Beyond the Bloom: Inside Domo Wells Journey from Living Room Designs to League-Wide Impact

There is something powerful about watching someone decide that if the door will not open, they will build the house instead. That is the energy around Domo Wells, founder and creative director of dead dirt, who is quietly and confidently reshaping how sports, fashion, and storytelling meet.

At Canva Create inside SoFi Stadium, in a session called “The New Arena: How Creatives are Redefining Sports Culture” Domo sat with Gia Peppers and talked less about glossy highlight reels and more about the in-between. The living room years. The rejections. The moments where she had to hype herself up because nobody else was doing it yet.

Dead Dirt did not start as a brand. It started as a container. A place to put ideas while she was pivoting out of a decade in music, DJing and working at a streaming platform. She always wanted to fuse music and fashion in a way that felt true to culture, not just trends, but the roles she was in were not built for that. After hearing “no” enough times, she stopped waiting for someone to hand her a lane and built her own instead. That shift from asking for permission to trusting her own vision is the core of her story.

Even the name 'dead dirt' is a statement. For Domo, it is about the work you do before anything blooms. The part where you are turning the soil, facing your fears, and pushing past your own hesitation. From the outside, it can look like nothing is happening.

Underneath, everything is. We live in a world that only wants the flowers. She cares about the root work. The funny thing is that her aesthetic is floral and lush, but all of it grows out of this belief that the process matters just as much as the final image.

That mindset carried her from making pieces in her living room to designing for professional athletes. The Washington Spirit, a women’s soccer club in her hometown of D.C., saw what she was building and invited her in. The collection they released did more than sell out. It made people look at women’s sports merch differently. It felt specific, intentional, like a story you could wear.

Photo: Washington Spirirt

From there, the world got bigger. Dead dirt went from creating for one team to working across the league, and Domo’s approach stayed the same: move with intention, respect the people and places you are designing for, and trust your timing, even if it does not line up with what is “supposed” to be hot right now.

Along the way, the outside validation started to catch up. One of her favorite pinch me moments was getting an email from Vogue. She genuinely thought it might be a scam. It was not. It was confirmation that the work she started in private, when it was just her and her ideas, had reached a much wider stage.

Through it all, she keeps returning to the same reminder for anyone paying attention: your ideas are worthy before they are polished. Dead dirt began with what she calls “real get up” pieces made at home. That version of the work still counted. It helped call in the very opportunities people assume you need to have in place before you start.

Domo’s approach to the Washington Spirit partnership did not come from a sports marketing deck. It came from music. She treated the collection like an album rollout, with strategy, storytelling, and a whole world built around the work. While a lot of teams were used to quick, transactional capsules meant to catch a moment and fade, Domo brought intention and patience. In her mind, if you are serious about building community, you cannot move like everything is a trend.

For her, real community does not come from a one off drop. It comes from research, from actually spending time with the people you are designing for, and from being willing to move at the pace of integrity instead of the pace of hype. That is why she does not let arbitrary deadlines run her. She trusts that the work will land when it is supposed to, for her and for the people she is speaking to. She even joked that she could drop a cherry blossom themed piece in November and it would still make sense, because resonance does not follow a content calendar.

Photo: Hypebae

That conviction helped her grow from that first Washington Spirit collection into work that touches an entire league. Today, Domo designs for 16 soccer clubs, each with its own story and fan base. From the outside, it looks like the output of a big agency. In reality, dead dirt is a small, tight crew. So much of what you see is Domo and her collaborator Christina doing the heavy lifting together.

Even as things scale, she refuses to water down the process. She still designs everything. She still insists on understanding each city, each team, each subculture beyond the usual clichés. She wants to know which stories people are tired of and which ones they have never seen reflected back at them. To her, these teams are not just franchises. They are living expressions of place, memory, and identity.

Her impact is also felt in how she talks about women’s sports as a whole. She does not claim to have changed the game. She honors the women who have been doing this work for years: the players winning titles, the advocates fighting for equal pay, the organizers pushing for coverage and respect. She is adding to a foundation that already exists, using her eye as a designer and storyteller to amplify what these athletes and communities have built.

Behind all of this is a creative mind that does not move in straight lines. On the Canva Create stage, Domo was candid about having ADHD and feeling like her brain is holding many conversations at once. She does not pretend to follow a strict method. Instead, she respects her own flow. Sometimes she begins with a concept, sometimes with a feeling, sometimes with the experience she wants someone to have. Wherever she starts, she returns to context and to the question of who the work is for and how they deserve to be seen.

What makes her story especially empowering is how fiercely she protects what she is building. She speaks openly about the power of saying no, especially in collaborations. She has taken on projects that did not feel right and learned they are rarely worth the cost. Now she holds a clear boundary. If a project asks her to dilute her vision or compromise the integrity of the work, she is willing to walk away. She trusts that when she clears space by declining the wrong thing, the right thing has room to arrive.

She also refuses to romanticize waiting. From the Canva Create stage, speaking to a room full of creatives, she offered a simple challenge. "Who is sitting on an idea, a project, a collection, a story, waiting for the perfect timing or the perfect co-sign?" Her answer is clear: put it out. Share the work as it is, with what you have, where you are. She started in her living room, making pieces that were, in her words, “real get up.” That imperfect, self directed work helped attract the very opportunities people often believe they must secure before they begin.

Domo Wells is a living example of what it means to build a creative life on your own terms. She has moved from government and corporate jobs to leading a studio that tells stories through fashion for some of the most exciting teams in women’s sports. She has gone from asking for chances to creating them, from designing alone at home to shaping the visual identity of an entire league, from tilling her own dead dirt to growing something bold, specific, and undeniably hers.

Her journey is a celebration of trust in self, in process, and in community. It is a reminder that the seasons that feel slow or uncertain are often the ones where the roots are taking hold. And it is an invitation to anyone reading to believe that their own work is worthy of the same care, integrity, and courage.