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It was the Friday of Columbus Day weekend in 2016, and we were driving to Maine for one last barefoot wander through the tidal flats and to shutter Erica’s sister’s house for the winter. We’d grabbed the kids straight after school and were making great progress when my phone started buzzing repeatedly.

“Did you see the Forbes article? It’s really great! What’s happening to sales?”

It was just under a year since we’d launched Hairstory, but it already felt like five. Sales were moving in the right direction but remained far too low to cover our overheads. Cash was draining at an alarming rate.

“Not a blip,” I responded. “I’ll check again when I get to the house.”

My sister-in-law’s house is perched on a granite cliff at the end of a long finger that extends out into the Gulf of Maine. It looks across a narrow tidal bay at the craggy trees and rocks on the next finger, preserved for eternity by the progeny of the Colgate-Palmolive family estate. Flushed twice daily by the tides, the small bay empties entirely at low tide, opening up miles of entertainment for small kids and big dogs. At high tide it is 10 feet deep and a haven for sailing, standup paddle or the occasional option to surf the incoming surge if you’re lucky enough to be there when a storm hits. Six-foot-long sturgeon breach unexpectedly at a regular cadence, a prehistoric exclamation that natural beauty like this is what endures and we are as transient as the tide.

It was the perfect place to contemplate why your new business is failing and to receive inspiration from the universe that changes everything, all at once.

It was the next morning and still sales hadn’t budged, which was particularly frustrating because the title, Bumble & bumble’s Founder Wants You to Never Use Shampoo Again, was amazing and the content was very compelling. As I sipped my morning coffee, looking out the floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows at the rocks and sloshing seaweed, a thought entered my mind: what if I boosted the article? We had already posted a link to it on Hairstory’s Instagram and Facebook pages. I could put a little money behind it to drive traffic. In creating that first ad, I targeted people who like several beauty brands I think are cool and then also people who are interested in yoga and gluten-free food. My thinking was that someone who is open to the idea that there could be a different / better way of exercising or eating may also be open to changing the way they clean their hair.

Almost immediately, the sales started to surge and within six months we achieved cash flow breakeven. In the end, that article got over 3 million views.

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Fast forward three years. Our one-hit-wonder digital marketing strategy had run its course and sales were stagnating right around $10mm. I had been very wary of hiring an agency – they were too expensive and none of them seemed to be willing to think differently – but I had recently met a woman who made me reconsider continuing to run our ad account personally. Her name is Emily Hickey, co-founder and CEO of an agency called Chief Detective, and she has since become one of a handful of digital marketing leaders who manage over $500 million of client spend on Meta. But when I met her at a coffee shop in Telluride in 2019, she only had four clients and was willing to take Hairstory on as #5.

The first few months with Chief Detective were fine, but relatively uneventful. They had spent particular time and energy running test campaigns that were not designed to sell, working instead to decipher which value propositions and what kinds of images resonated most with consumers. One day Emily called me up.

“Hey Eli. I took the liberty of mocking up a new product page for you over the weekend. It includes all our best learnings and I have a hunch it could help with conversion if we align the PDP messaging with the ads. Can you get it live and we’ll give it a test?”

That’s all it took – seriously. Within the next three years the business tripled. And I will be forever grateful to Emily Hickey (and her team).

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It shouldn’t be any surprise that, when it came time to launch Sans Savon, Erica and I turned to Emily Hickey again. I pitched the idea, sent her samples and asked her: “I know we’re much smaller than your usual clients – and we can’t afford to pay as much – but would you consider taking us on?” She agreed.

Every time you bring a new business to life it is both exhilarating and terrifying. Each new order generates a boost of dopamine while the time between orders feels like an eternity. For the first week or two, most of our orders came from familiar names. Both Erica and I sent emails to our friends asking them to check out the website and follow us on social media. Graciously, many purchased products as well.

In those first few weeks after launching the website, Emily’s team was following the same testing process that had been so powerful for Hairstory. And early signs were quite positive. We started stepping up the spend from a few hundred dollars per day to about $1,000. Now, $1,000 per day of digital marketing spend is pitifully low by most standards. But when it is your own personal money, it really feels different. Our stress levels skyrocketed, as did our anticipation.

