Every time someone thinks of a "business owner," they picture someone with money. Loads of resources. Loads of time. Which is fair, honestly, because you generally need all three to start a business.
Not quite my story.
I spent over 15 years in marketing and graphic design, working for people who were unwilling to accommodate my legally protected needs, or for people whose egos got in the way of the whole team moving forward. Sometimes my ego needed checking too, and I learned that the hard way. So I'm approaching this little art store differently. With a little more grace. Corporate life made me brutal with myself. Now I want to be comfortable with imperfection, within reason. I want to hold myself accountable, but I also want to actually listen to my body instead of just pushing through.
It didn't start with "I'm going to build a business." It started with a slow accumulation of what ifs. What if I bought a Cricut? What if I sketched some characters in Procreate? What if I turned them into stickers? One what if led to another, and somewhere in all of that, a theme started taking shape. Doris the Uterus came first. Then the Happy Pillz. Then Shiny Capsule, Bitsy the Bottle, Della the Drop. Five characters, one very specific and very intentional vibe: reproductive health positivity through kawaii art. Lighthearted. Cute. Completely unapologetic.
I called the collection Flow Friends because it felt right. They show up every month whether you asked them to or not. You might as well make them adorable.
Then came the actually building it part. Researching manufacturers. Tracking down a Cricut Maker. A lot of spreadsheets. And then I filed the LLC, which was simultaneously more and less dramatic than I expected. I remember sitting there after submitting the paperwork waiting for it to feel like a moment. It did and it didn't. Pretty Creative Studios was officially a real legal entity, and I was still just me, sitting at my desk, wondering if I'd made a huge mistake and was kidding myself.
Maybe?
So here's where I actually am now: two weeks past launch, and I still have a full time job. That's not a disclaimer, it's just the actual shape of this. I work my 9-5 during the day like a normal person, and then Pretty Creative Studios happens whenever there's time left. Nights, weekends, the 40 minutes between dinner and collapsing. One person, two jobs, way too much coffee. I don't think I understood what that would actually feel like until I was in it.
Nobody really tells you what launch day is like either. You build a shop for months, draw the characters, write every listing, figure out shipping profiles and tax registration and all the stuff nobody puts in a highlight reel, and then one day you flip a switch and it's just live. Out there. Anyone could see it. And then you close your laptop and go to bed because you still have to be up for your real job in six hours.
There's no confetti. No one's watching a countdown with you. It's just you, half asleep, checking your phone in the morning to see if anything happened while you were out. That part is a lot quieter than I expected. Not in a bad way. Just quieter than I pictured.
Honestly the thing that took up the most space in my brain was all the invisible boring stuff. Tax registration. Shipping profiles. Testing the checkout flow at 11pm because that was the only time I had. None of that is fun, none of it shows up in a cute product photo, and yet somehow all of it had to exist before Flow Friends could be a real thing anyone could buy. And even once the shop was technically live, it took a beat before it actually felt real. Like there's a gap between "this is launched" and "this is real" and nobody warns you that gap exists.
Meanwhile the part I actually thought would be hard, the art, the characters, the actual making of things, has been the easiest part of this whole mess. Not low effort easy. Just, it's the one piece that's never felt like a chore, even at midnight after a full day doing something else entirely. Kind of funny that the thing I worried about the least is the thing that keeps giving me energy back instead of taking it. I look at the keychain samples that arrived and think: I made this. And whatever vulnerable feeling was sitting there gets a little quieter.
So that's where I'm at. Two weeks in, still figuring out what a sustainable rhythm even looks like when this has to fit into whatever's left after a day job. Some weeks it works. Some weeks it doesn't and I just let something slide and pick it back up later instead of spiraling about it. Still working on being ok with that instead of treating it like I failed somehow.
I don't have a neat lesson to end this on yet. Two weeks isn't enough time to know what this actually is in the long run. I just wanted to write down what it's actually been like instead of some polished version of it, while it's still fresh.
More characters coming. More stuff coming. Figuring it out after hours, same as always.
<3 Maggie