Here it is, the overdue explanation for all the snip-snap, snip-snap decisions that have taken place over the last couple of months for Harlowe Green. It’s me, Ange, the gal behind all of those things, and I’m here to talk about it “on paper,” where I think I can maybe get it right.

So, in April, we announced we were closing. People were understandably upset.

Then, two months later, we changed course pretty abruptly and announced we were staying open. Most people were happy. Some seemed to feel the whole scenario was some kind of threat or stunt and that it wasn’t very responsible of me. This obviously impacted people and seemed really crass and very amateur. 

I asked on our Instagram stories whether our community really wanted the details, or if they were just happy to hear we were staying open. The poll had over 100 people clicking off that they wanted to hear a long monologue about this. I’ve never had that much engagement on a poll, ever. And truthfully, I do feel like I should probably explain this, if only if it helps one person out there hear something at the right time or know others struggle through the same things.

But the words ended up being hard to find. They still are, because it’s hard to know when to be vulnerable on the Internet, and this is hefty vulnerability. It wasn’t any one individual thing that was the big reason, but all the reasons seemed important to me. It was everything to me but it also felt like nothing to probably everyone else, and I didn’t know how to express it properly. I’m still leaving things out here, still not sure how to tell everyone about them all. So many times, I would open a new video on my phone and try to start talking it out to a screen with my own face on it, arm stretched out, face looking tired. But I couldn’t do it right. So now, I’ll just write it out, for those wanting to know. 

What happened? What’s next?

Well, to start with the obvious - business right now is a challenge. I think people thought this was the main reason, and understandably, wrote and expressed lots of condolences about this in the shop or via email or any way that they could let us know - they were expecting this, small business must be rough. 

It is. 

But it’s not just right now, this moment. Beginning this thing in 2020 during lockdowns has always made it an uncertain thing, a thing growing and existing during unprecedented, uncertain times. We scaled during a period of high hopes for people turning to small businesses, looking for the local, caring where things were made. Markets had this amazing energy, people looking to connect with their community and plenty of successful sales so that we could grow. But also, this greater thing was happening, this energy - it felt like we were building to a better place. Maybe this was going to be how we collectively spent our money, our time. Harlowe Green could organically grow on social media; one post with a picture of a refill would get 80-100 likes from our little set of a couple hundred followers - we used to have that level of visibility in the algorithm. It was fun and creative to post and it felt like it mattered, like the education part of our brand was really doing something good. There was a big focus on sustainability; a sudden influx of time at home where people could try a new project: learning sustainable skills, switching to refill, reading ingredients, decluttering and simplifying, cleaning up the routine - it was all part of it. 

However, as we grew, I hired help and we kept trying to move things forward, and we had our community right there with us. By the time the holidays in 2023 hit, things seemed to start falling the other way, and as inflation and living expenses have risen, we have experienced things falling further. Prices have risen for customers, for sure, but behind the scenes it’s even more than that - our suppliers are also decreasing the margins for wholesale customers, so we have less out the gate to pay our overhead with before the customer even comes in the door. The pivots have happened, and they have happened endlessly. Now the visibility is low where we saw our energy mattering before - I spent about a half hour on some content last night and this morning it has 6 likes. It is hard to commit multiple hours a week to content when no one sees it, or what we make no longer seems to resonate after thinking an idea might be so fun and endlessly getting it wrong. Our business isn’t about trends or trending music but maybe we need to be, but then the authenticity seems to fade away completely. We have people tell us they only see our content if they look us up deliberately for multiple days to get us back in their view. Markets are much quieter, and maybe we get the awesome aspect of connecting with people, but making back the market fee seems to be the anxiety behind the big efforts put into the event. Market conversations with other vendors are anxious and worried and not sure about the future. We are facing a higher cost of living, where some can’t choose better, or people are getting stretched thin mentally and need to get by with less stress and more convenience with Amazon, Walmart, Costco, and free shipping. It is tariffs and wars and endless bad news, AI and feeling like does any of this even matter?

