For three weeks, I prepared for an interview.

It was a company I genuinely wanted to join. Not because of its reputation, but because of where it was — not an office park, but a public art space. I'm an advertising major, and I've always been drawn to a question: can advertising be more than advertising? Can it belong to a public space? That company stood at that intersection. And the commute from campus was easy. I saw it as my ideal placement. For a while, I believed it was the best possible place for me.

It was a cold day.

I arrived early. Sat in the interview room, waiting. Two interviewers came in. I stood up and reached across the table to shake their hands — but the table was too long. My arm hung in the air for half a second. Then I sat back down. If you want one moment to sum up those twenty minutes, that's the one.

I had prepared a script. Nervousness erased it in the first minute. A few questions I could answer — ones about the brand itself. But most of the time, I just sat there. My mouth was moving, sounds were coming out, but language didn't feel like it belonged to me anymore. Twenty minutes. Walking out, I kept thinking — what was I even doing in there.

The interviewers were kind. They seemed to think I was just there to practice, and gave me advice accordingly. But I really wanted that job. That misunderstanding made it worse.

I sat on a bench in the compound and called my girlfriend. The wind was cold, my hands were cold. Later, when I thought back to that afternoon, the clearest image wasn't any question from the interview — it was the bench. Wooden, dark brown, a crack running along one armrest.

For a week after, the whole thing hung over me. Not a sharp pain — more like a low, constant hum. Was I not good enough.

Then one day, in the dorm shower, with hot water running, a question surfaced:

If I had expressed myself better — could the outcome have been different?

And right after, a question in the completely opposite direction:

What if I didn't express myself at all?

This is not an epiphany story. There was no lightning bolt, no sudden clarity. Just a very ordinary person, after a very ordinary failure, asking a slightly less ordinary question. That question had no answer — but it grew into something.

The reason it became a clothing brand is that the company that turned me down made clothes. If I had interviewed at a beauty company that day, the same thought might have become a beauty brand — "beauty lies in not expressing." It landed on clothing by accident, for no special reason.

And that's how BBAA came to be.