Six months later, we faced a moment of reckoning. By almost every metric, the ads we’d created for Sans Savon were working beautifully — which made the two that weren’t all the more maddening. The watch times were double what we would normally consider good. The click-thru rates were in line and people were spending plenty of time on the site. But two KPIs were killing us: our conversion rate was horrible – half of what it should be – and as a result Meta was charging us a fortune to put our ads in front of relevant prospects. The resulting marketing efficiency metric, ROAS, was completely upside down, and Erica and I had already burned the entire amount we’d set aside for investing in the business. Something needed to change. Another old Tevya adage came to mind: when you’re in a hole, stop digging.

We turned off the spend spigot and apologized to Emily Hickey and her team — she had taken us on as a favor and we had little to show for it. It was time to step back, re-evaluate what was working and what was not and figure out the “why” in both cases.

As I sat at my desk on the top floor of our renardier in Charlevoix, gazing out at the broad St. Lawrence with the mountains beyond, I felt a familiar pit in my stomach. Here I am again. It was like I was back at the window in Maine, waiting to catch a sturgeon leaping from the high tide, only this time… the inspiration didn’t strike.

I couldn’t believe I’d put myself back in this position – betting my family’s future on a dream. I felt like a fool. But I’d been here before and knew the path forward: Figure out the next best move. One foot in front of the other.

I pulled up a fresh page and started typing out a new plan: Sans Savon, phase 2.

Chilly swim in Maine

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It was a perfect morning for an adventure. Crystal clear bluebird sky, windless, with the St. Lawrence as calm as a reflecting pool. I had been prepping for this day for weeks and anticipating it for a year. Erica was my reluctant — and until recently unwitting — accomplice.

As we slid our tandem kayak into the clear, frigid water at the small marina down the hill from our house, the tranquility of our surroundings did its best to quiet the nagging anxiety in my stomach. We were heading off with both the tide and the current pushing us out toward sea, so turning back would be hard, and there wasn’t another spot to pull out for 24 kilometers. Our plan was to paddle along the craggy, empty coastline and see sights only visible from the water. Our daughter, Malka, would pick us up in a few hours at Port au Persil — a tiny ancient hamlet with a church, a few houses and, crucially, a protected cove with a dock and a ramp.

The first few miles were uneventful as we slid past the shoreline with surprising speed. A couple of porpoises surfaced far off to starboard, caught their breath, and dove out of view. Then, as we came to the first promontory — a small mountain cape protruding into the flow — I noticed the water surface in the cove ahead shimmering, as though whitecaps had appeared from nowhere. Yet the water remained glassy. We glided closer and began to hear the telltale “pssssshhhhhhaaaaaaahhhhh” of an aquatic mammal exhaling. We were floating straight into a massive pod of beluga whales.

Breathless, stunned, we lifted our paddles and watched for twenty or thirty minutes as wave after wave of belugas swam to, under and past our kayak. Huge clouds of whiteness moving slowly and breathing loudly, they barely seemed to notice us. If these had been orcas, I’m certain I would have been terrified. But these gentle giants posed no danger, and I felt perfectly calm — awestruck by their presence and our impossible luck.

Charlevoix has a permanent beluga colony, and we have watched them many times from the national park where they live. You are not allowed to approach them in a boat and can be fined for coming within 400 meters of one. It is a different story, of course, when they come to you.

By the time we drifted to the headlands, they were gone. When we finally arrived at Port au Persil, Malka was waiting. We were spent — physically and emotionally. I looked at Erica and didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.

What I was thinking, though: we had chosen a beluga as our logo a year before that morning on the water. I had wondered, occasionally, whether it was too on-the-nose — too cute, too obvious. Floating among them that morning, I stopped wondering.

This is why we live in Charlevoix.

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Charlevoix is a place that rewards attention. Many of its most striking features are immediately visible — the mountains, the estuary, the tides. But one of the most powerful lies hidden below the surface.

