47 Tech Fails, 359 Upload Errors & Multiple Existential Crisis Later…

What 18 months of building BloomBelles taught me about finishing what I start.

There’s something deeply unfair about finished things.

You see a nice website. Clean pictures, pretty jewelry, buttons that button and links that link. You click around for five minutes and think, Cute.

What you don’t see is the person behind it at 1:13 a.m. whispering, “WHY ARE YOU OVER THERE?” to a button.

You don’t see the 67 versions of the same picture named final.jpg, final2.jpg, FINAL-FINAL.jpg, USE-THIS-ONE.jpg, and ACTUAL-FINAL-I-SWEAR.jpg. Somewhere in there is the real final version. Nobody knows which one.

This is how civilizations disappear.

Welcome to BloomBelles.

I think this is true of almost everything we do. People see the finished presentation, not you rewriting the same slide eleven times. They see the event, not the person panic-buying tape at 8:47 p.m. They see the report, not the spreadsheet you stared at for three hours while questioning every career choice that led you to this moment.

People usually meet our work when it’s ready to be seen. They don’t see the hundred crappy versions that came before it, the mistakes we quietly fixed, the moments we nearly gave up or how many times we had to convince ourselves to try one more time.

Maybe that’s why we’re so hard on ourselves. We see everyone else’s finished version while having a front-row seat to every ugly stage of our own.

And BloomBelles had a lot of ugly stages.

 

 

There were broken links, missing pictures and pictures that were there yesterday but apparently had other plans today. Pages that looked beautiful on desktop and then completely lost the will to live on mobile. And an unreasonable number of times I fixed something, proudly refreshed the page and discovered I had somehow made it worse.

There is a special kind of confidence you develop after Googling the same problem six different ways. By the end, you’re basically typing:

“Shopify menu wrong. Why. Fix.”

Then there were hundreds of tiny decisions nobody will ever know I made. Is that font too small? Does this sentence sound weird? Should that be blush or slightly different blush? Is this necklace sitting two millimetres too high?

Does anybody care?

Unfortunately, I do.

And that’s how you spend 40 minutes fixing something a customer will look at for approximately 0.7 seconds.

But here’s the part that makes all of this slightly more ridiculous.

I started working on this website in March 2025.

It is now September 2026.

I’ll give you a moment to do the math.

Yep. Eighteen months.

There’s also a reason I ended up doing most of this myself.

At one point, I actually lost access to my Shopify account. I panicked, found someone who was supposedly an expert and paid them hundreds of dollars to fix it.

By the time they were done, I had all my original problems plus a few new ones and still had to figure out how to fix the whole mess myself.

That pretty much killed my desire to hire expert number three or four.

Money was already tight, I wasn’t completely convinced that I would stick with this long enough to justify throwing more at it, and I didn’t have the patience or mental capacity for another round of that crap.

So I gave up.

I said a prayer, closed the computer and decided I was done.

Apparently, my stubbornness had other plans.

Because eventually I opened the stupid thing again, looked at the mess in front of me and decided that if nobody else was going to fix it properly, I was going to have to figure out how to do it myself.

And somehow... I did.

Slowly. Badly. With several breaks in between.

I fixed things, broke other things while fixing those things, Googled things I still don’t fully understand and, more than once, stared at my screen thinking, “How the hell do people do this for a living?!”

Then I’d get fed up, walk away... and eventually come back.

Again and again.

And yes, there were breakdowns. Not one mild breakdown. Let’s not undersell this. There was a lovely assortment ranging from mild frustration with tears to sitting in front of my computer thinking, “Why the hell am I still doing this to myself?”

There were times shutting the whole thing down sounded less like giving up and more like sweet, sweet freedom.

 

 

And this is where those eighteen months actually matter.

Because eighteen months is not impressive when you look at it as how long it took me to build a website.

Dear God, no.

But for someone who has spent a lifetime surrounded by unfinished projects, abandoned ideas and things I swore I was absolutely going to stick with this time?

Eighteen months means something completely different.

Ideas have never been my problem. I can give you seventeen before breakfast. Plans? Love them. New projects? Please don’t encourage me.

Consistency?

...moving on.

I’ve started so many things with genuine excitement and every intention of finishing them. Then life happens. I get overwhelmed, distracted or lose momentum, and eventually another unfinished thing gets quietly added to the pile.

BloomBelles should have ended up there too.

There were plenty of opportunities. And plenty of people who thought it should.

I heard that I should shut it down. That it wasn’t going to amount to anything. That I was wasting my time. That all the jewelry, beads, chains, tools, packaging and supplies were taking up precious space we didn’t exactly have to spare.

After hearing enough of it, eventually I started wondering if they were right.

At one point, I actually started making going-out-of-business sale signs.

For a business I had never really given a proper chance to be in business.

Sit with the stupidity of that one for a second.

Because I had to.

I couldn’t finish those signs.

Part of it was stubbornness. I’m not even going to pretend otherwise. But there was something else too.

While some of the people closest to me couldn’t see what I saw, complete strangers did.

I took BloomBelles to markets. Real people walked up to my table, tried on my jewelry, bought it, complimented it and understood what I was trying to create. People who had absolutely no reason to spare my feelings handed me their actual money.

And I did well.

Those markets became one of the biggest reasons I couldn’t let BloomBelles go. Every time I started wondering whether I had completely lost my mind, some stranger would remind me that maybe I hadn’t.

