A few years ago, I hit a wall I couldn’t push through. I was running a business I cared deeply about, and from the outside, it looked like a shiny success story. Sales were coming in, my personal brand was growing, and people were paying attention. I had media features, I was winning awards, the whole shebang.
But on the inside, I felt like I was constantly scrambling. Every day felt like a string of decisions I was slightly underprepared to make.
What products should we focus on right now?
Why did sales suddenly drop this month?
Is this marketing channel actually working, or just keeping us busy?
Should we invest more here, or pull back?
And the strange part was, I had data and numbers everywhere. I had all the data I needed to come up with educated, data-informed answers to all of those questions, but I wasn't using it.
Shopify dashboards, marketing platforms, email reports, analytics tools, spreadsheets I’d built to try to make sense of it all.
But none of it actually told me what I needed to know, because everything lived in a different place, numbers contradicted each other, and understanding what was really happening inside the business meant hours of reading reports and trying to piece together spreadsheets.
Some days I did that. Most days, if I’m honest, I didn’t. I hate spreadsheets. I like setting them up and colour-coding them and making them all pretty, but actually filling them in and using them and decoding them... Gross.
Because when you’re already running a business and managing products, doing the marketing, handling customers, looking after operations and everything else, there simply isn’t time to become a full-time data analyst as well.
So I made decisions the way many creative founders do when they’re overwhelmed... On instinct, on my gut feel, through rose coloured glasses, on whatever tiny slice of information was easiest to access in the moment.
And slowly, without fully realising it, the business started running me instead of the other way around because, without data-informed decisions, I was just treading water like a duck. And there's only so long a duck can tread water.
Enter, my burnout phase. And burnout doesn’t usually arrive as a dramatic collapse. It creeps in quietly bit by bit, through the constant mental load, the feeling that you’re always reacting instead of steering, the exhaustion of holding an entire business in your head without ever seeing the full picture.
Eventually, I realised something uncomfortable. The problem wasn’t that I wasn’t working hard enough. The problem was that I was running a business without real clarity about what was actually happening inside it.
And once I saw that in my own experience, I started seeing it everywhere.
Over the past twenty years, I’ve been inside a lot of businesses. My own handmade fashion brand. A sustainable fashion marketplace. A conscious fashion community. Multi-million dollar brands, big brands, small brands...
I've spent years working alongside founders building thoughtful, purpose-driven brands, in different industries at different stages with different personalities behind the businesses.
But the same pattern kept appearing: founders working incredibly hard while quietly feeling like they didn’t have the clarity they actually needed. They hold it together, but they're overwhelmed.
They knew their revenue numbers. They could open Shopify and see yesterday’s sales. They had dashboards and reports and spreadsheets. But none of it answered the questions that actually matter when you’re trying to run a business.
Which products are truly driving the business?
Which marketing channels are actually working?
Is growth healthy, or are you just working harder to maintain momentum?
Where should the attention really be focused next?
Instead, founders are stitching together fragments of information across multiple systems like Shopify, Google Analytics, email, Instagram, 51 million advertising platforms, all the inventory tools, all the financial reports.
And each one tells part of the story, but none of them shows the full picture, so trying to understand your business this way is like trying to steer a ship while looking through ten different windows below deck instead of one clear view from the vantage point towards the horizon.
So founders do what humans always do when things get too complicated: they simplify.
They focus on the metrics that are easiest to see, even though they might not be complete. They rely on instinct, even though it might not be best for the long-term goal. They react to what feels urgent, instead of thinking of the bigger picture.
And slowly, business becomes hard, it becomes something they’re constantly managing rather than something they fully understand, or something that easily flows.
After years of watching this play out in my own businesses and in so many others, one idea kept coming back to me.
Founders don’t need more data. They need more clarity.
A simple, clear way to understand what’s actually happening inside their business without spending hours pulling reports and piecing together spreadsheets.
Last year, that idea turned into something real and I started building Dotti.
It's not another analytics platform filled with dashboards. It's something designed for the way creative founders actually run businesses.
Dotti connects the systems founders already use, platforms like Shopify, marketing tools, and financial software, and turns that scattered data into a clear picture of how the business is really performing so the next step becomes obvious.
It clears up which products drive profit, which marketing channels actually work, where growth is happening, where problems might be starting to appear, what to focus on and what to stop wasting time on.
The goal isn’t to give founders more numbers. It’s to give them more understanding and less stress.
Because the founders I’ve spent my career working alongside aren’t trying to build the biggest businesses in the world. It's not about making millions. Some of these founders simply want to run their one-person show and keep it that way, handmaking everything themselves, and building their own idea of success in a way that suits them - but without the business overwhelm.
They’re trying to build thoughtful businesses. Brands rooted in values. Businesses that support the people behind them instead of exhausting them.
But doing that kind of work is incredibly hard when you can’t clearly see what’s happening inside the business you’re trying to grow.
After twenty years of building, breaking, rebuilding and watching founders navigate the same challenges, that’s the problem I care most about solving now: helping founders finally see their businesses clearly.
Because when that happens, everything gets lighter, decisions become easier, energy becomes focused, and the business starts working with you instead of constantly pulling you in every direction, and eventually down.
Sign up for the waitlist for Dotti here and stay tuned on socials for the journey.
In the meantime, if you want to untangle your creative business or need help growing your sustainable fashion, beauty or lifestyle brand without ads in an authentic way, reach out. I'm here to help.
Claire x
