Bright Lips, Brave Heart

Break Free: Busting the 3 Myths Keeping You Small in Business

• Amanda Waterstone • Episode 16

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In this episode, I’m calling out three big myths that might be holding you back in your product-based business — just like they held me back in mine. Whether you're early in your journey or scaling to consistent sales, these myths can sneak in and make us feel stuck, confused, or even question our worth.

I’m sharing real experiences from growing QueenMee Accessories into a six-figure business — including the mistakes I made, the mindset shifts that changed everything, and what I wish I had known from day one. If you've ever thought "I just need more followers," or "does my business count as purpose-led," or "maybe my prices are too high" — this episode is for you.

Let’s bust these myths together and set you free to grow with confidence.

  • Why more Instagram followers ≠ more sales, and what actually does create consistent income.
  • How email marketing became my #1 sales driver — even when I was sending from a jam-covered kitchen table.
  • The truth about pricing for profit vs. pricing for popularity — and why brave pricing attracts better customers.
  • Why your business doesn’t have to “save the world” to be purposeful — and how creating joy and beauty is enough.
  • Ways to give back sustainably, without compromising your income or wellbeing.

 Join the Priority List for 🎀Styled to Sell🎀

If you’re ready to grow your sales consistently, my new course Styled to Sell is launching soon.
Only 5 beta places will be available — join the priority list now to be the first to hear when doors open 🎊

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Amanda Waterstone:

