Mimi Ikonn. Making my first $1M at 25 helped me find my true purpose earlier in life.

0:00Love, be love, spread love. I almost tattooed it on my hand a few years ago. Mimi Icon. She sold her company, Luxie Hair, five years ago, traveled the world, wrote two books, and gained a massive social media following. Her latest business, Intelligent Change, helps people live happy and more fulfilling lives. In this intimate conversation, she will inspire you with her obsession with freedom, self-discovery, and love, along with the lessons she learned on her extraordinary journey. Failures. I don't believe in that word. When you try something, you don't really fail because you have actually tried it.

0:32Within our first year, we made our first million. I feel the most alive when I feel like something that I do brings value and purpose and meaning to someone. We really have to redefine success. At the end of the day, what truly matters is that you wake up with a purpose and you do something that feels meaningful to you.

1:00Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm very excited about our conversation. Thank you so much, Anastasia, for having me here today, for giving me your platform to share my story. So now that you have your financial freedom, you've had it for quite a while. You're an experienced person in this sense. What's your relationship with money and how do you actually see it? I'm very grateful for money, 100%. I think people, again, who attain financial success and say it doesn't matter, I think bullshit because again money can buy you so many things that not having it is going to hurt a lot whether it is better health care even though for example we do live in a country that has free health care when I have a health issue I go into private straight away I don't want to wait for three months to get an appointment right so I'm extremely hyper aware that having financial freedom is an incredible blessing and I'm very conscious of the fact that I am the first one in my family who has made this mental leap into financial abundance and what I mean by that is that again before we lived in financial scarcity and it truly is a mental leap because I think once you realize you can make a million you know you can do it over and over again and I think another key element of having that healthy relationship whether with money or anyone actually I think this applies to romantic relationships friendships anything in life happiness as well is like being grateful enjoy it be aware how blessed you are to have it but don't attach too much of your significance or identity to it because the moment you do when you start like grabbing onto it and feeling like you would be nothing without it that's like beginning of the end and yeah I feel like I have a very healthy relationship and I see it as a blessing but I also and I enjoy it I enjoy all the luxuries thinking about you again but I don't think that it defines who I am and I know that if I were let's say to lose everything tomorrow I would be okay I would be the same my value wouldn't change and it doesn't make me better than others by having it um so yeah many realizations pure gratitude because it's still it's you know it's really important to have it because it's a also a tool like you can give so much and you can do so much good with money so also it's a huge responsibility how you how you use these assets what do you do with it and also when you have a business you know that's generating so much money like how do you run it with what ethics again going back to sustainability like we as business owners have such a huge responsibility on how we do things because we actually are the ones who can make the difference globally it's not the you know bureaucratic governments who will take 20 years to pass a new law or make a change.

4:10We as businesses have so much power. I know it's a little off topic for money, but I think it's still, it's not. Again, it's really important to money is such a big thing. And it's got like, it affects everything. If you think about it, it's just a piece of paper. It's an illusion. And yet it makes such, it can make such a huge difference in someone's life, how you treat it, what you do with it. So I'm very conscious in the way I spend. And yeah, does that answer your question? Absolutely. How do you want to be remembered? Well, going back to what we talked about earlier in terms of what my purpose is, which is love, be love, spread love.

4:53I want to be remembered as somebody who has loved, who has brought love to all those I've been around and who made the world a better place. Maybe it sounds a bit cliche, but I just love the song by Michael Jackson. You know, it's like, if you want to make a world a better place, take a look at yourself and make the change. So I always challenge myself to think, like, am I making this place better than when I came? It can be overwhelming sometimes because, you know, we didn't create this world like maybe we are co-creator but we didn't sing and hand like me as Mimi Icon didn't create all these wars and like this unsustainable in some way world that we're currently living in and yet I have so much power in the way I live my personal life The way I act makes an impact.

5:54Even though it's one tiny drop in the ocean, it creates that butterfly effect. So I always think of the fact that my actions can still change the world in a way. Even though it feels small, it's the only thing I will ever have control over. I don't have control over how you are, what you do with your life, or what the government does. And we can try to influence it. But in reality, all we ever have control over is our own actions and our own reactions. And yeah, that's the goal is to really be cautious with all of that and know that ultimately I can create a better world. So I really want to start from the very beginning.

