Hello my beautiful Mama Niche readers! If you are still here and reading this blog post, my true love goes out to you. Thank you for sticking around. I can see my views on the dashboard and since it’s been over a year since I was last active, people are still coming back to check in or discovering Mama Niche!
So I probably should speak about my whereabouts and what happened there :/ I really really struggle with this void in my life that I feel I am constantly chasing. It’s exhausting and it pulls me in all sorts of directions. (This year I am now able to focus time on myself and my own healing). Anyway, I had so much going on with my business so I returned to managing the shop when my daughter was 3 months old. My husband wanted to be at home with her, so we swapped schedules. I went back to the gym and was working on my mental health. I always feel better when I exercise, it’s like this massive shift that happens mentally and I just feel more stable in everything I do when I have a regular workout routine. My husband kept telling me I had too much on my plate and it would burn me out. He was right. So I decided one day, in a frustrating mood to delete my instagram and just slowly stop thinking about my side love, Mama Niche.
Mistake Charlotte! Haha – no but luckily I can still come back to my blog and see my beautiful readers still checking in and people still reading my previous posts. I had to create a new Instagram because I rage quitted my first one (insert crying face here x100) haha – so my new one now is all set up under: https://www.instagram.com/mamaniche_au/ shes a little lonley so go give her a follow 😉
So the big VID happened! Covid-19 – I’m sure everyone has their own name for the pandemic, I was just watching a stand-up with Kevin Hart and he kept saying the “vid” it was pretty funny so that’s just what I call it now. It makes it a little less serious, I felt like everyday during the Melbourne lockdown it was like we where chained to the walls of our home and this public announcement would happen every morning giving us an update on how many cases we had and the speech about light at the end of the tunnel is near and all that, oh and the phrases “flattening the curve”, “cushioning the blow”, well it’s pretty much spot on what it was like! The worst part, was when they closed the parks in Melbourne. I was like, who does that to parents? That’s like telling a child he can’t use an iPad for weeks! Eventually they’d probably forget about the iPad but a park is like paradise for children and has so many benefits for the child and the parent! Anyway, that’s probably the biggest thing I didn’t like about the lockdown. Did you sneak and see anyone? I remember seeing that lady on the news in Queensland I think she was from, “Oh now we won’t have to sneak around anymore, hoping to not get caught”. Haha I couldn’t believe she said that on the news! My brother lives a few streets away from me and we may have had a cheeky walk exercising for no longer than an hour of course 😉
During the pandemic I found myself dealing with lawyers and lease executives as our 5-year lease deal actually expired in May 2020. At first we wanted to leave and relocate to a new warehouse/office space and move out of the 7 day retail game. It was too taxing on us and our family. We had no life for 8 years. It was open 7 days a week, Thursday & Friday late night trade, and then the Christmas rush every year. It really changed for me when we had our first baby in 2017, we had 3 years left and we would honestly count them down. We’d find ourselves in ore of how we are still managing to stay afloat, keep going, and not giving up. We worked our ass off. We had everything on track to close up in May 2020 and then in March, the pandemic hit Australia. At this time I was working most days and my husband was home with our daughter and I’d drop my son off to daycare a few days a week. I had meetings with our lease exec and we’d look at some options, we went back and forward with staying and extending the lease vs moving into a new casual license and it took months. It was a really stressful time for me and I felt completely stripped of what I had left to offer. I hired a lawyer to help me get what I needed to be done for my business and we managed to pull off a month to month casual license. We lost our security deposit in the shop since we couldn’t pay our rent in April and May due to the pandemic, that money we would have gotten back when we left the shop and we had it saved for our deposit on a house. It was quite a large amount of cash that we used when we signed our deal back in 2015. But when we look back – if that was all we lost, we didn’t lose our business, our children were fine, they got mummy and daddy at home most days, and none of us got sick, we got lucky then. Being home with our children really made it all come together for us. We knew we needed our lives back. We gave notice in September to leave the shopping center, hired a big truck, and spent weeks cleaning out the shop and relocating our set up to our home office and garage. Lucky we moved house huh! haha
Since that move we’ve been set up in our home office, taking phone calls, having customers come out and design with us, print with us, most of our work now is done online via emails, website or telephone but it’s such quality work now. People appreciate what we do a lot more, especially when they come to your home to pick up their order. We haven’t had any retail abuse for 4 months and counting now! So the old life really is well behind us, it’s safe to say we won’t be returning to the shopping center life anytime in the future. Our quality of life and balance is right where it should be now, we are so much healthier and happier and we get to see our children and each other more than we have in the last 8 years. That time was not wasted though, we really put in the work to build our brand and I learned so much as a business owner. I’ve met so many business owners through what I do at work, have made so many connections with retail owners and executives to help anyone out. But I’m just so happy in the end, my family is happy. It really really is the cherry on top that shines above all the rest we’ve all had to deal with.
Anyway! So so much to catch up on, I’m going to write a few blog posts with more updates about business, children, and myself! I have so much to share and as always, I love to share with you. Please feel free to email me or chat with me wherever you can find me, let me know how you are what you’ve been doing and how you find the pandemic changed you or your situation, for better or worse. We all know someone who has come out better off and those who haven’t. I feel in this situation there is a silver lining, it’s just how you see it. I hope you all have seen one. This is the year to live it and appreciate that silver lining. Take care my loves xx speak soon.
