You Cannot Take Your Eye Off The Ball: Why We're Reducing Our Paid Ads

This is an extract from our Studio Dispatch from 17th April 2026.

In between all the creative inspiration, we also want to share something just as important: the behind-the-scenes of our business. Whether you're a creative, a small business owner, thinking about making the leap, or just plain curious, this section is where Eppie goes into the realities of The Fabled Thread. From the highs and lows of the creative process to the commercial realities of running a business, we’ll talk candidly about the decisions we’re making, big and small. Not many businesses share this side of things, but we wish more did. These articles won’t be for everyone, but for those they do resonate with, we hope they offer real insight.

Over the last twelve months I have been going through a process of trying to ease off my workload. Some of that was practical, some of it was personal, and a lot of it was driven by the fact that I had Sasha last summer and knew, with complete certainty, that something had to change. I knew I needed to take time off. I knew I needed to hand over parts of the business. I knew I could not keep working in exactly the same way and somehow just absorb a baby into the edges of my existing life as if nothing fundamental had happened.

At the same time, I also knew I did not want the ambition of the business to shrink just because my life had changed. We had had a few years of really great growth and I didn’t want to stop that. I did not want motherhood to become a story of retreat. I did not want to accept that this was the point at which things would have to slow down, soften, or become smaller in scope. I wanted to find ways for the business to keep growing without that growth depending entirely on me being there, pushing every single lever, every single day.

Some of the groundwork for that had already been laid long before I knew I was pregnant. Jen joining the team and moving into full-time marketing had already happened. Meg joining the team to work with me on The Studio membership and writing amazing content was already happening. Those decisions were not frantic reactions to a baby. They were part of a broader process of growth that had already begun and was necessary. But once I knew I was expecting Sasha, it absolutely sharpened my thinking around what growth might look like if it could not all sit squarely on my shoulders.

One of the things we started to explore was paid advertising. The appeal was obvious. In theory, it offered a way to find new customers that did not require me to be constantly making content, constantly appearing, constantly driving attention myself. We appointed a paid advertising firm. We started running ads. And on the surface, the ads appeared successful.

That is really the heart of what I want to write about here, because this is the point where it becomes very easy to tell yourself a story. You start to think that perhaps you have found the easy bit. Perhaps you have found the thing that allows a business to grow in a way that does not require the founder to be permanently wringing themselves out like damp cloth. For a while, I thought that was what had happened.

And then February arrived, and I realised that if something in business feels too easy, too clean, you need to look at it much more closely. Because the truth is that you cannot take your eye off the ball. You can delegate. You can build a team. You can buy expertise. You can create more space in your life. But you cannot stop paying attention. And the jobs that are truly yours will remain yours, however lovely it would be if someone else could quietly take them off your hands.