6:43I want to understand what it is in your childhood that you think resulted in you being where you are today. That's an interesting question for sure. And one thing that really stands out for me from my childhood that was different when I compare myself to my friends is that I always had the strong ability to dream and believe in my dreams. and you would say well most kids dream but the truth is they don't and even as a child I remember having all these big dreams like I always knew that I'm not I'm originally from Baku Azerbaijan I grew up there and I lived there until I was 16 and as a kid I remember telling all my friends that I'm not going to stay in Azerbaijan I'm gonna leave somewhere else I'm gonna travel the world and I remember them looking at me like I'm crazy until you know later on when I actually did move away and my family immigrated to Toronto and I remember coming back to Azerbaijan at one point I was already in my 20s and having a class reunion and a lot of my old friends told me wow like you did it like look at you like your dreams came true and I completely forgot about that part of my life so I think that ability to envision something that is different from where you are today I think a lot of us maybe have dreams but have been conditioned by the society or family or the environment to squash them and not believe in them and I think in order to create anything in life you have to have a vision you have to have a dream so yeah if I have to pinpoint one thing is that I'm a big dreamer.

8:25Still am. Did your parents support that? I think my dad for sure is a big dreamer as well. I think he was quite unique. Again, coming from that USSR upbringing where everything was like in a way black and white and structured, he always also wanted to like live abroad. And I think coming from Azerbaijan back in the olden days, like now you can travel it's a bit more flexible but like with a very passport you could only travel to a few places russia turkey georgia armenia but like you couldn't go to the us unless you were an entrepreneur or a diplomat so he always also had these big dreams of like living abroad and i think that probably rubbed off on me like subconsciously for sure we are the result of our upbringing and i think um without knowing it he definitely has influenced that so do Do you intentionally help your daughter now to be a brave dreamer?

9:27A hundred percent. Definitely. I am very conscious of I'm a parent now, as you said, like I have a daughter. She's seven years old. Since she was little, I remember thinking that it's not what I say to her. It's what I model by my behavior. And I'm always conscious of how I speak to her and also how I speak of the world. and I always tell her to choose what makes you feel good, like to choose to do things and choose to be around people that make you feel good. And I think ultimately we are at a stage in our evolution as humanity where we really have to redefine success. And when I was younger, you know, from the outside world at least, what we would get is like have lots of money have lots of material goods um have a status that would be success where right now what I am conditioning in a way to her is like as long as you feel good and you feel aligned with what you're doing and you have really good people around you that make you feel good that is success and that is where I am at I'm very lucky actually to be in a place in my life where like I do what I love I'm very much aligned with what I do that it doesn't feel like work and I have an incredible community of humans around me who are so supportive and inspiring and and fun and enlightening so I think the life we live is what we're modeled to our children ultimately yeah but when you started your first business yeah wasn't you thinking a bit different at the 100 i don't come from money as you you know we've been friends for many years i come from very humble beginnings especially growing up in um post-usssr country we had what they called back in the day is like a it's a two bed but actually it's a one bed because it was like a living room and a bedroom so my parents actually slept in the living room for as long as I can remember like so zero to 16 my dad slept on the sofa my man my mom slept on like a fold-out sofa and they gave their bedroom to my sister and I so we had a proper bedroom and that was very normal I never thought like this was not normal this is middle class Azerbaijan right to somebody from North America or even the UK listening to this podcast they would think like that's not middle class so it also depends what middle class is because it depends on where you're you know you've been brought up.

12:00Growing up with very little in terms of financial abundance, like money was always very scarce and we could never just buy what we wanted. I remember like my dad would only take me shopping once a year before the school year would start and I remember getting that pair of jeans and feeling so cool and so grateful as well that at least I got that like one little outfit for the whole year. I remember thinking that one day when I do have that financial abundance in my life that's when i will feel like i've made it and that's when i will be truly happy and feel a certain way and then you know in my early 20s my former husband and i alex icon um we've always worked together so we met at work uh working a bank and then started our first business together which was called luxi hair well i mean the business is still around still is called Black Sea Air.

12:54And we started that. And within our first year, we made our first million, which for us, both of us don't come from money, was like flying to the moon. And I remember creating a vision board probably a year before we started the business and putting on all these things I would love to buy or experience and places I would want to go. And a year later, being able to pretty much get most things I would want on my vision board. And yet, very quickly, within the first year of the business, I got extremely depressed, very anxious. And I think at that point in my life, it was a very scary time because I didn't know why it was happening.