Welcome to Bright Lips, Brave Heart, the podcast for creative entrepreneurs, bringing you inspiration and actionable steps to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Amanda Waterstone, and I'm on this journey with you. I've grown my product-based business, Queenly Accessories, from scratch whilst raising my two young daughters. I had a creative flame to design accessories burning inside me that I just couldn't put out, and so I left my corporate job and embarked on a rollercoaster entrepreneurial journey. Quite Quite a few highs and lows later, and here I am with the beautiful six-figure business of my dreams that spreads joy as I help women feel colorful and sparkling through their accessories. I'm always learning as I go along, and I'm excited to share what I've learned in Growing Queen Me with you every week so you can build your dream business perhaps a bit more quickly than I've done. My mission is to help creative entrepreneurs like you build a profitable business so you can shine your light bright I've created several free checklists and guides for you. These are the resources I wish I'd had when I was starting Queen Me. You can find them on my Instagram bio at Amanda Waterstone. So let's dive in. Get ready to be curious, brave and shine your life bright. Hello and welcome. This episode is about three myths that I see misleading people that are building a product-based business and I want to call out those myths and if you've fallen into them as I have fallen into them in the past I just want you to kind of get real and identify them because they have held me back these three things in my journey and I want you to get there more quickly than I've done I wish I had known about them from the start this is like a message to my past self to to kind of to identify these myths and to change what I'm doing in my business. And I hope that they are valuable for you, at least one of them. They cover all different things. So everything from just practical things to mindset. So anyway, let's dive in. So the first myth is, that i see holding people back is thinking that more followers on instagram equals more sales in your business or more consistent sales in your business now this is simply not true yes instagram is really really important i believe it's important it's been important in growing queen me accessories and we definitely need to post consistently that is so important and we need to be aiming to grow our followers, but I don't believe that it's the number one thing that we should be focusing on to get consistent sales. It is a big part of visibility. But the best way to grow yourselves consistently in my experience in building my lovely six-figure business, Queen Me Accessories, is through not social media alone, but most importantly through email marketing. And what email marketing does is that it opens up a direct conversation with our customers in a way that I don't think that we can do in such a personal way on social media. So if you do email marketing correctly, it does feel really, really personal. I think a lot of people think of email marketing as being a little bit corporate, but it can carry a really personal message if you use imagery of yourself and you tell your personal story and you address your customers directly through your copy. At the end of the day, it's a massive privilege to be included in someone's inbox. When someone agrees to be on your email list, they're really engaging with you in an incredible way Most people don't like being inundated with emails. So if you have the privilege of being in that inbox, you know, that's a huge privilege. And I think if you thank people for that, then they really appreciate that. So make your emails feel personal, make them feel exclusive, share your personal story, share exclusive promotions for your email list, for your email newsletter subscribers, and also email them consistently. So It does need to be every single week, minimum once a week. And every four to six weeks, you should also offer them a reason to buy with a promotion, like a gift with purchase or a special sale. And you will find that if you keep doing this, so if you use the right messaging, like personal messaging, and you email people consistently, the sales will come and they will be consistent, most importantly. It is the number one strategy alongside pop-up shops that have helped me to grow to six figures in Queen Me accessories. So I think email marketing deserves like a whole episode to itself. And I'd love to dive into it more fully with you in another episode. But I wanted to highlight it here if you are focusing on growing your website sales at the moment, because it really is the number one thing to focus on. And, you know, I think it's so easy for us to get caught up in this idea that it's all about social media and in particular the number of followers we have. But this has not been the case for me in growing Queen Me accessories to six figures and getting consistent sales every single month. That has come from email marketing. Now, email marketing has not always been easy for me. There is no doubt about it. When I very first started my website, I had just like a handful of emails that I'd collected from the few sales that I'd had on my website. We all have to start somewhere. And I knew I should try email marketing. I'd heard about it. And I remember sitting in the spare room in our house, which is a tiny, tiny little box room that I kind of alternated between being in there and working at the kitchen table, which was often covered in bits of jam and I had to wipe it off. I think I've shared that with you in another episode. I never had a real space for my business until I got an office. And I remember sitting in this little tiny box room and working for hours on my email, which I sent from MailChimp because it was a free service. And I just didn't really know what to say in my monthly email because I was only sending it once a month. I felt like I didn't want to overload people with emails. That's another kind of sub myth is that you shouldn't send too many emails. So at that point, I was falling into that trap as well. I thought people only want to hear from me once a month. But because I wasn't in the flow, because I wasn't sending emails very often, I struggled to find the words. I struggled to get the messaging right. And, you know, I'd had very, very little time in my business at this point. My children were younger and my youngest was at nursery school. So it was, I had, you know, literally just like three hours a day. Like that was it maximum, maybe only two and a half. And I would spend the whole of that time like two and a half three hours writing one email because it just didn't flow and then I would send this email you know it's putting all the links which would take ages and then I would get no sales and it was so disheartening it was so disheartening but I you know to be honest I was tempted to just stop doing email marketing but I kept hearing from lit from listening to podcasts and you know listening to other people who were in the business that email marketing was really important so I didn't want to give up on it and And in the end, I took a course and I learned a new system for email marketing. I went from MailChimp to Klaviyo, which has been amazing. So Klaviyo has been a really powerful system for me and helped