The Customer Who Became My Mentor
In the early days of LeveLux, before it was much of anything at all, really just me, a lot of hustle, and an idea I believed in more than the numbers probably justified, I always tried to give back to the people who shopped with me. It wasn't a strategy. Nobody told me to do it. It just felt right. Someone would buy a bag, and if they decided to make it a bundle, add a second piece, a wallet, something small, I'd throw in something extra on top. A free item. A little something that said thank you for trusting me with your money on something this personal. Because that's what a designer purchase is, whether it's your first one or your fiftieth. It's personal. You're not buying a household item. You're buying something you're going to carry with you, literally, into rooms and moments that matter to you.
I did that a lot in the beginning. Probably more than made sense on paper, if I'm being completely honest. There were plenty of nights I looked at my numbers and winced a little at how generous I'd been that day. But there was one customer, one specific person, where that habit of giving back turned into something I never in a million years expected.
She started buying from me, and then she just kept buying. More. And more. And more. It wasn't a single big purchase. It was a steady, building momentum, one item after another, until before I even fully realized what was happening, she had turned into the biggest single day I had ever had, entirely on my own, with no big campaign behind it, no sale, no promotion. Just her. One person, showing up, again and again, believing in what I was building enough to keep saying yes to it.
What I didn't know at the time, what I only found out later, almost by accident, is that she works in corporate, at a genuinely large, well known company. Someone with plenty of disposable income, plenty of other places she could have chosen to spend that money instead. She could have gone to any boutique, any resale platform, any other seller doing what I was doing. But she kept coming back to LeveLux, specifically, over and over. And somewhere in the middle of all that buying, without either of us really planning for it, it turned into a real friendship. Not a customer relationship dressed up as friendship for the sake of good business. An actual friendship.
She is one of the kindest people I have ever met in my life. Genuinely, not as a throwaway compliment. She's been supportive of this dream of mine from a point when it was still just that, a dream, something I was building out of a small hallway with a house cleaner turned assistant and a lot of trial and error. She didn't wait until LeveLux looked like a real business to believe in it. She believed in it while it still looked like a girl going live constantly out of her own home, hoping enough people would show up to make it worth doing again the next day.
Today, I consider her a mentor. Someone I genuinely look up to, not because of her job title or how much she's spent with me over the years, but because of who she is as a person, and because of the perspective she brings that I don't always have access to on my own. And the wild part, the part I still think about, is that it all started as a total coincidence. She just happened to be in the audience one day. She just happened to be watching. She just happened to decide, for reasons I still don't fully understand, that that particular day was the day she'd go all in.
I think about that moment often, more often than you'd probably expect for what was, on the surface, just a good sales day. But it's the clearest example I have of what this entire business is actually built on, underneath the packages and the platforms and the constant hustle of shipping things out. It was never about pushing product on people. It was never about hitting a number for the sake of the number. It was about treating people well enough, consistently enough, that they want to stick around. And sometimes, not always, but sometimes, what comes back to you is bigger than a sale. Sometimes what comes back is someone who ends up shaping how you see your own business, and honestly, how you see yourself.
I think a lot about why that particular relationship grew the way it did, when so many customer relationships stay exactly that, transactional, friendly but surface level, which is completely fine, that's most of business. But every once in a while, someone shows up who sees something in what you're doing before it's obvious to anyone else, and they choose to invest in it, not just financially, but with their time, their attention, their genuine support. That's rare. I don't think you can manufacture it or chase it. I think all you can do is be the kind of person and run the kind of business where, if it happens, you notice it, and you don't take it for granted.
That's the version of LeveLux I am still trying to build every single day, even now that we're so much bigger than that small hallway shipping station we started in. Not just moving bags from one closet to another closet across the country. Building the kind of trust where a stranger becomes a friend, and eventually, if you're lucky, a friend becomes someone who believes in you more than you believe in yourself on the days you need that most.
I don't know if every business owner gets a version of this story. I hope they do, honestly, because it changed how I show up for every single customer who comes through LeveLux now, not just the ones who spend the most. You never know which conversation, which bundle, which small act of generosity is going to turn into something you'll still be thinking about years later. So I try to treat every single interaction like it might be that one, because you genuinely never know until you look back and realize it already happened.
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