You Cannot Take Your Eye Off The Ball

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 or become smaller in ambition. 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 sharpened my thinking around how we might maintain growth in a way that did not all sit squarely on my shoulders.

One of the things we started to explore was paid advertising. By paid advertising I mean "Pay per click" - which is effectively putting adverts across Meta (Instagram/Facebook) and Google - which you then pay for everytime someone clicks on.

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. You create some content, but then that is just shown to thousands of people without you need to work out a way to get it to them. We appointed a paid advertising firm. We started running ads, and on the surface, the ads appeared successful. So we steadily grew our investment, until over the course of 12 months, it became really rather substantial.

That is really the heart of what I want to write about here, because this is the point where it becomes very easy to kid yourself. You get presented with numbers which look great, with a story that seems to only be going up, and you start to think that perhaps you have found the easy bit of running a business. Perhaps you have found the thing that allows a business to grow in a way that does not require me to be permanently grafting, running around like a mad woman, wringing myself out like damp cloth at the end of each month. For a while, I thought that was what had happened.

And then February arrived, and I realised that something was off. Despite the ads supposedly performing amazingly, why did the bottom line of the business not reflect that? Why did it look like our organic growth had fallen off a cliff? Why did everything suddenly feel so dependant on paid advertising?

The truth is that you cannot take your eye off the ball when you run a business - you cannot just listen to the story you are told without questioning it. You can delegate work, you can build a team, you can buy in expertise, you can create more space in your life - but you cannot stop paying attention. That's what the last months has taught be in a rather harsh, coming back down to earth, kind of way. Let me explain...