I Thought I Had To Be Serious To Be Taken Seriously
Two years ago, I met a college friend for coffee.
She told me she still has the earrings I made her.
From 2004.
I used to make jewellery in college and give it all away. Twenty years later, she still has hers.
That did something to me.
And once I started looking, the signs were everywhere. Every time I travel, I buy jewellery. It’s small, it packs light. I gift it everywhere. People always ask where it’s from.
And as a business? Almost unfair. Tiny. No warehouse. High margin.
And it never expires.
But the real reason goes deeper.
I spent ten years in software. And software is a very masculine world.
For the best years of my life, I ran my wardrobe on the Steve Jobs method. The most basic pieces, the same every day, the least possible thinking. One less decision before work.
Running a tech company made me so serious, so armoured, that people started assuming things about me that weren’t true. Somewhere in that decade, I misplaced a whole part of myself.
I thought that was the price of being taken seriously. I was wrong about that.
The jewellery isn’t a pivot. It’s a recovery.
I want to dress up again. I want to wear bold pieces. I want to be a little sassy.
And I love it.
At 40, something changed in me about permission.
One good thing came out of downsizing: we got a dog in the office. I call her our HR officer. She makes everybody happy.
She’s also my hiring filter. If you’re not open to my dog, you’re not my culture.
Because honestly, what is the point of starting a business if I can’t even have a dog at the office? I might as well work for someone else.
That’s the energy ThousandGold was born from.
At 40, I didn’t want to wait to live my life. I wanted something physical. Something AI can’t replace. Something that keeps my team together even if the tech changes. And something that’s mine, done my way.
My first bazaar humbled me.
I wasn’t planning to sell handmade pieces. Handmade doesn’t scale. But I didn’t have enough stock, so I made them frantically, by hand.
They sold out.
At one point, every piece I finished sold within half an hour. I couldn’t believe people wanted something I’d made with my own hands.
And still, the bazaar took everything out of my ego.
At 41, a startup founder, I really thought I’d be driving a Tesla by now. Travelling the world.
Instead, I was pushing trolleys and closing curtains at a market stall.
The stall humbled me. The sold-out table healed me.
Turns out you can get both at the same market.
Here’s my favourite part.
My family finally understands one of my businesses.
Ten years of software: polite, blank faces. One jewellery brand: suddenly everyone has opinions, excitement, stories.
The brand is named for my sisters. Every piece I write a story for is a memory of my family, written down for the first time in my life.
It’s an open diary. Written in gold.
Would it still be worth doing if it never becomes huge?
Yes.
Because even if nobody buys another piece, I finally wrote us down.
If you’re curious, the pieces live at thousandgold.co.
This is part of The Founder Edit — a season called The Things I Was Wrong About. One honest essay at a time. Start here.