Alisha Williams doesn’t have a home because she took a $50,000 risk in 2020.
The 33-year-old, who has a background in marketing and communications, started her sexual health business, Rosewell, with what could have been her house deposit.
Ms. Williams wanted to sell sex toys to women without feeling cheesy. It was a tough sell when it launched in 2020; sexual well-being was not in the Zeitgeist.
“I grew up when anything to do with sexual well-being was not comfortable,” she told news.com.au.
Ms Williams wanted to take the stigma out of women’s pleasure, but when she started planning the business in 2019, she was met with more blank looks than anything else.
She was trying to explain that she wanted to create a sex toy store that felt like “walking in Mecca”, and people just couldn’t imagine it.
“They were imagining a bright pink jelly dildo,” she said.
“Five years ago! It was too uncomfortable to tell anyone what I was working on.”
Ms Williams worked three jobs to finance her business and she has yet to receive any outside capital from investors.
The business is entirely founded by women, which is important to her. She wants to be in control because she feels she understands what women want, but that means she’s had to shoulder all the financial burdens that come with that.
“I would take out loans and pay them back as fast as I could,” she said.
Ms Williams said investing so heavily in her business was a scary decision.
She wasn’t paying herself a retirement pension and it was a huge risk that everything “depended” on her idea being right.
“It’s not just the money you’re putting in. It’s the opportunity cost of not earning a meaningful income elsewhere,” she explained.
My initial investment was between $50,000 and $70,000.
Ms Williams said her business venture was particularly expensive because it involved a physical product that took time and money to create, test and refine.
“I still don’t have a house. Everything goes in business,” she said.
The 33-year-old is still in a tricky place where any profit from the financial business goes back into the company.
“The business may be doing well, but personally, I can earn more by working for someone else,” she said.
Ms Williams said running a business is also much harder than being an employee, saying “it’s 10 times harder than doing a job because there are no boundaries or steady pay”.
All kinds of expenses come with a business. When she opened her brick-and-mortar store in Melbourne, she had to pay the bond and pay three months’ rent in advance.
“It was a $40,000 bill,” she said.
She is also transparent about the hard times that come with success.
Recently, she spoke out on the internet about her swallowing after her plan to have a co-director completely “backfired” and left her in the lurch.
Ms Williams took to social media to share that she was experiencing what she considered a “setback”, but she wanted to be honest about it.
“I have been doing this for four years now. “If you had told me today on our four-year anniversary what I would be doing,” she said.
“I would have cried properly.”
Ms Williams said being honest online can be difficult because if you’re a CEO, you want to appear “successful” and “aspirational” because it can help the brand.
However, she wants to tell people the reality because “nobody really talks about it” and she thinks it’s important.
Even though things are hard, it feels worth it.
She said she feels “proud” of the impact she has had on other women who use the products and love them.
It’s not unusual for her to get emails from women thanking her for creating products that make them feel more comfortable with their sexuality and their bodies.
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Image Source : nypost.com