Our last three years (Katrina's version)

Three years since the first iteration of MILO.

It began with a regenerative dream and a product I believed could change the way we consume, behave, and relate to ourselves and to each other. What followed has been three years of building, questioning, recalibrating, pivoting, grieving, learning, and evolving.

Looking back now, I can see how much we’ve been trying to hold inside one small bootstrapped brand. We were never just trying to make and sell skincare. We were trying to interrupt a pattern. Not only in beauty, but in the broader logic of capitalism that has trained so many of us to live in states of insufficiency, dependency, and quiet self-abandonment. To loosen the grip the beauty industry has had on us for so long. To challenge the conditioning that tells us we are always one more product away from being enough.

That has always been the real work.

MILO has never just been about products. It has been one expression of something I have felt for a long time: that the places where people spend their time, money, energy, and attention should actively nurture life rather than exploit insecurity. That business can be a vehicle for social, cultural, behavioural, and economic change. That what we build should leave people and communities with more life than it takes. That brands can restore agency instead of manufacturing dependence.

And now, as I prepare to bring a baby girl into this world in just a few short weeks, I find myself thinking even more deeply about the kind of world she will inherit and the responsibility I feel in shaping what I can. In taking responsibility where I can, as an individual, as a leader, as a founder, and now as a mother.

From the beginning, MILO was meant to be a space for exploration, for understanding yourself better, for reclaiming power. Not a loud brand fighting for attention. Not a brand built on pressure, speed, or aesthetic performance. But something quieter, more grounded, more honest. A brand that made room for you to come back to yourself.

A brand that could hold complexity, one where the product and the philosophy were inseparable. An alternative to lengthy routines, mental load, and the beauty industry’s exploitative tax. A different way to care. A new, or ancient, way to relate to beauty and to self. A new example for how to build businesses.

Not just in what we say, but in how we develop products, source, spend, structure, and market. In the ripple of impact we take responsibility for. In the kinds of behaviors we reinforce. In whether we are deepening dependence or helping people recover some sense of agency, time, enoughness, and power.

For the last three years, I have explained MILO to people in conversations, at events, and in person over and over again, and the response has so often been the same:

Oh. That makes so much sense.

People get it.

They understand beauty burnout. They understand the exhaustion of too many steps, too many products, too many promises, too much noise. They understand the hunger for something simpler, more intelligent, more human. They understand the relief of being offered a different relationship to care, and the urgency of an alternative to capitalism as we know it.

And yet, so much of that clarity has been missing in translation online, especially in a digital space that rewards streamlined messages, neatly packaged product stories, and immediate calls to action.

What I underestimated was never people’s willingness to care. It was the force of the systems shaping what gets seen, chosen, and repeated. What people even have the capacity to notice. What it takes to break through that noise.

Corporate scale. Convenience. Algorithmic attention. The machinery of consumption. The constant drowning out of discernment by noise. So much of what surrounds us is designed to keep us distracted, disconnected, and slightly unsure of ourselves. And it is one of the reasons so much of MILO’s clarity has not always translated online in the way it has in person.

People cannot support what they do not consistently see, understand, and feel invited into. And if I am honest, that is one of the places we have struggled.

One thing has become clear: if you are trying to build something that asks people to see differently, you have to be consistently visible yourself. As a brand, and as a founder.

That is something we have wobbled with. Not from a lack of care or effort, but because building something this layered and values-driven asks a very particular kind of visibility. A devotion to going against the grain. Against the default. Against what is familiar. Against what everyone tells you that you “should” be doing.

It asks you to keep showing up before the full picture has landed. To stay visible while your own understanding is still evolving. To repeat yourself. To refine in public. To hold a signal steady enough, and clear enough, that it stays attuned to what actually matters instead of collapsing back into the noise, the familiar or the default. 

Even more than that, it has asked us to understand visibility as a form of design.

Not saying everything all at once. Not condensing the entire worldview into a single post. Not expecting people to grasp the full depth of what you are building in one moment. 

But creating a starting place. Building a relationship that unfolds layer by layer. Letting people enter through what they can recognize first, and from there begin to understand not only what you are building, but something about themselves through the experience of it. Through the mirror it offers. Through the questions it surfaces. Through the potential it nurtures and the possibility it points to.

We did not just need to become more visible. We needed to design visibility in a way that reflected the same principles we were building the business around.

