Squarestylist’s founder Rache on cultivating a safe space for curiosity and creativity
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At first glance, the Squarestylist studio appears subdued in character. Nestled in the heart of an international district, this place embraces you in creamy neutrals, gently ushering you away from the hustle and bustle more than twenty floors below. Light streams in delicate lines from gauzy, floor-to-ceiling curtains; backlit wall accents; and long-stemmed lamps. Your eyes trace where these lines curve in unexpected ways—on the edges of an elevated platform, across the puffy chaise longue, inside arched doorways. Look more intently inside and the room might just surprise you.
The same could be said of its founder, Rachell de Luna—or Rache, as she’s affectionately known among students and collaborators. If you were here in person, she’d surely welcome you in with a warm smile. She’s dressed in her usual unassuming attire: a long-sleeved cotton voile blouse with vertical pleats and a pair of loose linen pants. Her hair is modestly tied back in a low ponytail to reveal her bare face. Rache would gesture for you to sit and be comfortable as she describes how she’s been lately with minimal detail (“well, it’s alright”). But try asking her about what she’s been working on lately so you could finally catch the twinkle in her eyes behind round, translucent glasses.
The projects she presents are less busywork and more exciting builds that tinker with newfangled design tools. She comes up with interesting inventions each time. “For me to keep enjoying what I do right now in my business, I have to find time to experiment,” Rache explains. This studio is her sandbox, a safe space where she can forget herself in the process of creating on her own terms. She doesn’t limit herself within the bounds of what is considered easy or practical. Rather, she lets curiosity pull her towards innovative ideas that challenge existing notions of web design and development.
One such feat is Standout Squarespace, a signature program that has taught more than 500 students to master the skills behind crafting sought-after websites. There’s an art and science to her process that makes even the most complex concepts approachable. She speaks softly with guidance grounded in self-assurance. Then she steps aside and lets her work speak for itself. What better way is there to stand out?
Rache draws from humble origins, having been born and raised in an Asian family whose skills were sharpened by material necessity.
Craft brings to mind the image of her grandfather. “I would say my grandfather is the most artistic. He’s a skilled carpenter,” she recounts. Even as a child, Rache looked up to him as he crouched and whittled the days away at his workbench. “I remember being amazed of how hardworking he was… He sculpted a rooster out of wood—and he’s also a singer,” she adds with a chuckle.
As for problem-solving, Rache thinks she inherited that from her father. He’s a licensed electrician, puttering about in people’s houses with a well-rounded skillset under his tool belt: “air-conditioners, light bulbs, electrical [wiring],” to name a few. She observed him as he dismantled machines to figure out what broke down and how to replace specific components.
But the creativity and care of her entrepreneurship? She got those from her beloved mother, who’s a saleswoman. “Our finances were stretched thin, [but] she would always find a way and she would do so with grace,” Rache recalls in awe. Her mother spared no expense in providing her the best learning experience her younger self could ever want. Knowing she had her mother’s back, she signed up for speech workshops that brought her out of her shell. She also found her voice in singing lessons for competitions—“which I think worked,” she notes with relief—even as she began out of tune. And for a few years, she put on her ballerina flats to stretch and spin around the dance studio, tiptoeing around their financial worries. Her mother shouldered it all. “She’s, like, [my] main source of inspiration.”
Rache didn’t have much at her disposal, but she made it work. “I remember when I was young, I would just ask for pen and stationery during Christmas,” she admits rather sheepishly. In most instances, she would scour the market for scraps of indigenous materials to incorporate in her school projects. She’d pile up on newspapers and magazines for eye-catching sections to cut out. All these textures come together in a collage awash with watercolor. Her efforts would pay off, since her submission ends up as top of the class each time.
If she fostered an unshakeable belief that she could do anything she set her mind to, she owed that tenacity to familial figures who modeled their willingness to take on life’s challenges. In persisting towards mastery no matter the circumstances, they all paved the way for her. “I have my family to thank for what I am today,” Rache stresses.
There was no question in her mind what she wanted to be when she grew up. As the eldest daughter, Rache strived to provide for her family as a way of giving back, even though it meant leaving behind her hobbies and interests. “Where I’m from, pursuing art was more of a luxury,” she elaborates. She pursued chemical engineering instead, because in her words, “I felt like that would give my family more financial freedom.”
