Stick With It
Day thirty-nine of ninety: I started a three-day water fast, ended an eight-day naming war by picking the name we started with, and spent the rest of the day asking suppliers for certificates like it is my full-time job.
Day thirty-eight ended with the campaign name still unchosen in its third life, the Japan decision still sitting on my desk, salary waiting on my final click, and six dispatches in my vetting queue with me as the bottleneck again. Tuesday opened and I made it harder on purpose: I started a three-day water fast. Today, tomorrow, Thursday, water only. Friday morning I break it gently, small protein first, no big celebration plate, and I have already set the reminder so future hungry me cannot pretend she forgot the plan. This was supposed to be my heavy lifting week. The weights have been respectfully postponed. Walking and light movement only until the food returns.
A fast is a funny thing to start on a meeting day. First meeting, inventory and registration: we finally settled a question that has been quietly causing confusion, the quantities on the restock sheet are pieces, not boxes. Five hundred means five hundred pieces. Words matter, abeg, because somebody was about to plan around boxes that do not exist. The registration route also got simpler and messier at the same time: documents will come from inside the house instead of me chasing them one by one, I still have to chase the trademark lawyer myself, and one overseas contact got cancelled because all he wanted to talk about was money, no answers, just money. Then the operations meeting handed out the usual homework, and the campaign meeting right after lunch handed out even more.
And then, in the middle of that campaign meeting day, the naming war ended. Eight days. We have explored every family of names a human can invent: drop this word, keep that word, quality this, beauty that, care for this, real to that. Today I floated two more, because of course I did. One turned out to already belong, in spirit and in writing, to other beauty brands. The other read nicely on a box but fell apart when you tried to say it out loud like a sentence. So I did the most founder thing possible. I said: stick with the original. The name we started with, the one already printed on the pitch, the one-pager, the directions sheet and the box sleeves, is the name. No rework. No new printing. The search is closed, and the relief in my body was immediate. Colour is not the name, by the way. Colour is a pillar inside it, and today I defined that too: blushes, bold and coloured glosses, colour eye looks. Brow pencils, tools and mascara are many things, but they are not a colour story.
With a name finally locked, the list underneath it got its own upgrade. We merged the team list into the main sourcing list: hundreds of new artists checked against what we already had, dozens already in there, and seventy-five duplicates hiding inside the team list itself, because apparently a list can duplicate itself when nobody is watching. We now stand at eight hundred and thirty-six unique artists, and every new one is being brought up to the same standard as the old ones, followers verified, city, niche, whether they teach classes, whether they have posted in the last thirty days. Two of the three headline names for our partner conversation are found, highlighted and ready. The third name exists on neither list and no artist by that name could be verified anywhere we looked. It looks like a meeting-notes typo gave birth to a person. She is still missing. If she is real, she should come and collect her highlight.
Content, for once, behaved. All five stories for today went up and were verified, one per account, no duplicates, no drama. And the farm feed that spent days refusing the posting tool, the one that made me post from my phone on Sunday like a woman from 2019, finally obeyed twice in one afternoon: the term of the week card and a four-slide carousel, both clean, both live. The block has cleared and I did not have to beg it. The home catalogue also moved from draft to nearly locked. Version two landed, the internal working note that leaked onto a client page in version one is gone, the house numbers page no longer announces that things are still to be confirmed, and the two questions the designer raised were answered from the makers own book, not from vibes. What is left is almost embarrassingly small: the whole document only looks low resolution because it was exported on the standard setting instead of the print setting. One dropdown. That is the difference between blurry and sharp. Then a second version of the same catalogue arrived, a lookbook this time, one hero item per page, and I called it great, because it is. It still has one liar inside it: a mood photo showing a tall fixture where a small wall light should be, so that one image goes back to be regenerated while the rest stands. And the new outdoor supplier does not wait politely outside either: the supplement gets built now, in this same lookbook style, and I will cut from the full picture later, as always.
The rest of the day was certificates. Three new lighting suppliers arrived in a single day, stone pendants, crystal chandeliers, outdoor lights, enough sparkle to open a showroom, and every single conversation ended at the same gate: show me the listing for the finished fixture. One of them answered honestly and I respect it: the parts inside are listed, the fixture itself is not, certification is in progress and they can apply properly once there is a formal order. Honest, but not a pass. Not today. Meanwhile the faucet supplier I have been patiently questioning failed its own gates in writing: no required certification, no safety listing, and the basin faucets in the quote are zinc, the one material I keep saying we do not build homes with. The quote stays as a price reference. Nobody is paying it. I am becoming the kind of founder who can reject a beautiful catalogue on one line of paperwork, and honestly, growth looks good on me.
Still hanging as Tuesday closes: Japan is still unbooked and the visa window closed today with Tokyo now non-refundable only, which is a decision I am apparently saving for maximum stress. Salary is uploaded and still waiting on my approval in the banking portal. A bank wants my account information updated by tomorrow or else. The women's event details that were due today never arrived, so the display now gets sized on a guess, as promised. The two Monday reel blueprints are still waiting for my shoot call, and this dispatch closes the queue instead of joining it, because the bottleneck remains me, now operating on water alone. Day thirty-nine ends with the scoreboard reading: one fast started, one name locked after eight days, eight hundred and thirty-six artists on one list, one missing artist invented by a typo, ten posts live with no duplicates, one catalogue nearly locked, one lookbook endorsed with one mood photo sent back, three new suppliers gated, one faucet quote rejected on paperwork. Stick with it, apparently, is the whole strategy. Day thirty-nine of ninety.