me to build up really good funnels, automations, and also I found it really good for campaigns and it integrates with Shopify really well as well. So it's brilliant. I would highly recommend it. I will put a link to Klaviyo in the show notes. But learning a whole new system, was very overwhelming. Sometimes I can find technical things quite challenging, but I persisted with it. I persevered. After a couple of months, I got more familiar with Klaviyo. I knew it was really important. I just knew it was worth the time and effort. And I also learned a kind of new way of scheduling my emails, setting up funnels and flows and doing campaigns from a digital course that I did, which was really, really helpful. And I'm so glad I made that investment in that course because email marketing has been the backbone of my website business. It really has. It's now 60% of my website sales. And I get open rates of almost 70%. So very high engagement. I can teach you all about email marketing in my new course, which I am so excited to let you know more about in the next few days. It's called Styled to Sell. And there is a priority list. So that there will only be five places available for the beta version of Style to Sell. So I've set up a priority list. And if you join the list, the link is in the show notes, you will be the first to hear when the opportunity to join the beta goes live. And I would love to teach you more about it. email marketing inside the course. I can share how I've got these very high engagement rates and give you a blueprint of exactly what you need to do. But what I want to focus on today is just please don't fall into this trap of thinking that more followers on social media is the number one thing that you should be focusing on. In my experience, the key to consistent sales is email marketing, getting it set up and working, getting your flows working, getting your engagement right. And if you are looking to grow your sales consistently, make that your number one focus if you have to choose one thing. Right, so on to myth number two. Now this one, oh my goodness, I have struggled with this so much. I've made mistakes around this myth over and over again. And the myth is that lower pricing equals more sales because you're appealing to a wider audience. Now, I think the root of this mistake for me was in money blocks that I had. So hopefully you don't have any of those, I'm hoping. I mean, I have been working through my money blocks and that has helped me to address issues with pricing as well. But I think, you know, when we first start our businesses, we just want to engage as many people as possible. We just want to get our product out there and sell it. We want to get that validation, right? We want to just build an audience. We want to appeal to as many people as possible. And when we do markets and pop-up shops face-to-face, if our pricing is on the high side, you know, compared with like high street prices, some people are going to make comments about that. You know, some people may say, oh, I get comments like, oh my goodness, like, you know, £35 for a haircut. That's unbelievable. And you are going to get those comments from people who are not your ideal customer, but you've got to understand that that is okay. It's really important when you're setting your pricing that you value your time and make your prices as full as they should be. You've got to really factor in all the love and work and the cost of your time that has gone into creating your collection. And you know, it's just so important that because then you will attract the right customers to you when you have the right pricing, the right customers will understand your pricing. They'll understand the work that's gone into your collection and they will appreciate that and support that. And yes, it is really good to have a pricing architecture. So if your prices are very high, so if everything's over £100, for example, because of the work that you're putting into your collection and to the pieces, And then you do a pop-up shop where we've got lots of people of all different walks of life coming. Then it's really, really good in your pricing architecture to have something which is at a more impulse price point. Like if you can, between £30 and £50. If it works with your collection, then even lower. So then if somebody who... loves what you're doing, but they maybe don't have as much cash this time, they can still engage and support you. So what you want to do is not lower the prices of your main collection, but see if you can have add-on pieces which are at an impulse purchase price. Therefore, you are still maintaining the right pricing message and you're going to attract the right people to you in terms of pricing, but you can still engage maintain your sales and maintain the message whilst maintaining sales at places like pop-up shops where you've got a wide audience. So in my collection, what I do is I have, I always have some pieces that are on sale. So I'll have pieces that are 25 pounds and I have a few of those and they're pieces where I have extra stock, but it's intentional because I want to make sure that there are some pieces that are at an impulse price point for people. so I can maximise my sales. But my main collection, I have continued to push up the pricing on that because it's not sustainable for me to sell things at £25 and it doesn't give the right messaging either. The quality of my work, the quality of the love and care that I put into my collection and my customer service, the right customers... fully appreciate that and they will fully appreciate that with you as well it can feel really really uncomfortable putting up your prices especially when you're facing customers at a pop-up shop for example and you do hear those comments it can feel very uncomfortable or even sending an email saying to your customers saying you know my pricing is going up I found that to be uncomfortable but you need to be brave with this you have to trust in yourself. It's about trusting in yourself and believing fully in yourself and the amazing gifts that you are sharing with the world. The value that you're delivering people through your beautiful collection and your wonderful customer service, that value deserves to be upheld with the right pricing. And if you're hearing this and you kind of know in your heart that maybe your prices aren't where they should be, where they're not as high as they should be, then please take action and put them up. I can't stress this enough. It's such a trap to keep your pricing too low. And if it doesn't reflect the love and care and time you're putting into your collection, then you should definitely make a change with that. And what will happen is that you will find your sales will grow and they will increase. So having lower pricing across the collection definitely doesn't grow your sales because When you have the right pricing, it then attracts the right customers and your sales start to grow and you start to get more consistent sales because those customers will engage with your collection more fully as well because they are the right people. So pricing is really key in getting consistent sales. Now the third myth that I want to address. Now this one is quite contentious. This is close to my heart because I have personally struggled with this a lot in my journey. And the myth is that