Career Code-Switching
After finishing her college degree, Rache landed her dream job as a product development specialist at a multinational food and drink conglomerate. This transition was exhilarating to a fresh graduate like her. Everyday she looked forward to utilize her ingenuity in coming up with new or improved formulations within their research and development team.
The novelty wore off when she got tired of the role she played, day in and day out. “It involved a lot of creativity at the start, but there was a point where the work became [so] repetitive that I only had to go to meetings,” Rache laments. She signed up for a role that stretched her intellect, yet she only wound up languishing in case reports and documents. Is this the best that life could possibly offer? Soon she was pulling at every loose thread to unravel what she thought she wanted.
"I’m trying to find the skill which will lead me to my dream career because my current one wasn’t working,” she says.
She attempted to dabble in a few hobbies on the side, such as leather crafting and hosting calligraphy workshops over weekends. But it was preparing for her own wedding that gave her the epiphany that she needed. Rache was stunned to witness the industry of event planners, fashion designers, photographers, makeup artists, and florists who all thrived outside of her corporate reality. Here they were showing up with utmost dedication to their work—and getting handsomely rewarded for it. Her appreciation for the arts and crafts scene compelled her to launch a wedding blog as she walked down the aisle. When none of her friends or relatives could help her set up the site, she stumbled upon one she liked with a footer that proudly displayed the words, Powered by Squarespace.
As she would learn, there are plenty of advantages to building on Squarespace. The platform is remarkably design-forward with versatile blocks and sections to work with. Its closed system suggests a more private and secure setup compared to its contemporaries. Not to mention, its default settings allow for easier handoff and maintenance for clients down the road. Yet the site editor was not as customizable as Rache had hoped at the time. “If I could only make the most out of Squarespace, push its boundaries a bit that I could still take advantage of how easy it is to use,” she supposes, “I will be more confident in offering it as a platform.”
Push its boundaries she did, both in a technological and geographical sense. An opportunity presented itself to Rache when an online prospect requested her calligraphy for a logo. Just like that, her seemingly random repertoire of interests through the years fell into place through brand and website design.
Rache deepened her knowledge by taking on white-label work. US and Singapore agencies paid her $800 at most per website, but she still challenged herself to come up with at least one custom-coded feature for each. Her own digital agency Creative Boss emerged much, much later—give or take a few years and a hundred Squarespace sites. By then, she’s catered to enterprises in skyscrapers paying a premium to redesign their website. “I would need to go to their offices to pitch Squarespace, to teach them how to use Squarespace, all of those stuff,” she remembers. Working with them meant coloring within the pre-established brand guidelines, not drawing them from scratch.
The more that Rache granted them creative control, the less creative freedom she enjoyed as a web designer and developer. The discontent felt familiar. Once again, she took a step back to make space for a side project: an exploration of her own taste in a single template and a handful of plugins. She named it Squarestylist.
To her surprise, following her own instincts garnered her far more attention than when she was merely creating what was expected of her. Rache’s digital shop resonated with a growing community of designers, each of them grateful that someone like her was pushing the envelope on Squarespace. “Even agencies from abroad would use Linea Template as the base for their own client work, and they would charge thousands of dollars for their agency client work,” she shares. When she realized that her shop was consistently bringing in $5,000 a month, it dawned on her that she didn’t have to lose herself in the pursuit of success. Squarestylist was here to stay.
"I still actually work with some of those enterprise-level companies today for retainer work,” Rache clarifies. Only this time she knows better to prioritize what brings her delight more than anything else.
Building a Library
The Squarestylist site unfolds much like the studio. You can see it in the way that the letterforms stretch and sprawl across the page. How nostalgia bleeds through the inked and textured edges of each section, so much that you could smell the stationery of Rache’s childhood. There’s comfort in how it arranges words and imagery to cradle memories like a well-worn book. No matter where you look, you’ll find traces of her warm, hands-on approach. As she deftly puts it, “I have a certain style—editorial, hand-crafted style—which also resonated well with my dream clients. And so I want that to be reflected on my work.”