13:37But obviously now, years later, when I look back, it is so clear why something like this would happen. Because, you know, I had an identity that I created and I had a whole idea of like what life is. And like when you get to point A, this is how you feel. But in reality, the truth was very different. And it was such a blessing in a way to get to that point. What a luxury to be able to make that amount of money where you can buy anything or go on any trip you desire and realize, actually, that's not what makes me happy. And then having the luxury to ask yourself, OK, then what makes me happy? Like, what is it?

14:14Like, what makes me feel alive every morning? And it was truly like a quote-to-life crisis, I call it, because I was around 25 then. And it was a very dark time in my life. I mean, I'm not going to lie. I had to go to therapists. I went to all kind of alternative healers and tried to look for answers. And in the end, what really helped me was two things. It was doing a silent meditation retreat, which allowed me to really sit with myself and do a lot of introspection and ask myself a lot of questions. and reevaluate what my life is all about. And then also discovering the power of gratitude, which in a way that led us to creating our second business that we're still very much growing and very excited about, which is called intelligent change.

15:03But going back to that, I think the biggest lessons I've learned is that ultimately it's all about creating a very healthy foundation for yourself of like the values that you have as a human being like what are the top five to ten things that you truly care about and it's going to be fundamentally very different from me to you for some reason you know for some people um safety is their top value for me freedom is my top value like having the freedom to do what I want whenever I want with whoever I want I mean that's why I created a business or co-created a business with my former husband because we had similar values as well.

15:45So a lot of entrepreneurs are people who have freedom as their, you know, top value because we become unemployable at the point where we realize like we just got to do things our way. And yeah, it's just a it's a fascinating journey for sure. and yeah I think yeah learning that is extremely important early on in your journey because then you can do things in a different way where everything is intentional but I think for many people I'm curious of course to listen to the other episodes of your podcast I love that you're really going deep into this topic and discovering I find that oftentimes it's people can go into this vicious cycle where they will get financial abundance and then it will make them happy and they will say well now I want more I want a bigger car a bigger house a private jet a boat and it's like yeah you can get stuck in that for the rest of your life and it will never be enough you will fly to the moon and it will still not be enough so having the courage to sit with yourself and have these very deep questions of like yeah you can still enjoy financial abundance but like what is the ultimate goal why am i here you know that is um that is kind of like the journey i've been on since my early 20s yeah i absolutely love that you mentioned everything important in just one answer so i lost aware which topic am i going to take i want to take them all um let let's just pick the the best order so if you don't mind let's explore your hunger for freedom yeah so So it looks like you had it as a child.

17:25It was one of the important motivators for starting a business. So this freedom thing clearly was in you from the beginning. So when you achieve this financial freedom early on, and you mentioned gratitude, did you realize that you finally had it or you wanted more of it? You started thinking about it differently. How your dream of freedom changed once you could actually afford anything you wanted? It's a deep question, actually. Nobody has asked me this before. And I've been asked many questions that makes me even question that because it's like what basically what you're asking me is that about my relationship with freedom and how it evolved as I got more freedom.

18:06Such an important question. And I think one thing I want to mention, and it's a new insight that I got about freedom because I had this conversation with two friends who are both from Germany. So they grew up with very different upbringing where they've had a lot of freedom. Like as kids, they were able to travel anywhere in the world. And one of their top values was actually safety. So I'm like, it's fascinating because for me, I had the opposite upbringing because growing up in Azerbaijan, couldn't go anywhere, like really wanted to have that freedom. So I think ultimately that, again, the upbringing is so crucial and like always looking at like our early childhood years because it can explain why we have certain values as well.

18:47Now, how did my relationship change once I attained freedom? I also realized there's probably such thing as too much freedom as well. Exactly. And sometimes stability is also really important and it can be very overwhelming to have too much freedom because when we first started our business, one of our biggest inspiration was Timothy Ferris who wrote the book The 4-Hour Workweek. It was truly inspiring to read his book when we didn't know anyone who was doing this type of lifestyle, which was like this. Basically, you can do your business anywhere in the world. You can travel and you have this ultimate luxury of like doing whatever you want with your time anywhere you want in the world.

19:29And having all these case studies that he presented in the book made it made it really real for us. even though we don't know these people personally if they can do it we can do it and that served as an ultimate inspiration and yet when we achieved that very much early on in our business I think literally before we even made our first 10 ,000 we already booked our flight to south of France and you know spent the month there then went to Paris then went like in that first year we lived in Costa Rica, in the States. So like we moved around a lot and it, we quickly realized that actually we need a bit of stability.

