Oh my heavens to Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Trump lost! Can you even believe this is real life right now? Are you breathing differently? I am! When I got the news, I felt like I took a real breath for the first time in four years. And it was like I didn’t even realize how deeply  I had been holding it! 

The past few have been hellish for us as founders, small-business owners, employees, and just humans. The election of Trump in 2016, with all of its blatant fear-mongering and dehumanizations didn’t feel like something new, but it did feel like something imminently dangerous. I remember, after panicking about minority rights and civil rights, starting to fall into a deep anxiety about the future of small business. 

It already felt impossible to start and run a small business in America and since then, over the past four years, I’ve watched our business almost unravel from the complete lack of infrastructure and community in this nation’s manufacturing and distribution economy. BEFORE the global crisis that is Covid, we struggled to have vendors meet their deadlines, to get our massive business partners to understand how to work with a small company like ours, and to not be taken advantage of by middle men at every step along the way. It has been exhausting and frustrating and twelve years in, we still question ourselves all day, every single day. 

I’ve always understood that running a business is harder for me because I’m a woman and I wasn’t lucky enough to launch with a million-dollar loan from daddy. But the Black Lives Matter movement revealed to me something that I should have already been understood: just how much harder it could have been for me. The less privilege you have, the more difficult all of those struggles are. In many cases, they become insurmountable. 

My hope is that we can use all of the difficult lessons we’ve learned at S.W. Basics to help, in whatever small way we can, to raise up more diverse voices in the natural products space and to add to a spirit of cooperation not cutthroat competition among small, independent brands. That’s why we’re committing to our new S.W. Basics x Collabs project. 

Since having this idea, I’ve been stalking brands and having conversations with so many new people. It was truly the best part of 2020. I got to meet so many great makers and founders all over the country and work together to development amazing new products with them while ALSO trying to start or save or grow our own businesses while ALSO trying to survive our realities.