But make no mistake. Rache pays close attention to development as much as design in her website builds, even when it’s not immediately apparent. “I always approach everything as both an art and a science, so it’s hard to separate them,” she relates. Creativity, in her view, thrives best within the constraints of standards and best practices like performance, responsiveness, accessibility. So when she observes many of her loyal customers struggle to grasp her pre-coded plugins, she sees an awareness gap that she’s in a position to address.
"I started out with zero coding knowledge,” Rache reflects, “Maybe I could teach other designers to code as well, and maybe they could have a deep understanding of how to use code to their advantage.”
This is how Standout Squarespace has become a natural extension of her brand. The words course and program barely scratch the surface of what Rache is offering here: a collective of web designers striving towards expertise in a growing library of resources. Her lessons do not stay latent on the page. Rather, each concept is explored and embodied through practice in short exercises or personal projects. You’ll be moving along the concepts one section at a time, shadowing Rache as she demonstrates her craft. “I’m very methodical, and so I love walking [students] through exactly how I approach the process,” she says with reassurance.
Rache could talk to you all day about what awaits you inside—the modules, workshops, bonuses, the Montage master template, even the Adagio animation library. None of these compare to the vast expanse of Squarestylist’s code toolkit, which contains more than 500 creative components as of writing. This number might take you by surprise, at least until you realize that Rache has been curating it for the past decade or so. “This repository… became this huge because it’s also my personal code toolkit that I share,” she explains. As its custodian, she’s been busy contributing more entries as her students nudge her towards new features to incorporate in future projects.
There’s no need for you to comb through every course material. Like in any library, you can choose to take what you need at any given moment, only to return and fill in the blanks later with your instructor’s guidance. You’ll take part in weaving the shared knowledge of this virtual community, an endeavor that once began from Rache’s pursuit of her own curiosities.
This speaks to the inimitable value of Standout Squarespace: the hand-holding that you get every step of the way. It’s almost as if Rache wants to become the most patient and attentive mentor you’ve had in your life. “I really don’t hold back in terms of helping my community,” she asserts. “Most of that innovation, coming up with new resources, is really based on what I see in the community.”
Lifelong Learning
Student feedback has been indispensable to Standout Squarespace since the beginning, back when Rache launched the pre-sale. Before then, she’s gathered some experience recording video tutorials for her templates and plugins but nothing quite like the scale of a full-fledged course. To her it was important to hear from the founding members themselves. As far as Rache is concerned, “They helped shape the Standout program that it is today.”
These days have never felt more removed from the corporate life of her past. Since she’s spent most of her time supporting the community, her working hours have been anything but dull. Now the highlight of her day is learning from her students’ questions just as they learn from her personalized answers.
The recent change of pace can only be a good thing for Rache. “I find a lot of fulfillment when I’m not trapped in a certain routine. That I enjoy what I do when I have the time to experiment,” she emphasizes, adding, "Even if I win the lottery, I will still experiment with code because creating things… discovering new things is what brings me joy.” She was being perfectly earnest. In fact, she encourages her students to indulge in their craft the way she does—to come up with concept projects that they could sell as website templates eventually. They never know what they’d discover about their signature style.
Evidently, learning has been Rache’s lifelong passion, and she’s not about to stop anytime soon. “Right now, I’m really curious about the intersection of AI and design,” she shares. She’s fully aware that public sentiment tends to be mixed within social media circles. Still, she remains optimistic that human creativity would drive the tech forward, not the other way around. “AI is just a creative tool because it is only as good as the questions we ask.” Perhaps it could even pique people’s curiosity enough for them to study web design and development more seriously. Rache has seen quite a few students join the program when they couldn’t discern if their generated code was good enough.
Whatever brought them to Standout Squarespace, Rache hopes to witness her students go from being intimidated to becoming genuinely proud of their design-development skillset. “I really love when I see that confidence ripple into how they price their work, how they talk to clients, lead sales calls, and just overall realize what they are capable of,” she gushes. Their confidence is unshakeable, if only because it’s grounded in competence. “My biggest hope is for Standout students [to leave] the program trusting themselves, believing that they are capable of coming up with creative solutions.”
As for those who have yet to take the first step? “The Standout program is here waiting for you,” Rache promises.
