For most of the life of this brand, every decision has landed on one desk: mine. The product formulas, the photography, the website, the pricing, the late-night packaging runs. There's no version of this story with a co-founder splitting the weight.
What Nobody Warns You About Doing It Solo
It's not the workload people picture. It's the decision fatigue — the fact that every single call, big or small, waits on you and only you. What the brand looks like, what it says, what it costs, whether an idea is actually good or just feels good at 11pm. There's no one in the room to talk you out of a bad idea or talk you into a good one you're too tired to see clearly.
I shot my own product photography for a long stretch — not because I couldn't have hired it out eventually, but because I needed to understand exactly what I wanted the brand to look like before I could hand that vision to someone else and trust they'd protect it.
Learning to Let a Little Go
Eventually I brought people in — a social media manager, content creators, collaborators for specific projects. That was its own kind of hard. Handing off a piece of something you've built entirely with your own hands means trusting someone else to carry a part of the vision without watering it down. I'm still learning where that line is.
Building alone doesn't mean staying alone forever. It means being the one who decides what gets protected before you let anyone else near it.
Why I'm Still Doing It This Way
There are real costs to building solo — slower growth in places a bigger team could have sped up, decision fatigue that catches up with you, the isolation of not having anyone who sees the business the way you do. I've felt all of it, including the stretch that led to the burnout I've written about here before. But there's also a version of this brand that only exists because no one diluted the vision before it was ready to be shared. That trade-off is one I keep choosing, eyes open.