Nov 15

Nov 15 On the Eve of the Holiday Season

Hello dear friends,

If you get our newsletter, you’ll know we have some big news to share on the eve of the beginning of our holiday season.

The big news is that I am pregnant! (Yes, again!) and am due pretty soon with our second bebe bird in early February.

Next year, I’m anticipating a shift in life and business to accommodate this family growth. I’ll be taking a step back to dream and explore what life with two little ones looks like for me, for my work, and we’ll be scaling back our operations along with that.

If I’m absolutely honest with you all, this year has been really rough. It has have been the hardest year of my life just trying to balance work and life as a new mom with my firstborn who is only 14 months, but it’s also been an astronomically tough year for perhaps all retail, particularly small business.

I try to keep this space light and optimistic but the reality is that being a primary caretaker with touch and go childcare while trying to be the nonstop hardworking business lady I once was mostly results in a ton of tears. And in a year where our sales haven’t been where they have been in the past, it’s been even harder physically, mentally, emotionally for me to handle on top of the physical, mental, hormonal, and identity changes that my body has gone through since my first pregnancy. I have a ton of feelings, and I’ve written and rewritten this a million times in a million ways with a million different feelings bleeding through the screen, but I think this is the best balance of the light and dark, the hopefulness and heartache that I’ve been going through lately.

Every time I get on Instagram I’m seeing another small business saying the same things - that online sales have dwindled, operational costs have skyrocketed, and the things we could count on have all changed. We are feeling this too. So many businesses are shutting down or changing direction or asking for help right now. I know this is the life I chose so I struggle to not complain while also sharing the difficulties, and I have resolved that it is time to recognize that we are also due for some change.

This holiday season feels a bit like the end of an era for us. In January I’ll share more about our plan going forward, and I’m not 100% sure what next year will look like! But it’ll likely look like letting some things sell out and not bringing them back, being in the studio less often to ship orders, but still trying in some capacity to do it all: care for two wild bebe birds, one elderly bebe dog, one bebe business, one bebe marriage, and one bebe mama, and knowing that I definitely can’t do it all all of the time.

So, next year I’ll be trying to take a breath of space to think, to evaluate, to dream of what could be in our growing and evolving life. If you want a preview of what we’re not planning on continuing after they sell through, check the retiring section of our online shop.

But for now, we are still here, things still will be the same for the most part this holiday season, and we have a particularly ambitious lineup for someone who is in the third trimester of a second pregnancy in two years [insert upside down smiley face emoji].

I hope you'll come to see us this season. It would be so lovely to see your lovely faces that have made our world so much brighter these past 13(!?!) years.

Find this season's holiday schedule below and stay tuned for some treats and gifts for you as we close out this whirlwind of a year.

Thank you, dearest candle lovers. This wild ride would never have been as much fun without you. <3

With a kiss on the cheek,

Amina Ahmad

Founder, Handmade Habitat