How I failed my first business.

A personal reflection with many valuable lessons that I learned along the way.

It’s a story you’ve heard before—Covid hit and I lost my job. I took it as the sign I always needed to break free and start a new venture. I had worked for small businesses for the past decade and always wanted something of my own. Reading #Girlboss by Sophia Amoruso and following this culture empowered and inspired me. I longed for that glorious ‘Founder’ title on my Instagram profile. I wanted the street credit for starting my own side hustle. I mean it was 2020, if you weren’t starting your own brand, who were you anyways?

You may already recognize the red flags at this stage. So there I was—given all the time and space in the world to focus on creating something out of nothing. I had a business name in mind, something that had been occupying space in my brain since 2018 and my summer spent in Italy. (Yes, the business was called A Summer in Italy and it was based on the first solo trip I took to celebrate my 30th birthday). I purchased the domain, secured all the social handles, got the Gmail address, and then had to decide what I was going to sell. The plan was to be a laid-back wellness brand and carry a variety of products that facilitate such a leisurely lifestyle. However, the budget didn’t allow for several products to be purchased, created, and launched all at once. So I decided to start with something I was already making for myself—face oils.

A Summer in Italy Face Oils

This was a huge undertaking, more so than I thought. Scott and I bootstrapped the whole thing from the ground up. He taught himself graphic design so we could submit label and box designs that met industry standards. I used Canva to come up with colour palettes, fonts, artwork, and logos for the branding. We figured out basic coding and built the website together during the late hours of the evening. It was thrilling, scary, and wonderful. I have a background in natural skincare and herb studies so I knew which ingredients I wanted the brand to feature. I designed these oils to be the products I wish I could find at Cap Beauty. I designed them for myself with potent plant-powered ingredients—and for that reason—they were the best oils I’ve ever personally used. I still make Blu Nude in small batches for myself, it’s just too darn good. *Note: At this point I had gone back to work full time and was coming home to work on A Summer in Italy in the evenings.

Now, let’s talk finances for a minute. What a lot of people may not know is that there are minimum purchases on things like bottles and custom boxes. We had to purchase 1000 product boxes (per design) before selling a single product (and these boxes are not cheap). This is when risky decisions started to happen. My excitement and confidence (aka my ego) took the driver’s seat and we threw common business sense out the window. We increased our start-up budget to cover the costs of materials and supplies and then realized—shit, we can’t just take iPhone pictures of these luxury products, nobody will take us seriously. So we hired a professional photographer and model, rented a loft, and styled the shoot that would get us through our first iteration of the website. I was living my #girlboss dream while we were getting deeper and deeper into debt.

Now that you have the back story and a good idea of where things were headed, let’s jump forward to launch day. The website went live! Instagram was our main marketing source, we sent a bunch of influencers free product to promote, and told all our friends/family. It was a success, we made a few thousand dollars right out of the gate. I started receiving feedback from people I didn’t know, telling me how much they loved the oils. We eventually had repeat customers and things were looking pretty good.

Fast forward another six months down the road and I was getting tired. Tired of posting about the same two face oils every single day. Tired of trying to take post-worthy photos in our tiny apartment with my iPhone and come up with ideas for reels to keep up with the annoying algorithm. Tired of being a broke #girlboss. We needed a refresh but without more sales, we couldn’t afford the crazy start up cost of launching a new product at this time. So we opted for another little photoshoot to at least offer some fresh content for our viewers… add another expense to the list.

Meanwhile, I was reaching out to small boutiques across the country and trying to get this product onto shelves (other than just our digital shelf) to increase brand awareness and sales. It was rejection after rejection. Mind you, taking on a freshly launched brand in the middle of a global pandemic was probably too risky for these business owners—but I was still left with feelings of discouragement and defeat. We sent out countless free samples and received generally one of two responses in return: “we have too many natural skincare brands already”, or “honestly, we can’t expand our inventory right now, times are tough”. We weren’t just struggling to get on shelves at this point, it wasn’t cheap to ship from Canada and with free shipping being the norm these days (and Canada Post international shipping fees starting at $45.00+), we wanted to just forget the whole thing.

As I mentioned earlier—this is a story you’ve heard before. Month after month I noticed more and more small batch skincare lines appear out of the woodwork. I wasn’t the only one launching a brand in 2020. But it wasn’t just small skincare brands, this was also the time it felt like almost every celebrity decided to come out with their own skincare line—the market was saturated. The worst part about this for me was that I never set out to be a skincare brand. The skincare part of the brand was supposed to be a temporary step on the way to well-being. But as time went on, our viewers only knew us as a skincare company and I couldn't help but feel trapped in a niche, cornered into an arena I never wanted to compete in. The face oils were tiny droplets in the sea of products I had planned for this line. They were not the right products to launch this brand with. The oils were too pricey to make and maintain (fresh oils don’t last forever), and they slapped a ‘skincare’ label across our faces on day one. This was yet another huge mistake I didn’t realize I made until too late in the game.

