/2024
What Happens When You Build a Life You Don’t Want?
Podcast Information
From the outside, everything about her business looked like it was working. The kind of thing people build toward for years. Growth, momentum, a real operation behind it. But sitting across from her, it was obvious something didn’t line up. We got into what it actually feels like to build something that succeeds… and still feel pulled away from it. There’s a point where the work starts to take more than it gives. More pressure, more responsibility, less space to breathe. She started realizing she didn’t want the life that came with keeping it going. Letting go of something that works. Something people recognize her for. Something that makes sense on paper... She’s choosing to step out of that and go back to murals. Back to something quieter, more personal, and a lot less certain. We talked about the weight of that decision, the pressure to keep going when things are “good,” and what it means to actually choose a different path. If everything looks right from the outside… but it doesn’t feel right, do you keep going?
Here are the show notes:
AMPLIFIED — Show Notes
ft. Tina | XXL Studios
We recorded this on the last day she would ever walk into that warehouse.
There's something about doing a conversation in a space that's about to disappear that makes everything feel a little more honest. Tina didn't have anything left to perform. The chapter was already closing. All that was left was to talk about what it actually meant.
And that's what made this one stay with me.
It started the way a lot of good things do — without any real intention. Christmas 2019, a hand-stitched scrunchie made from her mom's old shirt, gifted to a cousin who posted it to Snapchat. Two weeks later, from a 400 square foot apartment in Toronto, she launched XXL Scrunchie. She didn't think it would sell. It sold out the first day.
What I kept thinking about was how none of it was planned. The first viral moment that changed everything wasn't even her video — it was someone named Ribbon who tried to make one of her scrunchies at home, failed spectacularly, posted it as a joke, and accidentally sold out Tina's entire coat closet of inventory in a single afternoon. She didn't do that. The internet did it for her. She just had something real enough that a stranger felt compelled to talk about it.
That matters.
She moved back home to Belleville during COVID, renovated her parents' basement, grew the team, signed a lease on a warehouse, and started building toward the version of success she thought she wanted — the big space, the employees, the custom packaging, all of it. And then she got there. And slowly, quietly, she started realizing it wasn't the thing.
She described the moment she understood the business had outgrown what she actually wanted. More employees meant more energy spent managing people, more admin, more hats she never planned to wear. Her personal life started to cost her — she was missing birthdays, calculating the four-hour round trip to see friends in Toronto, feeling guilty every time she stepped away from work. She said something that landed hard: I would convince myself it's okay. This is a job. We're not supposed to always love our job.
She was right that that's a common thought. She was wrong that it had to stay true.
The content she'd been building on the side — YouTube, TikTok, the quiet documentation of the whole journey — had started matching her product revenue. Then it passed it. No overhead. No inventory. No warehouse rent. When she finally sat her dad down and showed him the numbers from content alone, he understood. Before that, it just looked like giving up a good thing.
What struck me is how she described the decision to pause as months of internal work that nobody else could see. To the outside world it looked like a hard cut. To her it was a long, slow reconciliation — with what she'd built, what it had cost, and what she actually wanted next.
And what she wanted next was murals. Which is where she started. Before scrunchies, before TikTok, before the warehouse — there was a girl painting walls in her apartment, showing a spa owner what she could do, asking if she could do three in the back rooms. She set all of it down when the scrunchie business took over. And six years later, painting a mural on the wall of our studio is what reminded her she missed it.
Full circle doesn't usually look like this. It's usually messier and slower and less clean than the story sounds in retrospect. But it's a real one.
She's not sad about the warehouse. She made a hundred scrunchies a day by herself for the final stretch, stressed and behind and sleeping at her parents' place — and by the end of it, she was just ready. Not burned out on creativity. Just done with that particular version of it.
The new chapter is quieter. Smaller team. Less pressure to post every day. More time to cook a meal, go to a birthday, be present. Six murals already booked. Excited to share the story behind each one.
She said something near the end that I've been turning over. A quote she came across somewhere: if you wouldn't be happy doing your current job even if you made billions from it, that's your answer.
She wouldn't have been. So she stopped.
That kind of clarity is rare. Most people talk around it for years.
Guest: Tina | XXL Studios Find her: @xxl_studios on Instagram