During the last ice age, a massive glacier carved what is now the Saguenay Fjord from the Laurentian Mountains. The thousand-foot cliffs that plummet to icy water are stunning enough. But the glacier continued another thousand feet below the waterline before gouging a channel into the St. Lawrence. Where the fjord meets the river, a massive submerged cliff forces super-cold water upward to meet relatively warmer water — creating perfect conditions for krill, and for the whales that feed on them. And just past that underwater cliff, perched on shoals that reveal themselves only when the twenty-foot tide recedes, sits a lighthouse surrounded entirely by water.

With its refined caisson neck — what lighthouse aficionados call a sparkplug design — this beautiful, functional architectural icon became the inspiration for our Sans Savon bottle.

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Even with uniquely differentiated and powerfully effective formulations, we knew Sans Savon would need to stand on the shoulders of an authentic brand. We reached out to our good friend Helen Steed to bring that vision to life.

Helen worked with me at Bumble and bumble, starting as a creative team manager and rising to Creative Director before leaving to become one of the first — and most consequential — employees at Glossier. After Glossier, she led creative at a celebrated agency, spearheading the launch and rebranding of companies like Supergoop, before going independent and working only with clients she genuinely wanted to work with. Thankfully, we fit that description.

Helen assembled a team she felt would be inspired by our vision. Through a combination of research, pre-work and live interviews, the team pushed and probed, added their own insights, and synthesized a clear brand story. When they presented their first pass at the brand foundations, it felt like something that had always existed and was only now being unearthed. The color palette anchored on Charlevoix photography. Simple, whimsical storytelling set in fairytale fonts. It all hung together — and it felt like us. No fakery. No hyperbole. Just an authentic love of nature and a search for balance.

For photography, we sought local Charlevoix photographers whose work we could license. We discovered Francis Gagnon — a stunning photographer who lives in Charlevoix and travels the world capturing the landscapes he loves — and his images featured heavily in our early brand thinking. When we finally connected, however, Francis told us he had stepped back from commercial work to focus solely on his art. He was gracious enough to recommend several other photographers, and through that thread we found Laurent Lucuix. Laurent lives on the Gaspé Peninsula across the river from Charlevoix but had photographed the region extensively, commissioning a small plane to reach locations impossible to access any other way. After reviewing our brand guidelines and learning about Sans Savon’s mission, he agreed to license us the images that now populate our entire website. I have done my best since launching to contribute my own timelapse photography in a similar spirit, but Laurent’s images remain the foundation.

The bottle design came together through genuine collaboration. We arrived with a vision: a deep blue-green vessel with a heaviness and gravitas that would feel like glass despite being made from super-thick recycled plastic — something that would look as natural in a spare modern kitchen as in a hand-hewn cabin. We brought the idea of wave-like embossing to reflect the tidal patterns visible from our porch, but it didn’t make the final cut. Helen’s team brought the caisson neck — and that became the bottle’s signature.

The last piece to fall into place was secondary packaging, and it was the hardest. We had set ourselves two mandates that pulled in opposite directions: the bottles should be “forever bottles,” clean and unadorned, with no labels that would show wear through years of refilling. And our environmental footprint should be as small as possible — no bulky luxury boxes. We explored wrapping the bottles in paper, which solved the labeling problem elegantly but proved impossible to scale. After many wrong turns, we realized we could design a fitted bag that achieved the same visual effect as wrapping while remaining operationally practical. With that final piece in place, the brand was ready.

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When you’re doing something for the first time, everything takes longer than you expect. Launching Sans Savon was no exception — the full gestation period, from idea to first sale, ran just over twelve months. As part of our soft launch, Erica and I wrote to a long list of friends asking them to test the site and buy only if they felt genuinely enticed. Even before the email went out, my childhood friends were jockeying to be first. And then, before any of them could get there, a complete stranger — unknown to any of us — somehow discovered the site and placed an order. It felt like a good omen.

It was a proud moment. And yet, looking back now over the ensuing two years, just the beginning.

One of my favorite elements of the brand that Helen and her team brought to life? Our logo: the simple outline of a beluga.

