CEOess® · Wear the Standard
The collection I madefor the woman I had to become.
A Reminder You Can Wear.
Not a slogan — a standard, in garment form
I spent years building everyone else’s systems while treating my own needs like a rounding error. The collection came out of the correction: the moment I stopped performing availability and started protecting my capacity.
Every piece carries words I needed to read on my worst mornings. SELF-FIRST. LEAD YOURSELF FIRST. STRUCTURE CREATES FREEDOM. Stitched where you’ll see them — at the collar, across the chest, against the skin.
Pre-collection · nothing here is for sale yet. Every piece is in development.
Why it exists
There is a version of ambition that looks like constant motion and feels like erosion. I lived there. Every yes I didn’t mean, every room I stayed in past its usefulness, every collaboration I entered to seem collaborative.
What replaced it wasn’t balance. It was structure. Systems that hold the work so I don’t have to hold it in my head. Boundaries that survive contact with other people’s urgency. A calendar that reflects what I’ve decided matters, not what arrived loudest.
The collection is that decision, made wearable. It is also unfinished on purpose — I’d rather release four families slowly and honestly than ship a catalogue of things nobody asked me to make.
Leilani Anderson-Monroe Founder, CEOess® · Boss Women Network
The pieces I wear first
Collection preview
Collection preview
Collection preview
And the tees, because I live in them
Three tees carry the whole idea without raising their voice: SELF-FIRST across the chest, the CEOess wordmark underneath, and a maroon that reads as a decision rather than a colour.
The SELF-FIRST Order
Self-first is not selfishness. Selfishness takes from other people. Self-first is sequence — the order in which you spend yourself so there is something left to give.
There are six things competing for you at any given moment. Only one of them can be funded first. This is the order I keep:
Spiritual health
The source. Prayer, silence, or whatever keeps you anchored to something larger than your inbox. It gets the first hour, not the leftover minutes.
Mental health
The filter. What you allow to run in your head decides what you allow into your life. Protect your attention like it costs money, because it does.
Physical health
The vehicle. Sleep, food, movement. Nothing else on this list functions if the body is not funded first — and no one can carry your body for you.
Family
The people close enough to see the seam. They get the present version of you, not the depleted remains of your week.
Business
The work. It gets your ambition and your strategy — not the last hour you have before you collapse. Ambition is renewable; capacity is not.
Everyone else
The audience, the inbox, the requests, the yes I used to give to seem generous. They get what remains — and that is not neglect. That is order.
Reverse the order and everything downstream collapses. That is the whole point: putting yourself first is not a feeling you announce — it is an order you keep.
The full collection lives at Boss Women Network.
Nothing in this collection is manufactured yet. When pieces go into production, they appear there first — documented, priced and photographed — so this page can stay what it is: the reason.
Garments shown are in development. Unmanufactured pieces are labelled Coming Soon or Collection Preview. No piece is presented as available until it is.