At the start of this year, I had all these plans for my businesses - both White Flag and Bare Bones. I had plans for holidays and even just simple things like going out to see more live music. It’s amazing how quickly all of that changed.

When I was growing up, I kept hearing “The customer is always right!” Usually this phrase was brandished by people who were, unwittingly, the very exception to the rule. Like it afforded them every privilege of royalty without any of the consequences of just being a horrible person.

Let me start with this : Facebook is the worst. They really are. Urgh, I hate them so much! Why did you even bring this up!!I can say, from my experience as a user and as a customer who’s handed them $75K, they couldn’t care less about you or me - to facebook, we are just data they can use to make money from. That’s a personal opinion, but it’s been pretty well documented how little they take care of their users.

If Reality TV singing shows have taught us anything, it’s that the singing part of the show is so secondary, it nearly becomes irrelevant. People just want that juicy backstory. A performer might sing like the love-child of Aretha Franklin and Robert Plant, but without some tragedy they overcame to get there, they best pass the mic and return to obscurity.

Five years ago, it felt like all you had to do to start a viable online business was get your product in the hands of a millennial with a smartphone and an instagram account and you’d be set. Now, with ‘influencer marketing’ on track to becoming a $15 billion industry it’s no longer the grass roots approach it used to be. I would go as far to say that it's become a dumpster fire that we continue to fuel with every swipe of the feed.

I sit there, staring at my screen, four hours into drawing a new ‘skull’ icon for Bare Bones. This will be the fourth update since the brand started, but I’m convinced an update will make a huge difference. So, I’m analysing each stroke on the screen like one misplaced brush stroke will result in the loss of a future customer. I’m up to version no.42 saving each separately in case I realise that ‘skull v.37_final-final_b’ was always the one — constantly searching for which shift of the pixel will level-up my brand and initiate send my sales skyrocketing.

At the beginning of 2015, I started an email series about how to use your social media for your business. At the time I’d just started my brand, ‘Bare Bones’. I was using this brand to test out my ideas and the advice I was giving to clients.At the start of 2017, I decided to kick things up a notch and really focus on developing Bare Bones. In order to keep things lean, I would keep running all parts of the business myself - designing the products, finding and visiting manufacturers, quality checking all the products, daily packing and fulfilling orders, social media advertising, customer relations … I really mean e-ve-re-thang.