It is exhausting and never-ending. However, although not many know my personal story, discomfort is actually a lot more normal for me than things being easy going. It is the people that don’t talk about the things that know what I am saying. It really isn’t a way I think anyone would want to be, but if there is a silver lining, it makes for a tough chin when you’re entrepreneur-in. 

But I wouldn’t say that Harlowe Green hasn’t been doing okay; we have continued to pay down that start-up loan, we have continued to pay our bills, we have continued to pay Living Wage to really awesome people. Maybe it has taken me longer because I have done it myself as a mum with young kids and I have hired great people instead of being able to do it all myself, but that is okay. It looks different and takes longer. There is no quarterly goals and projections here. We are just giving Jeff Bezos the finger with every sale, keeping the space a thing. Maybe that’s the wrong way to grow, but it’s never been authentic to push sales or optimize or market to our customer’s insecurities. We have a brand, for sure, but it is based in real life and paying attention to the fact that sustainability is not a facade of perfection. I don’t think integrity and authenticity look perfect, so I don’t want it to look that way. We have good quality essentials, we have customers that believe in this thing, and as the world gets tougher, we offer something of an alternative path to help people opt out of the big systems that are making the future bleak. We are here, and we are doing this thing, nevertheless.

The thing that honestly has made me hit a wall, after gritting it out through so many things, was one bad hire. I have had the best - and I mean the very best - people working at Harlowe Green, and I hope that it can be felt to our customers in our space just how differently I want to lead my team than some of the managers I’ve gotten to work under in my past work experiences. This was a bad hire for a thing that I could actually do myself but didn’t. I thought we had gotten to a point where I could delegate a crummy thing I procrastinated on. I hired a bookkeeper in 2022 to help me with the thing I didn’t like. And this spring, this bad hire became so much more.

I tried to be compassionate, to understand someone was having a hard time, to try to work forward with them. I gave them outs, they assured me that things were okay and they would get it done or get it sorted, for whatever reason. I know what people pleasing is like, and this person could not throw in the towel, and I let it go. I didn’t stay on top of it. I didn’t sit down with the year end reports and compare them to actuals, I didn’t set aside the time, because that was the point on the hire. I kept my eye on paying down my debt, I paid my payroll, I did the remittances, and I just let her do the thing she was hired for. I thought maybe she wasn’t asking questions because I had given her the right information. I thought in these situations, she knew the deadlines, I could outsource to a professional I had hired. I incorporated Harlowe Green in early 2023, and needed help to do so, so in advance of this, I hired this person to take the reins moving forward from there to ensure it went well. It did not.

Flash forward to summer 2025 when I couldn’t keep asking for things to be done that were overdue. Then finally submitting it to the corporate accountant and their telling me the entries didn’t make sense (because by now, I was pointing out the incorrect figures and trying to figure out what their assumptions were and getting no answers or responses in return). Then talking to other businesses this person had worked for and their having to redo their books and refile a number of amendments with the CRA, resulting in penalties and interest. I handed my books over to the accountant in the fall. I had to pay almost $10,000 to have them redone by March 2026, and that was including me rebuilding the books for one of the three years. The previous entries were so tangled that my sales were not reported properly over time. Assumptions had been made that I didn’t realize - I wasn’t looking for them. Any extra money was going to the bottom line; I haven’t paid myself in two years working on getting ahead while working another job. By the time the accountant was done, I had almost $30,000 worth of HST not reported over the last 3 years that was explained to me the same week I got the accounting bill. Could I have paid this over the years as I went? Absolutely. Can I pay this $40,000 immediately? No. Huge no. 

This person now has removed their business from the internet. I don’t know what I would say if I could say something to them. But this has been a blow, and as we approached closing, I realized I don’t have the business background or skills to be able to predict if I could leave with the right amount of money. I have to keep going because I can’t put that debt on my family. It is a blow that will have to push that start up loan back up that I was in my last year with, and with it, my chance at financial stability so much further away. 

