“Hear Me Out…Belt Bangles.”

I’ve come to accept the fact that I may have what is called business reflex.

Not to be confused with acid reflux.

Although, they do often go hand in hand.

What is business reflex exactly? Well, it’s sort of this strange ability to take something that gives you pure joy and turn it into a job.

It’s about as uncool as it sounds.

For example. If you were to give me a product, within minutes I will have created a marketing concept and probably already ran the profit margins in my head before you even finish. It’s automatic, kind of like muscle memory that fine-tuned itself from decades of entrepreneurship.

A party trick of sorts.

When I try to peg the source from which this great skill would have been acquired, I would say it was my mom who owned her own business in our small town. She had general merchandise, candy, clothes, that sort of thing.

Mom likes to say she knew I was bit by the “entrepreneurial bug” in about first grade, when the week of Valentine’s Day rolled around. She had noticed that all of a sudden, I was coming home with money. And quite a bit of it. But she had no idea where it was could have been coming from.

Turns out, I was taking boxes of candy conversation hearts from her store, selling them individually to the boys on the playground for a quarter a piece, so they could give them to the girls they had crushes on.

What. A. Rip. Off.

A quarter for ONE of those hearts? In 1986?

What an incredibly easy demographic to manipulate.

Lately I’ve been reminding myself that not every idea needs to be an LLC.

Some things are meant just to exist simply because they bring you joy.

Take my mother-in-law for example.

She is insanely talented at everything she does. From throwing clay on the wheel to making incredible vintage-style decorations that are super freaking fabulous.

Every single time my friends see a picture of her latest creations, they always ask eagerly when and where is she going to start selling it.

When I pass along these compliments with inquiries to my mother-in-law, she just smiles and says that the moment there's any expectation, it stops being fun, and she would never want that for something she actually enjoys doing.

Until that moment, I never realized just what a foreign concept that was for me.

When she said that, I was like, you mean you just sit there and make pottery for . . . fun?

With noooo intention of selling it afterwards?

Like you just give yourself permission to have a project that exists solely because it makes you happy?

I mean, I like to garden for enjoyment, but I’m not going to lie, I’ve even tried to think of how to monetize that.

“Belt Bangles. They’re gonna take off.”

Those are the words that I said recently to my husband, half joking, while cutting up vintage belts to turn into bracelets. I thought these would make a great addition to my new jewelry line. My husband just nervously laughed, nodded his head in agreement and said, “absolutely honey”.

He has seen how this type of thing starts before, so he’s always a little leery when I say things like that.

Like years ago, when a twenty-dollar soap kit turned into years of packing orders for over 10,000 stores, meeting senators and speaking on small business panels.

After that experience he earned the right to nervously laugh whenever I say, “Hear me out”.

While I still get that familiar entrepreneurial spark with every hobby, I've slowly learned to let the thought of growth drift by without chasing it.

Maybe it's about redefining success for myself. Or discovering that success can be found in the stillness of creating freely, without the weight of any expectation attached to it.

After two decades of building, growth and hustle, it feels strange and yet beautiful to enjoy creating again. There's no urgency, no inventory reports and no pressure to scale. Just me and quiet gratitude for my newfound peace.

As I sit here in the studio looking at old belts, vintage pins and runaway beads stuck to the bottom of my feet, I am happy that the road to reinvention doesn't have to be in what I build next, but in learning to enjoy things simply because it feels good to create.

So . . .Belt Bangles, hear me out.