Stumbling Through 2025.. stepping into INTENTION 2026

If you’ve been around here long enough, you know something about our rhythm — our year doesn’t really begin on January 1st.

When you own a studio specifically a boudoir specializing studio, Christmas and Valentine’s are back to back. The holidays roll straight into our busiest season. While everyone else is setting resolutions and easing into a new year, we’re in full momentum — editing, shooting, delivering, loving on clients, carrying the emotional weight of the season.

Our “new year” always feels like it begins around February 15th..

And this year, when February 15th came, I realized how tired I was.

If I’m honest, I only blogged twice in 2025.

Not because I didn’t have anything to say — but because I was living in the thick of it. And sometimes when you’re surviving, you don’t have the words. You just have the next step. That next step after shut down and the highest economic climate we have ever faced as a company and as community brought…….. CONFIDENT SURVIVAL

The last five years have felt like carrying a weight that never quite let up. Not just as a business owner with over a decade of service behind me — but as a mother, a wife, a daughter, a leader, and a woman trying to recognize herself in the mirror again.

We didn’t just “navigate hard seasons.” We navigated survival.

As a company, we made decisions I never imagined we would have to make. We reduced. We simplified. We became intentional in ways that were born out of necessity, not trend. We tightened our circle. We let go of what once felt permanent. We fought to preserve something we had poured more than a decade into building.

We closed our second location in Tulsa, after 10 years of service

That sentence still feels heavy. We celebrate launches. Expansions. Big milestones.

But we rarely talk about survival.

We don’t talk about what it does to an owner when you’ve experienced growth and momentum — and then have to reduce. To scale back. To choose preservation over expansion.

There’s a quiet grief in that. A humbling. An identity shift.

Survival doesn’t get applause.

But sometimes, survival is the real success story because we stayed long enough to fight for it. But ultimately, survival required humility. It required choosing longevity over expansion. Depth over breadth. Stability over ego.

And while the business was shifting, life wasn’t sitting still.

In Dec 2024 , Our daughter who was happy, healthy and a go go girl just like her momma, walked through an unexpected medical journey and the loss of a best friend to death all at the same time. A journey that none of us saw coming and changes you to your core. The kind that rearranges your priorities in a single phone call. The kind that makes you realize how fragile everything is — and how fierce you become when it’s your child. Everything stops…

At the same time, my boys are growing into young men. Formative years. Big emotions. Big questions. Bigger needs. They don’t need a distracted mom building an empire. They need presence. Guidance. Steadiness.

My husband stepped into a new job during what I can only describe as the hardest season of our marriage — not because we were failing, but because we were both growing. Growth is uncomfortable. It stretches you. It exposes the places that need mending. We were learning how to evolve without leaving each other behind. Add in aging parents. Add in a world that has felt collectively heavy. Add in the quiet pressure of being the strong one.

It was a lot……. all at once…. Somewhere along the way, I stepped back from marketing. I wasn’t loud. I wasn’t everywhere. I wasn’t pushing the way I used to.

But I never stopped shooting.

I kept showing up. I kept creating. I kept holding space for women. I kept pouring into my clients even when I felt like I was trying to find my own footing. Because creativity has always been the one place that feels like home.

2020-2025 felt like stumbling. Like walking through fog. Like trying to reconnect with a version of myself that had changed — because after five years of survival, nothing looked the same.

Not the business.
Not the friendships.
Not the rhythm of our home.
Not even me.

And maybe that’s the point.

Maybe rebirth doesn’t look like fireworks.
Maybe it looks like reduction.
Like refinement.
Like coming back to the core.

Now here we are.

One studio.
One photographer.
No extra noise.
No second location.
No excess.

Just intention.

Just art.
Just connection.
Just the heartbeat of why this all started in the first place.

It feels strangely familiar — like the beginning. But this time, it’s not fueled by hustle or something to prove. It’s built on wisdom earned the hard way. It’s built on knowing what actually matters.

We didn’t lose everything.
We stripped back to what was real.

And maybe stumbling through 2025 was exactly what was required to remember who we are.

This isn’t a comeback story.
It’s a becoming story.

And for the first time in a long time, I don’t feel like I’m surviving.

I feel like we’re rebuilding.
Intentionally.
Quietly.
Stronger.

-ASHLEY