That means simplification instead of overwhelm. Relationship instead of pressure. Trust instead of manipulation. Depth instead of noise. Communication that restores discernment instead of hijacking it. An unfolding that allows people to meet themselves inside the story rather than just consume a message and move on.

We knew we did not want to reproduce the very thing we were trying to challenge. But in resisting that so strongly, we held ourselves back from becoming visible at all. We did not want to contribute to the same cycles we were trying to interrupt, and in that, we sometimes failed to meet people where they were, or show up in the places they could find us.

That is one of the truths of these last three years.

And now here we are at a threshold. A more honest unveiling.

For the last five years, alongside building MILO, I have also been immersed in work around regenerative leadership and regenerative business design: how do we build in ways that increase life, agency, and resilience instead of feeding on burnout, fragmentation, and dependence? How do we create products, systems, cultures, and ways of working that restore energy, trust, clarity, and capacity rather than quietly extracting from them? 

This has been the thread pulling through how I lead, how I build, and how I support others to do the same. And now, MILO is where all of this gets to come to life and intersect in a new form: through a consumer brand and category of care that people can actually experience in their daily lives, and one that takes responsibility for its role in the world by helping create better systems that restore agency, regenerate life, and leave people, communities, and ecosystems with more than they take.

A daily ritual. A daily pattern interrupt. A daily reminder of what becomes possible when care is designed to support people rather than exploit them. A business designed to circulate resources back into the community it exists to serve rather than extract from it. Regenerative design is not a vague ideal. It is an operating system.

We do not need more empires. We need ecosystems.

That is what MILO is. That is what Human Care is.

An ecosystem.

Products that reduce excess instead of creating more of it. Multifunctionality instead of endless specialization. Nourishment instead of overstimulation. Skin health built around first principles, not trend cycles. Less mental load. Rituals that return people to themselves rather than push them further into performance. A business model, a customer relationship, and a communication strategy that leave people with more clarity, agency, and life than they started with.

Regeneration, is not just about sustaining what already exists. It is about creating the conditions for life to organize, renew, and deepen itself over time.

The MILO Trio is one artifact of that. Human Care is the larger vessel. Not a tagline, but a category through which we reclaim care and rebuild it around life-giving principles: reciprocity, renewal, natural intelligence, nourishment, interconnectivity, first principles of health, and a more sustaining relationship to self and community.

So here we are. Three years later, and I am standing at a threshold that reaches far beyond the launch of a product. This month holds three intersecting births: a baby girl, a Human Care ecosystem, and the version of me required to carry, build, and hold both.

And with that comes another truth: the capacity to be visible inside the multitudes of who I am, without reducing myself to a single role that makes me easier to understand.

Mother. Leader. Consumer. Founder.

I am complex, devoted, contradictory, alive. And I am no longer interested in flattening myself into something more digestible than what is true.

I am here to regenerate out loud and rebuild in real time, and to invite others into that path with me. And I could not be more excited to be sharing this more fully. To be sharing myself more fully with the world, and with you.

Because if you have made it this far, I know something in you probably craves something different, more. You know that you’re more than the labels and narratives you have been handed.

Maybe you are trying to shape and seed a different future too. Maybe you are in the middle of unlearning inherited systems and reclaiming parts of yourself you had to leave behind in order to survive, succeed, or belong. Or maybe you have simply felt, in your own way, the exhaustion of living inside systems that ask too much and give too little back.

Maybe what you are remembering is that you, too, contain multitudes.

Nine months ago, I would not have believed I would feel ready to bring a child into this world. And yet here I am, holding the weight and wonder of these births at once.

In so many ways, MILO has prepared me for motherhood, because regeneration was never meant to be limited to a business ideal. It is a way of living. A way of relating. A way of creating. 

And as I sit here, it is dawning on me that I could not have planned this even if I tried: two births, two living realities, arriving in the same month, each carrying its own kind of life force, and both asking me to grow into the person who can hold them.

MILO felt like the first birth in many ways. It was a lifetime of work leading up to this moment, but it took growing human life to really understand the magic of birth and life itself.  This baby has opened something deeper in me. A clarity, a power, a reminder that life expands when we create. And the dawn of motherhood is preparing me to meet MILO again with new eyes. More devoted than ever to building a world my daughter gets to grow up inside of. I’m glad you are here as we continue to cocreate and write the narrative.