On Making Things That Matter

When I was very young, my family was new to this country. We didn't have much. My mother would clip coupons at the kitchen table after dinner — careful, deliberate, because it mattered. The ones she saved most were for Subway sandwiches. A family of four. Two subs. Split down the middle.

I always shared with my dad.

I don't know if it was the sandwich or the sharing of it. But I have never been able to smell sweet onion dressing without feeling something I don't have a word for. Warmth doesn't cover it. Home is closer. A $5 footlong did something that a hundred better meals never did. It wasn't about the food. It was about everything that surrounded it. The intention behind it. The love that looked like a coupon folded into a wallet.

I think about that a lot.

When my grandmother immigrated to join us, I was four years old. I couldn't do much — I was too small, too young, too new to the world myself. But I felt the weight of the moment. So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I made her a card. Crayon on construction paper, letters I could barely keep straight: Welcome grandma, you're finally home.

It felt like the most important thing I had ever made. Not because it was good. Because I meant it completely. Every crooked letter was real.

She showed me that card last year. Sixteen years later, folded carefully, kept somewhere she could find it.

I didn't know what to do with that. I still don't, fully. But I understood something in that moment that I hadn't had language for before. When emotion is poured in, emotion is felt. You cannot manufacture it. You cannot template it. You can only decide — every time you make something — whether you mean it or not. Whether the person on the other side of it matters to you or not.

My grandmother kept a crayon card for sixteen years because she could feel that she mattered to the four year old who made it.

That is the whole thing. That is all of it.

Then I discovered Virgil Abloh. Off-White's quotation mark logo — taken from Glasgow Airport's 1960s signage system. The 3% rule: change something just enough to make it yours. A wayfinding system built to move strangers through terminals, resurrected forty years later as the visual language of a generation. I sat with that for a long time. The idea that meaning doesn't have to be invented from nothing. That it can be found, relocated, carried forward. That design is archaeology as much as it is creation.

That's when I understood what I was actually interested in.

Not making things that work. Making things that stay. The card kept in a drawer. The sandwich that tasted like enough. The airport logo that became something else entirely without losing what it was.

Most things are built to function. Very few are built to be felt. The difference between them is not talent or budget or technology. It is the decision — made before anything else — to care about the person on the other side. To mean it.

I am 20 years old. I am still new to this. Still figuring out what my hands are for.

But I know it starts with a shared sandwich that tasted like home.

It starts with a crayon card a grandmother kept for sixteen years.

It starts with 3%.

It starts with meaning it.