It’s not really a pretty picture to share. And I don’t know how to talk about it properly. It sounds like I have no business running a business. It sounds like I am a real dumbass. I don’t even know if it is normal to have taken on the debt I did to open up the storefront, so here I am, talking about debt when maybe most businesses have war chests and print out their personally developed Excel projections every Friday at 8am. No body talks about that amongst small business owners. I have some shadow knowing I don’t have a business degree, so I feel unsure about myself and an imposter when others talk about their business plans and tidy business startups or figuring out which program they will use for invoicing instead of the way I did it. Mine was started in my mudroom closet and then for lack of better way of explaining it, felt like being pulled behind a horse in the dirt but managing to hold on until it was a whole thing I didn’t actually plan for or initially ever dream of. I paid for the only invoicing program I had experience with at 4am before my toddler woke up and do almost everything before it is ready or I am ready. It’s the only way it was possible for me, and yet it always seems so amateur and incorrect.

But for some of us, we had to start with debt, there was no investor or family money or savings fund, and otherwise there would have been no business if it wasn't that route. I am lucky I had a dad that came out of high school with nothing and then used debt to build a farm business I could never dream of today. I am lucky to live in a family that knows deep down that they can bet on their own work ethic, and I have been hiring farmers whenever they apply for the shop every since. I asked my older brother about this when I was about to jump off the cliff of opening the Kingston storefront and I was about to sign a lease that could pay off half my house. I wasn’t fully sure that this could work, there’s no guarantee. He told me that if you want to sit at the table, you have to pay the fee to sit at the table. And he was right. Not everyone can sit at the table in the same way, but at least for us, we could bet on ourselves because we learned how to work hard. And this many years in, you can see the entrepreneurs that get to the table with that pressure that they can sit with and keep that grip on that rope behind the horse.

So with that being said, I thought paying off a start up loan in four years was actually pretty okay, especially trying to do it quickly by paying myself in deodorant and shampoo while working another whole job, squeezing in my business early in the morning and late at night. But this bookkeeper became a wall for me, and continues to be. I woke up the next day and knew it had settled down deep and I have just done what I needed to do, changing my course when I realized I didn’t know for sure if I could be okay, but it was enough to make it feel like I was grinding bones on bones to put one foot in front of the other. I have had my moments of wondering why, why if we were trying to do this good thing, that it had to hit me so hard. And those kinds of spirals of thought have always had the door shut on them immediately, they are never productive but I cannot move it as easily this time around. I’m a hyper independent person, and it feels like letting someone truly take care of something for me that I didn’t check up on for once was the mistake my gut always knew it was. It has really made it hard to keep the chin up when I’m not sure how to fix this one, other than to just take the blow and not allow it to happen again.

If you can believe it, that is only about 25% of the reason this all came about, and it is the one that probably is the easiest to clarify for others. But there’s more.

If you don’t know what perimenopause it, I hope this very vulnerable share can help you see how important it is to find out. I sure didn’t know this was a thing. And did you know, it hits neurodivergent people early, and usually lasts longer for them? Gah.

It wasn’t until this last year that I really found out how much hormones impact neurodivergent symptoms. I have an exceptionality here and it is still pretty new for me to be wrapping my head around, so I wouldn’t even say I properly had a handle on neurodivergence anything anyway and this added shift just turned my life so soupy. 

