“Ideas are cheap. It is all about the execution.”
Not sure who originally said this but it definitely has truth to it. Pretty much everyone has a great business idea at some point.
Many dream about opening something, sketch the brand, the visuals, the offering, and imagine the day it becomes successful enough to run on its own. You open social media and see stories of successful launches and brands that took off, which is genuinely great to see.
But there is another story. One that often goes untold: The gap between the idea and making it real is almost always wider than it looks.
The amount of work, the time, the decisions, the rejections, the moments where nothing moves and you question everything. Especially when you are building something completely from scratch.
And I have realised this more than ever with my newest, biggest, and honestly scariest business I am building: a lifestyle x gastro brand in Zürich. The idea has been clear for a while, the vision is there, but the distance between that and making it actually exist is something else entirely.
So rather than waiting until there is a successful launch to write about, I have chosen to document it as it happens. In real time, before the ending is written, before anything is certain.
This episode is about the early days of building Unelma.
Every Sunday I publish a piece of The Build, a series following my journey of building from scratch and more than anything trying and learning. In the previous episodes I shared the story of how I got to entrepreneurship, what the reality of running a side business alongside a full time job actually looks like, and how the failures are a part of the journey. In this one I share the honest reality of the first months of building a consumer brand from zero. The decisions, the rejections, the things that are not working yet, and what it actually takes to move something forward before anyone knows it exists.
On Wednesdays, I write about creating your path, style, mindset and career wise.