It hasn't been an easy road nor will it be easy from here onwards. When people ask, "How did you start this and why?" there is no easy way to begin. I was born on a little island in Estonia called Saaremaa, in a little village called Anseküla on July 5th 1988. I was like any other small kid, except really short. Our family wasn't too well off, we were living in two different places. One of them wa
s a cottage in Mändjala Camping Grounda and it fit a family of 6 - my parents, myself, my 2 sisters, and my brother. Both my parents worked in a restaurant on the grounds. The other family home was my grandmother's house in Anseküla. In the end, we moved to my grandmother's in Anseküla and stayed there. My oldest sister moved to the capital of Estonia, Tallinn; my brother followed shortly after, as did my other older sister. Me, my youngest sister, our parents and grandparents remained in Anseküla. After turning 16, I started working in Finland with my brother. I was labouring at a construction site, cleaning floors, picking up rubbish - all the lowly jobs that needed done. This was only a summer job as I was still in school and that started up when autumn rolled around. At this point I was a student at Kuressaare Industrial School. I only had a year to go but decided to drop out and work. I never managed to go back. Even in the early days I was interested in good clothes and styles. At the mere age of 18, I tried opening an online clothing store but that business flopped. After the first one, I tried opening a few different businesses but to no avail. At that time, I thought of them as failures. This meant going back to working for other people, which I did. I tried many different occupations and finally started work as a scaffolder. It was a well paying job but I was young and reckless - coming from a middle class family meant spending the money faster than actually earning it. I tried opening more businesses, ranging from clothing to scaffolding and everything in between. None of them were a success. Finally, me and my two friends decided to move to Australia. We had to loan the money to buy our flights to Singapore and spent 3 days in Singapore in order to get the cheapest flights to Australia and get a loan for more money. When we finally arrived in Australia, we had about $60 between the three of us. We slept in parks, bus stations, even public toilets on rainy days, but we never gave up, never stopped driving. We didn't even have any money for food. In the end we managed to hit up another friend in Estonia and buy a tent to sleep in for the following few weeks. We managed to score a painting job but weren't terribly good at it and ended up getting sacked. On the upside, we managed to save enough to buy a car! Then we got a job in Pemberton, in a potato factory. We were packing potatoes and cleaning floors, one of us worked at a sawmill. All the while we were trying to get work in scaffolding in Pilbara mines. After many tries we finally got a phone call saying we'd all got jobs with Linkforce. In order to work on scaffolds, we needed different tickets and needed to work and save money for those. Every time we drove to Perth, we slept in the car because we couldn't afford to pay for any accommodation. Finally we managed to get all our tickets and start work with Linkforce and things were starting to look up for us. The point of my story is to never give up, keep pushing yourself, get out of your comfort zone. Life needs to occasionally get uncomfortable or you won't try to do better. Thinking back, I've been without money, without work, tried and failed at numerous businesses but I've never given up. To this day, I've had a million ideas rolling around in my head, but now I've found what I'm really passionate about. My own brand, Glen Pold. My advice to anyone reading this is to keep trying. Even if you fail, even when you think it's just too hard, just keep trying because one day you will find a way to realize what you love and gain success. The road to success is not an easy one. Life never hands you anything, you need to go and take it. Before you can do this, you have to fail because without failure, there is no success. That is the short story of how I got to where I am now. I hope you all like my designs. Everything I do, I do with my heart.