All I knew was that something changed last summer, and it was abrupt. I felt like I was losing my way, but couldn’t quite put my finger on what it exactly was. I have always struggled with lost focus, lost memories, hyper vigilance, hyperfocus and intense feelings of right and wrong, reading the room/people pattern recognition stuff and some visual/language stuff, but a few of these things went a bit sideways. Some days I would hit noon and feel like I could cry for how tired I was, trying to endlessly side quest and get to every thought that was coming up of what I needed to do but never finishing anything. It was like my focus was a slippery fish that I could not grip no matter how hard I tried. My hair went weird, like I had lost a whole bunch of nutrients all at once and it was breaking apart near my scalp. My energy went away (or whatever there was there before), and my cycle ended up radically changing and would leave me feeling like a shrivelled corn husk of a human for days afterward. I was worried something was very very wrong with my body, and so I went to see my doctor. All they had to offer was birth control. No worries from their end on this, no mention of perimenopause, just a ten min appt (I can’t even write the full words out because that is exactly how much time that could be spared for this, it was a short-form if there ever was one) with the offer of an IUD to blanket-solve my mysterious eye-roll get-outta-here lady issues. It felt like a hand waving a fly away, but the fly was my whole universe. 

For the neurodivergence stuff on the other hand, I had lived most of my life just figuring it out, thinking I was a bit of an alien; an endless feeling of being weird but not really knowing what it was, and some good strategies in heavy use over time. However, now I could not leave my focus issues to the side any longer; with them running the show, it began to negatively impact my mental health. If you have any neurodivergent person in your life, you’ll likely know that there’s layers of shame for not being able to “figure it out” or just not understand “what’s wrong with me” - and I was definitely going down that path. I would have a reminder text from Leanne asking about shampoo bars and feel intense self loathing because I could not get it together and now the curly shampoo bars were gone. I would go into the shop and deep clean a corner instead of completing the 35 pressing things I needed to do. I would sleep through my lunch instead of clearing the metaphorical fires away. But I never connected the physical symptoms with the mental symptoms and the diagnoses. And somehow, even with showing up six weeks after an appointment about drastic changes to my cycle and it being written off as a mysterious lady hormone ailment to ask about ADHD medication (which I hadn’t tried yet), no health professional helped me connect the dots. I was told in December that if I was 38 and an entrepreneur, I didn’t need meds - I had “figured it out.” Imagine feeling lost and someone reading your age and occupation on their chart and deciding those two pieces meant you figured life out. It tidied it up though into yet another 10 min appt. 

And so, I went out to sea. 

I really did not know what was totally wrong, but things were totally wrong. I had tried to find help. It wasn’t a concern. Whenever I talked to anyone else about what I was experiencing, they’d ask me what was going on. I talked about parenting, about my other full time job, about the hockey schedules, my competitive dance job, about running a business. And every time, it always sounded like something had to be taken off my plate to fix whatever it was that I was feeling. But I always do this many things, and I usually thrive on it; neurodivergent people need stimulation, and I just made that for myself with heavy rock music and hard work with highly engaging projects and rodeo it out on the edge of what’s considered normal. But as I was feeling down on myself, I let that message settle in. I had to cut something out, and then things would be righted. And in the midst of feeling like I never know how to just get things right, it was Harlowe Green that felt like it needed to go. I realize now that there’s always been this layer of shadow and shame on being an entrepreneurial mom, even though I try to take some pride in it. 

Truthfully, I don’t really know anyone doing quite what I am doing with little ones. And it honestly doesn’t look at all the same as what I see women entrepreneuring without kids. No judgement on anything or any of it, but it really just feels lonely and like I am on a path that I don’t know if it makes any sense, except that it does to me. I do see entrepreneur moms with partners that have pretty secure paying jobs that provide the required stability, and I do see a lot of service industry entrepreneur moms that can low overhead a business and use a skill to make money without too much risk. But what I do not see are the cowboy moms out here jumping off cliffs every time they are ordering products in retail that have no clear picture on how much or if they will sell, with the pressure of being a really key part of the stability, of doing this by putting out money instead of a much safer way; if I could just offer services with low overhead I think I would feel a bit more chill. And on top of this is the usual entrepreneur mind bending stuff - the people you know personally that watch everything you do while pretending to know nothing about it or never supporting it; my parents lifetime message that this is not what women with children do; not getting the same support because this isn’t a ‘real job’ like when the men in my family were treated to zero home responsibilities when busy at their business; the dogged consistency of showing up every single day (I got out of the water this weekend at my son’s water park birthday to frantically help an employee reconnect our Shopify and debit machine, dripping wet in my bathing suit directly in the view of a beach of people like an audience while I tapped away). 

