Episode 45: Ready To Build Again
In this episode, I share more details about my former jewelry company as I explore what’s next for me creatively and in career. I talk about my desire to build something new and the steps I’m taking to figure out what’s next for me.
Episode Details
Summary
In this episode, I’m reflecting on a part of myself that I thought I had left behind. Six years after closing my jewelry company, I’m finding myself looking back on that chapter with less hurt and more gratitude, nostalgia, and pride.
For the first time in a long time, I feel ready to build something again.
I share the story of how my jewelry company began, from making jewelry out of curiosity while working at a call center to eventually growing the business, hiring employees, opening a brick-and-mortar shop, and creating a space that brought people together. What started as an experiment became a deeply formative part of my life.
Looking back, I can see that what I loved most was not only making jewelry. I loved taking an idea and bringing it to life. I loved creating experiences, building worlds, supporting other small businesses, and cultivating community.
This episode explores what it feels like to reconnect with a part of yourself you once needed to leave behind. I do not know exactly what I am building next, but I can feel something waking up in me again. The creative visionary, the entrepreneur, and the community builder are all asking to have a place in this next chapter.
This is an invitation to notice what parts of your past might be ready to return in a new form. Sometimes moving forward is not about becoming someone completely different. Sometimes it is about welcoming home a part of yourself that finally feels safe to come back.
This episode is for you if…
You’re curious about your own creative potential and are ready to explore further
You’re an entrepreneur or aspiring entrepreneur who’s ready to start a new business
You want to learn more about what it’s like to run a brick-and-mortar small business
You’re a multi-passionate creative who’s ready to make their dream a reality
You are a visionary who’s not sure how to use your skills to create a business
Related Episodes
-
Welcome to The Shoreline, where we explore the tender in-between seasons of the human experience. My name is Kim, and I'm here to support you as you navigate your next becoming. Here, we don't fix, we listen. We don't rush, we allow. Hello and welcome. If you're new here, I'm so happy you've made your way to The Shoreline. And if you're returning, welcome back. I'm so glad that you're here. So I think at the end of last episode, I shared that I might be making some changes to the Shoreline private coaching sessions and my business. And that kind of little nudge that I felt has really pushed me into a new in-between. Six years ago, I closed my jewelry company. I had started my jewelry company while working a full-time job, and I grew it from being a side hustle into a full-time business for just me to then hiring and employees, and then in 2020, I decided to close and let it go. And I really launched into this path of big personal growth, of spiritual awakening. I tried out all kinds of modalities. I experimented in freelancing, in coaching, in intuition sessions, podcasting. And that's where kind of brought me to now. And I think that it's been interesting because over the last couple of months, I think that I've been thinking a lot about my jewelry business. It's been coming up more and more, and I've been really missing being part of my local small business community. When I had my jewelry company, I was really involved in the creative business community. I knew a lot of the other businesses in my neighborhood. I really reached out and tried to make connections, and I loved supporting other small businesses. And it was just something that brought me a lot of joy. And when I closed, I think I needed just like a clean break. It was almost like a bad breakup. I just really needed to completely detach and remove myself so that I could go on my journey and work on myself, but then also just kind of process everything that happened. And recently, I've been looking back at that time in my life of those 10 years having my jewelry company, and specifically the six years that I had my jewelry company in Seattle and all of the growth and the lessons that happened there. And I noticed that I started to look back, not from a place of hurt or not from a place of analysis, but this place of like joy and nostalgia, and really just looking back and being so proud of what I had done. And what happened is something inside of me is awake now, and I finally feel like I'm ready to build something new. And I didn't know if I would ever come back to this place. I think that I had kind of convinced myself that a quiet career would be enough for me. But at my core, I really identify as being a creative visionary. And I love the process of bringing ideas to life and really transporting people into another world. One of my favorite parts about my business was the creating the concept for my brick and mortar store and picking everything out and setting intention of how I wanted people to feel when they walked in. And I wanted them to feel like they had been transported into another world. And bringing that to life brought me such an immense amount of joy and fulfillment. And I think that that same part of me is the part of me that loves, you know, writing a novel, because I get to create a whole world and bring it to life for the reader. And that's really what I love doing. Even here, I love that this podcast can be just a break in your day, where you get to leave behind whatever it is that you're going through. And just for a moment, you get to be in a different place and you get to hit pause on the world. And really just explore your inner landscape, be here with me. And it's that idea of, or just that feeling of being transported that is so special to me. And I had this kind of awakening of sorts of like, oh my gosh, it was like a light turned on and it's like, oh, I'm ready. I'm ready to build something and I want to build something. I want to get back