There’s something strange about people who don’t know you rooting for something you’re creating while you’re still trying to convince the people around you, and sometimes yourself, that it’s worth pursuing.

Those strangers didn’t know it, but I carried their excitement and acceptance with me.

It made me wonder:

What if this actually could work?

And deep down, I’ve always had this annoying little feeling that it could.

The markets proved people would buy my jewelry.

What I still hadn’t done was consistently show up for BloomBelles as a business.

I’d spent countless hours learning, making and remaking. I’d created packaging and marketing materials, built a website and paid subscription fees month after month while telling myself it was almost ready.

Sometimes I kept making and remaking pieces until my wrists were swollen and I couldn’t comfortably hold my pliers anymore.

 

 

And I’d spent time on this that could have gone somewhere else. Time with my girls. Time I could have put toward going back to school. Time resting.

And then, somehow, after eighteen months of fixing, changing, learning and “just one more thing”...

I ran out of reasons to call it unfinished.

It wasn’t perfect. It never will be. But it was done enough. The products were there. The pictures were there. The links worked. The damn buttons finally buttoned.

BloomBelles was ready.

Which meant there was only one thing left for me to do.

And somehow, after everything it took to get here, that became the scariest part.

Press Publish.

Because what if I do it...

and nothing happens?

What if after eighteen months of paying for subscriptions, buying supplies, learning, practicing, making, breaking, remaking, photographing, editing, writing and fixing... it goes nowhere?

What if all the people who told me I was wasting my time get to say, “See? I told you.”

What if I’m wrong about how much potential I see in this?

What if I fail?

There.

That’s the ugly part.

Because as long as BloomBelles is unfinished, I can always tell myself it could have worked.

An unfinished dream is safe that way. You can keep imagining what it might become without ever finding out what it actually will.

And I think that’s what I’ve been hiding behind without realizing it.

I kept building. Preparing. Improving. Getting ready to get ready.

Because preparing is safe.

Publishing isn’t.

Once you publish, people can ignore you. Or they might buy, tell someone else, and maybe something small slowly becomes something bigger.

But you don’t get to find out which one happens while you’re hiding behind almost ready.

And that brings me back to one rule I have for myself:

I don’t want to get older carrying a bunch of “what ifs.”

Of course I’m going to have regrets. Everybody does. But I don’t want one of them to be sitting there years from now wondering what BloomBelles could have become if I’d just stopped being scared long enough to give it a proper chance.

Because that’s the truth.

I haven’t failed at BloomBelles.

I haven’t fully tried yet.

And somewhere in these eighteen ridiculous months, I learned something about consistency that I wish somebody had explained to me years ago.

I always thought consistency meant being one of those people who wakes up motivated every morning and just... does the thing. Day after day. No detours. No procrastination. No disappearing because you’re overwhelmed and don’t even want to look at it.

Apparently some people live like that.

Good for them.

Couldn’t be me.

My eighteen months looked more like: try, get overwhelmed, stop, life happens, come back, screw something up, fix it, disappear, doubt everything, come back again, get excited, lose momentum, come back AGAIN.

And somehow...

finish.

Maybe consistency isn’t never stopping.

Maybe it’s refusing to stay stopped.

Sometimes showing up means three hours because you’re completely in the zone. Sometimes it means doing one annoying thing when you’d rather do absolutely anything else. And sometimes it means opening something you haven’t touched in months and saying, “Okay. Where the hell was I?”

I wish I’d understood that sooner.

Because for someone with a lifetime of unfinished projects behind her, finishing this is actually a pretty big fucking deal.

And now, after spending eighteen months trying to finish the damn thing, I’ve somehow developed the opposite problem.

I won’t stop “finishing” it.

There’s always one more picture I could improve. One more sentence I could rewrite. One more tiny thing standing between me and that magical day when everything will finally be perfect.

Except that day doesn’t exist.

And perfection has a sneaky little habit of looking suspiciously like procrastination when you’ve been chasing it long enough.

At some point, making it better stops being the brave thing.

Letting people see it is.

Ugh.

I hate it when life teaches me things.

I was perfectly happy yelling at Shopify.

So here I am.

I don’t know what’s going to happen after I press Publish, and for once I’m not going to pretend that I do.

Maybe BloomBelles becomes everything I believe it can be. Maybe it becomes something completely different. Maybe I make mistakes.

Actually, scratch that.

I am a walking, talking blunder waiting to happen, that DID happen and will continue to happen on the regular. 😂

Maybe the first week is amazing. Maybe it’s crickets. Maybe six months from now I’ll look back at parts of this website and wonder what the hell I was thinking.

I don’t know.

But I’m finally realizing that publishing isn’t the verdict.

It’s the beginning.

It’s the first time I’m actually giving this business the chance to answer the question I’ve been asking myself for years:

What could this become if I actually gave it a proper shot?

I owe myself the answer.

Because whatever happens with BloomBelles, I'm much more afraid of meeting an older version of myself one day and having to explain why I quit before I ever found out.

So after eighteen months, 47 tech fails, 359 upload errors, an undisclosed number of breakdowns ranging from mild to perhaps I should move into the woods and abandon modern technology entirely, thousands of tiny decisions and more uses of the word FINAL in file names than any reasonable person should ever need...

I'm doing the thing that somehow became scarier than all of it.

I'm pressing Publish.

Whatever happens next, at least this time I won't have to wonder what would have happened if I'd tried.

Because this time, I actually did.

Welcome to BloomBelles. ♡

Please don't refresh too hard. I just got everything working.