On paper, Anna, founder of Anna Lou Jewelry, had a

story that reads like the kind of trajectory every product founder

secretly hopes for. You start making things at home. A buyer

spots you, suddenly you're in Selfridges, then Topshop, then Harvey

Nichols. Your pieces are popping up on celebrities.

So it grew and grew and grew to the point where I was turning over

almost £3 million but not making any profit. You're doing

shows on QVC, journalists are calling. You have a shop on

Carnaby street in London and the orders keep climbing.

Welcome to the resilient retail podcast Game plan. I'm Catherine Erdly and in the next

few minutes, you're about to get powerful real world retail strategies from

insights shared both from my guests and myself, backed up by

my 25 years in the retail industry. Keep listening to learn how

to grow a thriving, profitable product business. Let's jump in

with this latest episode. It

all sounds incredible, doesn't it? It sounds like proof that the whole thing

is working, because that's what we're taught to believe when you're busy, busy. Busy

and you've got the pressure of making the sales back because you just bought all

this stock, you're not grounded and you're not

aligned with yourself. Big stockists mean success. High

turnover means stability. Visibility means safety.

But that's not what was happening behind the scenes. The numbers were telling a

very different story, one that most business owners don't talk about until

they're on the other side of it. And that's why I wanted you to hear

Anna's experience directly from her. Not the glossy version,

not the look where I ended up version, the real one, the one that played

out underneath all the noise while everyone else assumed she was flying.

But instead of starting with the highlight reel, I asked her to explain

what the business actually looked like during that turbulent period.

Financially, operationally, emotionally. And she didn't hold back.

Here's Anna. I was actually a multi seven figure

business, so it was actually more than a million. Yeah. And I was in Selfridges

and Topshop had a concession in Topshop, Harvey

Nichols, Liberty's Harrods, Issa Tan in Japan.

I mean, the stores that people would dream of.

And I have to say that I even had a show on

qvc. I was quite young, but I was selling, selling, selling,

selling, selling, selling, selling and not really looking

at the proper numbers. And I was manufacturing.

How it all started was when I first got into

Harvey Nicks, I then slowly got into the other department

stores. It's kind of a bit of a ricochet effect. Once you're in one,

then sort of. The others tended to follow suit. But what

happened was, is that I had an interview with another

high street company called Reese. I think Reese is

still going. I'm not sure if they still are. So they asked me to do

a collaboration with them, which was obviously really exciting. And

I had never made in China before, but what happened was I was

making at home, in my bedroom, selling in

these department stores. So I'll see my turnover wasn't massive. And then

all of a sudden I get this meeting with Reese and they said, how

many pieces can you make a week? And I just plucked out

of the sky, oh, 50,000. I mean, I'd never made

more than about. Probably 35, to

be honest. Yeah, 35. Not 35,000, just 35.

35, yeah, exactly. Well, maybe a bit more, but anyway, so this meeting

went exceptionally well and then I received this massive order

for 48,000 pounds worth of jewelry. And I thought,

oh, my God, I'm going to have to go and get these made overseas. So

I literally made the samples myself, took them over to China, because I'd

been suggested some places to go and had the

whole collection made over there, delivered back to Reese. So it

grew and grew and grew to the point where I was turning over

almost £3 million but not making any profit.

Wow. Wow. So that was

partly lack of experience. I was just really

inexperienced and I have learned so much since.

From the outside, that kind of growth looks amazing. On the

inside, it was overwhelming. Stock everywhere, spreadsheets

everywhere. And a business that only worked if Anna never

stopped sprinting. I guess it's because you've got a

spreadsheet of items that people are ordering

regularly. You know, every day we've got new boutiques,

people saying, oh, but I want that one in a pink and not a blue.

And then have you got that one in more of a lighter blue, not a

darker blue? You know, all of those questions that go on and in the end

you realize, actually we've got far too much stock, we've got far too

many options, we've got cells on spreadsheets. The cost

of managing those spreadsheets of the staff

was just not feasible for me. I got

pregnant, actually, with my first child and I just thought,

whoa, this isn't going to work, this is not sustainable. And I

have to say, I did have options of getting investment and a lot

of competitors that I've got now did take investment and

they've grown and they're huge and they're Amazing brands,

but that's a choice I chose to be a mum at home

and basically pivot on. Keep the brand going,

but making sure that it was online only

and made to order. The other hidden piece here, and

it's an important one, is what Anna was sacrificing personally to keep

all of this moving. Not just financially, although that alone

was huge, but emotionally, energetically, in

ways that never show up on a profit and loss sheet, but are really real

for founders. Because when you're running a business that looks wildly

successful from the outside, there's this unspoken pressure to keep the illusion

going. You don't want to admit, even to yourself, that you're not

paying yourself well while you're paying staff, paying for concessions,

paying rent on a shop on Carnaby street, paying to fix mistakes that

other people made. You don't want to acknowledge how much of your time is being

swallowed by admin, by stock issues, by the endless cycle of

saying yes so people don't lose interest. And honestly,

most founders don't even notice the toll until something forces them

to stop. Pregnancy burnout, a big bill they didn't see

coming, or simply the quiet realization that they haven't enjoyed

their own business in a little bit too long. Anna hit that

point. She didn't make a big, dramatic announcement about it. She didn't have a

breakdown in a boardroom. She just saw it. She

saw the gap between what she was projecting and what was actually happening behind

the curtain. And then there's the values piece, the part

we often ignore because we think it's secondary, something that you sort out later

when things are calmer, except it never gets calmer.

