Alicia Millan

I closed Aletheia & Phos because things had been going well for so long that I stopped noticing.

I built it from the ground up over 13 years. A bracelet I made at my kitchen table turned into a multi-million-dollar business with a community of people who wore my pieces to their weddings, their chemo appointments and the births of their children. People buried their loved ones wearing my jewellery. It was, by metrics anyone uses to measure these things, working.

But I was done. 

I’m not burnt out. Nowhere near bitter. Just finished, and ecstatic about it. The way you finish a book you loved. I reached the last page, and it was time to put it down.

I think we need to talk about that, because often the only story we tell about business closures is one of failure. The founder who couldn’t make it work. The market that turned. The landlord, the tariffs, the pandemic, the algorithm, the raising capital, the foot traffic, the fucking Meta ads. These are stories worth telling, and a solace for those going through similar experiences to know they’re not alone. 

But what we don’t have language for is a founder who looks at something successful and says, “I’m actually just bored. This doesn’t challenge me anymore.” 

The moment I knew it was time to close my jewellery label wasn't dramatic. It was a Monday. I messaged my friend. 

I'd mastered every part of running my business. I could write a product launch email in 20 minutes. I knew my customers so intimately that I could tell you which subject lines would land, which pieces would sell through by April and which would need a push in May.

I didn’t ask even one person for their opinion about closing. I just sat with it. I didn’t let anyone else’s thoughts make mine ‘wobbly’. Two hours later, I texted my accountant. 

After 13 years, I made this decision faster than making sauce on a Sunday. Because somewhere in the last decade, I’d stopped learning. I only noticed when I started travelling, and my brain lit up again. Ravenous for new ideas, new conversations, new problems. Excited in a way my business hadn’t made me feel in years. The decision was fast because the evidence was already there.

The biggest thing I’ve learnt in business is the cost of indecision. Not the wrong decision, but the waiting. Every time you sit in limbo, hesitating, overthinking, you’re silently paying for it. With time, energy and momentum. Maybe money, too. You lose the spark that made the idea feel right in the first place. Doing your job with your eyes closed sounds like success, and it can be. But I am not someone who wants to do anything with her eyes closed. 

This feeling started humming underneath my skin after I closed my store in October. It was like an electric current. I knew I wanted to travel and work on the road for all of 2026. I held this feeling up in different lights to see if it would change shape. It didn’t. Every time I came back to it, the answer was the same. I was proud of what I’d built, but I was ready to stop building it.

The strangest part was other people’s reactions. Everyone expected me to be devastated. Friends checked in with that careful voice. Customers wrote to say they were so sorry, as if someone had died. I found myself reassuring people that I was more than fine and seeing them struggle to believe it.

We’ve internalised this idea that walking away from something you built is wasteful. Ungrateful. That you owe it to the business, to the customers, to the story, to keep going. I think that belief keeps a lot of founders trapped in things they’ve outgrown, running businesses that sustain them financially but have stopped sustaining them in every other way.

You are allowed to close something that is working. You are allowed to want more than competence. You do not owe your business your whole life just because it hasn’t broken you yet. The question isn’t whether you can keep going. Sure, you can. The question is if keeping going is the most honest thing you can do with what’s left of your time.

Aletheia & Phos closes permanently on May 31. Shop the final collection at aletheiaphos.com. 

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