Two Southerners
in Syracuse.
Derrick is from Louisiana. Mia is from Atlanta. When they both landed at Syracuse University, they were two of the only Southerners on campus — and they found each other the way people do when they're a little far from home.
They became college sweethearts. And somewhere in those early conversations, they discovered something that stopped them both: they shared the exact same birthday. August 21, 1982. Same day, same year. Two people born on the same day, from different corners of the South, finding each other in upstate New York.
Some numbers just mean something.
"We were two Southerners a long way from home. I think that's why we found each other."
After college, Derrick followed Mia back to Atlanta — her city, her roots. They were married in 2009, and began building a life together in the city that raised her.
Bravery and Sage.
They named their children the way some people name promises. Not just what they hoped the children would be — but what they hoped the world would become because of them.
The hardest
two years.
Her name was Rita — Miss D'Rita to the people who loved her, Nana to the grandchildren she adored. In 2022, right after the pandemic had already taken so much from so many, Miss Rita was diagnosed with stage four cancer.
Around the same time — almost as if the world had decided to test the whole family at once — Mia's father John had a massive heart attack. He went into a coma. Then in and out of the hospital for months, surgery after surgery, the whole community holding its breath for a man they loved.
Because John is not just a father. He is a legend in East Atlanta. A teacher at East Atlanta High School and Crim High School, he spent decades in Atlanta Public Schools shaping young people — and when he retired, he went back for ten more years as a school counselor, because once was not enough. He taught most of the families in the neighborhood. He is the teacher people still talk about. The one students call their favorite. The kind of man a whole community prays for.
And Miss Rita — she was right there beside him all those years. She volunteered in schools, showed up for every child in the community, poured herself into the school system so consistently that they eventually created a parent liaison position just for her. She helped raise all of their friends — every kid who came through that door, every teammate, every classmate. She helped raise a neighborhood.
And the proof is in what that household produced. John and Miss Rita raised three children who went out and gave back. Their oldest, Jeremy, became a Division I basketball coach. Mia became a school psychologist. Their youngest, Megan, became a surgeon. Three kids, three different ways of serving people — all of it rooted in parents who believed that what you do for others is what you leave behind.
It's no coincidence that Mia married a man made of the same thing. Derrick has been teaching children with autism and behavior disorders since 2006 — nearly two decades of showing up for kids who need someone to show up. He didn't just move to Atlanta for Mia. He planted himself here and got to work. That's who he is.
Five months after her diagnosis, on August 21, 2022 — Mia and Derrick's fortieth birthday — Miss Rita passed away.
"Two days after she passed, my dad had another heart attack. We had to delay her funeral because he was in the ICU."
There are no words for that kind of grief stacked on top of itself. No roadmap for what comes next when you lose your mother and almost lose your father in the same breath. When the woman who helped raise your whole neighborhood is suddenly gone, and the man who taught half of East Atlanta is fighting for his life.
What came next was a decision: we would go home.
Coming home
to rebuild.
Mia grew up in a house built in 1950 in East Atlanta, Georgia — one of the most highly desired communities in the city. It was her father's home, her mother's home, and now it needed to be more — it needed to hold a whole family again. And it needed to become something extraordinary.
Mia and Derrick moved in so John could stay in the home he'd always known — the home he and Miss Rita had built together, the home that still held all of them. And then, because that's who they are, they got to work.
They gutted walls. Opened up the floor plan. Put on a new metal roof. Derrick and Mia German-smeared the outside of the house themselves. They waterproofed and sealed the basement. They laid new flooring. Rebuilt the kitchen. They are adding an entire addition. All of it aimed at one vision: a luxury designer spa resort feel — the kind of home that looks like it belongs in Architectural Digest — built on a teacher and school psychologist salary, mostly by their own hands, learning DIY along the way.
They documented all of it — the progress, the mess, the breakthroughs, the moments that made them laugh and the ones that made them sit down on the floor and breathe.
"We're not just renovating a house. We're honoring the people who lived here. We're building the place our kids will remember."
Brave & Sage World grew out of all of it. The renovation content. The apparel they wanted to wear while doing it. The dog who watched it all happen from the corner — Oso, their AKC Cane Corso with champion bloodlines and ice-blue eyes. The home picks they could genuinely stand behind because they'd used them themselves.
It became a brand the same way their family became a family: intentionally, imperfectly, and with everything they had.
