Origin Story, part 2. Check out Origin Story, Part 1 to find out how we got here.
So, three months at home with baby. Mom’n it hardcore, household managing it not so hardcore, but whatever. There were so many new challenges in these three months. I mean, learning to keep a human alive is indeed a heavy task, never mind trying to navigate what it means to have a family when it’d just been my husband and I for seven years.
Truthfully, it was amazing, beautiful and gratifying to be nurturing this new life…but it was exhausting, stressful and lonely, these long hours at home with just me and baby. Inevitably, my career-driven, passion inspired creative side yearned for more…
So, the daydreams began: maybe I could make my own perfume!
My nose had been trained and I had fallen in love with perfume during my career in the fragrance industry; I loved the challenges of product development; I knew how to bring a product to market; In fact, I now had a great network of people to ask questions to as well! This was it! Yes! Of course! I’ll create the most incredible fragrance around! Wahoooo!
My brain was stimulated, and it was invigorating…so while baby slept, I kept daydreaming. What are the current fragrance trends? Perhaps I could theme the brand around this? Or maybe, yes maybe, I will go extreme and create the most exquisite most expensive perfume that ever there was! [insert maniacal laugh here]
When I presented this idea to a girlfriend, she looked at me, very shocked, and asked what would be in such a fragrance. My quick comeback was fairy dust and unicorns.
It was a bit of a ridiculous idea, though, so I kept brainstorming.
Soon after, I had dinner with this same friend and another good girlfriend. I was telling them my woes of motherhood three months in, as well as my perfume daydreams.
I kept telling them the baby situation was finite – everything changes so quickly (they ribbed me for using such a fancy term), and we laughed about my fairy dust and unicorn perfume dreams.
But, when I got home, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about this word finite. My daughter. Me. This new life my husband and I were making as a family. The challenges we were facing as a new family. Finite. Finite.
Then this burst of stars occurred in my head, combined with the erasing of finite and the explosion of infinite. This new life with our daughter had shown me, had challenged me to see in myself, that I could do anything I put my mind to. That I had always been capable, and that I had always achieved anything I set out to do.
I had never believed this before - I had never believed in myself.
This beautiful little baby and all the love and challenges she brought with her, showed me who I actually was – someone who achieved the goals they’d set out to achieve. Because of her, I finally believed in me.
And now that I did, I wanted every woman everywhere to have and feel this same confidence, self-belief, empowerment, this power that I now had… and I would do it through my fragrance passion.
After nursing the babe in the early morning the next day, I sat at my computer and brain dumped the idea.
Ilsa Fragrances and the Infinite Collection were born and like that, I was an entrepreneur! Living the dream of being self-employed and having a flexible schedule and adding value to the world!
HA! Or at least that’s what it may seem like – all rosy.
But the truth is, I exchanged an amazing, beautiful and gratifying, exhausting, stressful and lonely existence, for one that was amazing, beautiful and gratifying, and even more exhausting and incredibly stressful.
But at least I wasn’t lonely?
Welcome to the mompreneur life.
😊
Ilsa
xx