Sweet Little Crumb did not begin as a business plan or a brand strategy. It began with my daughter, Miette.

She started Sweet Little Crumb as a way to raise money for children like her (children living with brainstem tumours). Miette didn’t know she was dying. Miette, alongside her older brother and younger sister, made art and craft pieces, hair accessories, and small handmade items.

I contributed by making soaps and scrubs. We called the business Sweet Little Crumb because Miette’s name means “little crumb” in French.

Where It Actually Started

My own formulating journey started long before Sweet Little Crumb, although I didn’t recognise it at the time. 23 years ago, during my first pregnancy, my sister taught me how to make a salt scrub. I didn’t know the word “formulating”. I didn’t understand emulsions, surfactants, or structure. I simply followed instructions and made something with my hands.

Even when Sweet Little Crumb was running as a small market business, I didn’t think of myself as a formulator. I knew how to make soap. I knew how to make scrubs. That felt like the full extent of it. What I didn’t yet see was that my long-standing fascination with essential oils, skincare, and ingredients was quietly laying the groundwork for everything that would come later.

My children were the light that kept me going, even when functioning felt more like performance than presence. Life continued around me whilst I existed beside it (technically upright, technically capable, but not truly there). People tried to pull me out of that hole. Sometimes I managed to climb a little way up, just enough to breathe, only to slide straight back down again. That was the rhythm of it. Constant. Exhausting.

The black hole is still there now. It has not disappeared. But it is smaller. It no longer fills the whole house. Most days I can walk around it, live alongside it, even forget it is there for stretches of time. And then, without warning, it opens again and I fall. That is how grief works. It does not resolve. It shifts. It shrinks. It waits.

When the World Stopped and I Woke Up

Something shifted when the world shut down. Suddenly, everyone else was at home, feeling trapped, disoriented, and cut off from normal life. I had been living in that space for years. For reasons I still cannot fully explain, the global pause stirred something in me. I logged into Facebook for the first time in years (more out of curiosity than intention). I checked my personal page and then the old Sweet Little Crumb page.

What I found stopped me in my tracks.

There were messages. People asking about Salty Little Crumbs. Asking if we still sold salt scrubs. Asking where they could buy them. Asking whether we would be back at the folk festival. There was an outpouring of kindness, memory, and connection tied to something I had assumed was long gone.

I made a quiet decision then. If I was going to do this again, I was going to do it properly. I wanted to learn how to make salt scrub properly (not just repeat what I had always done). I enrolled in an online “advanced skincare diploma”

It was meant to prepare me to launch a brand. Instead, when I finished, I felt more lost than ever. I had not learned how to formulate. I had learned how to tweak someone else’s formula. That distinction mattered more than I expected.

So I kept going. More courses. More textbooks. A subscription to Point of Interest (SCM). I thought I was set. I was not. Joining the SCM community made it painfully clear how much I still needed to understand. Susan’s writing resonated with me immediately. The humour, the honesty, the refusal to oversimplify science for the sake of marketing. It felt familiar. It felt like home.

In 2024, after lots of formal study and relentless self-directed learning, I completed my Diploma of Personal Care Formulation (11268NAT) through the Institute of Personal Care Science. Somewhere along that journey, something important clicked. I was not interested in building a brand. I was interested in the science behind products. The qualification mattered, but the bigger revelation was understanding where my passion truly sat. Researching. Developing. Explaining. Problem-solving. Not selling.