There is a very specific kind of optimism required to start a business.
It’s the kind that allows you to spend an entire evening enthusiastically planning something that does not yet exist, for customers you do not yet have, using money the business has not yet made.
And somehow, while doing this, you think:
Yes. This seems perfectly reasonable.
Welcome to the business side of Glow Theory.
When I first started down the colour analysis rabbit hole, I was mostly thinking about the actual work itself: learning colour, understanding undertones, studying what happens to a face when you change the colour underneath it, getting certified, working with clients and eventually creating a space where people could come in and have that slightly surreal experience of realizing they have been buying the wrong shade of beige for fifteen years.
I knew I wanted Glow Theory to feel different.
Warm. Modern. A little irreverent. Educational without being stuffy. Somewhere between “here is the science behind why this works” and “that colour is making you look vaguely unwell, please remove it immediately.”
What I did not fully appreciate was that learning how to be a colour analyst and learning how to build a colour analysis business are two very different things.
And I am currently doing both.
At once.
While also working a full-time job.
Because apparently I enjoy having hobbies like “creating impossible amounts of work for myself.”
Building Something While You’re Still Building It
There is an odd stage of starting a business where it simultaneously feels incredibly real and completely imaginary.
I have a name.
I have a brand.
I have a website.
I have clients.
I have a studio.
I have actual people booking appointments, sitting in front of me, being draped in approximately seventeen thousand pieces of fabric and leaving with a completely different understanding of their colouring.
So yes, Glow Theory is very much a real business.
But then there’s the other side.
The part where I have a running list of ideas approximately the length of a Victorian novel and a business bank account gently reminding me that perhaps we could calm down.
There are so many things I want to build.
Tools. Guides. Better client resources. Digital experiences. Educational content. Technology that makes colour analysis easier to understand and actually use. Resources for other analysts. Systems that connect all the little pieces of the colour world that currently live in seventeen different places.
And every new idea tends to create three more.
It is equal parts exhilarating and deeply inconvenient.
Because this is where the great small-business chicken-and-egg problem arrives.
To build the things that could help Glow Theory grow, I need money.
To make more money, I need Glow Theory to grow.
To help Glow Theory grow, I would like to build the things.
To build the things—
You see where this is going.
There are days when I want to hit fast-forward.
I can see what this could become so clearly that sometimes the frustrating part is simply existing in the gap between the idea and the resources to execute it.
I want to build technology.
I want to create beautiful client materials.
I want to experiment.
I want to hire people.
I want to make mistakes quickly, learn from them and build the next thing.
Unfortunately, businesses generally prefer that you earn money before spending all of it.
Rude, but financially sound.
So right now, there is a lot of doing things the slower way.
Making something myself instead of paying someone to make it.
Learning software I never expected to learn.
Building prototypes.
Changing them.
Changing them again.
Asking myself at 11:42 p.m. whether a button should say “Get Started” or something slightly more charming.
Realizing the entire thing needs to be rebuilt.
Rebuilding it.
And then going to bed.
The Strange Double Life of Building a Business
Glow Theory is also not the only thing happening in my life.
I still work full-time in the Executive Assistant/Personal Assistant/operations world, which means my days can be…full.
Very full.
The kind of full where your calendar develops a personality.
I have spent most of my career around founders, executives and growing companies, and in hindsight, I think that has influenced Glow Theory much more than I realized it would.
Working behind the scenes of businesses teaches you a lot.
You see how decisions are made.
You see what happens when systems work beautifully and what happens when absolutely nobody knows where the spreadsheet is.
You learn how much customer experience matters.
You learn that the tiny details people barely notice are often the ones shaping how they feel about a company.
And you learn that an idea, no matter how good it is, eventually has to survive contact with logistics.
So there’s a strange crossover happening in my brain all day.
One part of me is coordinating, organizing, troubleshooting and thinking ten steps ahead in my professional life.
The other part is quietly taking notes.
Oh. Glow Theory should do this.
Glow Theory should never do that.
This would make a great system.
People hate this experience. How could mine be better?
Then I finish work and open the other laptop.
Metaphorically, at least. Sometimes literally.
And Glow Theory gets its turn.
Is this the easiest way to start a company?
Absolutely not.
