By 2013, SOLE 2 SOLE was still operating. The concessionaire counter in a department store was running. The online store was live. We did a pop-up. There was still activity, still some revenue, still a version of the business functioning.
And I still chose to stop.
That’s the part people sometimes find surprising when I describe it. There was no dramatic collapse, no single event that forced the decision. The business hadn’t failed in any obvious sense. I simply looked at what continuing would require – the structural rebuild, the investment, the sustained effort to realign everything that had drifted – and decided that wasn’t the right use of what I had.
This article is about that decision, and what it took to make it clearly.
What “continuing” actually meant
By the time I was considering the exit properly, I had a clear enough picture of what staying would involve.
The retail model as it had been built was no longer viable. Brand owners had moved direct. The cost structure – short leases, turnover rent, Singapore operating costs – made competing on price impossible. The customer behaviour that had made Millenia Walk work so well had shifted when the office towers around us changed tenants.
Each of these was a structural problem, not an execution problem.
Solving them wouldn’t have meant working harder or smarter within the existing model. It would have meant building a different business — new model, new cost structure, new channels, new relationships with brands who were now, in many cases, our competitors.
That was possible. It just wasn’t what I wanted to do.
There is a difference between a business that has failed and a business that has run its course. Knowing which one you’re in is its own kind of clarity.
→ Related: Why Everything Started Feeling Heavy (Before I Knew Why)
The personal context – and why it matters
At the same time, my mother’s health was changing. She has Parkinson’s, and by this point the condition had progressed to where medication alone wasn’t managing it. I needed to be more available. More present. More able to respond to what was happening at home without the fixed obligations of a physical retail operation.
I’ve sometimes been cautious about including this in how I talk about the decision, as though it might be mistaken for the primary reason.
The business reasons were genuine. The personal reasons were genuine. They arrived at the same time and pointed in the same direction. The personal circumstances didn’t cause the exit – they made the need for clarity more immediate, and removed any temptation to delay a decision I had already, at some level, made.
What the wind-down taught me
The actual exit took about two years. The physical store closed in 2013. The concessionaire counter ran for a while longer. The pop-up was an experiment – testing whether a lighter-format version of the business made sense. It didn’t, not in a way that justified rebuilding around it.
Each of those steps was deliberate. I wasn’t trying to salvage the original model in a smaller form. I was testing what, if anything, was worth continuing – and finding, gradually, that the answer was nothing I wanted to scale.
What that process taught me was something I hadn’t expected: that stepping away from something cleanly, with intention, is a form of decision-making that requires exactly the same clarity as building something. Maybe more.
You have to be honest about what the business actually is – not what it was, not what you’d hoped it would become — and whether what it is still makes sense to sustain.
→ Related: What Retail Taught Me About Customer Decision-Making
Why not scale
The question I’m sometimes asked is: why not pivot properly? Raise capital, rebuild the model, find a new angle.
The honest answer is that I wasn’t interested in building a different version of the same business. What SOLE 2 SOLE had taught me – about how customers make decisions, about where structural complexity comes from, about what happens when systems outgrow their original design – felt more valuable as the foundation for something new than as the rationale for another iteration of retail.
Scaling would have meant investing years into a rebuilt model in a market that had fundamentally changed. Exiting meant taking what the experience had revealed and doing something more directly useful with it.
That’s not a universal answer. For another founder, in another situation, scaling would have been the right call. But the decision has to be made from clarity about what you actually want – not from the momentum of what you’ve already built.
What came next
I returned to corporate work for a period. That distance – from the day-to-day of running the business – made it easier to see the patterns clearly. The same structural challenges I’d experienced in retail were showing up in different forms elsewhere: too many disconnected moving parts, effort that felt heavier than it should, systems that existed but didn’t guide decisions clearly.
In 2017, when personal circumstances shifted again and I needed to work differently, I started Pollyanna Consulting. Not as a continuation of SOLE 2 SOLE, but as a direct response to what it had revealed.
The exit wasn’t the end of the story. It was where the more useful part of it began.
If you’re at a decision point in your own business and finding it harder than it should be to see clearly: