Catherine Edley [00:00:01]:
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.

Anna [00:00:20]:
So it grew and grew and grew to the point where I was turning over almost £3 million but not making any profit.

Catherine Edley [00:00:28]:
You’re doing shows on QVC, journalists are calling. You have a shop on Carnaby street in London and the orders keep climbing.

Catherine Edley [00:00:37]:
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.

Catherine Edley [00:01:00]:
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.

Anna [00:01:07]:
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.

Catherine Edley [00:01:15]:
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.

Catherine Edley [00:01:52]:
Financially, operationally, emotionally. And she didn’t hold back. Here’s Anna.

Anna [00:01:57]:
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.

Anna [00:02:36]:
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.

Anna [00:03:06]:
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.

Catherine Edley [00:03:25]:
Yeah, 35. Not 35,000, just 35.

Anna [00:03:27]:
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.

Catherine Edley [00:04:00]:
Wow. Wow.

Anna [00:04:02]:
So that was partly lack of experience. I was just really inexperienced and I have learned so much since.

Catherine Edley [00:04:11]:
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.

Anna [00:04:23]:
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.

Catherine Edley [00:05:28]:
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.

Catherine Edley [00:06:29]:
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.

Catherine Edley [00:07:19]:
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.

Anna [00:07:46]:
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.

Anna [00:08:13]:
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.

Anna [00:08:55]:
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.

Catherine Edley [00:09:18]:
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.

Anna [00:09:45]:
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.

Anna [00:10:22]:
… 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.

Anna [00:11:15]:
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.

Catherine Edley [00:11:25]:
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.

Anna [00:11:34]:
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.

Catherine Edley [00:11:50]:
Right.

Anna [00:11:51]:
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.

Catherine Edley [00:12:06]:
So you deliver them the stock and then it would be four months until you were paid.

Anna [00:12:10]:
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.

Anna [00:12:43]:
I think I’m highly investable actually as an entrepreneur that’s been through every possible.

Anna [00:12:52]:
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.

Catherine Edley [00:13:06]:
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.

Anna [00:13:17]:
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.

Anna [00:14:03]:
Not a rich husband, but an accountant that is in my pocket.

Anna [00:14:09]:
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.

Catherine Edley [00:14:22]:
Everything, looking at the costs right now.

Anna [00:14:24]:
Looking at the costs way more than I even look at the sales, actually always looking at the other way around.

Catherine Edley [00:14:31]:
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.

Catherine Edley [00:15:13]:
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.

Catherine Edley [00:15:31]:
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.

Anna [00:16:03]:
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.

Anna [00:17:06]:
But I’m so adamant that I won’t take it off because I love It.

Anna [00:17:13]:
Which is not great, but. But then I’m like, there will be that person out there that loves it.

Catherine Edley [00:17:19]:
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.

Anna [00:17:27]:
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.

Anna [00:17:42]:
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.

Catherine Edley [00:18:00]:
Wow.

Anna [00:18:00]:
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.

Catherine Edley [00:18:19]:
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.

Catherine Edley [00:18:58]:
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.

Catherine Edley [00:19:32]:
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.