20:09We need to have like at least a base where we are and, and then we can travel. But even in a way, travel lost its meaning if you're not doing it with purpose. So I love that you asked that question because I think I, even myself, I need to still reflect on that relationship I have with freedom because I love that word and I'm so in a way attached to it. It's, but if I do reflect on my life, it's, it's freedom within boundaries as well. And then it's more enjoyable, right? Because if it's too much, it can be overwhelming. And I found myself feeling so overwhelmed, like, yes, I can go anywhere, but when you can travel anywhere, unless you have a community of like-minded people, whenever you're traveling, it's like nobody can relate to your experience right like it's only exciting to be a tourist in a city for a few days and then what right like again unless you have a community you're aimlessly like just doing this thing and i'm sure maybe some people can't do that but i feel like it's a very small percentage of people who could do it sustainably over a long period of time so we couldn't and eventually our base was in Toronto and that's how um you know we got an office and we said yeah we need we need some stability we need some roots and we grew that business and after about eight years um we sold it but before that we moved to London and I don't know if you want to go into that part of the conversation I would love to talk about your business a little bit more because it's very important it's very unusual for our community in the sense that you built that business with a very pragmatic specific purpose following team ferris's advice and that book was also life-changing for me so i totally understand how inspiring that was but um you were very pragmatic about it you created this amazing cash flow in your business early on and you didn't have to work very hard in that business once you've started it.

22:13And when I met you guys, you just moved to London, it was like 10 years ago. And I remember you both sharing with me how beautiful your lifestyle was and all your travels. And I thought, oh my God, why did I ever think of building a software company in the first place? This is how people do it. I was so inspired. And then I asked you, so what's now and your answer absolutely killed me because actually in that point I don't know if you remember yeah you said well now I want to work and that was before I sold my company and went through this life-changing experience and I thought it was so fascinating you guys were then sharing like you had this beautiful idea to build a very you know sustainable fashion brand Exactly.

23:05But you really wanted to work. So I want to talk to you about then your relationship with work that you avoided in the first business. Absolutely. But then it creeped so much. I think, again, the greatest realization from those first two, three years of building Luxie Hair and it becoming such an instant success. both Alex and I realized that at the end of the day what truly matters is that you wake up with a purpose and you do something that feels meaningful to you and even though we both enjoyed Luxie hair and it was exciting because we're learning a lot and we were doing something at the time that nobody was doing which was using social media yeah with zero marketing invested literally just making videos on YouTube and sharing how to use the products we were selling and telling a good story is basically what we use for the first five years of the business.

24:03That's just a side note of how, you know, we grew and marketed the business. But, you know, basically what happened later on in the business is that I just realized that what gives me true purpose, again, reflecting back on life and asking myself, honestly, what is it that brings joy to me? and I realized that it's like serving people. Like I feel the most alive when I feel like something that I do brings value and purpose and meaning to someone. And then asking another question, like how can I do that within the business that I have? Okay, I can still do that. No matter what you do, where you are at in life, you can do that in any business.

