For too long, women going through perimenopause have been told there's nothing wrong with them. Ali Daddo and Mary Doube know exactly how that feels and exactly why it has to change.
Ali traded the modelling industry for what she always really wanted: life as a mother and early childhood teacher. Mary channelled a love of maths into an engineering career, raised three daughters, and moved her family across two continents. Two different journeys, but the same uninvited chapter was waiting for them both.
When Everything Fell Apart
For Ali, the signs started quietly. A shift in her cycle. Sleep that slowly disappeared. A creeping anxiety she couldn't quite name. She had recently uprooted her family from America to Australia, one of the most stressful experiences of her life - so she did what most women do: she put it down to stress and kept going.
But things got worse. Much worse.
"Everything spiraled worse and worse until I was a wreck mentally, just a wreck. Thoughts were so dark."
What made it particularly disorienting was a small, persistent inner voice telling her this wasn't right. This isn't you. She didn't yet have a word for what was happening. Her mother had never spoken about perimenopause. She was, in her words, left to fend for herself.
Mary's experience mirrored this in striking ways. Thirty kilos gained. No sleep. Anxiety that had never existed before in her life, growing darker and more consuming until she couldn't leave the house. She went from doctor to doctor, each one telling her there was nothing wrong.
"It was a moment of loss of control and loss of myself."
The Turning Point
Healing didn't arrive neatly. For Mary, it began unexpectedly - she walked into a CrossFit gym. As a dancer by background, strength training was entirely foreign territory. But something shifted. Physical strength quietly rebuilt the foundation beneath everything else: her confidence, her mental clarity, her sense of self.
At the same time, she discovered a word she hadn't known before: perimenopause. The combination - building strength while finally understanding what her body had been going through - became the beginning of her recovery.
For Ali, her background as a pregnancy and birth coach had already taught her to advocate for positivity around the female body in transition. That lens, it turned out, was precisely what she needed to reframe this next chapter.
Building Something Better
Both women arrived at the same conclusion, separately and then together: no other woman should have to go through this without support. That conviction became Aviiana - a perimenopause and midlife platform built to meet women at every stage, from the first subtle signs through to post-menopause.
"That propelled the second half of my life in my late 40s to intersect with Ali, where we created Aviiana and a community of 83,000 women who no longer have to figure it out alone."
What's striking about their story isn't just the platform they built it's the insight underneath it. That women have always been navigating enormous physical and emotional complexity, largely in silence, largely alone. Periods, pregnancy, labour, perimenopause: the full arc of a woman's hormonal life, met for generations with a kind of institutional shrug.
On Strength
Ask either of them to define a strong woman and the answer comes quickly - and it isn't about never breaking.
It's a version of strength that looks different in every woman, but that both Ali and Mary recognise instantly - resilience worn quietly, the ability to rebuild, the decision to turn a painful chapter into something that helps others.
At IDA+S, we've always believed that every woman's story deserves to be told.
This season, we're shining a light on stories of strength, resilience and momentum - all while dressed in IDA+S. And honestly? This one gave us all the feels.
Ali Daddo wears the Amira Asymmetrical Pleated Trousers and Marnie Compact Cotton Knit Tank and Mary Doube wears the Elinor Linen Midi Dress
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