Vivienne Richards
Zee Richie - The Girl Who Dressed Her Dolls
Six Miles Outside Falmouth
I grew up in Bounty Hall, a community six miles outside the historic town of Falmouth, and my earliest memory of making something is also my earliest memory of feeling like myself.
I was a little girl, and I was making clothes for my dolls. Not buying things for them, not pretending with what already existed. Making. Cutting, shaping, putting something together with my hands until it looked like what I had imagined. I also made jewellery for them. The dolls had to be dressed well, and I was the one responsible for that. Looking back now, everything I do today started in that small, serious act of a child who couldn’t stop creating.
Bounty Hall wasn’t a place where fashion shows came through. But creativity found its way in regardless.
Ms. Taylor and the Tuesday Visits
There was a woman named Ms. Taylor from the 4H Club who used to come to the community on Tuesdays to teach the housewives how to bake, sew, and do arts and crafts. My mother would go, and I would go with her. I was not supposed to be the student. I just couldn’t stay away.
I absorbed everything. The way fabric behaved under a needle, the way a craft could turn raw material into something finished and beautiful. Ms. Taylor planted something in me that Tuesday visits alone couldn’t contain. I started watching runway shows whenever I could find them. I read fashion magazines, studying the colours and the trends of each season, learning how the world of design spoke its own language.
Crochet came later, but when it arrived it felt like everything I had been moving toward. A craft that is entirely handmade, that takes patience and presence, that produces something nobody else can replicate in quite the same way. I understood immediately that this was mine.
What the Island Asks For
My crochet pieces are colourful, vibrant, durable, authentic. They are made to reflect the culture and lifestyle of the Jamaican people, and they are made for all kinds of people who move through this island and carry pieces of it with them when they leave.
Some pieces are for the risk takers: the bathing suits that ask you to be bold, to take up space, to own the beach. Others are crochet tams for the visitors who come to Jamaica and want to feel connected to the culture, to wear something that says they were here and it meant something. I design for the elegant woman and for the laid-back one. For the person who wants to make a statement and the person who wants to simply feel at ease. Jamaica holds all of those people, and so do my pieces.
I think of Zara and Miu Miu when I think about where Zee Richie sits in the broader world of design: brands with a strong point of view, with colour and craft at the centre, with a global reach that doesn’t lose what makes them distinct.
Staying Up All Night
When I am in the zone with crochet, time stops being a real thing.
I will stay up all night creating. Not because I have to, but because the work pulls me forward and I don’t want to stop. There is a rhythm to crochet that takes over once you’re inside it: the hook, the yarn, the pattern growing stitch by stitch under your hands. It is meditative and urgent at the same time. Hours disappear and what remains is a finished piece that carries every one of those hours in it, even if no one can see them.
That invisibility is part of what makes handmade things precious. The work doesn’t announce itself. It simply holds.
The Hardest Part
Marketing has been my toughest roadblock, and I won’t dress that up.
Creating I have always known how to do. Getting the work in front of the right people, building an audience, learning how to speak about what I make in a way that reaches beyond my immediate community: that has required a completely different set of skills. Skills I have had to learn from scratch, often while also trying to fill orders, manage production, and keep the creative side alive. It is a balancing act that nobody fully prepares you for when you start.
But I kept going. That is the only real answer I have. You keep going.
For the Woman Who Notices
When I design, I think about Meghan Markle, not because of who she is in terms of titles or headlines, but because of how she has consistently chosen to put small businesses in front of the world. She notices craft. She chooses it deliberately. The woman I design for has that same quality: she sees what went into something and she values it.
I design for the elegant lady and the laid-back person equally. For the people of the Diaspora who want something real and rooted. For the visitors who come to Jamaica and leave wanting to carry the feeling of it with them.
For that person, I want the moment they look at one of my pieces to feel like recognition. To feel the authenticity in it before they can fully explain why. Jamaica is in every stitch, and I want them to feel that without needing a single word from me.
Life Support for Small Businesses
Things Jamaican has been the life support for many small businesses, especially those of us connected to tourism. Our creations have been displayed in their gift shops at Sangster’s International Airport and Devon House, placed in front of visitors who would never have found us otherwise. But beyond the placement, Things Jamaican is now carving a path for us, holding our hands, guiding us on how to bring our brands up to the standard the global market requires.
That guidance matters more than I can fully say. It is one thing to be able to make something beautiful. It is another to understand how to carry it into the world properly. Things Jamaican has helped me learn both.
Five years from now, I see Zee Richie’s handmade crochet pieces in major retail stores globally. That vision is clear to me. It always has been.
To the young person who wants to start: do your research, start something you genuinely love, and if you fall, get up and start again. Success is not a moment. It is hard work, accumulated, day after day, stitch after stitch.
Zee Richie is available at Things Jamaican.