24:43But also you have to be honest with yourself. What is the longevity of that? So we always knew that even though Luxie Hair is a great healthy business that was growing, it's not something we want to do for the rest of our lives. And that's why we position that business to eventually sell it. And as I was going through that life introspection and all of that and learning how to help myself through the darkest time in my life and learning all these, you know, tools and tips on how, what can help me on my journey, you know, the second business idea was created, which was an intelligent change and I guess the relationship with work changed by just realizing that you you can choose something in your life you can choose to do something in your life that actually doesn't feel like work and fuels you and to this day I mean like I work crazy hours sometimes and sometimes I don't work for a week or two or even a month I mean I'm still working but like not intensely working i'm not in the hustle mode because i think sometimes when you first start a project and that was the case with with luxi hair especially in our early 20s this was the time to really hustle and of course it's not about the age but you know it's like sprints right like you go fully in and you have to invest a certain amount of your time and energy people that look back and say look back at their success and say well if i were to go back i wouldn't work so hard it's like yeah bullshit to be honest because if you didn't work so hard you wouldn't be where you are today i don't believe that i tell people sometimes you just have to invest that time and energy and know that like this is the end goal let's say you're positioning to sell the business which in our case we always knew what luxie hair is not something we want to do for the rest of our lives we need to hustle hustle hustle and then show growth and then sell the business and also sell it in a way where we're not part of the sale that was also very intentional something that you know we hired a general manager who was in charge of day-to-day so that we like more the visionaries and at that point the business actually stayed in Toronto and we moved to London so it was perfect and when we ended up selling eight years later we were not part of the sale and we could like literally next day do something different and um but going back to like the relationship with work is like it's about again choosing what you love to do so you never feel like you are working but then fully stepping into that mission that sometimes you go in those sprints and sometimes you take time off to reflect and when you take time off to reflect I don't look at that time as in a way not working because sometimes the reflection time the sabbatical time that many people choose to take also is going to help you on your next journey on the next project so it's just as valuable and important but I I don't like the word work I don't often use it I feel like for me it's like art I look at what I do as art and one of my favorite books ever is called linchpin by Seth Godin and in fact anybody who joins our our team it's like a required reading and the reason I love it so much is because basically what Seth Godin talks about in Linchpin is that anything you do, whether you're a janitor at a school, cleaning the school, when you take that ownership of your work and look at it as your art and as your purpose and as something that gives you meaning, you will do it differently.

28:17And in the process of doing the work, you will evolve as a human being. and you just bring different parts of yourself and you look at it as art you treat it differently and again even if it's a if it's a business that fails ultimately you know that what you have learned through the process has taken you to the next level of your on your journey so I don't know if that adds like a long-winded answer to your question do you feel like that answers I love it I love it I think of work as art it takes the responsibility out of it take it takes the pressure out of it it's it's interesting because i met people who are the opposite and they actually um are very motivated by the sense of duty they like to think of of their work as duty because they can get they get this satisfaction that i did the right thing and uh your view is is as art is quite different and and beautiful it's more about the process enjoying the process rather than achieving the goal.

29:18I think, yeah, totally. And one little story I want to share with you, which is fascinating because my friend actually is a little side note, but I think it's interesting because I like to dissect everything psychologically. And my friend is doing a lot of work on her relationship with money. Anyway, she shared a story how she's reading this book and the woman says like, look at your first memory of money and how that influences to this day, your relationship with money and she then shared her story which she doesn't have a like a healthy relationship with money and then as i was listening to her voice note that she sent me and as she was sharing her story i remembered my relationship with money and my first memory is actually i had a very um sweet uncle who was a famous artist in azerbaijan like a painter and my first memory of money is him coming to visit us and he would always bring us money they could always give us dollars like all these cousins, me and my cousins, and he was the only family member who would do that.

30:20And I always associated that art equals money. How funny. Probably subconsciously. Fascinating. I never thought about it until last week when she shared that story. And I was like, how interesting. So in my mind, it's like art and artists can make lots of money. Just quite even though, in a way, I do business, but I always look at all of our businesses as like, it's art. what we create, the products we create, the services we create, eventually the retail space that we will create, or like now we have events as well. It is the experience as part of the art that people get to experience, whether they're unfolding the product out of the package that they receive or they're on the website going through the whole experience of buying.

31:05All of that can be tasteful and artful. So yeah, it's just a little insight. I think it's a good question to ask yourself because ultimately that relationship sets the tone for so many things of how we do things and why we do things. Would it be correct to say that you have a desire to create and it's very important for you and your business is just your form of creativity? So a painter paints, a business creator creates businesses. That's why you see it as art because it's not the same for everyone. Some people are driven by the desire to create, while other people are driven by other intrinsic goals, but not necessarily creation.

31:48So for you, it would be creation. I think it's an accurate representation, as well as in addition, I would add that any time we have created a business, it was to solve an issue that I personally had in my life. So it's two things. A, it's partly like an art because you're creating something new that maybe didn't exist or didn't exist in the way that you have created it. But also you identifying a problem that you have. For example, with the first business we created, hair extension business, it's the reason we even came up with ideas because we were getting married. I wanted to have long, thick hair for the wedding.

