It's easy to buy without thinking, which means you're probably buying more and spending more on impulse purchases.
As women age, media reinforces that we become less relevant. So we seek relevance by dressing in a way that makes us feel like we're still in touch, still here, still haven't "let ourselves go." We're checking in with the internet about what's okay for us to wear.
We're distracted. We're not thinking about acts of resistance. We're not thinking about manufacturing practices or employment ethics. We're just thinking, "I need to look relevant and rich. What's the cheapest way to do it?"
The paradox is real: What's the cheapest way to make me look expensive?
Before we ended the episode, I asked Brigitta for her spicy take — the hill she'll die on when it comes to style.
Here it is: Your self-expression will not alienate clients you want to work with.
If you show up more as yourself and people unfollow you or don't want to work with you because of how you dress, your political opinions, or your sexual orientation? That's a marketing problem. Not a style problem.
Think about the type of person who's not okay with you being yourself. Why would you want to work with them in the first place?
We carry so much baggage from corporate environments where self-expression wasn't encouraged because it wasn't aligned with company values. But in the small business space, those attributes are what make you you. And when people buy into who you are — not just what you do — they can't find that anywhere else.
That's how you become the obvious choice.
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Over the last 5 years as a Brand & Marketing Designer, I’ve helped freaks like us design their unconventional brands so they can step onto the main stage & own their weird. Because if you wanted to be, look or sound like everyone else, you wouldn’t be where you are today. Now it’s your turn.
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