Our last three years (Lisa's version)

In this two-part series, our co-founders share the truth of their last three years building MILO.

I was sitting on my bed in Berlin talking to Katrina on the phone. It was early 2023. Thomas was alive and my job was intact. I could see the next few years taking shape. I was stable in a way I wouldn't be again for a long time and that I never had been before. 

Discussing next steps on MILO, I said to her: I'm so excited about this. But I don't know how we're going to build a brand of the scale needed to support our mission.

That was my greatest fear named out loud before anything had even happened. I had fifteen years in brand and marketing at that point. I'd worked at two of advertising's top three global firms. I had contacts. I had pattern recognition, instincts, and a very clear picture of what MILO needed to become based on our shared vision and philosophy. What we didn't have was the execution capacity to make it real or the money to buy it.

We agreed that we would develop the brand as an MVP and that product development would be decidedly more than that. We poured our energy and resources into formulation, getting very lucky with two strong partners who took us from start to finish in only three rounds. 

On the brand side, we quickly met the ceiling of our ability to convey what we wanted to do. We didn't have all the language of Human Care yet. Only a strong mutual sense of what we wanted to change about an industry that had affected us our whole lives. So we built what we needed as we needed it. A placeholder name that ended up sticking. A logo. An investor presentation. Product names. Positioning statements. Photoshoot. Eventually those pieces became the brand we started with. Most pros will tell you good branding generally doesn’t come piecemeal. We were already behind, but it’s the first trap of many under-resourced brands. 

I started to tease the idea to a few people in my professional circles of big brand and innovation who did occasional angel investments.They were enthusiastic based on my storytelling, before seeing what we’d put together. When I shared that early version, it fell flat. It was excruciating. I had access to people who could help if they wanted to. What I heard back sometimes directly but usually indirectly was a mix of the brand not being there or that the very concept of multifunctionality is bad for business. In short, people didn’t get it. Hearing it from one person hurts, but feeling that it’s the general consensus among your peers is…rough. Especially when you know it's true. Especially when you've spent your career making brands work for other people and you can't make it happen for yourself. I had never felt so completely out of my depth. I kept asking myself the same question and couldn't find the answer. How does that happen?

And that was before my world came crashing down.

Not long after we finalized our formulas and began fundraising, my life partner Thomas died suddenly. In the time it takes to have a massive heart attack, I lost everything. My life partner. My job. My home in Berlin. The person who had been my biggest cheerleader, my sounding board, my strategic advisor, and most of all my peace had disappeared on an ordinary Saturday morning. The truth is I could have kept my job at his company, but really I couldn’t. As his Chief of Staff, we were a package deal. A dynamic duo. I had no interest in doing that without him.

A hallmark of our relationship was him trying to make me see in myself what he saw in me. A woman of limitless potential and bound only by her own neuroses. He was mystified by the difference in our perception of the same person: me. When we lost him, I realized if I didn't cultivate that confidence for myself, I was at serious risk of getting off track. Of backsliding into an even more dire version of my old scarcity-driven need for the validation of success. Success I chased to burnout and back on a relay that started even earlier than my career did. It was do or die, literally. I knew I wouldn't be able to recover from this via self-destruction. This time around, I’d have to take responsibility for myself from a place of self-love instead of punishment. Finally, something so bad happened that even I agreed I deserved to be extra nice to myself for a change. 

At the hospital after they told me, I made a promise to him that I would keep going. Thomas was infectiously optimistic and could be stopped at nothing when it came to realizing his vision. I thought that energy would be available for me to draw on over the years. Instead I had to find it in myself without a roadmap for this level of self-development through kindness. As a start, I decided to treat myself as I would a best friend who found herself in the same position. 

I was catatonic in Berlin from September until December then left for good, first to LA to be with Katrina as she got married. Then back to Toronto to start over, alone. From the time I arrived until the following September, we pushed for progress. Nothing came easy but eventually we had a version of MILO Multifunctional we felt good about. It was an arduous process to get there and a lot of creative spin between co-founders fighting for the same vision with different language and from different perspectives. Our soft launch arrived and with zero marketing dollars, we hoped for what everyone does. For the public to just get it. It’s hard to admit that’s what I thought would happen as a self-purported marketing person. I pushed for a soft launch on the one year anniversary of Thomas’s passing. Always one for symbolism and ritual, it felt right in planning but launch day was too stressful for ceremony. The site development was behind and we were pushing updates late into the afternoon. We managed to get it done, finally ready to start spreading it around. I’m chronically online and thought our manifesto would resonate. Instead, the beauty communities found it self-important. They didn’t like the idea of multifunctional skincare as we were explaining it. They were skeptical about our claims of three products replacing twenty. They wanted a dermatologist as our spokesperson. Our entire strategy was to cite the preeminent dermatology textbooks as a form of removing bias and challenging industry marketing norms. It all fell flat. In total, I believe the tides didn’t turn in our favor because we didn’t have a brand container big enough to support the scale of the claims we were making. 

