How I've been humbled.

I just went to hell and back.

Yesterday I posted a Substack about how obsessed I was with my work and how I was losing my mind because some of my packages had to ship in a plastic mailer instead of a paper one.

I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if I jinxed it. But I’m going to tell you what the universe did to me over the next twenty-four hours, because I feel like I owe you the sequel.

I wrote yesterday’s Substack from the factory. I had just driven an hour and a half from Malibu to downtown LA and I sat down to write because I wanted to express what I was feeling. I hit publish.

And then the phone rang.

It was my business address in Malibu - which is the return address on my packages. And the person on the other end said, hey. About four hundred packages just got dropped back here. USPS just dumped them at the door. The labels are wrong. The weights are wrong. We can’t hold them. You need to come get them right now.

My heart dropped.

This was not fifty packages. This was the biggest single shipment BRÛLÉ has ever done in one swoop. This was the batch I hired a girl to help me with on Monday. This was the batch I wrote the whole obsession essay about.

Here is what happened. I had used a new system to print my shipping labels - it lets you batch-print all the labels at once instead of clicking through them individually in Shopify like I usually do. I’d been using it for two weeks. And here’s the part that still makes my brain short-circuit: this new system was silently overriding the Shopify weights on every product and calculating the weight of every single package as two ounces.

Two ounces. Every package. For two weeks.

And nobody said anything. I had been dropping stacks of underweight-labeled packages at the Thousand Oaks post office for fourteen straight days - the big scan-and-go location where they just move volume through as fast as possible - and every single one of them made it to its destination. Tracked. Delivered. Happy customers. No red flags anywhere in the system. For two weeks, and I had no idea.

Until this drop. Because this drop was too big and I dropped it at the small local Malibu post office, which is not the vibe for a four-hundred-package drop but I was trying to be efficient. I even had a bad feeling when I was unloading it because they were all watching me and trying to get more carts for me and it just felt off. I left…and the local Malibu post office looked at the pile and decided today was the day they were going to actually check things.

They saw some of the packages said two ounces. So they weighed EVERY ONE OF MY PACKAGES and stamped every single package UNDERPAID in red.

Which meant I couldn’t quietly drive them over to Thousand Oaks and pretend nothing had happened. I had to bring them home.

I rushed home from the factory - the factory I had just driven an hour and a half to get to. I lugged every massive bag of packages into my house. I set up my printer at my kitchen table. And I want you to appreciate what came next, because the brown craft mailers I had overnighted (lmao) had just arrived. So at least I had those.

Here is what I had to do for the next sixteen hours. And I want you to actually picture this, because I don’t think I can properly describe how mind-bending it was until I walk you through it.

This was the vibe… On one side of me, giant bags of stamped-red packages. In front of me, my laptop with two browser tabs open - Shopify on one, the third-party shipping platform on the other - because the systems didn’t talk to each other for this mistake, which meant every fix required me to bounce between both. Next to me, the printer. Next to that, the brand new brown craft mailers I had overnighted. (I usually do this at the factory on a table that is chest height so I am not bent over).

The process for each package:

Pick a package out of the bag. Read the shipping label. Type the order number into Shopify. Pull up the customer’s order. Cross-reference the actual product to look up the real weight. Toggle to the third-party site. Void the existing label. If it hadn’t already been scanned by the Malibu post office. Recalculate the weight and dimensions. Purchase a new label. Print the new label. Open a new brown mailer. Unpack the underpaid-stamped package. Repack the piece into the new mailer. Attach the new label. Set it aside. Reach for the next bag. Start over.

That was one package.

Some of them were quick - five, seven minutes if I was moving fast. Some of them were significantly worse. If the package had already been scanned by the post office before they decided to reject it, I couldn’t void the label at all. Which meant I had to eat the cost of the original label and purchase a new one and figure out the correct weight from scratch. One package took me twelve minutes to fix. Twelve minutes. On one package. And I had four hundred (or something idek) of them.

Somewhere around package one hundred, I looked up at the ceiling and thought….you know, those plastic mailers really weren’t that bad after all.

I also have to be honest about where my head went during those hours, because it wasn’t pretty. Somewhere in the middle of the grind I started calling people to tell them what was happening. And I got off those calls feeling angry. Because some of the people I called didn’t offer to help. And the ones who did offer were out of state, so there was nothing they could actually do.

And I know - I know - this was not their problem. I know nobody in my life is obligated to drop what they’re doing because I’m having a shipping crisis at my kitchen table. I know nobody even realizes how nuanced and specific and technically brutal this kind of situation is, because if you haven’t been the founder in this situation in the middle of it, there’s no way to understand it. This is my business. This is my problem. It’s not anyone else’s job.

But sitting there at hour ten, with the printer running and my back gone and the bags still not empty, I felt this wave of overwhelm and sadness and frustration that nobody in my life could actually meet me in it. That everyone was just living their lives while I was doing this - alone, at my kitchen table, in the middle of the worst logistics day of my career. And I know that’s the founder-alone thing. I know it comes with the territory. But something in me woke up in that moment, and I want to name it: when someone in your life calls you to tell you they’re in the middle of a hard situation like this, offer to help. Even if you can’t do much. Even if you’re out of state. Just the offering is what matters. Because when you’re inside it, the offering is oxygen.

That’s my only PSA from the whole ordeal.

And here’s the punchline. When I finally saw some of the correctly-recalculated weights next to the original two-ounce labels? Some of them were literally three cents off. Three cents. That’s what all of this was for. The Malibu post office rejected four hundred packages, cost me thousands of dollars in labels, cost me an entire day of my life and my spine, over what added up in some cases to three American cents per package.

I was up until 2 AM. I woke up at 5 AM. I finished at 2 PM today. Hunched over a laptop and a printer, doing individually - by hand - the work of a girl I had already paid to help me do the first time. It was easier the first time because we were looking at unfulfilled orders. ALL of these orders were fulfilled so I had to cross reference each one.

I am unwell. I need a Xanax prescription. I need three to five business days to recover. Lolllz.

But the honest thing is - I’m also sort of laughing. Because if yesterday’s piece was about learning to distinguish the obsessions worth having from the ones that are strangling me, this was the universe’s response. You want to obsess about mailers? Great. Here’s four hundred of them. Have fun.

Maybe the lesson is that I really do need to let go a little. Maybe the lesson is that letting go wouldn’t have changed this because the label system would have failed regardless. Maybe the lesson is that no matter how many essays you write about the obsession, the obsession is going to keep finding new ways to test you, and the work is not to stop obsessing - it’s to keep making peace with the fact that you built a brand where the details matter, and sometimes the details fight back.

I don’t know. My brain is scrambled. I’ll figure out what I learned in about a week when I can sit up straight again.

For now, all four hundred packages are out. They are on their way to the correct addresses in the correct brown craft mailers. If you ordered from BRÛLÉ recently - she’s coming. (If I am being honest, I hope I NEVER see these packages again. Lol).

All paper mailers. (LOL BYE)

And she cost me my entire spine to get to you. But she’s coming.

Slightly unwell. Three to five business days.

But before I go - I’ll be thinking twice before I bitch about the small things. And I truly cannot wait until every one of these packages says delivered on the other end, because holy shit, this was no small task. And this linen? Is REAL good. Worth it. I think.

She’s coming.

X,

KB

(Honey helped)