BE WITNESS TO MY EXPERIMENT

WANT TO BE WITNESS TO MY EXPERIMENT?

(Shared to our newsletter on Jan 11)

I hope you’re having a really good start to this new year!
I’ve been meaning to send this update for a couple weeks now, but honestly… my 2025 had to end the same way it unfolded.

I always hesitate about how much I should share in here. But the truth is, I’m an open book, and I really don’t love when people are left guessing. So I’m just going to tell you how 2025 actually went for me & why I’m now asking you to be a witness to this year-long experiment.

and i’m excited. and terrified. But mostly excited. So here we go.

I started harly jae in 2017. my goal back then was kind of big: change the world, or at least the world of fashion, while forging my own path at the same time. I started a clothing brand, but for me it was always more than that. We used to say “more than just clothes” all the time in the early days, and I still really mean it.

My goal has always been to share how I try to live intentionally. How I pause, audit the business I’ve built, the life I live and fine-tune both so they feel more aligned. Because if you’re a business owner, you probably know this too, we often start businesses for freedom, and then somehow rebuild the exact thing we were trying to escape.

For me, in the early years, that meant starting my own business because I hated the 9-to-5 grind… but then feeling crushing guilt if I wasn’t working 9-to-5 on harly jae. So I had to stop, audit, adjust. Again & again. All the way to moving the business from the city to the ocean-side suburb we live in now, just to simplify my life a little more.

and then came 2025.

I intentionally left a bigger age gap between my two kids, because with my first pregnancy my business had just recently taken off and I truly didn’t take time off. Not even a few days. I worked while taking care of my daughter, exclusively breastfed, did all the nights, everything. and after a year of that, I was completely exhausted.

So I promised myself I wouldn’t do it the same way the second time.

Quietly, my goal for 2025 was to figure out how a small business owner could actually take a real maternity leave. I didn’t talk about it much, but it mattered deeply to me. I had a plan. I wanted to figure it out for myself & others like me. I wanted to come out of it with a roadmap and say, see, this is possible.

and then life happened.

At the very start of the year, we found out my mother-in-law had a brain tumor. Three months later, she was gone. She was the person who was supposed to help support me during that maternity leave & suddenly we were grieving instead.

Then, just one month into my postpartum, we found out my father-in-law had cancer too. The man I often call our biggest life hack (he lives with us in our suite, helps us so much). The last six months have been filled with treatments, surgery, hospital trips, and just… holding our breath.

So no, I did not figure out how to take a proper maternity leave. and if i’m being honest, that’s left me feeling like I failed.

and here’s the part I haven’t really said out loud yet: going through all of this on top of having a baby showed me how fragile the way I was operating really was. 

The business has been running on this constant momentum for years: the next launch, the next deadline, the next fire to put out. and when life got heavy, there was no breathing room. I still had to hold everything. and I realized I can’t build something that leaves me with no space to actually show up in my own life when it matters most.

Which brings me to now. The beginning of 2026.

I’m committing to making this a slow year. Not just talking about it, actually walking the walk. I’ve preached slow and intentional living for a long time, and in many ways I do live it. But the way the business has been engineered behind the scenes doesn’t fully reflect that. and I’m tired of pretending it does.

Through conversations with you (through polls, messages, back-and-forth on Instagram) I’ve landed on a new way I want harly jae to run.

and this is the experiment:

Can you run a successful business - one with real overhead, a storefront, and people on payroll - while truly choosing to slow down?

Less launches. More intention. Fewer drops, but deeper ones. More time to actually walk you through things instead of racing to the next thing. and mainly: operating from a grounded place instead of constant momentum.

PS. Just to be clear, the clothing itself has never been the part I compromised on. We’ve always stayed small-batch, ethical, thoughtful. That part stays. What’s changing is the pace we move at behind the scenes. 

So… here I am. Announcing this new way of operating, in front of people.
Which absolutely terrifies me.

But I also know this: I don’t want to keep building something that looks good on the outside but doesn’t feel right on the inside.

So if you’re willing, I’d love for you to be a witness to this experiment & keep me accountable at the same time. and perhaps it inspires you to do less in one area of your life too…

Click here to get the updates. I honestly have no idea what they’ll look like yet, and I’ll gladly take suggestions if you feel like commenting on this blog post!

With SO MUCH love,
Laïla

Read this piece for context as to how I got here
& my first update here