As lockdowns passed and life started to shift back to normal, we continued on. I was still working my full time day job and Scott had started his Bachelor of Commerce degree. Burn out was creeping closer and closer but we decided to get married and have a little wedding ceremony with eight of our closest friends and family members. We both ended up with Covid a week after our wedding and I was taken down pretty hard. Hugely actually, but I’ll save that story for another time. It’s ironic that the straw to break this camel’s back was the same one that started this whole experience in the first place—a very clever virus indeed.

My mental and physical health soon got to the point that I had to take a break from Instagram and social media to gain back some strength. Honestly, at this point I was going to bed praying that orders wouldn’t come in because I was tired and didn’t want to do this #girlboss thing any longer. Without our marketing team (me, myself, and I) sales eventually stopped all together. I had taken on too much and it was finally catching up with me. I wasn’t paying myself for the hours I was pouring into this company, so I would work non-stop and still not be able to afford much of a personal life. It was unsustainable. I didn’t put healthy practices into place to lay the right foundation for this business. I created a mess and gave myself more responsibility than I could handle long term. I had to make the hard choice of continuing on like this to keep the business alive, or calling it quits.

I sat with these feelings for weeks before going to Scott. He believed in me to bring this vision to life and I so badly didn’t want to fail him, the person who put their time and money into a project that I couldn’t follow through on. It almost felt worse to fail Scott than to fail the business. I wrote out a list of all the mistakes I made, things I would do differently looking back, and how I could see so clearly from this side why we weren’t as successful as we could have been. All the reasons why this business was starting to feel like a burden rather than a blessing. Finally, one night I sat him down and, with enough tears to flood our apartment, I told him I didn’t know if I could keep doing this. I took full responsibility for the loss and presented my list of mistakes. He did what he always does and said the exact thing I needed to hear. He told me there is a right time to walk away from things in life, and the only true failure is being too afraid to try again when the time is right. He said the lessons I learned were worth every penny he invested into this business. That this was a priceless experience I will take with me into my future and become a better person for. He told me that he knew I put a lot of thought into this decision and that he was proud of me for doing what I believe to be right, even though this was one of the harder choices I’ve had to make. He said we could talk about what closing down the business would look like later, first we need to take a breath.

It was only this week that we signed the papers to complete all the final taxes and shut down the legal side of things. I’m still keeping the name, email, website domain, and all the social handles. The story of the face oil company has ended but A Summer in Italy is something that still lives within me. It might not be for a while, but I know this company will have another chapter. Things will be done differently—slower and with more intension— but I will try again. Not to be a founder hustling to get a business going, but to continue creating and sharing what I believe in.

If you made it this far—thank you for reading my story. I made big mistakes (lots of them) and I forgot to take care of myself along the way. The business relied on me to stay healthy and I sacrificed my health trying to make the business succeed. I wanted to keep up with the Kardashians #Girlbosses of the world and prove myself. I used the company to connect with likeminded individuals, rather than just connecting with likeminded individuals as myself. I gained external confidence but lacked the internal confidence that I was looking for. I lost alignment to my personal values of well-being and work/life balance. I’ve often prided myself for being the hardest worker or top performer, but somewhere along the way I realized that life is so much more than my output. I missed the slow, leisurely weekends that inspired the whole vibe behind the brand I was building in the first place. I was posting my talk on social media but I wasn’t walking my talk.

I failed my first business in so many ways. I’m only now able to openly talk about it, it wasn’t easy coming to terms with this reality. A humbling experience to say the least.

In the end, I learned a lot. About business, about myself, and about my relationships with others. I learned that I absolutely love styling photoshoots and working with photographers—all the images in this post are little pieces of artwork that I’m so incredibly proud of. I learned that I’m really good at curating, have a wicked eye for design, and absolutely love connecting with the community we built on a personal level. I learned that after a decade of working in the natural skincare world—I’m over it!

Most of all I learned that writing our monthly newsletter for A Summer in Italy was one of my favourite parts of the job. I always felt a little restricted though, because I had to write from A Summer in Italy’s voice and not my own. When one door closes, another door opens—so they say. The door of the face oils is now closed, but my new newsletter door is wide open and You’ve Got Lauren is the personal project I should have started from the beginning. The one I’m so glad I’ve started now. It’s a piece of my heart, direct to your inbox.

Thank you for being here.

And one last thing before I let you go: Being a #girlboss doesn’t require owning your own company or starting the most aesthetically pleasing brand on the market. The people out there living the life that best suites their needs and dreams—prioritizing what brings pleasure and value to their life and community—those are the real #girlbosses in my mind. If you’re holding onto the hustle culture with white knuckles because you’re scared of letting go—I hear you, I was you. But things are pretty awesome on this side of the grind.