“Hear Me Out…Belt Bangles.”

Not every hobby needs an LLC

It’s funny how life sometimes hands you a quiet encore of the very thing that started a journey in the first place.

Two decades ago, before my soap company first took off, I was sitting in our living room painting rustic jewelry boxes and making leather bracelet cuffs out of old belts with a rivet and snap maker. Then one little bath-bomb kit that I added to the line changed everything.

The dessert-inspired soaps took off, the snap maker went into a drawer, and I didn’t look back for twenty years.

Fast-forward to this summer: while feng-shui-ing our lives and minimizing for a season of travel and adventure, I found that same little bin, the leather, the buttons, rivet tool-all carefully preserved from that very room where it began.

Now here I am, traveling with my mom to antique stores, collecting vintage jewelry to reimagine. Only this time, it’s not about scaling or systemizing, it’s about intention, time, and gratitude.

It’s crazy when you think about it-a quiet encore to the first act of my creative life.

Indigestion

I’ve come to accept that I have what I call a business reflex, not to be confused with acid reflux, although they do often go hand in hand.
Give me any creative idea, and within five minutes I’ve named it, and built a marketing plan. It’s automatic, like muscle memory from two decades of entrepreneurship.

Lately, I’ve been reminding myself that not every idea needs to be scalable, sellable, or strategic. Some things are meant to exist just because they bring you joy.

“Belt Bangles. It’s going to take off.”

That’s what I said one afternoon recently, half-joking, while cutting up old vintage belts to turn into jewelry. My husband just laughed, nodded his head in hypothetical agreement, and said, “Absolutely honey.”

He wasn’t mocking, of course-just gently amused. He’s seen this kind of obsession before. It’s the same one I had when I was melting soap bases at our kitchen counter almost two decades ago.
Who knew that a craft kit would eventually lead to products in thousands of stores and a business that changed our lives.

After that experience, he’s earned the right to laugh a little nervously when I say I’m “just messing around.”

The Creative Ride (Without a Business Plan)

While I still get that familiar entrepreneurial spark with every side venture, I’ve learned to let that thought of growth drift by without chasing it.
This isn’t about suppressing ambition. It’s about redefining success.

Sometimes, success can be in the stillness, in being able to create freely without the weight of expectation attached to it.

Take my mother-in-law. She is insanely talented at everything she tries her hand at, from throwing clay on a potter’s wheel to glazing and firing it, to making the most incredible vintage-style decorations. You name it, she can bake it, make it, all of the things.

Every single time my friends see pictures of her pieces of art, they ask me the same thing:

“When is she going to sell these? These need to be in stores!

When I passed along those compliments with inquiry, she just smiled and said that the moment there is an expectation, it stops being fun and starts being pressure, and she just would never want to do that to something she loves doing.

She can sit at her wheel, make a hundred bowls, and not feel the need to rush out and sell a single one, something I’m slowly learning.

Giving yourself permission to have a project that exists solely because it makes you happy is extremely powerful.

That’s what this phase of my life feels like, a creative renaissance of sorts, without spreadsheets.

Peace After the Pivot

After two decades of building, growing, and grinding, it feels strange, and beautiful, to simply enjoy the making again.
There’s no urgency, no inventory reports, no pressure to “scale.” Just quiet creativity and gratitude.

As I sit here surrounded by old belts, vintage pins, and the occasional runaway bead in the bottom of my foot, I realize the real reward of reinvention doesn’t have to be in what we build next, but can also be in learning to enjoy things simply because it feels good to create.

In this era, that feels like peace.

So now… Belt Bangles. Hear me out.