A natural flair: Tetyana Chumak
CLOCKING ON...
Designer and TG Botanical creative director Tetyana Chumak weaves moments of wellness into her workday as she balances running her Ukraine-based brands and family farmland remotely from Catalonia.
7.30am
I wake up, make breakfast for my daughter and then drive her to school on weekdays. I brew my morning coffee while she gets ready and then meet the new day by enjoying this drink after I’ve dropped her off.
9.00am
Meditation time. It is very important for me to start my day in conversation with the Universe, in order to set my mood and dream a little.
10.00am
My working day begins at 10.00 am CET, which is 11:00 am in Kyiv. It is difficult to schedule meetings with my teams right now, as my colleagues are all in Ukraine and there is a constant lack of electricity and internet connection. As a rule, though, I tend to work for an hour each morning, which mainly consists of communicating with colleagues via various work chats.
11.00am
My breakfast is always very simple. It can be avocado toast or scrambled eggs with vegetables. I follow a low-carb keto diet and practise intermittent fasting. I have breakfast at 11.00am and dinner at 5.00pm.
12.00am
Movement. I alternate between online Pilates classes and tennis. I only discovered Pilates recently and I try to never miss a session now. It makes me feel wonderful and lifts my spirit, body and mind.
1.00pm
This is when my working day really gets going. As I said earlier, there are a lot of work chats to manage, since we are currently forced to collaborate at a distance. I try to coordinate each team’s workload separately, which helps me to focus and resolve issues quickly.
3.00pm
I have an online meeting with TG Botanical’s stylist and production team. Today, we discussed our global goals for the brand and tomorrow we plan to talk filming and promotional strategies. The day after that, we will choose fabrics and materials for the next collection. We’re also collaborating with U Space at the moment, a concept store spotlighting Ukrainian design which recently opened in Barcelona.
4.00pm
Meetings regarding our agricultural activities. My family back in Ukraine is mainly engaged in farming, so I work on agriculture-based projects in parallel with my work in fashion. Our business has been deeply impacted by the war with Russia. In the first few months following the invasion, some of my family’s fields burned down and we are still recovering from this awful incident.
5.00pm
Time for dinner. To be completely honest, I really love delicious food, but I don’t like to cook and spend time
preparing meals. If they came up with a pill to replace food, I would happily take it!
7.00pm
I don’t even know if I can really relax after a working day. Most likely this is not possible for me.
9.00pm
My evening begins once everybody has finished dinner and retreated to their various places. No phone calls or messaging. Sometimes, I will go for a walk, other times I might watch a film, meet for dinner or spend time with my daughter… nothing unusual, just simple human pleasures.
Tetyana Chumak initially rose to prominence with her debut fashion label Tago in 2006. A farmer’s daughter, her affinity for the natural world, its fibres and plant-pigmented dyes ultimately led to the birth of TG Botanical during the covid pandemic. The totally made-in-Ukraine brand participated in Copenhagen Fashion Week as a Zalando Sustainability Award finalist in February.
PHOTO: TONYA MATYU
