Is This Your Hobby, or Is It a Business?

He meant Kara Designs, a small boutique I had started in Kampala years before KaraSpace existed. I loved it. I also nearly closed it, four times, maybe five. I never had a tidy answer for him, because the honest answer didn’t fit either word. It wasn’t quite a hobby; I took it too seriously for that, and it cost me too much. But it wasn’t behaving like a proper business either, with uneven performance and rising costs, despite my passion and hope.

For a long time that question embarrassed me. It felt like being caught out, as though a real entrepreneur would have known, by then, which one it was. I have since come to think it was one of the most useful questions anyone has asked me, precisely because I couldn’t answer it cleanly.

I would sit with the accounts at the end of a slow month and do the sensible calculation. Rent. Stock that hadn’t moved. The tailor’s wages. The maths pointed one way. And each time, something in me refused. Not stubbornness, exactly, more a quiet insistence that this thing was carrying something I wasn’t ready to put down. I kept choosing it, even when the business analysis said I should have let it go.

We talk a great deal about starting things. We are encouraged to be bold, to launch, to pitch. We talk much less about the things we keep almost-closing and choose, quietly, to keep. There is no applause for that. No one live-streams the decision not to give up on a shop that isn’t working yet.

But that boutique taught me things a profitable business might never have. It taught me what I actually cared about, not selling clothes, it turned out, but making a place where beauty, African craft and unhurried attention could sit together. It taught me how to lose money and keep my nerve. It taught me that some ventures are not failing; they are teaching, and the tuition is patience.

Years later, when KaraSpace took shape, the café, the garden, the boutique folded inside it, I understood that Kara Designs had been the first draft. The instinct I couldn’t justify was the instinct that built everything that came after. In Her Element, the work I am doing now, grew from the same root: a refusal to let a part of myself be left behind because it didn’t yet make sense on a spreadsheet.

So I have stopped apologising for the question I couldn’t answer. Hobby or business is, I think, the wrong binary. Some of the most important things we build begin as neither, as a part of ourselves that refuses to be abandoned, long before it knows what it is going to become. The tidy answer would have been easier. It would also have been wrong.

What have you kept holding onto, even when it made no sense on paper?