The way forward that gave me the ick
The tiniest elephant in the room: the lip balm.
So I told you the other day that if there’s one thing I knew for sure, it’s that I couldn’t be the one making the lip balm moving forward. And there are quite a few reasons for that.
The most obvious - it’s a lot of work, time consuming, I’m only one person, and I have so many other things on my plate.
But it was more than that too.
Now, I’m not sure how to explain this, and I can’t believe I’m telling you this, but here goes…
I have this worry about germs and cleanliness when it comes to lip balm production that is, shall we say, not 100% rational. I don’t know that I want to call it OCD because I’m not diagnosed and don’t want to make light of it, but making sure everything is perfectly clean causes me a lot of anguish.
So anytime I made lip balm, I had to fight this side of myself, which unfortunately, doesn’t give a shit about all the rational arguments I’ve thrown at it, like, yes, this is clean, it’s sanitized, you’ve washed your hands… I’ve broken down into tears trying to explain it to the ladies in my mastermind group because it sounds so ridiculous, yet it’s just so heavy.
Then, videos I made of myself making lip balm went super mega viral, which is probably how you even know about me. And while it was cool and changed my business in a way I could have never imagined, I would get a lot of people nitpicking at how I did things, because you know, it’s the internet and all.
So now, instead of having my own voice second guessing if I sanitized that scraper (Spoiler - I did. Twice), I would hear the voices of trolls. I’d be furiously trying to wipe a water spot from a stainless steel scraper lest someone see it in a video and accuse me of having dirty equipment.
Because now, it wasn’t just making lip balm. It was filming the process. Because how could I make lip balm and not capture that content gold? My breathing has gone shallow just remembering all of this.
I eventually stopped making new videos for a long time, but in the summer of 2025, we had started filming new content. There was a filming station I’d walk each tray to where cameras were set up to capture an overhead and side view with fancy lighting and everything.
And walking into my commercial space and seeing that setup after I was newly single was like a gut punch. That entire place just felt like a relic to a past that part of me feels I hallucinated. Where I thought I was building something for a future that it turns out he did not want to share with me, even though he went through all the motions. I feel there is no other word to describe the feeling of entering that space other than mindfuck.
I had also felt like a bit of a failure walking into that space for a long time before then too, which I had initially leased to accommodate a growing team. Now, I know that in entrepreneurship, we seem to glamorize growing a company, hiring employees… grow, grow, GROW! I say that because I used to glamorize it too. Until I lived it.
At one point, Eclair Lips was sold in over 500 small shops across North America. I had a team of 3 employees plus me. And that gorgeous commercial space.
I soon realized that my business isn’t especially well suited for on-site employees. The idea of creating jobs for people sounds so rewarding. But this company isn’t busy enough to offer predictable, steady work someone can support themselves with in a way that justifies a physical location. And my mistake was offering that to people and then stressing myself out to try to provide it.
Managing people is also a job of its own. And as an introvert who would rather just be hyperfocusing on her project, it’s one I’m not especially well suited for, nor one that I want to take on again anytime soon.
So that left me with one viable option: contract out the making of the product.
The idea of it felt like a weight off my shoulders and gave me the ick at the same time.
Thank you for letting me share my story with you. Here are the other parts I've shared so far:
