I have decided to create my new project differently this time. I need my creativity to ask no more of me than I am able to give. In every sense. Temporally. Energetically. Entirely.
One of my tutors used to say that a website is the very last thing we should concern ourselves with; that it won’t launch our business, and a beautiful interface won’t miraculously turn us into professionals. It isn’t that I disagreed with the notion that it is the work itself that shapes us into professionals over time, but I simply needed to create beautiful things first. Before anything else. And so, I spent months building my website. Learning how to craft it. Had I told Jane, she would have reminded me that I was starting from the wrong end. But to me, it felt right. This was before I even knew the term slow business. And long before I realised that, by doing so, I was giving my project the time to ripen into a form that brings me ever closer to my true self.
And so, my e-shop remains in ‘coming soon’ mode. Should it occur to you that this is merely a marketing ploy, let me assure you: though I am a seasoned expert in making excuses to myself, I am nowhere near that calculated when it comes to online marketing. It was simply more important to me to create the landing page. The one with the bold headline: “Why you won’t find me on Instagram.”
I have chosen to go against the grain, defying every principle I know of this world. I have decided to share this journey with you—to share thoughts on how a project can be born of atmosphere and feeling, rather than strategy. I love the community that is unfolding here. All of you—the people who read slowly, who perceive nuances, and who understand the thoughts written between the lines.
Slow business. I remember how my mother started her business more than thirty-five years ago. A time before emails, when a fax machine was the height of innovation. An era when invoices were handwritten on forms bought at the local stationer’s, and meetings were arranged over a single landline call—one conversation, not a flurry of messages. Without online marketing, she built a successful company through daily work and genuine human connection. Even if she had to wait days for an original invoice to arrive by post.
I am not suggesting we return to the dark ages. But perhaps, in my own nostalgia for a world where we didn’t tether our worth to algorithms and curated images, I have chosen to build my project at a different pace. I admit, I do not know if a successful project can be built this way today. I do not know if slowness can withstand this age of haste. And I do not know exactly where this path leads. But I know this path is mine. And that is reason enough to walk it.
Slow business is not about doing less. It is a refusal to accept speed as proof of value. It is a quiet, conscious rejection of the pressure to be everywhere, instantly. To be wherever is ‘marketably correct.’ I refuse to feed visions of success that disregard my own rhythm and the gentleness my life now requires.
I have journeyed through that all-too-familiar burnout, borne of my years in high-pressure management, and more poignantly, through a season where my own body drew me to a halt, teaching me how fragile the strength of our muscles and breath can be. This experience brought me to a point where I refuse to fight myself any longer. If I am to build a world founded on slow and artful living, I cannot do so through the lens of aggressive business and the pursuit of numbers. It would be a contradiction. I am learning to listen to my nervous system, creating in a way that allows my creativity to ask no more than I can lovingly bestow on any given day.
And that is enough. Because in this project, the ‘when’ is secondary to the ‘if.’ I care too deeply for what I create to let it be stifled by speed. I choose the freedom of not showing up if I do not feel it, of growing in the quiet. It may be strategically disadvantageous, but it is the only way to remain faithful to myself and my health.
I want to create things bound to ritual. To stillness, to silence, to a return to the self. And I want to do it at my own pace—governed by the principles of my own marketing plan which, though it suggests the opposite of what is ‘correct,’ feels right for me. For the first time, I am doing it right for myself. There is freedom in this. To be without the pressure to be seen. To be without the need to be everywhere.
With the bold, strategically ‘unwise’ statement: “I do not want to be on Instagram.”
For me, to create is to live. And it is time, at last, to live as myself.
Thank you for being here with me.
With love,
Nicolette xx
read my first essay: Beneath the White