Essay — Lavender & Rage

Branding Yourself
When You Are
the Brand.

On the personal and business identity tangle: what it costs, what it gives back, and what happens when someone tries to make you feel like one of them is a mistake.

There was a version of this business that was just a name and a craft. Leiralizcustoms. A handle, a starting point, a functional thing. I made stuff, I sold stuff, I was someone who made and sold stuff. The business and I were separate. That felt safe and normal and fine.

Then I rebranded. Lavender & Rage. And something shifted: not just the name, not just the aesthetic, not just the products. The whole relationship between me and the thing I was building changed. I wasn’t just marketing a brand anymore. I was marketing myself. And I’m not sure I fully understood what that meant until I was already deep inside it.

This is an essay about that tangle. About what it means to be the product, the founder, and the face all at once - and about the specific kind of exhaustion, pride, and occasional chaos that comes with it.

The Moment the Lines Disappear

Most small business advice treats the brand and the founder as separate entities. Build your brand voice. Define your brand values. Create a brand persona. The implicit assumption is that the brand is a costume - something you put on, wear well, and take off at the end of the day.

That’s not how it works when you are the brand. When the brand voice is your voice. When the brand values are your actual values. When the aesthetic you built reflects how you move through the world. There’s no costume. There’s no taking it off. Lavender & Rage isn’t a persona I perform - it’s just me, with a logo.

What you see is what you get. At the booth, online, in the writing, in the products - it’s consistent because I’m consistent. My opinions are loudly stated within the brand on purpose. The politics, the mutual aid, the queer identity, the refusal to sand down the edges - none of that is branding strategy. It’s just who I am, and the brand grew around it.

Which sounds freeing, and it is. But it also means that when someone comes for the brand, they’re coming for you. And that’s where it gets complicated.

The Specific Tax of Showing Up

Nobody talks enough about the emotional labor of being the face of something. Not the logistics - the setup, the inventory, the shipping, the emails. That stuff is hard but it’s just work. I mean the other thing. The thing where you have to show up as the brand even when you’re running on empty. Even when something hard happened that morning. Even when your nervous system would very much like to stay home and not perform enthusiasm at strangers for six hours.

The market doesn’t know you’re having a week. The customer who just walked into your tent doesn’t know you’re emotionally drained. And because you are the brand, your mood is the brand’s mood. Your presence is the brand’s presence. There’s no manager to cover for you. There’s no brand team to pick up the slack. It’s just you, and you have to figure out how to be there.

I don’t have a clean answer for this one. What I have is the understanding that showing up anyway is itself part of building something real. Every market I’ve done while running on fumes is still a market I did. That counts. The brand doesn’t know what it took to get there — but you do.

Consistency as Protection

One of the things I’ve come to understand about being the brand is that consistency is actually a form of protection. Not in a buttoned-up, calculated way - but in the sense that when you’re always the same, nobody can accuse you of switching up to chase trends or telling people what they want to hear.

Lavender & Rage has stayed Lavender & Rage. The values have been the same since the beginning. The aesthetic, the politics, the way we talk about community and mutual aid - none of that has shifted to match whatever the moment required. People who find us find us because of who we are, not because of who we performed being for the algorithm that week.

There’s a version of this that could read as stubbornness. I’d rather call it integrity. The brand has grown with me, not ahead of me, not behind me. We’re at the same place at the same time, which means I can stand behind every single thing that has the Lavender & Rage name on it. That matters more to me than being flexible enough to be everything to everyone.

When you are the brand, transparency and consistency aren’t marketing tactics. They’re how you stay sane. The alternative - performing a version of yourself, managing what gets seen and what doesn’t, curating a brand persona that doesn’t match the actual person - sounds exhausting. I’d rather people know exactly what they’re getting.

The Time Someone Tried to Make It a Competition

I want to tell you about the moment I almost walked away. Not because the business was failing. Not because I was burned out or the numbers weren’t working. Because another vendor - someone I considered a friend, someone I had worked alongside, someone whose booth I had literally run for them - accused me of copying their designs.

The designs in question were freely available on the internet. This was not a gray area. But that wasn’t really the point, was it? The point was the accusation itself. The point was having someone take something I’d built - something I was proud of, something that was genuinely mine — and try to make me feel like I had stolen it.

When you are the brand, that kind of attack doesn’t land on a business entity. It lands on you. It questions your integrity, your creativity, your right to occupy the space you’ve worked to build. And for a moment - a real, genuine moment - I felt it. The urge to step back. The question of whether it was worth it.

It was short-lived. Because what came next was clearer and louder than the hurt: I just need to build this better. Not to prove anything to her. Not to win whatever competition she had decided we were in. But because the answer to someone trying to diminish what you’ve made is to make it undeniable.

What Nobody Tells You About Being the Face

Here’s what I want makers and small business owners who are tangled up in this same thing to hear:

The fact that you are the brand is not a liability. The mainstream business advice will try to tell you it is - that you need to scale yourself out of it, build systems that don’t depend on you, create something that could run without you in the room. And maybe someday that’s true. But right now, in the building stage, in the vendor tent stage, in the “I’m doing 2–4 markets a month and also running a website and also writing about it” stage? The fact that people are buying from you is the whole thing.

People who find Lavender & Rage and stay - they’re not just buying a sticker or a sweatshirt. They’re buying into a perspective, a set of values, a person who shows up at a folding table and means it. That’s not scalable in the traditional sense. It’s also not replaceable.

The tangle is real. There will be days when you can’t tell where you end and the brand begins. There will be moments when something that happens to the business feels like it happened to you personally, because it did. There will be people who try to use the closeness of that relationship against you.

Build it anyway. Be consistent. Be transparent. Be exactly who you are and make the brand match it, because the alternative is spending all your energy maintaining a version of yourself that isn’t real. That’s a tax I’m not willing to pay.

From the Zine

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