And meanwhile, she's making acrylic pieces she no longer feels aligned with,

moving stock around the world because the wholesale machine demands it, and

dealing with buyers who want 10 variations of everything but won't commit to any

of them. At some point, it stops feeling creative, it stops feeling

meaningful, it stops feeling like her. And that

internal tug, the misalignment, the discomfort, the

this isn't who I am anymore feeling, that's often more powerful than

any spreadsheet or sales report. Because when your values start whispering

that something is off, you can only ignore them for so long before it

becomes physically exhausting to keep going. So, yes, the

financial strain was real, but so was the emotional strain of running a business

that didn't reflect who she was anymore. And that combination,

the numbers and values colliding, is what ultimately pushed her into

rethinking everything. That's the moment I Want you to hear next, because

this is where the shift really begins for Anna. Here she is. Well,

I really wasn't paying myself that much money. I was paying all these people.

I had, like, nine members of staff. I had people working in the concessions

and also just the managing of all the stock in all these different places, like

Selfridges. I hate to say it, but they didn't really know where half the stock

was and the cupboards would be lost. And it was very.

I'm being a bit too honest here, but it was very, very

stressful that in the end you just think, oh, my

God. Like, this is. I've made some wrong choices and you just have

to have a long, hard chat with yourself. I mean, that was one of

my first rebirths that I would call was really

hard because it was my baby that I had built from nothing

but pure creativity and passion. And I just had to face up to the

fact that I didn't have a financial controller. I had some

people working in the shop that weren't particularly honest.

I had a shop in Carnaby street, which was a really brilliant shop and it

was packed, had loads of tourists coming in day in, day out. It

was brilliant and it was popular, you know, it was in the magazines. We had

celebrities wearing the pieces. We had Kate Moss, we had Lily Allen, we had

Paris Hilton, Kylie Minogue. So many different people. But

it just wasn't enough. You almost needed to have a lot more

investment. You needed to have like a boost of investment to go

really big. That's not an excuse. But that was something that I just

thought, I'm not going to be able to get that investment because I'm pregnant with

my first child. I won't be able to give the investor

necessarily what he wants because I want to look after my baby.

I'm interested as well about the stock piece, because one of the things that I

quite often run into is that people will say, well, I need to have the

stock to make the sales. So they. There's a sort of mentality that

more stock equals more sales, but then what they don't

realize is that more stock also equals less cash flow. And

it's like finding that balance between, you know, like you said, someone said, oh,

do you do this in pink? And you were saying, yes, and adding it to

the spreadsheet. Was there ever a point at which you thought, what if I just

stop. And I

actually

realized that wholesaling was basically moving stock

around the world so that that shop wasn't going to have it. Well, then that

shop might have it and then that shop might have it. And in the end

I was a bit like, we just like transporting stock from

shop to shop. One, you know, this is all just a bit strange.

...

bringing

more plastic into the world. I've made some interesting

choices with this business because I love it still and I do still think we've

got my handwriting. The plastic quirky products

definitely were the things that gave me a name because they

were bold and bright. Yeah. And then since then it's been

letters and names and now I've kind of moved into

much more, you know, wellbeing and personal journey

pieces. From the outside, people still assumed things were great,

but Anna had already decided to step back from a lot of that prestige

and, and rebuild on her own terms. I've always been quite

brutally honest and what I realized is that people didn't really need

to know that we weren't in those stores anymore because

they still had the database of people. It's not like, oh my God, big

announcement. We're not going to be in Sally's gift shop

next month. Right. We don't need to do that. I mean. And

Harvey, Nick's just sort of slowly sort of dissipated and I just had

enough of those. You know, the payment terms was getting longer and

longer and longer and longer. And we just can't work with

120 days payment terms. So you deliver them the stock and

then it would be four months until you were paid.

That

was

actually

QVC Japan that said that it wasn't QVC UK. We did used to sell

on QVC UK but it wasn't quite so strict. But you still have to put

the stock up front now. I think I'm highly investable

actually as an entrepreneur that's been through

every possible.

Mistake that you could possibly go on

and still be around. You know where the hurdles

are. If I was about to invest in someone, I'd want to use somebody

like me who knows where not to go wrong. So what does it

look like when you come out the other side of all of that? For Anna,

it's a mix of very practical number watching and a much deeper

focus on her own energy and alignment.

And

I buried my head in the sand with the costs.

And I remember I had this shop in Carnaby street and then I just realized

I couldn't really afford the rent. And then they said, well, you know, we'll

give you a bit of an extension. They said it was like a pop up

store rent, but it was like a long term pop up store rent. But anyway,

in the end I just realized I just had to bite the bullet and be

like, oh my God, like I haven't really been looking at the

numbers properly. One thing that I've learned is that I have

an accountant who is literally like in my pocket.