There are moments when I desperately wish I could give Glow Theory my full attention.
There are also moments when I recognize that this strange season is giving me something valuable: I am building the business slowly enough to actually notice what it needs.
Every client teaches me something.
Every question someone asks becomes a potential resource.
Every moment of confusion tells me there is something I could explain better.
And every time I find myself saying, “I wish there were a tool that…”
Well.
That is how Glow Lab started.
The Part I Can’t Stop Thinking About: Glow Lab
Glow Theory began with colour analysis.
Glow Lab is the reason I know it won’t end there.
I love analysing someone’s colours. I really do.
There is something incredibly satisfying about watching the right colour suddenly bring someone into focus. Their eyes sharpen. Their skin looks clearer. The shadows soften. Sometimes even their facial structure seems to change.
And then you watch them see it too.
That moment is magic.
But I kept thinking about what happens after that moment.
Because knowing your season is useful.
Knowing what to do with it is better.
You can walk away knowing that you are a True Summer or a True Autumn or a Bright Spring—but then you go into a store and there are 400 sweaters and none of them have little signs saying:
HELLO TRUE SUMMER. THIS ONE.
You buy makeup online and every shade is described as something like “soft warm rosewood mauve nude,” which feels impressively committed to being every undertone simultaneously.
You decide to colour your hair and suddenly you are looking at words like ash, beige, golden, neutral, dimensional, mushroom, champagne, copper and caramel and wondering whether any of us actually know what caramel means anymore.
That gap fascinates me.
The space between:
“Here are your colours.”
and
“Here is how to live in them.”
That is where I think Glow Lab belongs.
My dream for Glow Lab is that it becomes the experimental, educational, slightly nerdy heart of Glow Theory.
A place where I can explore the parts of personal colour that go beyond simply naming someone’s season.
Hair colour.
Makeup.
Contrast.
Patterns.
Metals.
Neutrals.
Colour combinations.
How our colouring changes over time.
Why two people in the same season can still make very different choices.
How colour systems relate to one another.
How analysts describe what they see.
How we can use technology without removing the human judgment that makes colour analysis valuable in the first place.
Some of the ideas are for clients.
Some are for analysts.
Some are currently half-built experiments sitting in my computer that may never see daylight.
That is the lab part.
I want permission to test things.
To make tools that solve tiny annoying problems.
To question whether the way something has always been done is actually the best way to do it.
To build resources because I desperately wanted them to exist and eventually realized nobody was going to make them for me.
There is a version of this business where I simply become a very busy colour analyst.
And to be clear: that would be a wonderful business.
But I don’t think it is the business I am trying to build.
I don’t want the entire future of Glow Theory to depend on how many people I can physically fit into my studio every week.
There are only so many hours in a day and only so much draping one woman can do before she becomes one with the fabric rack.
I want Glow Theory to have a life beyond my appointment calendar.
I want to create things that are useful while I am sleeping.
Things another analyst can use across the country.
Things a former client can open six months after her appointment while standing in a Sephora having a minor existential crisis over lipstick.
Things that make colour analysis more accessible, practical and connected.
I want Glow Lab to become the place where those ideas get to live.
I don’t entirely know what it will look like yet.
And strangely, that is one of my favourite things about it.
There Is Room for All of Us
One of the biggest surprises of this entire experience has had nothing to do with colour.
It has been the people.
I went into my colour analysis course expecting to learn a new skill.
I did not expect to come out of it with a group of women I now talk to constantly.
We send each other ideas.
We ask each other questions.
We celebrate bookings.
We troubleshoot weird draping results.
We talk pricing, clients, marketing, websites, tools and the thousand tiny decisions involved in turning a certification into an actual business.
Sometimes someone drops an idea into the group and five people immediately start building on it.
Sometimes someone is having a discouraging day and everyone else reminds her why she started.
Sometimes we disagree about colour—which is actually useful, because despite what the internet would occasionally have you believe, personal colour analysis is not performed by a magical machine that spits out an indisputable answer.
There is judgment.
There is observation.
There is learning.
And there is enormous value in being surrounded by people willing to say, “Wait, what are you seeing there?”
What I particularly love is that it does not feel like competition.
Technically, I suppose we are competitors.
