The obsession might kill me.

I want to write this before I lose the honesty of it, because right now I’m still in it and I’d rather share the piece from the middle of the feeling than from the tidy version I’d write next week.

July was the best month BRÛLÉ has ever had. I know I say that every month (which is a good thing cause I am growing every month!!!).

I hit the highest number of orders I’ve ever hit. I hit the highest revenue I’ve ever hit. I hit a number I have been quietly targeting for months, and I hit just 5K short of it. I was sooo close. It felt so good to nearly touch it. And I want to say - I am so grateful. This is the growth I built the last year and a half for. Every month has been consistent growth. Every month I can look at the numbers and see that the flywheel is spinning faster. The brand is compounding in exactly the way I hoped it would when I put my head down and disappeared into the work.

And I am now, for the first time, in a position where I get to think about what comes next in a real way. I met with someone recently - a very successful brand owner - and we talked about the mechanics of what a next-level BRÛLÉ looks like. Tightening up. Reading data. Making projections. Setting monthly targets. This excites me. I’ve been running this brand entirely from my heart. I’ll always run it from my heart. But it’s exciting to know there’s also a formula that I can pair the heart with the data and keep hitting these numbers on purpose, not by accident.

There’s a bigger monthly number I want to get to. I know I’m going to get there. I have an “end goal” of where I would be really satisfied to be.

And I also want to be honest that my growth is small next to something like a brand that goes by virility. Like a Parke or Daily Drills. I know that. I have not been chasing that type of growth though. (NO SHADE they are crushing I am just saying different business model/vibes for real no shade like my hats off to them). But it’s quality growth. It’s steady. It’s compounding.

It’s mine, all mine. No outside funding, no partners, no growth-hacked shortcuts that would have gotten me there faster and left me with something I didn’t recognize. Made to order. Restraint. I’ve built this slowly on purpose. Which is why the number I’m chasing feels earned (well 5K shy I will hit it this upcoming month…) in the exact way I wanted it to feel earned.

BUT I want to be honest about what is happening inside me as I get to this level. The obsession might kill me.

That’s the thing I’ve been sitting with. And I don’t mean it as a joke, and I don’t mean it as a highlight-reel humblebrag. I mean it as a real observation about the way I am wired, and what it is costing me, and what it might cost me if I don’t figure something out.

I want to give you two examples from just this week. One is about being unable to let go of work. The other is about being unable to let go of control at work. And I think they’re the same illness, presenting as two different symptoms.

THE SUNDAY

I tried to take Sunday off. Quote unquote. What that means for me is: do nothing, just be at home, chill, don’t work. Which is genuinely something I never do, because I am always fucking working.

And I couldn’t. I mean I did it. But I ate myself up inside.

I found so much discomfort in myself just being still. I felt this low-grade panic humming underneath everything because the to-do list never ends and the responsibilities never end and I know they’re waiting for me on the other side of the day. It is really hard to turn off. And then Monday hit and the second the week started, the things I hadn’t done on Sunday felt insurmountable. I was drowning in a version of the work that would have been totally manageable if I hadn’t tried to rest. Which is the trick, right? The rest itself becomes another thing to recover from.

I’m addicted to this. To the do better, be better, always be moving thing. And I’m struggling with it because on one hand, it feels fucking incredible to have this much drive and grit and this good of a work ethic. It’s satisfying. It makes me proud of myself. I love shining and growing from a place of real work - no handouts, no shortcuts, nothing borrowed. That feels so good. I love that I don’t obsess over boys, or feel in lack, or anything like that because I am FILLED to the brim with my work. I love how that feels.

But there is another part of me. A voice that says it’s never enough. That I’m never doing enough. That it’s never scheduled tightly enough, never perfect enough, never done enough. That voice does not turn off when I try to rest. And that’s the thing I can’t quite figure out yet - how to be the woman who built this brand and the woman who gets to sit still on a Sunday. Right now those are still two different women, and one of them is winning.

THE MAILER

The second example is fresh. It’s why I sat down to write this at all.

I just hired a girl to help me with shipping. This is huge. This is one of the biggest steps I’ve taken in the last year - finally letting someone else touch the pieces before they go out. Yesterday was her first real day. And we had all of July’s orders to ship, which included a pair of shorts I made that went pretty viral in July. The shorts finally came out of production from the factory, and they were better than the sample I originally shot. We had tweaked the fabric, the color, the fit, and it was one of the truest presentations of BRÛLÉ I’ve ever made. I stood there looking at those shorts thinking, this is the level. This is what I’ve been building toward.

If you order from BRÛLÉ, you know I care about the details. The hangtag is thick organic paper. There’s a marketing card. Everything ships in a brown craft mailer, which is significantly more expensive than a plastic one - but I use it because I only use the best organic fabrics and every touchpoint has to match the fabric. That is the standard. I set it, and I hold it, and I refuse to break it.

So we’re packing. Her first real day. The most orders we’ve ever shipped in a single push. And halfway through - I run out of brown craft mailers. Dumb on my part to not have a ton of backup. Exciting for the brand because we had more orders to ship than I was prepared for.

I had Ubered her in. I had blocked her whole day. I had a mountain of orders in front of us with labels printed. We had to keep going. And I had, somehow, a stash of white plastic mailers I had ordered in the first month or two of BRÛLÉ that were still sitting there. Wrong material. Wrong feel. Wrong everything. But they existed and we had to move.

I told her - okay, we can use these.

I was printing the shipping labels, handing it to her, and she was packaging. And, as we were doing this, I was, and I mean this literally, freaking out inside.