you need to have a purpose in your business other than making beautiful products and making your customers feel good. I think there is so much talk around this at the moment and we all feel it, but we need to have some kind of purpose. We need to be saving the world in some way. But what could be more precious and more important than making your customers feel good? That is why you're doing what you're doing. If you also manage to do something else as part of that, like, you know, donate to an animal charity or invest money to grow trees or... support a charity which helps children whatever it is that you are also able to do obviously that is a wonderful wonderful thing and that I fully uphold that and back that and I applaud you that is fantastic but what my message here is that please Don't feel that you need to do more than you're already doing in your business. If you are creating beautiful products and you are putting love and care and thought into them and you are making your customers feel good and you are offering excellent customer service, that is enough. You are doing enough. You're creating your product out of passion. And you are meant to have that passion burning inside of you and therefore you are meant to create the products you're creating. You're meant to shine your light bright. You're living your purpose in doing that. And that is a very, very brave thing to do in itself. You are braver than most people in the world for going out there on your own and shining your light bright and putting yourself out there over and over again. That in itself is enough. And don't put pressure on yourself to feel that you need to do more, that you need to have a specific purpose beyond that. So I've struggled with this, as I say, and especially in the beginning, because when I first went full-time in my business, I chose to support Wonder Foundation, which is a wonderful charity which empowers women through education. It's a fantastic charity, and I am so proud to have supported them. It totally aligned with my brand values for Queen Me of empowering women and lifting them up. And originally, I donated 3% of all the sales that I made on my website to Wonder Foundation. I believed in it. I believed in the charity. I loved having a purpose. And it felt really, really exciting to me to do that. but I learned pretty quickly that it put a huge amount of pressure on my business now I remember there was one month when I felt so proud because you know I had I'd sold well on my website and it was 600 pounds that I was due to give wonder foundation and I donated the money feeling good but then you know I was I was balancing my cash flow it's always a challenge balancing your cash flow and I realized that I didn't have enough money to pay myself that month and I That was not making me feel good, obviously. It's so important that we pay ourselves and that we put our own needs at the head of what we're doing in our business. And so I thought long and hard about this and I knew at that point that these cash donations, they had to stop because they weren't sustainable. And it felt sad to make that decision at the time. But looking back on it now, I can't really believe that I made that mistake. Because the most important thing is that you are following your heart and doing what you're meant to do in creating your products and making your customers feel beautiful. And, you know, anything above and beyond that. It's fantastic, but just be proud of yourself for doing what you're meant to do. And I can't believe that I made the mistake of feeling like I had to do more. And that also putting the pressure on my business from a cash point of view as well. But I had this feeling that I had to have a kind of greater purpose. And I think that came from... reading things on social media, listening to some of the podcasts I was listening to at the time, there was a sense that you had to be a purpose-led business. And I don't want to detract from people that are managing to do that, because obviously that is fantastic. And I still love donating to charity through Queen Me Accessories. It's a wonderful, wonderful feeling. And there are so many It's great to give back whenever you can, but it's got to be sustainable. It has to be your business has to be sustainable. It's got to be. You've got to be able to give what you can give. So don't give too much. Just give a little if you can at the beginning. But the main thing is to keep going with your business and keep doing what you're meant to do in terms of your purpose to create your products and shine your light bright. So now in terms of what I do through Creamy Accessories, I donate raffle prizes whenever I'm asked for them because that's something simple that I can do. And also I donate stock to Cancer Hair Care. And these are pieces that I have maybe a few extra pieces of. So it's sustainable. It's not making a big dent in my cash flow. I am using my time to create the pieces and to prepare them and give them to the charity. So that feels very precious. And the charity that I have found, Cancer Hair Care, is very grateful for the pieces. So that is just fantastic. Having the stock donations works for them. And previously, I have donated to... women's aid and that was also they were very grateful for the pieces as well so I have found that the way to do it sustainably is through donating stock where I have a few extra pieces it still is a gift the charities are very grateful but it's sustainable for Queen Me and at the end of the day it's a bonus it's something that I want to do but I know that the most important thing is that I am creating the products that I meant to create, helping the customers that I meant to help, helping them to feel great with their accessories. That is my purpose. And so giving to charity is a bonus. Now, I really want you to hear this. If you are in the boat that I was in a few years ago when I felt like, my purpose wasn't big enough. I want you to hear this message. You are enough. You are so brave for doing what you're doing. Everyone who's listening to this, you are doing a great job. You are so brave. You are one of the brave ones for putting yourself out there over and over again. You're amazing. So I hope you've enjoyed today's episode and that you found it helpful busting those three myths. I would love to help you grow your sales consistently. If you go to the show notes for this episode, then you can join the priority list for my brand new course, which is called Styled to Sell. And the course covers mindset, goal setting, and most importantly, growing your sales consistently and the ways that you can do that. whether it's through wholesale, pop-up shops, online, online marketplace selling. I cover all of those options in the course. And all of my knowledge is on videos that you will have lifetime access to. So I'm running a beta and there will only be five spots available. So it's going to be a really limited availability. So if you're on the priority list, which I've linked in the show notes, then you'll be the first to know when the opportunity goes live. And I would so love to welcome you thank you thank you for listening bright heart I so appreciate spending this time with you if you've enjoyed this episode I'd be very grateful if you could subscribe and write a review to help this podcast grow and spread the light thank you