If you’ve been following along since the Peanut Butter Jam collection launched, you might
have noticed things went a little quiet around here. No new posts, not much on socials,
and if you sent me a message and got a slow reply... I’m sorry. Life got very, very full, and
I needed to step back before I fell over completely.
I want to be honest with you about where I’ve been, because I think that’s the only way this little community of ours actually means something.

Here’s the thing nobody really talks about when you launch a small business: the moment
after. The launch is all adrenaline and excitement and late nights fuelled by coffee and
pure determination. And then it’s over, and your body sends you a very firm invoice for
everything you borrowed against it.
I was running on almost no sleep. My toddler was waking multiple times through the night, every night, and I was getting up after those wake-ups and going straight back to my laptop or my sewing machine. I was answering emails, managing orders, trying to figure out the next step, all while functioning on the kind of tired that sits in your bones.

And then there was the financial reality. To restock, to order new samples, to move forward... it all takes capital. Capital that, as a small independent brand with no investors and no big backing, I simply didn’t have sitting there waiting. I had poured everything into getting the first collection made, and when it came time to think about what was next, the numbers just didn’t add up yet.

So I froze.

I don’t say that dramatically... it’s just what happened. The burnout, the exhaustion, the
financial pressure, and the overwhelm of trying to figure out the next step all arrived at the same time, and I went quiet. I stepped away from the socials, from the blog, from the
inbox. I needed to just… be a mum for a while. To sleep when I could. To breathe.

Here’s what I didn’t expect: stepping away from the business of Peppermint Peach gave
me back the creative part of it.

When you start out as a creative person and move into running a business, something
strange happens. The admin starts to eat the art. You spend so much time in spreadsheets
and shipping policies and email sequences that you forget why you started in the first
place. I had gone from someone who sketched for the pure joy of it to someone who was
staring at the blank sketch pad.

In the quiet, I started drawing again. Just for me. No deadline, no collection brief, no
pressure. And slowly, slowly, the ideas started coming back. New prints. New designs.
New stories I wanted to tell through fabric.

I’ve been sewing. I've been learning. I’ve been sketching and I’ve been redrawing things that weren’t quite right and starting again without the anxiety of a ticking clock. The printing process for the artwork is a journey in itself, getting the colours and the detail exactly right has meant going back to the drawing board more than once, but I’m not rushing it. I'm also not going to burn out again

I’m not ready to show you everything yet, but I can tell you that what’s coming feels so good (and delicious. The new collection is being built slowly and carefully, with the same love and obsessive attention to detail as the first one — just with a little more wisdom about what I can take on, and a much better sleep schedule (fingers crossed).

I’m also going to be doing things a little differently this time. I’ll be sharing more of the
process as it happens, the messy middle, the failed prints, the moments of doubt and
the moments of joy. I want you to feel like you’re part of building this, because honestly?
You are. Your support, your messages, your photos of your families wearing PBJ... that’s
what brought me back to the sketchbook.

And when the time comes to launch the new collection, it will be through a pre-order
model again, which I’ll be talking about a lot more soon, because I think it’s one of the most important things to understand about how a small, sustainable, independent brand actually works. More on that very soon.

If you’re still here after the quiet, thank you. Genuinely. It means more than I can say.
Peppermint Peach has always been about the joy of being together, the sticky fingers and
the belly laughs and the barefoot backyard moments. It’s also, it turns out, about the
messy, imperfect, beautiful reality of building something from scratch while raising a tiny
human who thinks peanut butter belongs on everything.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.

See you soon... there’s a lot to share. 
🍑Big Love, Zahra x