in the game and I want to be, I want to be an entrepreneur in that way again. And it's, yes, I have my own business. Yes, when I freelanced, that was also having my own business, but it feels different to bring a brand and a concept and an idea to life in that way. And I'm not sure where this little nudge is leading me. It's still very fresh, but I wanted to just explore it with you because, as you can probably tell, it feels really exciting for me. And it just feels really special to even have this feeling again. And I don't know, it feels like I've found part of myself that's maybe been hidden for a little while. I think there was a lot that I needed to process with my jewelry company. And I will forever look back on it as just this beautiful thing that I built. And I think that, you know, it happened the way it needed to happen. The end was the ending that I needed at the time. And I was also super overworked and just overextended and burnt out. And had I not been so burnt out, I may have chosen to end in a different way. And I'm just so, so, so happy that I can look back on it with this loving nostalgia and be really proud of what I created instead of wanting to just erase what happened. And there were so many lessons there, and I think there are so many lessons I'm coming back to. And I think that I'm really excited to dive into who I am as a leader and how I want to embody being a leader and leadership going forward. And I'm excited to continue to develop those skills and to evolve and grow. And I'm really not sure what it is I'll be creating. I just, where I'm at right now is really just, I'm excited to open myself up to receive the next idea. And I don't even know if I've had the courage to share the name of my company here. I feel like I've always just referred to it as my jewelry company. But my jewelry company was called Fresh Tangerine, because at the time I really liked the color orange and I wanted a creative way to express that. So Fresh Tangerine was the name of my business. And when I started it, it came from this very organic place. Like, if we go back to 2010, I was two years out of college. I had spent the last year in France teaching English, and I came back to the US, and I moved to Portland, Oregon, and it was a recession. We had just had that big housing crisis and there were no jobs. I even went back to a retail store. I had worked at the same location I had worked at and asked for a job, and I was like, you don't even have to train me, just put me on the schedule. And they were like, there are no jobs. Like, we don't have anything. We can't even give hours to the people who work here. And so I ended up working at a call center in Portland, and I worked there from I think like 2009 to 2011. And it was the fall of 2010, and I had this strong desire to go back to France. I really wanted to move back to France. I loved being in Europe. I loved living in France, and I wanted to figure out how to get there. And so I was looking at maybe doing the same program I had done before and maybe teaching English again. And I knew that I would need some sort of supplemental income. So I remember sitting down and just like writing out all of the skills that I had. And jewelry was one of them. I had grown up in a very crafty household. My mom is a quilter. She's done all sorts of crafts. And when I was younger, she used to work and sell things that she made at craft markets. And so from a very young age, I think like four or five, I would go with my mom to these little local craft markets, like in elementary schools. And I would make little bracelets. And as a four or five-year-old, I was selling them. And I had just always made jewelry. It started with just like simple plastic beads and string. And as I got older, I developed my skills. And then when I was in high school, I actually worked at a local bead shop, four-store credit. And I remember just being at the shop and absorbing everything that people would say and the projects they would bring in. And I would buy materials and just make things for the joy of making them. And it's something that really stuck with me throughout my life. So when I was writing down the skills, I was like, oh my gosh, jewelry, like I know how to make jewelry. I know how to like sell at a craft fair. Like, let's just see what happens. So I went to my local craft store. I made a bunch of jewelry. I like collected things and I made a booth display. And then I signed up for a few markets and it was really just coming from a place of curiosity of like, if it works, it works. If it doesn't, I can try something different. But I just want to see how people receive my jewelry. So I sold at these markets. There were some that did really well. There were others where I didn't do that well. But I made enough money that I was able to like, reinvest in the business and I kept doing that. I just wanted to see where it would lead me. And then not quite a year later, I was still working at the call center and that job just became too draining for me and I just felt like I couldn't keep going. And at the same time, my business was doing well enough where it felt like a possibility to make it my full-time job. I didn't feel ready and it didn't feel like the business was quite ready, but I kind of was pushed into taking the leap. And so I quit my job at the call center and I started doing jewelry full-time and I really bet on myself and I continued to do different markets, getting into bigger markets, better markets. And I really took everyone's feedback. Anytime someone would come to the booth, I would listen to what they were saying, what they were looking at, what they were drawn to. And I thought about what was important to me. And I remember making what I called the friendship bracelet. And it was this very simple bracelet with just a few beads and then some chain and a clasp. And I made them in all sorts of different colors. And I was like, this is so fun. It was my take on a traditional friendship bracelet that you used to make with like thread growing up. And that was my aha moment. I remember making them, and I had already promised all of the bracelets I had made to