The Making Of Beare Park: Gabriella Pereira Reflects On Five Years Of Growth
Lessons in growth
By Kiri Johnston | 19th June 2026The first time Issue 03 cover muse Gabriella Pereira presented Beare Park at Australian Fashion Week, she arrived with a debut collection, a clear point of view and a vision for a fashion brand she hoped women would form a lasting relationship with.
Today, Pereira, known simply as Bella, is balancing a growing business, a young family and a career entering a significant new chapter. I briefly met Bella following her Pre-Fall presentation at Australian Fashion Week. Five years after launching Beare Park in the Yallamundi Rooms, she had returned to the same space with a collection that reflected both how far the brand had come and how unwaveringly she had remained committed to the principles that shaped it from the beginning.
A few weeks later, we reconnect via video call. Speaking from her Paddington home while her nine-month-old son Augie plays downstairs, Bella is reflective, thoughtful and candid about the realities of building a business, navigating motherhood and the evolving demands of leadership.
From the beginning
For many designers, returning to the venue where it all began might feel symbolic. For Bella, it offered an opportunity to pause and reflect on just how much has changed. When she launched Beare Park, she wasn’t following a traditional fashion pathway. Born and raised in Sydney and proudly half Sri Lankan through her father’s side, Bella had built a successful career in finance before deciding to take a risk on an idea she couldn’t stop thinking about.
The idea was simple; she couldn’t find the clothes she wanted to wear.
Beare Park isn’t built around trend forecasts or customer personas. Instead, many pieces begin with a simple question: what does Bella want to wear? She gravitates towards oversized tailoring, relaxed silhouettes and clothing that feels effortless yet considered. That personal lens gives the collections their consistency and authenticity, creating pieces women return to season after season.
That customer-led mindset still sits at the centre of Beare Park today. “I really only design things that I want to have in my wardrobe that I can’t find,” she tells me. It sounds straightforward, but it has become one of the brand’s greatest strengths.
Ask Bella who the Beare Park woman is, and the answer is broad. From women in their twenties to women in their eighties, Bella has never designed with a specific age in mind. Her customer might be a corporate executive purchasing suiting season after season, someone searching for a dress for a wedding, or simply a woman looking for pieces she’ll reach for for years to come. That broad appeal is something she loves about the brand.
There is an inclusivity in the way she designs that naturally allows different women to find themselves within the collection. Rather than creating clothing for a particular demographic, she designs for women who value quality, longevity and a strong sense of personal style.
On dressing Margot Robbie
That philosophy has also translated beyond Beare Park’s core customer base. Earlier this year, Margot Robbie was photographed arriving at Sydney Airport wearing the brand’s Carmen Short and Long Sleeve Crew Neck T-Shirt. The sighting quickly circulated online, with both styles selling out shortly afterwards. For a label built on elevated essentials rather than statement pieces, it felt like a fitting moment, proof that thoughtful, well-made clothing can resonate just as strongly as a red-carpet gown.
It’s also why fabric remains the starting point for every collection. Before silhouettes, styling or campaigns, Bella begins with materiality. The weight of a fabric, how it moves, how it feels against the body and how it will wear over time all influence the final design. That commitment extends beyond the sketchbook.
A brand built with intention
Everything produced by Beare Park is made in Australia, and Bella remains closely involved throughout the process. Most weeks involve meetings with makers and suppliers at their factories, many of which are located just a short drive from the brand’s Redfern headquarters. It’s a hands-on approach that reflects the way she runs the entire business.
Most days begin in the office alongside her team. Ideas are developed around a whiteboard, discussed, erased, challenged and refined until a final direction emerges. The process is collaborative, built on conversation and a willingness to keep refining an idea until it feels right.
What becomes increasingly clear throughout our conversation is that Beare Park has been built with purpose. From producing every collection in Australia to prioritising quality fabrics and maintaining close relationships with local makers, the decisions behind the brand have always been guided by a long-term vision rather than short-term momentum.