Bottom line: I do not know moms doing this. I’m sure they are somewhere but they seem elusive and I feel like maybe there’s a reason why that I need to pay more attention to but can’t seem to learn how to be properly. But I see other moms teaching dance; the majority of choreographers and teachers I know are moms. I see other moms working for organizations like my full time job; it’s mom city over there. I see other moms managing their kids’ hockey teams and getting their skates sharpened. I see moms doing everything I do except for run a retail business, especially a bit of a socially weird one at that (which being weird is also not really the norm for women, women have that pressure to make sure everyone approves), or at least having a bottom line at the end of the month that their multiple jobs’ income needs to hit to make that water play place birthday a reality. There’s a real issue with needing to run a business intentionally when it seems there are so many ways to make more money in the more exploitive ways (which is actually the norm and not even something to be ashamed of in retail land) and knowing that’s not what you’re gonna do. And so I also have another job. It was too hard to be relied upon like that for the family I really love.

So anyway, this felt like the shameful thing that I do as a mom. When someone told me I had too much on my plate, all I heard was that I am stretching myself to thin before getting to the mom part, that I don’t give myself enough time to make handmade granola bars or roasts or coordinate the multiple themed items party or seasonal decor. All I could hear was all the things I was not doing because everyone understandably pointed out the problem is my commitments and how this isn’t normal. And that I have a family and they are only young once (which was meant to tell me to take a load off, but really didn’t land that way). No one was talking about this massive life shift; I internalized it all to the thing I feel the most worried about. I don’t think anyone was expecting to read that. But it’s true. It is mentally a really tough thing to have had a mom that stayed home and a dad that was an entrepreneur, and to actually try to meet whatever expectation I have on myself to fulfill what both of those people fulfilled. On top of that, they really had a lot of support in me, an eldest daughter, fixing a lot of things and being a baby parent. That’s all very loaded, and doesn’t even make sense for a person to think that they could do all of that, but I think there’s actually a lot of women right now facing that tension of attempting to fulfil more than one role because we didn’t have access to as many role models for this newer kind of reality. And man, were my hormones making my neurodivergence run away with the worst of it.

And so, I tried to sell Harlowe Green. I didn’t know what else to do to fix it. But no one that was interested in buying it was able to pay for it, and I was not able to leave that HST unpaid. And that was really hard, doing the added work of a professional business valuation on top of the added part-time job of redoing years of books, to be told what it was worth, and knowing that the passionate people that wanted to do it couldn’t pay that, but that I would have to take on that HST debt if I was okay with walking away and letting the business be on to the next chapter with the right person. And when it finally came to realizing that I could not sell it, and I had hit this wall with my health and my HST, I just wanted it to stop. 

And so I tried. I posted we were closing. I was stopping it. And I really thought it was going to stop, no matter how it turned out for me. But stopping Harlowe Green was never going to fix any of these problems. 

And so I put things on sale. I tried to figure out what a closure looks like. I tried to figure out what I would do when it was done, whether I would go online or not. I tried to figure out my ordering, trying to keep things in stock that we clearly need to have available and figure out what things I needed to stop ordering.

Then, I had so many reach out about how important this space was. I cannot thank those that took the time to very meaningfully tell me what the space, what the opportunity it has been to have hope during this time, has meant to them. I had other business owners happen to tell me things that seemed nonchalant but in actuality bent my mindset around a 90 degree corner or put glasses on something I couldn’t see at all until that very moment. 

