Now that I’ve been at this for about two months, here comes the first official update on how this experiment is going.
While I made the announcement and shared some context back in January, this experiment really started in early December.
During the fall I could feel that change was coming. Things were bubbling inside me, but I didn’t know what it would look like yet. I’m now old enough to know that you can’t force clarity (yay!). It comes when it comes, usually when you stop trying so hard to find it.
A friend of mine always says, “there’s power in the pause,” and this time I decided to actually test that.
So when Christi (my right hand & only full-time employee for the past six years) went away for three weeks in December, I chose not to work harder. Normally we would have kept up the same level of output, splitting her workload between the rest of the team and planning ahead to compensate. But instead, I let things slow down.
Partly because I simply didn’t have it in me to go into overdrive for three weeks (in December of all months), but also because I was curious about what would happen if I stopped pushing for a moment. “The power of the pause,” I kept thinking.
So we paused.
We didn’t push launches. We stripped things back to the bare minimum required to honour prior commitments. I reduced my own output too, and especially the pressure around it. And we continued this into January, which is usually a month I love to launch new things because it helps me through the January blues but this time, I refrained.
And now, two months later, I can confidently say that it worked.
Clarity did come.
But (because there’s always a but) it hasn’t been easy.
Never in my life have I had to confront how quickly my inner thoughts could swallow my confidence whole, convince me that I was failing, and that I might lose everything. Truly.
And when that happens, it’s very tempting to go back to the old way immediately. I definitely grappled with that. But I stuck to the plan, which I’m proud of.
So yes, the pause can be very scary.
And if you’re reading this thinking, “well, I can’t afford to pause!” that was me too. Truthfully, I couldn’t afford it either. Our revenue dropped by about 60%, and it will take a few months for the business to recover. My business was never built with runway for something like this, so right now I’m operating on a lot of trust.
But I also couldn’t afford to keep going the way I was.
The pause allowed me to step off the hamster wheel long enough to see where I was heading.
Which, honestly, was nowhere. Just running to run. And in a strange way, that financial pressure grounded me. It forced me to look at reality instead of momentum.
Maybe not everyone relates to this, but for me, jumping off cliffs has always been easy. I moved away at 20 years old with my entire life in my car and never looked back. I quit my full-time job before harly jae generated any income and trusted things would work out. I opened a storefront without really testing the market first.
That’s how I’ve always learned.
But when you have dependants, a team, a retail lease, and real life commitments, jumping like that isn’t always the smartest move anymore. And I think that’s where I am now.
A big part of the clarity that came is realizing that this year - this experiment - is really about reconciling where i am and where i want to go, and learning to honour the in-between instead of skipping over it.
And from here, making decisions has actually become easier. Both in the business and in my personal life.
So we’re not going from four launches a month to one (as dreamy as that sounds for my nervous system), but to two. Cutting the pace in half instead of trying to change everything overnight.
It also means changing smaller things in how I operate day to day. Not trying to answer every email immediately. Accepting that not everything will get done. Putting an auto-responder on. Letting some things wait.
Outside of the business, it’s looked like this too. Not exclusively breastfeeding anymore. Adding formula feeds. Adding one extra day with our nanny. Going for long walks & committing to a weekly pilates class while our nanny is at home, even though my old self would have thought that time should be spent working.
Small decisions that create more space instead of filling every gap.
The best part of not forcing clarity is that some decisions have started making themselves. Instead of thinking my way through everything, I’ve been stepping back and looking at the facts from a distance.
When you get honest about what you want for your life (and what you can actually carry) some things naturally stop fitting. And when that happens, the decisions don’t feel dramatic or heavy. They just feel inevitable.
That’s where I am right now.
My next update will be about what’s changing with our store as of April 1st… this change is also responsible for how great our next sample sale will be. Details by signing up here (no need to if you’re already on the hj newsletter!)
