Pandemic Crisis and How I survived.
The Years That
Tried to Break Me
I survived 2016–2020. But the world wasn't done with me. Between supply chain collapse, historic inflation, and billion-dollar competitors selling $6 dresses — here's what came next.
I already told you about the algorithm, the tariffs, and the pandemic. Those were the early years. This is what came after — when I thought the worst was behind me.
By 2020, my store had survived four years. I'd figured out Instagram. I'd weathered the tariffs. I'd even found a way through the early pandemic. I was still here.
But the next five years brought the kind of compounding pressure that doesn't just threaten a business — it threatens the person behind it.These are three things that nearly took me under between 2020 and 2025. I don't talk about them much. But they happened.
The post-pandemic rebound collided with global supply chain collapse. The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Asia to the U.S. surged from under $2,000 to over $20,000. The Suez Canal was blocked for six days in March 2021, halting $9.6 billion of trade daily. Production delivery times nearly doubled to 100 days. Consumers encountered out-of-stock messages at more than double the rate of 2020. The Global Supply Chain Pressure Index hit an all-time high in 2021.
My entire business is curation. I find and design beautiful things — dresses, orthopedic shoes, sandals, heels collections, loafers, scarves, bags, jewellery — and I get them to women who'll treasure them. That's it. That's the whole model. But in 2021 and 2022, the simple act of getting inventory into my garage became the hardest part of running my business.
Everything I sourced — from artisan markets, from smaller manufacturers connected to global supply networks — was trapped in the same bottleneck as everything else on the planet. Containers sat at ports for weeks. Costs exploded. I heard about sellers paying $22,000 per container, up from $3,500 the year before. I'm one woman working out of my garage. I can't absorb that. Nobody like me can absorb that.
Money that should have gone toward growing the business — toward advertising, new products, maybe finally getting a proper workspace — went to freight companies instead. And the delays weren't just expensive. They were unpredictable. I couldn't tell my customers when new stock would arrive. I couldn't plan seasonal collections. I'd photograph pieces, list them, and then have no idea if they'd actually show up in time to ship.
Amazon was out there chartering private cargo ships. I was sitting on my kitchen floor at midnight, refreshing tracking numbers, wondering whether the shipment I'd already paid for would arrive this month or next.
I'd watched Austin rents eat small businesses alive. I wasn't willing to gamble my last shot on a lease. So the garage stayed. And I figured it out from there.
U.S. inflation hit 9.1% in June 2022 — the highest in four decades. The Federal Reserve responded with aggressive interest rate hikes, including a 0.75% increase in June 2022, the largest since 1994. By April 2022, 78% of small businesses reported increased prices for the goods and services they purchased. Small business confidence hit an all-time low. Consumers globally began cutting back on discretionary purchases, with more than 80% adjusting buying behaviour due to inflation concerns.
My products have never been necessities. They're beautiful things — scarves, bags, jewellery — that make getting dressed in the morning feel like an act of intention. My customers don't buy from me because they have to. They buy because it matters to them.
But when inflation pushed the cost of groceries, rent, and fuel to levels people hadn't seen in decades, the beautiful things were the first to go. I could feel it. Orders slowed. Carts got abandoned. The women who used to treat themselves once a month were now thinking twice about everything that wasn't rent or groceries.
I was caught in a vice. My costs were rising — shipping, materials, packaging, platform fees, everything. If I passed those costs to my customers, I'd price out the very women I built this business for. If I absorbed them, I'd watch my margins disappear. I spent nights going through spreadsheets, cutting costs on things I didn't even know I was spending on. There was no good option. Just less bad ones.
And there was a weight on top of the numbers that's hard to explain. My brand isn't built on being the cheapest. It's built on meaning — on the idea that buying something beautiful for yourself is an act of self-respect. Inflation didn't just threaten my revenue. It threatened the emotional space my customers needed to justify spending on themselves at all. When everything costs more, self-care starts to feel like selfishness. And that broke my heart.
My customers are women who know that getting dressed in the morning can be, on some days, its own small act of courage. I built this for them.
Shein's revenues surpassed $24 billion, making it the world's biggest fashion retailer — outselling Zara and H&M combined. Between November 2022 and November 2023, Shein launched 1.5 million new products, compared to Zara's 40,000 and H&M's 23,000. Temu entered the U.S. market in late 2022, spending an estimated $3 billion on marketing in 2024 alone. By 2024, 40% of U.S. consumers had shopped at Shein or Temu in the prior twelve months. Their average product price: $14 or less, with many items under $6.
This was the one I couldn't outwork, outpost, or outlast. It wasn't a recession or a shipping delay or an algorithm change. It was a fundamental shift in what "fashion" meant to a generation of shoppers. And it almost made me question everything.
Shein and Temu didn't just sell cheap clothes. They built AI-powered, factory-to-doorstep machines that could spot a trend on TikTok and have a version available for $8 within ten days. They had armies of influencers. They gamified their apps like video games. They spent more on a single Super Bowl ad than I'll probably gross in a decade.
The impact on businesses like mine was brutal. I watched other small fashion sellers — on Etsy, on Jane.com, independent brands — talk about how impossible it had become to compete. And I felt it myself. How do I explain to a potential customer why my hand-picked $45 scarf is worth it when Shein has something that looks similar for $4.99 with free shipping? I know the answer. I know the quality is different. I know the story is different. I know the woman who wears it feels different. But those things don't show up in a price comparison.
And when the algorithm pushes sponsored Shein haul videos to the same women I'm trying to reach — women I know, women I built this for — the playing field isn't just uneven. It's a different game entirely. I can't win on price. I was never trying to. But some days it feels like price is the only thing anyone's looking at anymore.
People kept stopping me. "Where did you get that?" A woman at a coffee shop asked three times in one week. Something clicked. I knew how to spot a beautiful thing. I still do.
Six crises in nine years.
And I'm still here. For you. For us all.
Algorithm changes. Trade wars. A pandemic. Supply chain collapse. Historic inflation. Billion-dollar competitors selling $6 dresses. Each one of these has buried businesses run by people with more resources, more backing, and more margin for error than I ever had.
I had a garage. I had my eye. I had women who understood what I was building. And I refused to let any of it stop me.
cost increase, 2021
June 2022
in 12 months
All claims based on published data from 2021–2025.