Maybe, somehow, they know we’ve been celebrating them.

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Postscript: To watch a video of me and Erica floating through belugas, check out my personal Instagram @elihalliwell and scroll down to August 15, 2025. And turn on the sound!

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I spent my first day in Australia walking the tree-lined streets of Paddington and Woollahra in search of a home worthy of uprooting my new family. A beautiful, crisp fall day in April — as I passed the beautifully refurbished row houses I thought to myself, “This is what London would be like if it were in California.” I found the perfect one. It was 12 feet wide.

Because they were twelve time zones away, I didn’t meet with a single Jurlique employee before accepting the job of CEO. The business had been struggling ever since the founder put his shares to the richest man in Australia and ran off abruptly with the Swiss distributor. There had been five or six CEOs in as many years, and I had been hired by a new private equity firm to turn things around.

The next day, after introducing myself to the Sydney-based team, the head of R&D asked to speak with me privately. “Before you accept this job, you should know something. There are several ingredients in our hero product that are not listed on the packaging because they are not aligned with our ingredient policy and brand promise.”

I had already signed the house lease.

When I asked one of the board members over dinner that evening whether there were ingredients in the products not listed on the packaging, he immediately answered, “No.” This was the first of many lessons regarding the trustworthiness of this man and, after a moment of silence, he continued: “When I say ‘no,’ what I mean is ‘yes.’”

I spent the next three years making Jurlique’s products match their brand promise. It was not easy. But it taught me something I’ve never forgotten: in beauty, the product has to be the promise. Branding can get you in the door, but authentic, differentiated efficacy is the only thing that keeps customers coming back.

Almost twenty years later, that conviction sat at the center of every decision Erica and I made building Sans Savon.

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We had met Marc Demarais on a trip to Montreal a few years prior. He had been doing cutting-edge formulation work for Hairstory — some of which worked brilliantly and much of which didn’t — and we had liked him immediately. Marc is one of a new generation of small-batch chemists who have emerged to meet the demand for genuinely clean beauty: creative, passionate about the intersection of wellness, environmental stewardship, and molecular innovation, and endlessly curious about what’s possible at the edges of the field. When we reconnected to talk about Sans Savon, he didn’t hesitate. “The landscape has exploded in just the past few years,” he told us. “The technology is advancing at an incredible rate, particularly around cleansing. I love this idea — we can definitely develop something exciting.”

We had one non-negotiable: while many “clean” brands define themselves by what’s not in their products, we’ve always found that table-stakes and uncompelling. A negative list isn’t a philosophy; our ambitions were affirmative. We wanted to work with small, innovative, local ingredient suppliers who shared our values. We wanted naturally derived ingredients wherever the science supported it. We wanted to use upcycled ingredients wherever we could, building sustainability into the formulation rather than bolting it on afterward. And we wanted to avoid added fragrance entirely — relying instead on essential oils to do the work of both scent and efficacy at once.

Marc understood immediately, and the early submissions gave us confidence we were on the right track.

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Developing a new product from scratch involves a sequence of evaluations that the customer never sees and the brand rarely talks about. First you assess results and efficacy — does it actually do what it’s supposed to do? Then texture and feel — how does it behave in the hand, on the skin, in the rinse? Then comes the long, often maddening process of iteration, in which you try to move one variable without disrupting the others.

The Hand Wash came together relatively quickly. The first submission cleaned beautifully — olive oil gone in a single pass — and left a silky finish that absorbed into the skin without tackiness. A few rounds of refinement and we had it.

The Body Wash was harder. Early versions cleaned well — sweat and body odor completely gone after a run through the woods — but left too much residue on the skin, a slight tackiness that lingered past the rinse. We knew we were close. Getting the viscosity right while honoring the ingredient philosophy proved genuinely difficult, and it took a few months of iteration before we had something we were proud of.