Not a rich husband, but an accountant that is in my pocket.

So, yeah, I definitely know that the numbers are

absolutely vital and I'm looking at

graphs all the time, all the time. However depressing it

is just looking at numbers, looking at the data, looking at. Everything, looking

at the costs right now. Looking at the costs way more than I even

look at the sales, actually always looking at the other way

around. To be honest, this is the part of the conversation I keep coming

back to because it's one thing to say, right, I need to look at my

numbers properly and quite another to actually change how you run

your business day to day. Most product founders I work with don't struggle

because they're reckless. They struggle because they are unfocused.

They chase sales and keep running after shiny new tactics instead of

focusing on what really makes a difference to the bottom line. And Anna did

exactly what so many of us do. She focused on the exciting bits. The

orders, the interest, the stockists, and ignored the

extremely unsexy truth sitting right underneath all of it.

Costs, margins, capacity, cash flow,

the stuff that doesn't sparkle. What I love is that she doesn't

gloss over it. She's blunt. She didn't look at the numbers. She didn't have the

right structure, and she paid for that. But she also

rebuilt herself around it. She started tracking the right things. She

brought in an accountant. She learned the actual rhythms of her business

rather than the imagined ones. And then this is the deeper bit.

She realized it wasn't just about spreadsheets. It was about her nervous system, her

alignment, her ability to make decisions from a place that wasn't

purely panic or purely yesing or pure external

validation. Because you can have the best systems in the world, but if

you're permanently overwhelmed or out of sync with your own business, none of it

sticks. But when Anna talks about this, you can really hear the shift.

She's not just a founder who learned financial discipline. She's a

founder who learned herself. Here's how she explains it in her own

words. One of the things that I do now is actually

check in with myself before anything. So this is

the first thing to just make sure that that stockist

feels aligned, that everything that you're doing feels aligned. And when I

say feels aligned, it's like when you're busy, busy, busy, and you've got the pressure

of making the sales back because you've just bought all this stock, you're not

grounded, and you're not aligned with yourself. And to

me, that's really, really important, number one.

And dealing with your own nervous system, actually.

Because if we're calm and we're high vibe and we've got good

frequency and we're eating well and we're sleeping well, then the business will

take care of itself. As I said before, like, not to strip

away kind of what looks good and have a

look at what's actually making you the profit,

which is easier said than done, because I have also been really guilty,

being a designer, of going, no, I'm not taking it off the website

because I love it. And then it hasn't really sold at

all. But I'm so adamant that I won't take it off because I love

It. Which is not

great, but. But then I'm like, there will

be that person out there that loves it. It is why they call it the

art and science of running a retail business, because it's part science about the

numbers and part of it is the art of picking the right product. Yeah.

And you're so right about the science. And I think that that science is

something that is. You can learn that science. And it's also. I think

with investment, there's a science to investment as well. There's a science to

all of it. And I didn't know that science before. I was just given this

amazing opportunity and I ran with it. I remember when I was in

Tokyo and I was with the British embassy and they'd taken out

like six brands to showcase their work for the accessories embassy.

Honestly, I think I did a million pounds worth of sales alone

in that one trip. Wow. And I

remember the ambassador, British fashion ambassador,

she said, we've never seen anything like it. Like, this is

absolutely unbelievable. And I was like, well, you know, I didn't think.

I thought this was normal. But now when I look back, I was just so

blase about it. And that feels like the right place

to leave Anna's story today. Because where she is right now is

such a strong place in terms of having created a business that works

for her. It actually fits her with a focus on things that matter

to her, like meaningful pieces that are aligned with her interest in personal

development. She's taken control of her manufacturing and shifted her

model from overproduction to made to order. And I think that's the

real takeaway here. We spend so much time chasing things we're told matter.

The big names on the stockist list, the perfect Instagram feed, the revenue number

that looks impressive when you say it out loud. But none of that guarantees

stability, and certainly none of that guarantees joy. And

none of that guarantees a business you actually want to wake up and run every

day. What Ana's story shows is that the pivot points, the

uncomfortable moments, the pauses, the rebirths, they're not

signs you've failed. They're usually moments when you finally see the truth clearly

enough to do something about it. So whether you're at the start of your journey

or you've been running your brand for years, I hope this conversation gives you

the permission to step back and check in with yourself. Not just with your numbers,

though. Absolutely do that. But with your energy, your capacity,

and your values. Because the businesses that last are rarely the ones that grow

the fastest. They're the ones built with intention, honesty, and a founder

who's willing to evolve. If you'd like to find out more about Anna, you can

check out Anna Lou of London on Instagram. That's A N N

A L O U of London on Instagram, and we'll put

all the links in the show notes. And if you're finally ready to get help

with some of the challenges we've raised in this episode, you might want to book

a call to talk about my Retail by Design program kicking off in January.

Go to resilientretailclub.com and click on Retail by Design to find out

more about the Focus Framework that I use to help you get

in touch with the business that you really want to run. And I'm looking forward

to talking to you next week in episode 281. That one's all

about how to run a stock clearance sale. See you next week.