That same philosophy informed the brand’s recent Pre-Fall collection, which explored ideas of devotion, instinct and permanence. Rather than signalling a new direction, the collection reflected a designer refining and deepening an already established point of view. Through elongated tailoring, fluid draping, sheer silks and crisp cottons, Bella explored the tension between structure and softness, while a palette of burnt sienna, nightshade, ivory and tobacco evoked a sense of memory and intimacy. Anchored by the lyrics of Sinéad O’Connor’s In This Heart, the collection felt deeply personal, conceived during what Bella described as a period of profound personal and creative change.
That respect for craftsmanship was also evident during Beare Park’s recent Pre-Fall presentation at Australian Fashion Week.
In the show notes, Bella included the names of the makers behind each look, a distinct detail I had never seen before. It was a small gesture, but one that spoke volumes about the values underpinning the business and the people responsible for bringing the collections to life.
As the brand has grown, so too has Bella’s understanding of leadership. When we speak, Bella is in the process of slowly expanding the team. Despite the visibility of the brand, the operation behind it remains relatively lean. Alongside that evolution has come a greater appreciation for the people around her. Building a strong team has allowed her to focus more deeply on creative direction while empowering others to contribute their expertise. She speaks about her team with genuine admiration, describing them as some of the smartest and hardest-working women she knows.
It’s a perspective that has become even more pronounced since becoming a mother.
Beare Park’s first flagship
Last year was transformative. Alongside opening Beare Park’s first flagship boutique on William Street in Paddington and continuing to expand the business, Bella welcomed her son Augie and married her husband Sean in an intimate ceremony at home.
The boutique represented another significant chapter in the brand’s evolution. Set among Sydney’s luxury fashion destinations, it gave Beare Park a permanent physical presence and offered customers a more intimate way to engage with the world Bella had spent the past five years building.
Motherhood, she says, has changed her more than she anticipated. Not by softening her ambition, but by sharpening it. She describes herself as more decisive and instinctive, with greater clarity around where she places her time and energy.
That sense of clarity has surfaced in her creative work, too. In the notes accompanying Beare Park’s recent Pre-Fall collection, Bella reflected on devotion as something that sharpens intuition and leads to greater clarity of purpose. It feels closely aligned with the way she now speaks about both motherhood and business — less concerned with external noise and more confident in her own perspective.
Listening to her speak, it’s clear that family now sits at the centre of everything she does. Her husband remains one of her greatest sources of support, while the arrival of Augie has added an entirely new layer of purpose to both her life and work. Professionally, there has been no shortage of milestones.
Beare Park’s Matildas partnership
Partnering with the CommBank Matildas as their formalwear provider represented a major moment for the brand. Opening the flagship boutique marked another. More recently, being selected to design uniforms for thousands of CommBank employees across Australia has become one of the most significant projects of her career.
Yet Bella is surprisingly measured when discussing success. For her, success has never been defined solely by growth, numbers or external recognition.
Instead, she speaks about women returning season after season. About customers developing emotional relationships with pieces. About seeing the team grow around the brand. About arriving at a point where the creative vision feels clearer and more fully realised.
Valuable lessons
One of the most valuable lessons of the past five years has been understanding the difference between growth and sustainable growth.
Sometimes the right answer is yes. Sometimes it’s not yet. Learning to make that distinction has become one of the defining lessons of her career. Throughout our conversation, Bella returns to one theme more than any other: conviction.
Five years of building Beare Park have taught her plenty about business, leadership and growth. But perhaps the most significant lesson has been learning to trust her perspective and protect the integrity of her vision.
The result is a brand with a stronger sense of identity than ever before. As Bella wrote in her recent show notes, “Devotion distils instinct into a clearer sense of purpose and selfhood” – a sentiment that feels as relevant to her personal journey as it does to the clothes themselves.
Five years after launching Beare Park, Bella has built a brand defined by clarity, conviction and an unwavering sense of purpose. The values remain unchanged, but her understanding of who she is, what she stands for, and where she’s headed next.