The Body Bar was in a different category entirely. Too hard. Not enough product depositing on the skin. Not enough moisturizing payoff. We went back. Reformulated. Tested. Went back again. By the time we had a bar we were satisfied with, Marc and his partner had submitted nearly forty versions. Forty. Most were wrong in ways that were instructive. Some were wrong in ways that were baffling. A few were so close that we almost convinced ourselves they were good enough — and then one of us would use it for a week and know they weren’t. The product has to be the promise. That phrase kept us honest through the whole process.

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While the formulations were taking shape, a parallel problem was quietly becoming urgent: what to call any of this.

The working name was Soapless. I liked its simplicity and its directness, but the more we sat with it, the more it felt like a category description rather than a brand. Too literal. Too flat. And frankly, given how expensive the products would be to produce, too down-market for the positioning they’d need.

One afternoon it arrived, the way the best ideas do — not from a brainstorm, but from a sideways angle. What if the brand had genuine provenance? An origin story rooted in a specific place, with a specific landscape and palette and scent? We had this remarkable property in Charlevoix — a region of almost improbable geographic beauty, where the Laurentians crash down to the St. Lawrence and a 450-million-year-old asteroid crater has left behind some of the richest farmland in Quebec. We had fallen in love with it. It was already our inspiration to form the new business. Why not make it our brand?

Sans Savon. French for “without soap.” The moment I said it out loud, something clicked. The name gave us the brand: the color palette, the imagery, the story, and — most critically — the scent direction. Before I’d even finished the thought, I was buying URLs. Sans Savon. Senza Sapone. Seifenfrei. Sin Jabón. Sem Sabão. Five languages, five potential futures, the whole thing done in twenty minutes.

The scent came easily after that. Marc developed a base “Boreal Blend” of essential oils drawn from the trees of the northern forest — the same birch, fir, spruce, and cedar I’d been skiing through when this whole idea was still forming. When you first arrive at our house in Charlevoix, there is a forest sweetness to the air that hits you the moment you step out of the car. We put it in a bottle.

We had the integrity. We had the formulas. We had the name, the place, the scent, the story.

For the first time, all of it felt right.

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I was born in Vermont and lived on several communes before my parents deposited a few thousand dollars to mortgage a dilapidated 10-acre farm. My earliest memories include hand milking a goat while she bleated and stomped in her roughhewn stockade, rushing my father to the ER with a nail driven clear through his boot from cleaning out the old pig pen, wandering through a seemingly forest-high garden and picking peas from towering vines, and splashing about to scare away the crayfish in the spring-fed pond. In the winter I trudged and tunneled through oceans of snow in a full-body snowsuit. In the summer, I was almost always naked — it seemed like everyone was pretty much always naked.

My parents were refugees of sorts, escaping political turmoil and suffocating families in New York to find themselves and start a new life — a new family — in the rural north. They were hippies, but not just of the pot smoking, longhaired, health food store, counter-culture genre. They were political. Their friends were the Chicago Seven, they had not just attended but led the takeover of Columbia University, and in the first year of their time in Vermont my father was on trial for inciting a riot (which apparently he didn’t do and he was eventually acquitted). One of my mother’s earlier boyfriends served life in prison for his role in the Nyack Brinks robbery.

While being raised in this environment undoubtedly influenced me in countless subliminal ways, I did not grow to adopt many of the political or even cultural mores of my parents and their friends. The main residual influences I can identify are 1) a love of the outdoors and wilderness and 2) a deep distrust of governments, businesses, institutions of pretty much any kind. I also became very comfortable on my own — wandering off to walk the farm at first and later, once we moved to the town of Montpelier, disappearing on my bike to explore for hours.

The punchline to this backstory is this: while many entrepreneurs crave money as their inspiration, I am the type of entrepreneur who seeks independence and self-reliance. This has been both a blessing and a curse and is foundational to my journey.

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When my wife, Erica, and I stepped down from day-to-day operations at Hairstory, we found ourselves in an awkward financial position. For the first time in our lives we had healthy savings, yet it felt far from financial stability. We had started Hairstory with the goal of funding our lives, not making a fortune, and for the prior seven years it had worked. Yes, there was a year early on when we had halved our salaries to preserve cash, but after an initial investment by friends and family, we had bootstrapped the business to profitability. When the board suddenly stopped my salary, reneging on the agreement that had been part of me transitioning to Chairman, it felt very destabilizing. We had not planned on raiding our savings to fund our lives and, in a very rational response to the circumstances, Erica wanted me to get a job.

