For many years, I have helped organisations understand people, make sense of complicated problems and create what comes next.
Then a personal problem arrived. My own life. Several parts of my life changed almost at once.
A home was sold. Relationships shifted.
I moved. I started again.
strategist would do.
I observed.
I paid attention to what I was feeling instead of immediately trying to make it disappear.
I looked again at photographs, conversations, relationships, memories and ordinary objects I had carried with me for years. I questioned some things I had always believed.
I tried things. Some worked. Some did not. Some failed stupidly.
And somewhere in that beautiful mess, new things began appearing.
A fashion brand.
I am Nhu Vo.
I work across business, life and the
messy parts of becoming.
I start by asking better questions,
noticing the little things and trying things out.
As a girl growing up in Vietnam, I was fascinated by the possibilities of things. Where was the airplane above us going? What was beyond the ocean? What language did aliens speak?
At eleven, I started learning English for less than an hour a week. Somehow, that small opening brought me language, writing, art and a world far beyond the one I knew then. I kept following that curiosity.
It took me through building companies, travelling to forty-five countries, going back to school at Stanford GSB, learning new sports, and creating new things.
And I am still full of contradictions.
I like structures and ignore them sometimes. I like beautiful things and also complicated numbers.
I can spend hours looking
at a spreadsheet, then get completely
distracted by different shades of blue.
I can search for woodsmoke in the morning, enjoy a late afternoon glass of bubbles, and be equally happy
sitting on a plastic stool watching traffic go by.
I can play sports until I’m exhausted and then spend twenty minutes staring at some texture of lace.
Structure and mess. Ambition and softness. Numbers and feelings. Sweat and silk.
All of them can belong to the same woman.
Welcome to my colourful life.
A woman can build a company, a family, and a reputation. A woman can be capable, independent and good at making decisions. And she still finds herself facing questions with no obvious answers.
I became interested in these questions because eventually they became mine. If something I have lived, learned, questioned or created helps another woman take one small step toward a life that feels more like her own, then this voice has a purpose.
This is why I’m here.
From one woman figuring it out to another.
I don’t have the answers.
Probably neither do you.
I’m just more interested in better ways of asking the questions.
That’s Design Your Next Era.
Business, life, and the messy middle where you actually try a fragment of life.
The Places I’ve Been
Problems, people, possibilities. For more than twenty years, I have worked with leaders and organisations to understand complex problems, uncover human needs and turn insights into action.
Strategy. Human-centred design. Customer experience. Facilitation. Learning.
This is where I learned something I now carry everywhere: The way we frame a problem changes the possibilities we can see.
When observations turned inward. I began writing during a period when several parts of my life were changing all at once. Instead of trying to explain everything, I started with small things.
The Beautiful Mess became an observation of memories, relationships, motherhood, identity, endings, beginnings and the strange things we notice when life changes.
What if we could move forward without knowing the answer first?
Design Your Next Era™ is a practical, skills-based open workshops and tailored organisational programmes for women navigating change.
It brings together my work in business strategy and human-centred design, my learning through Stanford GSB’s LEAD programme, and the tools I began testing while navigating significant changes in my own life.
Participants learn to notice what is changing, use emotions as information, frame better questions, make decisions and test possible next steps.
You may not leave with one perfect answer. But you will leave seeing your situation more clearly, with a different way of looking at it and a few possible next moves to explore.
What we wear helps us play with how we feel and express ourselves.
NHÚ began with another curiosity: Why should lingerie only belong underneath an outfit?
NHÚ explores intimate dressing as part of personal style: colour, texture, layering and those small glimpses that change an entire look.
For me, it is also another expression of how we become.
Because lingerie is the beginning of an outfit.
Not the end.
I work with people and organisations as they navigate the messy middle, make sense of complex challenges and create what comes next.
“During a turbulent period of my own life, I found myself returning to ordinary objects, memories, relationships, emotions, and lots of questions.”
Invite me.
Ask me something.