We are building businesses in the same industry.
But I have never felt that someone else’s success leaves less available for me.
If someone books ten clients this week, she did not steal ten clients from my imaginary allocation of humans who are allowed to receive colour analysis.
Her success is proof that people want this.
Her brilliant idea may spark a completely different idea in me.
My experiment may help her solve a problem.
There is room for different analysts.
Different styles.
Different approaches.
Different personalities.
Different businesses.
And frankly, I think the industry gets better when we stop acting as though knowledge has to be guarded in order to be valuable.
I would much rather build alongside people.
Maybe that comes from spending years in operations, where I have seen repeatedly that the strongest systems rarely come from one person sitting in a room protecting their ideas.
They come from collaboration.
Someone asks a better question.
Someone catches the thing you missed.
Someone says, “What if we did this instead?”
Suddenly the idea is better.
That energy has become a huge part of how I think about Glow Theory and eventually Glow Lab.
I want to contribute to an industry, not simply occupy a corner of it.
The Less Instagrammable Part
Starting a business is exciting.
It is also extremely good at making you question your own intelligence.
There are days when I feel wildly confident about Glow Theory.
I can see exactly where I want it to go.
Then there are days when I spend money on something, receive one booking notification and immediately think:
Well. We had a good run.
Small-business finances are humbling because everything feels expensive before the revenue catches up.
Software.
Supplies.
Drapes.
Printing.
Insurance.
Websites.
Products.
Marketing.
Equipment.
Education.
Every tiny idea appears to come with a monthly subscription.
And when you are funding growth mostly from the business itself, you become very familiar with prioritization.
What do I need now?
What will actually create value?
What can wait?
What can I build myself?
What deserves professional help?
What am I only tempted to buy because somebody on the internet has excellent branding?
I am learning.
Sometimes gracefully.
Sometimes after buying the thing.
But underneath the anxiety, there is something very cool happening.
I am watching a business become real.
Not overnight.
Not because I posted one video and suddenly 700 people formed an orderly queue outside my house.
Slowly.
A person books.
She tells someone.
That person follows.
Someone sends me a message.
A collaboration idea appears.
I test a new service.
A client asks a question that inspires a new guide.
One little thing creates another little thing.
And gradually there is momentum.
What I Hope This Becomes
I have no interest in pretending I have a perfectly mapped five-year plan for Glow Theory.
I have approximately a five-minute plan and several hundred notes.
But I know how I want this business to feel.
I want someone to interact with Glow Theory and feel like colour analysis suddenly makes more sense.
I want people to leave my studio understanding themselves better—not feeling like they have been handed another set of rules about what they are allowed to wear.
I want Glow Theory to be useful.
I want it to be curious.
I want it to evolve.
I want Glow Lab to become somewhere ideas can be tested, knowledge can be translated and useful tools can be built.
I want to collaborate with clever people.
I want to support other analysts.
I want to create resources that I wish existed when I started.
I want to see how far this can go.
And yes, I would eventually like the business to make enough money that every new idea does not begin with me Googling:
“Can I build this myself for free?”
Baby steps.
The funny thing about starting Glow Theory is that colour analysis was initially the obvious part of the business.
Now I think it may simply be the doorway.
The more I learn, the more interested I become in everything surrounding it: education, technology, tools, community, consumer behaviour, beauty, psychology and the way people translate information about themselves into actual decisions.
That is the bigger idea.
Not just telling someone which colours make them glow.
Building something that helps them understand why, remember it, use it and have fun with it.
And creating tools that help other people do that too.
Right now, I am somewhere in the messy middle.
Working.
Analysing.
Building.
Learning.
Making money.
Spending money.
Trying not to spend too much money.
Collecting ideas at a rate that is frankly becoming problematic.
Some days I am incredibly excited.
Some days I am overwhelmed.
Most days I am both.
But I think that might simply be what it feels like when you’re building something you actually care about.
Glow Theory is still small.
Glow Lab is still becoming whatever Glow Lab is going to become.
There are a lot of things I cannot afford to build yet.
There are a lot of things I do not know yet.
But for the first time in a long time, I have this feeling that I am not just building myself another job.
I am building toward something.
And I cannot wait to find out what it becomes.