Looking back

A great brand, but a great business?

The last two weeks have been big. I think they’re always pretty big to be fair. Busy with the agency, all very positive, so I won’t go into that. It’s not going to be very revealing. 

But the brand has been a rollercoaster. It might be useful to recap where it all began - if you’re going to be coming on this ‘dear diary’ journey with me. Don’t worry it will be a whistle-stop tour. 

Having worked in beauty for years at some of the best PR agencies (which I loved), I had an amazing network around me and a desire to work with that network to create something for myself. Very naively we created a great brand but a terrible business. I say terrible because we had no business plan. Running a service based company (and to be honest I’ve been winging that for seven years), is completely different to launching a product. If I had known then what I do now, would I have still done it. I’m not sure. I definitely would have done a hundred things differently.

We launched in 2020 and people loved the concept. And let’s be honest you don’t work in an industry for 15 years, getting people to give a shit about certain products and not learn how to do that well. It was all self-funded. Family supported, we drained one business to support another. But I had absolutely no idea how much money it would take to fuel a beauty brand. Work ethic has never been an issue, I’m happy to give myself high praise for that. But capital, financial planning and fundraising for a brand, I was completely unaware of. I really should have swotted up first. 

First big lesson learnt, have a financial business plan and create it with someone who knows what they’re doing. Then see if you have the stomach for that plan, as your fundraising for a beauty brand (if you want to take it nationwide, let alone global), is going to need to be within the millions and over the course of multiple rounds, which trust me, is a very draining experience.  

Without going into too much detail, we had two positive years. Good growth, good interest, good investment. So I guess naively again, at this point I still wasn’t really planning too far in the future. I was always in survival mode. Since then we’ve been a bit stuck. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had a huge amount of wins. I like to think of the analogy of the premier league and how as a footballer, to play for a premiership team would be such an unbelievable achievement. With the amount of brands that launch every year, for me, reaching the league we have, seems like premier league playing. But now, now I’m going through a period of reevaluation. Reevaluating what it is about the brand and running the business that makes me happy. Really thinking about the aspects I enjoy, and trying to find a way to continue. I don’t have any of the answers but I am happy to share my journey with you.

So back to the last few weeks. After a rocky start into year one of school for child one (six weeks off felt like an eternity). Another contradictory set of feelings within parenthood - I loved spending time with my eldest son but also couldn’t stand the carnage of the summer holidays (parenting lesson learnt - book more clubs whilst he’s at the age to be happy about going to them). So after a rocky start, all is well at home with child one. Child two isn’t sleeping well. Hasn’t been for weeks. So any small chance that I might get up and run (and again for full transparency I am not a super fit runner, I’ve got three quarters of the way through Couch to 5k twice), has gone out of the window. Every day I wake up feeling like I don’t know how I’m going to get through the day being this tired, but after cuddling child two with a bottle (his not mine), on the sofa, I’ve woken up enough to realise that I will, as I do it everyday.

I made a decision that I didn’t want to fundraise a few months ago. Putting yourself out there for constant rejection is really hard. And you have to be in the right frame of mind for that. Currently I am not. And so I have been working to get our business running costs right down, so we can spend some time assessing what we want to do next, without so much pressure. I’m guilty of constantly comparing how well other peoples business are doing with my own. I really recommend having a network of people in your situation around you and viewing them as teammates rather than the competition. As when things are tough, which is basically all of the time, it’s so helpful to be able to chat (usually voicenote), with people experiencing the same things as you. And one thing you quickly realise is, that whatever you might be seeing (usually on social), isn’t the 360 depiction of what’s going on, for anyone.