I'm writing this from the bench, three years after it happened. The reason I'm writing it now is that a wearer asked, in a recent email, whether there had ever been a moment when I thought SENMOMO wouldn't work. I told her the truth: yes, there was a morning. And then I realized I had never written it down.
This is that morning, plainly. I don't think it's interesting because it's dramatic. I think it's interesting because it's not.
February 11, 2025
The morning was a Tuesday in February 2025. The studio had been in Wenchang for four months. We had made forty pieces. I had no employees yet — Daisy joined later that year. I was at the bench by 7am, with a tea, with the trays out, but I wasn't working. I was sitting there.
The night before, I had received three messages within an hour. The first was from a wearer in Tianjin who'd received her bracelet six weeks earlier and was writing to say she had lost it on a flight. She wasn't asking for a replacement — she just wanted me to know. She was sad. She had cried at the airport. She wasn't writing to be helped; she was writing because the bracelet had mattered enough to her that losing it felt like something she had to tell me about.
The second was from a supplier in Brazil saying that the price of rose quartz at the quality bar I'd set was about to increase by 22%, which would either compress my margin or force me to raise prices when I'd told three wearers their pricing was locked in for the year.
The third was from my mother, who had been visiting for the weekend. She'd left earlier that morning to drive back to Guangzhou, and she sent a message — kind, careful, not pushy — asking when I was planning to go back to a "real" job. She used the words "real job." She didn't mean to hurt me. She meant: she was worried about me. She had been my mother for thirty-five years and she had watched me leave a stable career to make beaded bracelets in a small town in Hainan and she was trying to ask, gently, how long I was going to do this.
The three messages, together, took the floor out from under me.
What I sat with
I sat at the bench for about forty minutes without doing anything. The morning light came in. The trays were out. There was a piece I was supposed to be making — a Slow Sunday for a wearer in Auckland — and I couldn't pick up the silk thread.
I want to be specific about what was in my head, because I think this is the part most founders don't say out loud. It wasn't dramatic existential despair. It wasn't a breakdown. It was something quieter — a small clear thought that kept repeating: maybe I should stop.
Not "this is hopeless." Not "I can't do this." Just: maybe I should stop. Maybe the wearer in Tianjin would have been better off with a $30 bracelet she could replace easily. Maybe my mother was right. Maybe the rose quartz price increase was a sign. Maybe I had spent forty bracelets worth of work proving that I could do this, and the next step was admitting that doing this and having a working business were two different things.
The thought wasn't loud. It was reasonable. That's why it was harder to ignore than panic would have been.
What I almost did
I almost emailed three wearers whose orders were in progress and offered them a refund. I drafted the email in my head. It was professional, kind, brief. It said the studio was reassessing and would honor existing orders but wouldn't take new ones for a period. I didn't send it. I almost did. I had the tab open.
I almost called my old boss. I almost wrote to my mother to say she'd been right. I almost packed the trays into the small cardboard boxes I kept in the back room and called the building's owner to break the lease.
I didn't do any of these things. But I didn't do them not because I was strong. I didn't do them because I was paralyzed. Sometimes paralysis is the only thing that saves you from a decision you'd regret.
What happened
Around 9am, a small thing happened. The wearer from Tianjin — the one who had lost her bracelet — wrote a second message. This one was different. She said she had been thinking overnight about whether to ask if she could just commission a new piece, with the same stones, same design, same number if possible. She knew this wasn't standard. She was offering full price. She just wanted to know if it could happen.
I sat with that message for ten minutes. Then I wrote back. I said yes, of course, and I would make her a new piece, but I couldn't give her the same number (the numbering doesn't repeat; #033 was hers, and even though the piece was lost, the number stayed with her in our archive). I would make her a new piece with the same composition and a new number, and I'd waive the rebuild cost in exchange for her writing me a sentence about what the original had meant to her. Something for me to keep.
She wrote back the same hour. The sentence she sent me is on a small card pinned to the wall above my bench. I won't share it here because it's hers. But it broke open something I'd been holding too tight for too long.
I made her replacement piece that afternoon. Piece #041. It exists now. She wears it. She still has the same #033 in our archive, with a note that the original was lost on a flight in February 2025.
What I learned, slowly
I want to be careful here. I don't want to wrap this up neatly. The morning I almost gave up wasn't followed by a triumphant arc. It was followed by a Tuesday afternoon where I made one piece for one wearer, and then a Wednesday where I made two more pieces for two other wearers, and then a Thursday where I had a very ordinary conversation with my mother about her garden, and we didn't talk about the studio at all.
The lessons I took from the morning, as far as I can articulate them three years later:
The work doesn't save you. The wearers do. What got me back to the bench wasn't a renewed sense of purpose; it was a specific wearer asking for a specific thing. The job of the studio is to be there for those specific moments. The motivation flows from them, not from the abstract goal of "running a studio."
It is reasonable to almost stop. I think every founder of a small studio has at least one morning like this. If they say they don't, I don't quite believe them. The fact that you sit at the bench for forty minutes without working doesn't mean you're failing. It means you're real.
The compounding effect is invisible until much later. In February 2025 I had made forty pieces. By the end of 2027, we had made about 280 in total. The graph from forty to 280 looks dramatic on paper. From inside the studio, day to day, it doesn't feel dramatic at all. It feels like Tuesdays. The work is always Tuesdays. You don't see the curve until you look back.
The hardest mornings are not visible to anyone. No wearer knew I had nearly emailed them a refund. My mother didn't know. The Brazilian supplier didn't know. The morning happened entirely inside my head. I'm writing it down now partly because I think other small studio founders should hear that this happens to people who are also still here.
Why I'm telling you this
If you wear a SENMOMO piece, you have something that exists because of decisions made on mornings like that one. Most of the time, those decisions go invisible. Most of what reaches you is the finished work — the well-photographed bracelet, the printed letter, the clean cream box. You'd never know about February 11, 2025, unless someone wrote it down.
I'm writing it down because I owe wearers honesty about where the work comes from. The piece you hold isn't the product of a confident founder running a streamlined operation. It's the product of someone who almost stopped one Tuesday in 2025 and didn't, and then made forty pieces, and then ninety more, and is now sitting at the same bench three years later writing about it. That's the studio. It's not heroic. It's just continuous.
Thank you for being patient with us. Thank you for writing back when you do. Thank you, especially, to the wearer from Tianjin, whose second message I will never quite stop being grateful for.