32:29and then I bought hair extensions and when I bought them I came home I put them in my hair and then it was really bad quality hair extensions by the way thank goodness because otherwise the first business would have never been created and then I remember you know looking at my sister and complaining to her and then Alex was like what's hair extensions like tell me more about it so like from that problem came the first idea to our first business and as I shared about you know like my personal mental health struggle as you know we achieved the success with the first business the idea for the second business was created so also like I guess the answer to your question is like the two things right like also identifying like what value are you bringing it's an opportunity to bring value because I feel like attaining financial success comes with like exchanging value for something again that's at least how I see it in my experience and it's like if you create something that solves a problem for someone and creates a solution first to your problem and if you're happy with that I always think like there will be at least a million people like yourself in this world I mean now what's the population is more than eight billion people so if you can create a solution to your problem you will find at least one million people who will want that service or business and then make it your art make it the best product the best best service that you can create in the most beautiful design savvy way or sustainable way because that's also a big part of how we do things like sustainability is very close to my heart it's something i really deeply care about so that's another element that i always feel like brings purpose to what i do because you can make it also more sustainable than what exists already in the world currently so by the time you were free from your first business you already had very clear idea what you wanted to do next absolutely and you knew you wanted to continue doing business i remember it very well you were also you know bursting with creativity and and kindness because again that that the fashion brand you were thinking of doing um also came from a very beautiful uh place of kindness and compassion and care for the planet and animals tell me why why that business didn't quite work and how you actually came to intelligent change because it's very interesting where you went and then decided not to be.

35:04And I think it's also important to talk about like quote unquote failures. I don't believe in that word to be honest because I think when you try something you don't really fail because you have actually tried it. Failing for me is never trying, right? never having the courage to do something you really wanted to where in my case let's talk about intelligent change first because that started very organically in 2013 just because we wanted to create this tool to use and again that's when the best businesses I think are created and now so that the first product was five minute journal and now it's sold probably around two million copies around the world and of course we have other products like the productivity planner we have um different games you can play called let's get closer to go into like more deep and meaningful relationships and in general what we do now is like we help people on their journey of self-actualization but back then we didn't have this grand vision for this business it was just we need to create this journal because we were using gratitude daily um already in our lives, but we wanted to simplify the process, you know, and for us, it was just like a simple tool that we can create because we did a lot of research in terms of happiness and what makes people happy and looking at the research of how important it is to focus on all the good in your life.

36:28And the structure is very simple. Basically, it's like focusing on all these great things in your life activates this part in your brain called reticular activating system that when it's like a brain filter that when you focus on it it makes you see the life in a completely different way you know you can watch the news every day and read about all the negative and bad things that happen or you can do quite the opposite like there's the duality of life both the good and the bad exist but it's like what do I want to choose to focus on right so anyway so we we just created that and printed thousand copies and thought listen if nobody buys this we will just give this to friends and family for the rest of our lives and we were very lucky that it literally took off so quickly and um in fact tim ferris was one of the biggest advocates and still is like two days ago somebody tagged me in a video where he still uses it like now 10 years later because we gifted him the product and he was going through a very difficult time in his life and it really helped him and he featured it in his book and on the podcast many times and we never ever paid him for that by the way but um yeah so that the business took off organically but we didn't focus on it for the first almost five six years because we were still focusing mainly on Luxie hair and in the meantime I did try to do the fashion business which from the point of view of somebody who really cares about sustainability I just find that to this day there's a huge gap in the market where you can go to a brand a fashion brand and say like anything i buy here is really sustainable from from the stitching in the in the dress or the the blazer whatever you're buying or the shoes to the fabric that everything can be composted at the end of the life cycle and i really wanted to create for me at that point i didn't wear leather for many for 10 years in my life and I really wanted to create something that was biodegradable basically compostable even biodegradable is not a term that's regulated by the way so you have to say compostable because it can essentially go back to nature but through my research and like putting a lot of money in that project and it going nowhere unfortunately but it was just not the right time at the right you know at the right place is that I realized that it was just the you know the fabrics that I was using at the time, they were not actually compostable.

38:55And I couldn't bring to the market something that I can't stand behind. You know, like it took a year and I was working with the best factories that make like Chanel flats and beautiful high-end designer shoes. But ultimately, the story was not true or authentic, even though they were marketed as biodegradable. It was essentially a polyurethane material, which is plastic. and it's actually way worse than leather. So on my journey of that self-discovery, I ended up actually going back to wearing leather because in my research, oftentimes the leather, unless it's exotic leather, that we use in shoes or bags is a byproduct of meat industry.

