We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Priya Narasimhan a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Priya, appreciate you joining us today. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?
Yes!, after a very long journey. I formulated and sold my first products almost fourteen years ago, and my business has grown slowly but surely each year, until it became a full-time living a few years ago. And last year, I made a big leap: my husband left his job to work with me on the business, and we moved to a cabin in the woods in Vermont where we live and create the products that make up Priya Means Love.
Both my business and the slowness of its growth stem from my health problems. I have ME/CFS (which is a lot like long covid) and fibromyalgia, and I was disablingly sick for several years when I was in my 20s. I gradually learned how to take care of my condition, and part of that process was identifying my triggers, one of which is a severe sensitivity to various chemicals, especially synthetic fragrances. My chemical sensitivities led me to imagine what it would be like to create products for myself, just for fun — can it be done, using ingredients that I would consider food or similarly elemental ingredients? I drew on my experience with herbal medicine and my orientation toward scratch organic cooking and started making products that spoke to my body and made me feel better, and within a half year I vended at my first craft show in a church basement in Toronto in October 2009. I got obsessed with the craft and kept going.
People often ask me if switching to my own products made all the difference, and the answer is yes and no. Switching to all my own products in 2009 did have a major impact, but I was still really struggling. My experience of dealing with ME/CFS has been like a slow climb up a high hill. Gains are slow but setbacks can come fast, and my goal has been to listen to my condition to better understand how to deeply care for myself while avoiding the kind of setbacks that can come with overexertion, with the hope that I’d get a bit healthier and more able with each passing year. And for the most part, that’s been the case! In 2012 I moved to Baltimore, and within four or five years of the move, I was able to work the well-over-40-hours typical of most small business owners, in a way that worked well for my body. But this slow and steady approach meant embracing a level of caution that’s at odds with how most people approach business. I’ve turned down opportunities to expand, have kept my business in my home and haven’t ever hired, so that I’m not tied to fixed costs that might sink me if I were to have a health setback that could keep me from working for weeks or months.
For years, I felt like an impostor with my business, because I was so out of step with the standard approach to having a business, and I was so slow, quiet, and cautious. But each year I grew stronger, and more customers found me and kept coming back, leading to organic growth. It turns out that if you grow a small but substantial amount each year for a decade, in a way that’s sustainable for you, eventually you look up and realize you’ve made a living! And enough of one that the business can support my husband working with me too.
If I had to do it over again, I’d be just as cautious and gradual as I was, but this time I wouldn’t feel any shame about it!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My own health challenges and the process of deep listening to a very sensitive body led me to formulate and create the products that make up Priya Means Love. I create facial skincare, bodycare, practical products like clay-based shampoo, toothpaste, and deodorant, as well as botanical fragrance. I think of my products as topical herbal medicine, crafted to speak to the needs of the skin and the body. I use a limited palette of completely natural, mostly organic ingredients, and I try to be very thoughtful about every ingredient in a formula. I want my products to smell good and feel luxurious, of course, but I am most deeply satisfied when my products make my customer happy because their skin or body is humming with the feeling of getting the soothing nourishment it needs, and it’s a bonus for all that this feeling often comes with skin looking great. I feel proud and lucky that this happens quite a lot! I find it especially moving to hear from customers with challenging bodies who find nourishment, support, relief, and pleasure from my work.
My health makes me a bit of a hermit, and I feel like when my work is at its best, it’s a form of deep communication, transmitted from my home into the world, into the quiet spaces in the lives of my customers, speaking through the subverbal responses of olfaction and the body’s own drinking in and responding to the materials it soaks in via touch. I love that I’m able to quietly send out care from afar. Living with chronic pain, I think about how pain can build on itself, and the body can get more and more routed into the pathway of experiencing pain — getting good at “doing pain” and having pain come more easily. I like to imagine that both for me creating this work and for my customers, the daily rituals of gentle self care might make us all a bit better at “doing pleasure,” so that pleasure in other forms might come more easily.
To be a bit more concrete: I formulate differently than most other skincare companies, even the natural and organic ones, eschewing the ingredients that make even the more natural brands’ creams and lotions tick. My textures are different, and they speak to the skin differently, in a way that shows up in the experiences of my customers. It’s an honor that I often hear from customers, especially sensitive folks, that my products are the only ones that have ever worked for them.
My orientation as a perfumer is a bit unusual as well, as I didn’t come at it from a love of fragrance, nor even a love of the natural florals like jasmine and rose that beguile perfumers. Indeed, I’m so sensitive to synthetic fragrances (which are in every single fragrance that isn’t conspicuously all-natural) that I cannot even experience virtually all of the mass market and niche fragrances out there. But what I am is an obsessive smeller of all things natural — mushrooms, bark, soil, snow, cat fur, cocktail glasses, food, forests, streets. Even rotting fruit has dimensions of appeal to me — I’m not easily disgusted. I am in love with and bonded to the varied natural smells of the world, and my omnivorous impulse comes out in my perfumes and colognes, which are more bonfire on a beach and buzzing summer meadow than they are bouquet and cashmere.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
I’ve had to unlearn the lessons we all imbibe from the cultural waters about what work and success look like. We are not winning if we are grinding. Businesses that appear to be thriving may be failing; and success can look like a business closing for the right reasons. Social media is a trick mirror, and comparing to other people based on what you see there is foolish. If you define your identity and legitimacy by your sales and your following, you’re letting capitalism yoke you. If you’re able to pay your bills and enjoy doing work you find meaningful, you’re winning.
Have you ever had to pivot?
The sickness that changed the course of my life happened when I was in grad school trying to get a math PhD. I was so sick that erasing a blackboard would make my arm hurt for days. I would have good days when I could get to campus, and bad days when I was bedbound. I didn’t understand what was happening to me, and the unpredictability was difficult to cope with. I struggled to recognize the patterns, and at some point I realized I could start to feel when my health was slipping downhill. And then for months, I felt like if I could feel myself slipping, then there must be something I could do to prevent it, but yet I wasn’t preventing it — so it must be that I was bringing it on myself somehow. It took me far too long to realize that there wasn’t anything I could do — and that my blaming myself was a way of avoiding the disturbing reality that I’m not in control. And the reality is, that’s how so many problems in life are. We often explain away the desperate circumstances of other people — whether cancer, abuse, job loss, poverty — by grasping for a story of how a person brought it on themselves by their choices or personal qualities. It’s a way of avoiding reckoning with the fact that none of us can fully control our own lives. If we can look at a person struck down with some bad fortune and say it’s because of something they did that I would never do, then we can avoid the disturbing thought that that could just as easily be us. Pivoting to recognizing my own frailty and the frailty of everyone else was a massive shift for me. It was depressing in some ways, recognizing that I can’t control the basics of whether my mind or body can function, even in my 20s. But it also made me recognize a basic truth about the world, and it made me kinder and more compassionate to myself and to others, and more grateful for the things I am able to do. I can’t imagine my business coming into existence without this orientation toward everyone being vulnerable and in need of tender care.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.priyameanslove.com
- Instagram: @priyameanslovebodycare
- Facebook: facebook.com/priyaMeansLoveBodycare/
Image Credits
Priya Means Love