My whole life going back to adolescence, I’ve been obsessed with the power of Brand. It stems from an all-consuming love of fashion. A collection of thoughts, ideas, and aesthetics that reach you on an emotional and existential level. To have someone meet your creation with resonance always seemed like a profound and noble enough mission to me. Over time, I became a lot more conscious as a consumer and a businessperson. MILO was my first time reconciling brand love and conscious consumption. Embracing that dichotomy is what started to build the container we always needed. I started out so focused on the approval of the world I came from that I forgot to acknowledge basic logic. To people inside The System, an obviously small indie  making disruptive claims as big as ours presents as nothing short of naive. Without conveying scale and executional ability the way we hoped, it might have been a time others would say to cut our losses especially in an industry as fickle as beauty. Nevertheless, we persisted with what we could.

Katrina is a natural community-builder and has spent the last 18 months hosting and attending so many events and markets on our behalf that it makes my head spin just thinking about it. Still deep in the throes of grief, I didn’t have the capacity to be out there. I still did events and built community here in Toronto, but Katrina did what I couldn’t. She’s sampled the product to hundreds of people, many of whom came back with encouraging anecdotes that have kept us going. While she was out there, I was where I am as I write this. In bed. Working, thinking, ruminating, grieving, developing. Climbing into or out of deep depression, depending on the day. And ultimately, into the person who could finally see herself as Thomas did all along.

With this growth came spiritual and energetic awakenings that have changed my life and brought me to a place of wholeness and integration I didn’t know possible. I used to live life as two separate people: The public version of me—The Achiever. And the behind the scenes version. The Walking Coping Mechanism. Entirely burnt out, with a nervous system shot to hell. Leaning into addictions and disorders to quell feelings of self-doubt and exhaustion to meet The Achiever’s mandate. 

I was officially out of the corporate grind which for me meant 70% travel and pretending time zones didn’t exist. It was a nearly 24/7 job but I loved it. When it ended, there was a vacuum I didn’t have tools to fill. I tried implementing routines and schedules to get some sense of normalcy. Nothing stuck because nothing was normal. Eventually I surrendered to the idea that instead of trying to be anything—brand, founder, person—I should just be myself wherever I happen to find myself. The question wasn’t one of knowing myself because I’ve kind of always known. Instead it was something harder. A conscious decision to admit who I was to everyone, all the time. No more hiding. I became more open about the grief I was managing alongside startup life. About the long overdue ADHD diagnosis that came when loss stripped me down to the studs. The struggles of living in the executional gap of what your mind can envision and your budget can realize, all while feeling like time is running out. As I began to build community through authenticity, podcast and panel invitations started coming in. It was an opportunity to take this more integrated version of myself out for a spin. No more posturing as someone who has all the answers.

Instead, I allowed myself to be someone with one answer that carried me through most things as soon as I let it: Keep going. Surrender to time and fate but never to the opinions of others. Don’t give up based on someone’s current perception of you, show them who you are through action. 

The way for me to do that was to embrace the dichotomies of myself I previously thought I had to rectify. To allow myself to be whoever I am at any given moment whether I’m in a meeting or with friends, or on vacation. To embrace every part of me with love and acceptance however much I’d rather not. In what I call a reconciliation of fates and others might call irony, the final brand platform we arrived at—I contain multitudes—is the embodiment of exactly this. It’s about accepting and lovingly embodying all parts of you. Honoring the shadows as much as the light and refusing anything that asks you to condense or flatten yourself into something more digestible for your environment. It’s about allowing two things to be true at the same time and leaving room for more truths as they arise. Accepting messy realities without judgement and meeting them with love. Choosing your version of yourself over the versions others might project on you. When you’re completely honest with yourself and others about who you are, you suddenly become much easier to understand. You find your community because you finally allowed them to meet you. 

xx Lisa