Before New York, there was simply the feeling many ambitious women know well, that there might be more waiting somewhere beyond the life you’ve already built. For Madi Stefanis, relocating and living abroad represented something more layered than career progression alone. It was the decision to leave behind what was familiar in favour of what may come next.
The beginning of 35MM Co wasn’t born from a polished business strategy, but from a vintage film camera purchased for $50 and later resold online for $250. A small moment that hinted at something larger unfolding, as film photography began to re-enter cultural focus alongside a renewed desire for something physical and lasting in a digital age. What started as curiosity quickly evolved into something far larger. Yet for Stefanis, entrepreneurship was never solely about business growth. Beneath 35MM Co was a way of building that felt instinctive.
More than a brand story, it became tied to something more personal. How your environment quietly shapes direction, identity, and decision-making. In her view, certain versions of yourself only emerge when familiarity disappears, a shift that often asks you to take risks before you feel ready. As she puts it, “You’ll only regret the risks you don’t take,” a reminder that at some point the risk of remaining the same begins to outweigh the risk of change.
Stefanis speaks about living abroad not as a leap, but as something far more layered. Uncomfortable, disorienting, at times deeply lonely, but also expansive in a way that’s hard to replicate. Removing yourself from everything familiar, she suggests, strips away the versions of you shaped by routine and expectation, leaving space to see who you actually become without it.
Living abroad, on the other side of the world, forced Stefanis into a version of independence that feels far less structured in reality than it does online. New communities had to be built from scratch. Stability became something she had to create and not just something she arrived with. Routine, friendships, identity all reconstructed while still moving forward professionally and personally. In time, she learned that resilience is not defined by moments of change, but by how you continue when there is no clarity ahead.
What feels most present is the way living abroad reshaped not only her surroundings, but her internal pace. New York dismantled the urgency of traditional timelines entirely. Milestones that once felt fixed for young women, marriage, settling down, building a conventional future, began to lose their immediacy. Distance created perspective, and in that clarity came something simple but lasting, life no longer needed to be measured against what was expected.
The city itself didn’t change her. It simply brought something already there into focus. Surrounded by people constantly creating, risking, building and publicly pursuing ambition, Stefanis found herself thinking bigger, speaking more freely, without the need to reduce her ambition into something more manageable.
Yet for all that living abroad gave her, it also clarified what mattered back home. Australia transformed from familiarity into something she could suddenly recognise the value of, closeness, balance, lifelong friendships, the ease of everyday life. Distance has a way of making certain things more visible.
Living abroad was never about becoming somebody entirely different. “Living away from home has taught me that I’m far more adaptable than I realised,” she says.
What becomes most evident in conversation with Stefanis is not transformation, but scale. New York brought out a clearer ambition and a more decisive way of moving through life, one less inclined to hold itself back. There is a quiet confidence in that evolution. Her version of success has been built slowly through uncertainty, solitude, resilience and choosing growth over comfort.
For Stefanis, leaving home became an investment in herself as much as her business. Because often the most defining decisions are not the safest ones, but the ones you learn your way through in real time.
Maybe that, in itself, is the story. Not just a young founder building a globally recognised brand, but a woman who chose uncertainty over certainty and found what came next in doing so. Sometimes the most defining shifts are not about becoming someone else, but about allowing more of who you already are to surface.
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