And then, someone told me about perimenopause. About how women blow up some of the best things in their lives because they know something is wrong but they just don’t know what is actually wrong, when nothing is actually wrong, it is just a really wild shift in life. I bought a book on it (can I tell you, how strange it was to go into Chapters after shifting far far away from that type of shopping, for the first time back in so many years? Wild!). I realized what hormones do to my focus issues. I realized how hard it had hit my self esteem because I thought it was a personal failing. I realized it maybe wasn’t actually something wrong with my life or me as much as it was just my symptoms being heavily activated. I had to eat differently. I had to take care. I had to maybe try medication, and that this was actually the time that most late-diagnosed women end up finding success with that route.

I also got to have a few really important experiences that helped me remember a few things about myself and get back to a better space internally. Firstly, I exited a situation where I was not being very authentic or confident with myself. It had gone on for so long and then super-speeded into one single decision to leave immediately. I just walked out. And I know that isn’t really a lot of information, and it probably sounds dramatic when in reality it likely wasn’t that dramatic, but it meant a lot to choose myself and my son. So this small thing of leaving this place really helped me remember that authenticity is hard, but worth it for any kind of self worth. 

A day later, my younger sister called me to ask me about being a mom that really enjoys working, just before she was due to have her first baby. She was worried about committing too much time to say she could work when her baby arrived, but she was also worried about closing the door on work or knowing how long to do so. Now, this might sound toxic as hell, but that’s exactly why she was calling me - because deep down, loving to work is part of our make-up, just as much as any other farming man we grew up around. Going on maternity leave for us might be just as scary as it is for those farmers to consider retiring. And I told her exactly how to make sure she kept the door open, because it was the lose of purpose during such a tender time of identity reformation that really hit me hard with becoming a mom myself. I was literally talking to her about how it’s okay to be alternative, you can be a mom in the way that it makes sense for you. Just because others might not find that the norm, it doesn’t mean you are wrong. 

And I realized. I am not wrong at all for being an entrepreneur and a mom. It looks extremely different from other entrepreneurs, yes. And maybe it’s not very normal for moms, true. And maybe I have had more challenges than if I played it safe. But fuck that. If I am going to do all this work to so visibly embody my authentic path for the last six years, I am not letting perimenopause and worrying that I didn’t become an entrepreneur “right enough” to never face a mistake make me feel like it is all wrong and let that be the conclusion of this incredible thing. 

And so, here I am, with a lease signed a few days later. I shifted, I repainted, I worked to change course. I have work to do now to make sure I can keep us through this lease and keep us through this - yet again - unprecedented time.

Does this mean we will never close someday? Or we won’t ever be able to sell to those really passionate people? Or to someone else? Will I decide to calm down? Honestly, I don’t know. I hope those passionate people want to bring the energy that might be sucked out of my bones to make Harlowe Green even better. But I am just taking it through day by day. I used to think my business had to be on par with the big, very resourced, very faceless (unless, ya know, its a celebrity with a marketing team) businesses and be that professional, constantly the same, never changing, magnanimous kind of entity. But the truth is, all of the small businesses I have followed that persist beyond that first five years all have one thing in common - and that is change. They move towns, they bring the business. The entrepreneur grows, they sell or close and begin something new. The shifts, the pivots around new babies and unpredictable life changes and challenges. We ourselves have shifted our delivery around and are bringing it back now as we can. Our home shop opened and we then had to close it eventually as our children started their own passions and consistent shop hours could no longer be a reality and a dedicated chunk of our home to this wasn’t realistic if it wasn’t open. We will evolve, and we will try until we can’t any more, and if we can’t, we will try to find someone that can bring that energy and vitality that we may have lost over the endless pivots over the years. But really, it’s always been about change, and the growth that a person ends up having when they have their own business means that things can never stay the same anyway. The person that started this is long gone, and although she was pretty alright, this new one is so much more real. There’s no container for evolution like the small business pressure chamber.

So what’s next? We try. And we keep trying. And we still will, as long as we can. 

Thank you for being here, thank you for making this all mean something. I apologize if the humanness got in the way of things and it shook it up a bit too much. I guess I’ll just sign off cowboy Ange, and you can from now on expect more mistakes and diving under the waves of me, just whatever this messy best I can do is.