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.