39:35And although I don't personally eat meat, billions of people do, and that leather is still there. And it's better to use it for something rather than discarded. And at the end of the life cycle, leather will still compose better than polyurethane will take a thousand years or more and I mean I still dream about going back into the fashion project I have another idea now that I'm very passionate about and it's it's on my list of things I definitely want to dabble with in the next year or so but it's it's not shoes because shoes is way complicated I mean there's so many elements that go into go into shoemaking I have so much more respect for anyone who has a shoe brand.

40:19So intelligent change. Exactly. How much time it takes and effort from you today? I mean today is a very different story than you know even a few years ago because ultimately because the freedom is still my top value I always am very conscious about only doing in the business what brings me joy and outsourcing everything that doesn't. So for example I never ever touch the operations of the business. I never have even with the Luxie hair. I mean, maybe in the beginning stage, the first year, yes, of course. I used to do customer service. I used to do social media. I was the one taking all the pictures and managing all the accounts.

41:01But of course, as you grow, you realize you cannot do it all and you have to trust people. Otherwise, you're also stifling your growth. And I now mainly focus on the vision, storytelling and like being out there like spreading the message about the brand and also like product creation which I really love and enjoy so a lot of the products that obviously are there are like the product of my own journey of learning something for example like we have different affirmation cards and that you can use in different areas of your life whether health and well-being or relationships and all of these are the product of my own personal journey of using affirmations as a very powerful effective tool to rewire my inner self-talk so everything you will see is like things I've tested for years and years that I know have worked for me to bring me to now where I am truly living my dream life does that mean my life is perfect of course not there is transitional periods which is something I'm going through now but ultimately I feel like I am alive I'm living my dream life life is exciting and I feel this inner enthusiasm and like I feel present and excited and I think that is truly such a blessing so that brings us to your transition up here right now yeah should we talk about that to you and yes we We could.

42:29Well, yeah. I mean, after 16 years together with my former husband, Alex Icon, we have decided to separate. We've announced it very recently, so it's still a very new thing for me to speak about it. But again, I think both of us believe that life is to be enjoyed, relationships are to be enjoyed, and we are so grateful for the 16 years we have had and shared with each other. And when something doesn't feel right, we honor that and we trust it. I always believe in being connected with your intuition and how you feel. And I think a big part of why I'm here today is because of my intuition. Like I've always followed my intuition.

43:22like how we started the podcast today and you asked me that question like what was different it's like I was a dreamer right but it's also like I could have I could have chosen not to believe in my dreams and say like oh that's because I think dreams are just like your intuition telling you like this is where you gotta go this is what you gotta try this is your your potential in a way that you can tap into and I think most people don't go there out of fear and for me yeah like that it's very important to be honest with my intuition and and listen to it because it's got me here so if it's got me here i know it can take me to even greater things in life but it's still very difficult because the fear is still there and you know especially going through this journey specifically now of like separating after having so many years of an incredible respectful relationship where we work together we're best friends um I literally tell Alex all the time you have managed somehow to replace the whole replace a whole community of people for me as one person so we really did have like the most magical relationship but I think a lot of times when people again will feel something is off and they will not be honest with themselves then they can come to a point where they start resenting their partner because they're not following their authentic truth and then that's how things can get toxic and sour over time where both of us have decided hey like things have been so great up to now let's close this chapter here and keep it great and now we call it like conscious expansion there's a term called conscious uncoupling i don't like that term because i feel like we're still a team first of We have a child, so we'll always be parents.

45:13And we'll have to be a team in that regard. Yeah, business partners as well. Right, business partners. We still work together in the same capacity. So we're still a pair, but we're just consciously expanding in different ways romantically. So yeah, that's the journey we're on. And I'm very grateful to say that we've been navigating it in the most respectful, kind way, which has really touched me deeply because Alex is such an emotionally advanced human being. So it made things very easier for me. And of course, I have the same level of love and admiration and kindness towards him. So we've really supported each other through this and are supporting each other because it's still a process.

46:02It's very, very new. Still supporting each other through this process. And it's I think ultimately, if you can manage to be kind and not take things personally, you can save yourself and each other a lot of heartbreak and not burn the bridge. Right. Like this is a beautiful relationship. Why burn the bridge? Right. And I think a lot of times people take things personally and they burn the bridge. And then it's just yeah, I mean, it just is right. There's more than one way to do life. I'm not going to sit here and judge other people's experience. But I think if anybody is listening, I think I want to just allow people to see the opportunity for a different story.