When I first opened my etsy shop, it was a crafts and cosplay boutique under the name Cinderella's Mice. "Even a princess needs help sometimes," was my tagline, and I couldn't imagine how true that was. Within just a few years, I was being inundated with custom orders, all of which took too much time to make and returning too little profit to enjoy. I was getting burned out, and my own cosplay projects were quickly becoming collateral damage. Finally, my partner told me to pull the plug. He said it wasn't worth losing whatever few marbles I had left.

So then, as quick as it started, my shop came to an end. I still got messages every so often from customers asking when I'd be back, but as bad as it made me feel to abandon them, I really needed the time to recharge.

Flash forward two years, and I catch wind of a cool new machine that (obviously) I wanted. The Glowforge! Lasers are cool, you guys. And a laser engraver was exactly the sort of thing to get my cogs turning. Of course, the machine wasn't cheap, and my partner and I were already struggling after the pandemic affected both our jobs, so we came up with a plan. Reopen the shop to pay for the Glowforge. Seemed simple enough.

But things needed to be different if there was any chance of my holding onto those aforementioned marbles. No more high-energy low-profit products. Regulate how many custom orders I could take. Make our inventory proactive instead of reactive.

So here we are! We reopened as Hexwood Forge, and now that I don't have to hand-sew everything, I'm able to keep my marbles and eat them too (or something like that). It's like my own little happily-ever-after. With lasers.

Looking back, I think I learned some really important lessons from my journey so far. I learned that I need to value my time and prioritize myself every once in a while. I learned that having someone around to keep you grounded is pretty damn important. And I learned that even though something may not work the first time, that's no reason not to try again.