I had other plans. I have only held three normal jobs in my life — once after my first startup failed, once after my second startup failed and once after taking several years off from work to care for my family after we learned our son had cerebral palsy from a stroke in utero. I had come to the conclusion that I’m not particularly well cut out for the normal hierarchy of corporate work and could not envision a return to that life. Instead, I had envisioned pivoting to work on other projects that had occupied my mind on long runs for the prior decade — all of which were non-profit and none of which were likely to fund our lives. With the new urgency to generate income, my mind shifted to more profit-oriented ideas.

Hairstory’s main product, New Wash, is an oil-based hair cleanser that cleans without detergent — no foam, no stripping, just genuinely healthy hair. I didn’t invent it; I recognized it. And its remarkably strong repeat purchase rates are the reason Hairstory succeeded. But I’ll save that story for another time.

It has always seemed strange to me that, after cleaning my head with this innovative new technology, I would use traditional soap on my body. I wondered if the same benefits New Wash brings to your scalp would apply to the rest of your skin — no more stripping, plenty of hydration and moisture, less stress and better health — but the company’s name is Hairstory and it didn’t seem on-brand to explore other parts of the body. Now that I was no longer managing Hairstory, however, I felt free to let my mind wander. Could there be another business that would leverage the same core philosophy and insights? I started my research…

I discovered an exciting statistic: 71% of people self-report as having sensitive skin. As a devout evolutionist, this datapoint is impossible to explain in the absence of external factors. I’m pretty sure the culprit is soap. Further research confirmed this belief: our skin was not designed to be stripped daily, and neither was our microbiome.

Next, I scoured Amazon and the broader internet in search of soapless cleansers. While there were plenty of non-foaming, oil-based facial cleansers, every “soapless” or “soap-free” product I tested for the body actually foamed. More gentle than traditional soap, but still soap. As far as I could tell, the category of soap-free cleansers for hands and body was completely and entirely unpopulated. Immediately, I bought soapless.me (soapless.com was taken — more on that story later!) as a placeholder.

Finally, I modeled out the business in Excel. While it would cut aggressively into our savings at the outset, the model revealed that with very modest traction — building a business 1/10th the size of Hairstory — we should be able to generate enough cash to replace our lost income. Rather than invest in the stock market or in government bonds, we would invest in ourselves.

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By the time I decided to start Hairstory in 2015, I had learned enough about myself to know I would fail without a trusted, detail-oriented partner to offset my weaknesses. I conscripted my wife, Erica. Erica ran our finance, HR and customer service functions — all of the shit work, in her words — but as a co-founder she projected a powerful voice to influence all other areas of the business as well. When we stepped away from day-to-day at Hairstory, both of us were surprised how much she missed it. In hindsight, we shouldn’t have been. While building Hairstory had been challenging, demanding and often tedious, it had been incredibly rewarding and flat out fun to work together as a team. What makes us strong life partners translated into successful business partners as well. It had also been the perfect work for parents, enabling unparalleled flexibility.

Erica is my main sounding board for every idea that excites me, and she had been evaluating the soapless idea as it developed. But it wasn’t until I returned from the ski trip to our house in Quebec that I made the final pitch:

We would take what we learned at Hairstory and apply it to other parts of the body. We would work together again, instead of taking a “real” job. We would bootstrap the business, keeping the threshold for success far lower than typical. It would be scary, it would be risky, it would be challenging — but we would be investing in ourselves.

And if it worked, it would carry us into the next chapter. Empty nesters with something to build.

She said yes.