Not visibly. I did not let her see it. She’s amazing and I am thrilled to have her. I held it together while she worked because I need help. lol. But internally I was in complete free-fall. Because I was watching the brand I had built ship in the wrong mailer. Because I was not touching every single moment of this process like I have done for the past 1.5 years. Because I was watching a customer’s experience be one percent less than what I had promised her (THE FUCKING MAILER). Because my system had been compromised, and the system is not just how I run the brand - the system is how I know I’m still in control of what I’m building.

We shipped roughly a third of the orders in white plastic mailers. What did I do next? After we completed the largest shipping moment of my brand thus far?

I went back and forth for twelve hours on whether I should redo them. Un-pack every single order. Reprint every single label. Repack them in the brown mailers that I have overnighted. Which would have taken a full day I did not have, when I already have so many things on my to-do list to move things FORWARD.

I talked to AI platforms about it. I asked them what I should do. I ran the scenarios. I asked whether the customers would care. I asked whether the customer should care. I asked whether I was being crazy. I asked whether I was being not crazy enough. I spiraled at a level I want to describe honestly because I don’t think I’ve ever been this transparent about what running this brand actually costs me internally.

Twelve hours. Over one third of one day’s ship.

I’m sharing this not because I think it’s a good look. I know it isn’t. I’m sharing it because I think the honest inside of building something like BRÛLÉ is exactly this - moments where the obsession that made the brand possible is the same obsession that could break the person building it. And I don’t know how many founders will admit to this out loud. So I’m doing it.

WHAT I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO WORK OUT

The obsession is not the problem. The obsession is the reason BRÛLÉ is what it is. The reason people who buy it feel something when they open the box. The reason the fabric is what it is, the reason the fit is what it is, the reason the hangtag is thick and the card exists and the details compound into something that feels like a real brand instead of another dropshipped shirt with a wordmark. I want them to FEEL Restoration Hardware but clothing. I want to feel like an accessible Row. I would not trade the obsession for anything. It is my competitive advantage. It is the reason I’m winning at the size I’m winning at, quietly, without outside funding, in an industry that is completely saturated.

But there is a version of the obsession that is going to become a ceiling if I don’t figure it out. Because I cannot personally pack every order at the number I want to be shipping in six months. That is a physical impossibility. Which means I have to learn - genuinely learn, in my body, not just as a concept - the difference between the obsessions that are quality-defining and the obsessions that are quality-adjacent.

Quality-defining is the fabric. The fit. The design. The way a piece feels on the body. The consistency of the collection. The point of view.

Quality-adjacent is which mailer it ships in.

Both matter. But one of them defines the brand and the other one supports the brand. And if I obsess over both at the same intensity, I’m going to become the bottleneck that stops BRÛLÉ from becoming what it’s actually supposed to become.

The mailer thing is going to reveal itself, in retrospect, as a moment where I confused the two. Because here is the truth I already know, even in the middle of the spiral - no customer is going to receive a pair of the best shorts I have ever made, hold them in her hands, feel the weight and texture of the fabric, notice the finishing, put them on and understand what she just bought, and then think but the mailer was plastic. That is not what she is going to remember. She is going to remember the piece.

The mailer is a promise I make to myself about the standard. It is not the standard itself.

Same with the Sunday. The Sunday is a promise I make to myself about the pace. It is not the pace itself. And I have to figure out how to let both go a little - the mailer, the Sunday, the small controls - without letting go of the actual thing they were built to protect.

Because as I scale, I am going to keep running into moments where a system I built at one size does not survive the next size intact. And I am going to have to keep asking, in real time, is this the thing that makes the brand, or is this the thing I built to make me feel like I was in control of the brand? Those are two different questions with two different answers.

The obsession has to protect the brand.

Not the founder’s feeling of controlling every atom.

I am writing this from a place of still not being fully over it. I want to be honest - I am still uncomfortable that a third of that batch went out in the wrong mailer. I would be lying if I said I made peace with it. I almost did not drop them off this morning. But I am also aware, from the same brain that spiraled for twelve hours, that this is exactly the muscle I’m being asked to grow at this level. Because there is no version of BRÛLÉ at the number I want to be at where I personally touch every mailer, every hangtag, every label placement, every card. I am going to have to trust systems. I am going to have to trust people. I am going to have to accept that some fraction of the details are going to slip in ways I wouldn’t have let slip when I was doing everything alone - and I am going to have to figure out which slips matter and which ones are the ego of the founder confusing herself with the brand.

That is the actual work of scaling. And nobody warns you about it. Because it’s not the exciting kind of work. It’s not the let’s launch a new collection work. It’s the quiet, internal, day-after-your-biggest-month work of realizing that the version of you who got the brand to this point is not necessarily the version who takes it to the next one. And letting the old version die a little.

I am in the middle of that death right now. I am grieving the version of me who did every single ship, personally, in the exact right mailer, every single time, and can not enjoy a day off. She is very good. She built this thing. And she cannot come with me to the next number.

That is what I mean when I say the obsession might kill me.

Because if I don’t let some of it go - the right parts of it, the quality-adjacent parts, the ones that are protecting my sense of control rather than the actual brand - the obsession is going to eat the founder before the founder gets to see the brand fully bloom.

And I’ve built it too slowly and too intentionally to let that happen.

So I am writing this as the reminder. To myself, and to any of you reading who are also in some version of it - obsessing about the wrong details, spiraling for twelve hours about the wrong mailer, unable to take a Sunday off because you’re afraid of what happens if you stop moving.

The obsession has to serve the thing. Not the other way around.

Best month ever. Second-best mailer job ever. Both are true. And I’m going to make peace with both if it kills me.

Which, given the title, it just might.