I started with a market stall on Portobello Road. I was 19. I had no money, no contacts, and no plan beyond a feeling that I could make something people wanted to wear.
At 23 I got my first £45,000 order. I remember opening the email. I remember not telling anyone for 2 days because I needed to be sure it was real. I flew to China and India to source materials I could not afford. I learned how to negotiate in rooms where I was the only woman. I made every piece by hand in my bedroom while the first buyer at Reiss put my jewellery into 50,000 pieces a week.
The stockists came after that. Harrods. Selfridges. Liberty. Harvey Nichols. Isetan and Hankyu in Tokyo. Henri Bendel in New York. Each one a door I had walked into not knowing whether it would open.
Each of those doors looked, from the outside, like the end of something. A buyer says yes and the story is supposed to stop there. It never does. The order has to be made, and then the next one, and the thing you built in order to get through the door is rarely the thing that keeps you in the room.
Then everything I had built came apart at the same time. The marriage. The business as I had run it. The eldest child I lost contact with for reasons that took me years to understand. I moved onto a houseboat on Taggs Island because that was what was available and because something in me knew I needed water near me.
There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes with several things ending at once, and it is not the tiredness of having worked hard. Working hard has an edge you can lean on. This has no edge. You are not solving anything. You are carrying it from one room to another.
I rebuilt. Not the same business. A different one. The jewellery now is made in the UK because ethics matter to me more than margin. The coaching practice exists because women kept asking me how I had survived what I had survived. The houseboat is still home.
That line about ethics mattering more than margin sounds like a sentiment until you do the arithmetic. It means a piece costs more to make and sells for roughly the same, and you find the difference somewhere else or you go without it. It is not a decision you take once. It is a decision you keep taking, every season, in a spreadsheet.
People assume rebuilding is a decision too. One morning you decide, and then you set about it. It is almost never that. It is a long run of very small things done badly and then slightly less badly, in no useful order, with no sense at the time that any of it is adding up.
Nobody warns you that the first stretch looks like nothing at all. You are not making progress you can point at. You are getting up, which is the entire job, and the getting up is invisible to everybody including you.
The question I am asked most is how long it takes. The honest answer is that it does not take, it accumulates. There is no finish line. There are mornings that are easier than the ones before them, and eventually there are more of those than there are of the other kind, and you only notice afterwards.
The second question is whether you go back to being who you were. You do not, and that turns out to be the point rather than the loss. The person who builds the first thing is rarely the one who could build the second. She does not know enough yet, and she is too busy being capable to find out.
What I would say to anybody in the middle of it is that the shape of the day matters more than the plan for the year. Something at roughly the same time each morning. Something that gets you out of the house. 1 person you tell the truth to.
And that the reason to keep going is not that it will be worth it. Nobody can promise anybody that. The reason is that the alternative is deciding now, on the worst information you will ever have, what the rest of it is going to look like.
As for needing water near me, I could not have explained that at the time and I am not certain I can now. What I can say is that moving water gives you something to look at that is not your own situation, and that turns out to be more use than almost anything anyone says to you.
What I am proud of: the children who came back. The work that is honest. The fact that nothing about this trajectory was inevitable, and I kept going anyway.
Pride is a strange thing to arrive at. It does not feel like triumph. It feels like relief that has had time to settle.
22 years. Still here.
More like this
From Portobello Road to a houseboat, the version nobody published. https://www.annalouwellness.com/reset-stories/from-portobello-road-to-a-houseboat-the-version-nobody-published
The houseboat interiors that cost almost nothing. https://www.annalouwellness.com/love-and-relationships/the-houseboat-interiors-that-cost-almost-nothing
Why I do this work https://www.annalouwellness.com/love-and-relationships/why-i-do-this-work-nervous-system-regulation-and-somatic-release
I write about the rest of it in the Reset Letters, at resetletters.substack.com. They go out quietly, and that is where anything lands first.