Eli & Erica, before and now

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Thigh high snow puffed and squeaked under our skis as we huffed our way back up the mountain through a boreal forest of birch, fir, spruce and cedar. Aside from our shuffling and breathing, the blanket of snow absorbed all other sound, leaving our earlier tracks from the run downhill as the only evidence of humanity. Every hundred feet of elevation or so, animal tracks hinted at the vibrant community living around us — the hop of a hare, the prowl of a lynx, the pounce of a fox. But for the most part, it felt like we were at the edge of the world, far from our homes and families and the lives we had made for ourselves. And indeed, we were.

The St. Lawrence River widens where it first becomes the Gulf of St. Lawrence, still 600 miles from the open Atlantic. For a tumultuous, current-infused section, it becomes an estuary as the ocean pushes the river backward at a fierce pace only to relent thirteen hours later in the cycle of tides. These waters are frigid and flowing with ice in the winter, and yet teeming with life from krill to humpbacks, belugas, seals and porpoises. On the north shore, the Laurentians — one of the oldest mountain ranges on the planet — crash down to the estuary, visually striking and yet muted remnants of their former Himalaya-dwarfing grandeur. And just at this juncture where the river, the ocean and the mountains all meet, a mighty asteroid struck the Earth about 450 million years ago. Two kilometers across, it created an impact crater twenty-five times wider that eventually filled in with sediment to become an oasis of beautifully rich farmland in the midst of mountains and untouched wilderness.

Once we reached the pond, the yellowy long light that made the snow sparkle like crystals also urged us to quicken our pace if we wanted to reach the house before dark. We trudged up the final pitches in silence, stripped down and drenched despite the subzero temperature, and came in sight of the house just as the outdoor lights illuminated it for the evening, a glowing symbol of warmth and safety as the blue blackness of a cloudless evening encroached. Exhausted, delighted, we put away our gear and prepared for a final evening before the long drive home.

This was my first stay at the house as its owner, and I kept pinching myself in disbelief at my good fortune. For over a decade, my wife and I had been searching Canada for an escape from a world on the edge of becoming unhinged. After exploring everywhere from the Bay of Fundy to Cape Breton to Vancouver Island and the Gaspe Peninsula, we stumbled upon Charlevoix, this relatively small region of tremendous geographic diversity thanks to cosmic intervention, and we fell in love. We fell in love with the water, with the mountains, with the artisanal farms, food and drink, with a slower pace of life all communicated in French, with living at the edge of civilization. When you climb a mountain in Charlevoix and look north, you sense both a void and a fullness of unadulterated life all the way to the North Pole.

The memory of that afternoon stands out as a milestone marking before and after, much like every day of a major life event or decision. The prior year had been one big disorienting transition, as I’d lived the classic case study of a private equity deal gone bad. On the downside, I’d been berated and bullied into stepping down from running my own company, which subsequently went from profitable and growing to hemorrhaging cash and floundering. On the upside, I could finally buy this property and still pay to put my children through college. And I had gained freedom to work on something new. Like Charlevoix, my life has been a strange convergence of natural forces that ebb and flow cyclically, beautifully, at times painfully, with a logic that only ever becomes apparent in hindsight. I have failed more than almost anyone else I know, and yet somehow it has all worked out — at least so far. I had built four businesses by that day in early 2023, and run two others, and as I looked out at the dawn the following morning before hopping into my friend’s pickup for the ten-hour drive back home, I knew I would start one more. I would call it Soapless.

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This diary is a real-time, real-life story in the making. It is now early 2026, three years from that fateful decision and two years since Sans Savon (Soapless in French) breathed its first breath. Through this series of Substack posts, I plan to share how an idea becomes a business — the moments of inspiration, the key assumptions, the strokes of luck and the frustrating setbacks. But while the pretext of this story is entrepreneurialism, my goal is to share more completely. No journey exists in a vacuum. We create our lives in the context of the relationships we build, the values we hold true, the dreams we simply cannot relinquish. Through Sans Savon I am manifesting a dream for my life that would not have been possible without everything that came before — the strokes of luck, the debilitating blindsides, the fortunate misfortunes, even the unforced errors. Life is hard and life is beautiful. We make plans with the certainty they will never work out as we thought and the understanding that true value accrues from making the journey itself. This is my story. I am excited to see where it goes.