What No One Tells You About Scaling Fast
Taylor Swift wore the dress. Orders exploded. Team scaled to 30 people. From the outside, it looked like every founder's dream playing out in real time.
From the inside? Little Lies founder, Jade Robertson, was drowning.
Little Lies went through what a lot of brands experience but few talk about honestly - that moment when the growth you chased becomes the weight that's crushing you. The team that made sense at 10 people stopped making sense at 20, then completely fractured at 30.
Jade ended up with complete burnout, off work for four weeks with a three-month-old baby, running a business that looked successful but felt completely unsustainable.
Her solution wasn't what most growth advisors would recommend: she didn't hire a COO, she didn't raise funding, she didn't push through. She cut the team to 5 people and rebuilt the entire operation from the ground up.
That was two years ago. The business is now more profitable and more focused than it's ever been.
What actually breaks when you scale too fast
The problem wasn't that Little Lies couldn't handle the volume - the infrastructure could cope, the orders were getting out the door. The problem was structural.
At 30 people, every decision required layers of communication. Every process had steps that made sense when they were implemented but compounded into bottlenecks. The founders spent more time managing managers than actually running the business.
And here's the bit that doesn't show up in the P&L: they lost the clarity that made the brand work in the first place. When you're constantly firefighting, you stop making strategic decisions. You start making reactive ones.
Jade knew something had to give. The version of Little Lies that existed at 30 people wasn't the business she'd set out to build, and it definitely wasn't one she could sustain.
The rebuild
The current Little Lies runs on 5 people and a very intentional tech stack. Shopify handles the operations backbone. Klaviyo runs retention flows that used to need a dedicated person managing. A Gorgeous AI chatbot (they call it Stevie) fields customer service queries 24/7 without the inconsistency of rotating staff.
It's not about replacing humans with tech - it's about freeing up the humans to do work that actually moves the business forward. Strategy, creative, relationships. The stuff you can't automate.
The team now is lean but functional. More importantly, it's built for the business Jade actually wants to run, not the one that growth-for-growth's-sake demanded.
If this sounds familiar
Most ecommerce operators know this pressure. Revenue's growing but margins aren't. The team's expanding but productivity per head is dropping. You're working harder but it doesn't feel like you're getting anywhere.
The instinct is to fix it by optimising what's there - better processes, clearer KPIs, another hire to solve the bottleneck. Sometimes that works. Often, it just makes the machine more complex.
Jade's approach was more surgical: question whether the model itself still makes sense. Not "can we do this more efficiently" but "should we be doing this at all."
Scaling back from 30 to 5 sounds dramatic. But when the alternative is continuing to run a business that's burning you out while technically succeeding, it starts to look like the only sensible option.
This article is part of our Open Tabs series, where we talk to founders about the realities of running an ecommerce business day to day. Watch the full episode with Jade from Little Lies here.
