End of an Era!

It's the end of an era! ?

After 14 and a half years, I have sold Red Candy!

I couldn’t have imagined back in 2009 the crazy journey ahead of me. I was perched on a stool in my kitchen in Moseley, laptop and landline to hand, answering customer calls, sourcing products, doing my own bookkeeping, building social media accounts, writing product descriptions…

…every day a whirlwind of a hundred mistakes and five dizzying successes, driven by a never-ending enthusiasm to try new things, to see what I could achieve, and to enjoy the freedoms of self-employment!

September 2009, the month Red Candy launched, the niche I’d identified paid off and the company went straight into profit. Revenue for the first year was ￡313,527.65. The fact that there were people out there willing to exchange their hard-earned money for Red Candy products? Wow. I celebrated every order with a Napoleon Dynamite fist pump and a quiet thank you to the universe for enabling me to earn a living doing what I loved. This is the dream, right?

The following years were a real adventure. Year-on-year growth, 4 branding changes, 5 website relaunches, 4 business reinventions, over 20 employees, designing and manufacturing own-brand items, heaps of fun and valuable connections along the way! And then came the Covid years…

Business tripled overnight. We saw annual revenue peak at ￡5,354,849.20. If my wide-eyed 2009 self had foreseen such a thing he wouldn’t have been able to believe it. ‘You’ve made it! You must be so happy! Your life is a success!’ However, the reality was something quite different.

Don’t get me wrong; I was and still am incredibly grateful that we were able to continue trading through Covid, and able to thrive whilst businesses around us were decimated overnight. But for me, this was a huge turning point beyond which I quickly become lost.

Fast forward to September last year. I knew something was drastically amiss when following my thousandth emotional outburst of the week (I think maybe we’d received a 3-star review on Feefo – oh the humanity!) my partner asked me a simple question - if I still enjoyed running Red Candy? I was just about to answer with the standard ‘of course I do, it’s my baby, it’s my life, it’s blah blah blah…’, when the words stuck in my throat.

It was two days later following a lot of soul searching when I finally gave my honest answer. ‘No’.

The truth is, I hadn’t been enjoying it at all for almost 3 years. Following the incredible growth triggered by Covid came the building up of the team, learning WFH, replacing overrun and outgrown systems, outsourcing to multiple agencies, sourcing and manufacturing FAR too many containers of stock (hindsight is a wonderful thing ??), and investing heavily across the board to help sustain growth. All of this whilst personally trying to reconcile the fear of an actual pandemic and the stressful effects of not being able to see family and friends.

At the point I’d finally built a whole new business structure, fit for meaningful future growth, the lockdown was released. Those in the retail sector had predicted a dip, but the slide was much larger than imagined. We rode out 2021 hoping to turn things around in 2022. I mean, what else could go wrong?

February 2022, up steps the massive t**t named Putin.

The effects were immediate. Sales dwindled further as households cut spending across the board. Costs spiralled and margins were strangled. Throw into the mix the assassination of Facebook ads by iOS14.5, containers going up from $1,700 to $20,000, the towering pile of ‘Brexit paperwork’, storage costs tripling…

I was hit with the incredibly demoralising realisation that if the company was to survive I had no choice but to pick apart and strip out all of the positive changes I’d made in the previous year, including making members of the team redundant – the first time I’ve ever had to do this. It was absolutely heartbreaking for everybody at Red Candy.

The never-ending startup hours continued, and the feelings of helplessness and isolation grew. I was continuously tired and anxious, blowing up at the slightest thing that went wrong, living in burnout.

This is the thing. When you run your own company you get so used to dealing with issues as they crop up. Every buck stops with you. Just get your head down and get on with it. Good times are inevitably just around the corner. Issues stacking and multiplying non-stop for 30+ months just doesn’t happen. …until it does.

When the word ‘no’ came out of my mouth it was like a switch being flicked. I was hit with the realisation of just how unhealthy my relationship with the business had become. I looked into the future and couldn’t see any path where I was still running Red Candy, and every path looked rosier because of this.

??? Fast-forward to the present day! ??? We’re barely 3 months into 2023 and I’m beginning to feel my best self again. The business sold and changed hands in January to the loveliest guy, enabling me to take a few months off work. And there was me thinking running a business was the dream… Nuh huh! It’s all about temporary early retirement, let me tell you! ??

I’m now a totally different person at a totally different stage of life to the guy that started Red Candy in his kitchen in 2009, and as such my priorities are likely to be entirely different. I was just so caught up in the day-to-day that I never took a moment to ask myself – is this really what I want from life?

Without wanting to sound too ‘Academy Awards’ here, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank every single Red Candy team member I’ve had the pleasure of working with since the beginning. It has been a blast, and the company would not be what it is today without all of you. And thanks for tolerating good boss, bad boss, inspiring boss, stressed boss, absent boss, doolally boss… ??

Thank you also to all of the amazing suppliers, agencies and individuals (you know who you are!) I’ve partnered with over the years. Don’t worry, for good or bad this won’t be the last you’ve seen of me. ??

Before I wrap up my maiden LinkedIn post (and what a wordy thing it is!), have a little nibble on these nuggets:

? Check in on yourselves, regularly. What are your priorities, and are your days structured to support them?

? Work is one of the most important relationships of your life. Are you getting as much out of it as the business is?

? Your happiness has an infinitely greater value than anything you’ll ever see in the bank account. Investing in the former provides a greater ROI. ??

#ecommerce #redcandy #retail #covid #entrepreneur #startup #burnout #businesssales