Savannah Anand-Sobti on professional and creative growth

This is the second in a new series titled Charming People, where we ask creatives we love about their journey to finding and expressing their own unique selves. It is made in partnership with Pandora, celebrating a new collection of miniature Pandora Me charms, earrings and carriers designed to help you better express yourself. 

Figuring out who you are is a complex process. Depending on your perspective, it can be incredibly stressful or incredibly freeing.

We chose the latter after sitting down with Savannah Anand-Sobti, one half of the team behind Ladies of Leisure and self-professed “Jill of all trades, master of none”.

In our time with Savannah, she spoke to just how many endeavours she’s tried out in her 27 years of life, and admits to starting a lot of those with more gumption than experience. After studying textile design at university, for example, she got a job in marketing – a logical leap, obviously.

The current iteration of Savannah goes by the title Creative Director, running LOL as a zine-cum-workshop space alongside editor in chief Sally Tabart. But it took her a long – and often surprising – journey to get there.

LOL began as a zine, filled with everything the pair felt passionate about and coloured by Savannah’s feel for design and colour (thank you, uni degree). But the team couldn’t shake the feeling they were disconnected from their audience.

“We’d have a zine launch, and there would be all these great people who came along,” Savannah explains. “But we’d just be thinking, ‘Who are you?’”

So, like the creatives at its core, the zine evolved. Sav and Sally established a dedicated LOL space to meet their zine community in real life, and let them meet each other. They started hosting workshops, covering a spectrum of topics like running a business, making friends, life drawing and having better sex.

The goal was to link the zine’s readers with industry professionals and role models in a safe and beautiful environment.

For someone like Savannah who’s so used to switching things up and exploring new paths, laser focusing on one thing is a big change. She knows this isn’t her final evolution – personally or professionally – but notes that being able to sit with that is a type of growth of its own.

“This has been a year of being more present, and I’ve consciously decided to just focus on LOL workshops and do one thing really well,” she says. “It’s not where I want to be in the future sense, but in the present sense I’m so okay with that.”

She explains that she spent so much of her teens and 20s being really, really hard on herself and found it exhausting. How she combats that is a very practical kind of zen, acknowledging that she’s got time ahead of her and that nobody can be on a super productive grind all the time.

Being able to accept and even enjoy that downtime also makes it easier to do some soul searching.

Proper self-knowledge is an intense process and one filled with introspection. But Savannah paints it as an exercise in sifting: figuring out what actually makes you happy as opposed to what society is subconsciously feeding you.

The key to navigating this process is confidence.

“If you don’t have confidence, even if it’s a quiet confidence, it’s hard to get things done,” she says frankly. “You can’t rely on external praise to get you anywhere.”

She’s talking getting things done in terms of your career or making meaningful connections, but also in terms of just living the most fulfilling life you can. By knowing who you are and feeling good about yourself, you’re opening the door to being able to express yourself in a way that feels natural and productive.

While Savannah points out that self-expression is a very broad concept – “Everything’s self-expression, right? The kind of music you listen to, the clothes you wear, your favourite brand of toothpaste, it’s all a choice.” – one of the biggest ways it manifests in her life is through creative endeavours like LOL.

While both the zine and workshop space are slick and full of personality, Savannah drives home the fact that there are strong values underneath the aesthetics. Those values come directly from Savannah and Sally, reflecting the topics and ideas that are most important to them.

Principles like inclusivity and the empowerment of women shine through LOL’s agenda. And with every workshop, the tangible results drive the pair to keep pushing themselves with what they can offer.

The environment becomes a physical, interactive moodboard, decked out with objects and people Sav finds cool or inspiring.

Thinking about this reality, Savannah laughs. “It’s almost selfish in a way, isn’t it?”

But in the context of self-expression, perhaps that’s the point.

Savannah wears bracelets, charms and earrings from the Pandora Me collection, which is now available at Pandora stores and online. Browse and shop the full collection here and read about our other Charming People here.

pandora.net

Styling credits

LOOK ONE
SUKU TOP, MODEL’S OWN PANTS, CONVERSE SHOES, PANDORA ME BRACELETS, CHARMS AND EARRINGS

LOOK TWO
MODEL’S OWN TOP AND SHOES, SISTER STUDIOS SKIRT, PANDORA ME BRACELETS, CHARMS AND EARRINGS

LOOK THREE
HANSEN AND GRETEL CARDIGAN, MODEL’S OWN CROP TOP, PANTS, SHOES AND JACKET, PANDORA ME BRACELETS, CHARMS AND EARRINGS