I’m about to get REALLY honest… the life of an entrepreneur ain't all it's cracked up to be.

what everyone sees: bomb products, cute packaging, pretty branding, press features, “congratulations”, awards, a verified badge and growing followers on social media.

what it really is: broke w/ a side of broke, slow sales, product launch delays, tax bills??, “please see below my rate for IG stories”, “unfortunately, your business wasn’t selected for this grant”, depression, imposter syndrome, burnout and the list goes on.

people only talk about the wins & glamourous stuff, but the reality is that this shit is hard. nothing hurts more than having a dream that you’re working towards every single day, but still feeling like you’re making zero progress. “start the business”, they said. “you don’t need a lot of money to start” – this is true. you don’t need a lot of money to start, but you do need A LOT of money to grow & scale, make an impact and touch the lives of the people who you started the business for in the first place.

as most of you may [or may not] know, kanti recently lost all its packaging to flooding from hurricane ida. that’s $10k’s worth of custom printed glass bottles, dropper tops and branded boxes for likuid gold.

I wish I could tell you that our financial struggles started there, but since this is honesty hour, I’m kandidly telling you that the flood is just scratching the surface. to suffer from a flood amidst trying to launch new products is bad enough, but to exhaust the launch budget before we could even release the products is heartbreaking. these products were supposed to launch since march, but 5 revisions down the line, when we finally fell in love with our formula, we had to revise it AGAIN because one of our suppliers just up and decided to stop selling a crucial ingredient that we couldn’t get anywhere else. what this meant for us was extra product development costs that we did not budget for. 

to add to that, it’s no secret that coins were limited to begin with as a small business with no funding, so we’ve been applying for grants to keep the business afloat and pull through with our launch. we applied for 10+ grants this year alone, and we got rejected for every single one. so, here we are, pulling out our last card, PLAN Z – asking our community to help us out🙏🏾

you’ve been with us from the very beginning, because even before you met kanti, it was made for you. please click here to learn how you can help kanti shake the skincare industry and celebrate black and brown skin 🤎