stores for wholesale orders. But because I was making everything myself, I brought them with me to this market called Renegade Craft in Chicago. And I was like, I'm just going to bring all of my back stock because I just don't know what's going to happen. And I just feel like I need it all with me. And that weekend, I completely sold out of bracelets. People kept coming back to my booth and I was running out of colors and they were having to pick colors that weren't their first choice because they didn't buy them right away on day one. And I sold all of them, all of these bracelets that were already promised to other stores. And I had to come back from that and make all of them again. And I was like, this is the thing. This is the moment I've been waiting for. And that really pushed me to the next level. And then I decided to ultimately move to Seattle, both for personal reasons, but also because I wanted to like, take my business to the next level. And Seattle didn't have as developed of a craft creative community as Portland. And I wanted that opportunity to bring people together. And I think that my time in Seattle, those first few years, that was like the peak for me of like, I had this beautiful studio, I hired my first employees, and we were able together to be really collaborative and host events and workshops and bring people together. And I was really open to getting to know people in the community because being a business owner and being an entrepreneur, it can be really lonely because you're spending a lot of time by yourself, like in your work, in your business, and you don't necessarily have people to share those wins with. And that's what I was missing. Yes, friends and family can support you and be happy for you, but no one else, when you're a solo founder, no one else will truly understand what your wins feel like or what it means to you or the business because they haven't been there since the beginning. And that loneliness really pushed me to want to build community and find other people going through the same thing as me. And I think, as I look back, the piece of bringing an idea to life, I was so just hungry. Like I would work, I would spend all my free time working, but I wanted to. Nothing felt better or more exciting than working on my business. And it fueled me in a way that nothing else had. And then when I kind of moved into the next phase, bringing people together, making friends, building community, that also really fueled me. And I was super passionate about it. And it made me so happy to bring people together and to also support other businesses. I remember when I opened my brick and mortar shop, like it felt so exciting to be able to sell the products, not only my own products, but my friends' products and to help their business grow and thrive. It felt like this really beautiful ecosystem that we created. And I really missed that. And I think now more than ever, we're craving that connection. We're craving that those places to go, like small business is so important. All of those little shops and cafes and restaurants, that is what makes a neighborhood rich and special. It's not the bigger businesses, it's someone putting their heart and soul into their business and sharing something that they care about. And it's really special. And even now, where I'm at now, I've made so many friends from my local yarn shop. There's a little corner market that I go to, and I get to have relationships with all of the people who work there. I get to go to my coffee shop and see the baristas and ask them how their day is. And not in a fake like everything's fine, but really ask them about their lives. And it's that connective piece that is so important. And that's what I'm really, I think, craving. I don't know what it looks like, but I want to do more, I think, in the small business sphere. And I still very much care about supporting people going through transitions, and in between seasons, I think what I'm craving is maybe more balance, or I want to bring in this part of me that I neglected and rejected for a little bit. And so, yeah, I just feel like I'm in this in between of not knowing what is coming, but there's this awakening that's happening, and this is a really beautiful in between place to be, to say like, okay, I'm ready. I am ready for what's next, and I don't know what that is, but I'm excited. So thank you so much for listening today. I feel really honored that you're here and that you're listening to part of my history. It feels really special to share this part of myself with you, and it feels really right. And I just want to say, whatever it is you're going through when you're in between, I would love to hear from you. And if you are a small business owner, or you want to have your own business someday, or you're going through the growing pains, or the loneliness that comes with being an entrepreneur, like my door is open for you. I would love to hear from you. I would love to work with you. So yeah, just reach out. I would love to hear more about what's alive for you. And so that's what I have for you today. You know where you can find more information about working with me, or if you want to just read more on my website, I will put the link in the show notes. And I hope that you take good care while the waves carry you closer, and know that your next version is already waiting on the shore.
If you’re feeling stuck in the foggy middle and exhausted from having to always “figure it out” alone, I want to invite you to…
Explore The Shoreline Private Sessions to find aligned support as you navigate a significant life transition
Use this FREE intention setting worksheet to help you find your north star and get clear about your path forward
Learn about my favorite tool for self-reflection and uncover deep insights about yourself
Listen to this visualization when you want to invite more peace and calm into your life and use a somatic practice to come back to your body and the present moment
Kim Kogane is a writer and intuitive guide helping you navigate the tender in-between seasons. She lives in Seattle, Washington with her dog, Cauchy, and three cats. Learn more about Kim
