His working hours are unplanned and places arbitrary. He works with social media, creates music for promotional videos, frequently takes cigarette breaks. He chooses materials for new collections, produces clothes with local tailors from Blagoevgrad and sells them. This is what 21-year-old Philip Rusev, creator of the closing brand Melanin, likes to do.

Rusev came up with the idea of a clothing brand a year ago, and since then has been rigorously working for his goal.

“It’s self-realization. I am becoming more aware of who I am, I am discovering myself with this thing, honestly. Not like, oh, it’s working, now I am a designer of clothes. I am not a designer of clothes. I don’t know what I am. I cannot really put it in one word, I just love it, the whole process, everything, being a little part of this, being a little part of that,” he says.

All working days are different for Rusev. It mostly depends on which stage of production Melanin is on. However, the creative process is even less predictable. “Coming up with the design is very random. It can happen if I’m in the toilet, in the shower, if I’m sleeping, right after Underground, after a party, usually. I am not a work planner. I don’t plan it. I do what I feel like and it just happens to be ok,” he says.

Once he got the idea of a new design, he describes it to people, gets feedback and turns it into real piece of clothing. “[I] just speak it into existence. I speak about it, I speak about it, I buy the materials, I go to my nice ladies, the tailors, I describe to them,” says Rusev.

Rusev calls himself a motivator, rather than manager or designer. He thinks that he could not have done anything without his team of friends. “We super love each other. And it is amazing to see how everybody grows, how everybody prospers. We all do it together and we also do it because we are together,” he says.

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