You can spend thirteen years building something, and weather can take half of it in one afternoon.

Count what the storm took.

In September 2022, Hurricane Ian came through Southwest Florida — my home, and the only home the company has ever had. When we could finally assess the damage, the math was brutal: four of our ten stores were damaged, representing roughly 40% of our brick-and-mortar sales at the time (those are our own figures, stated publicly then and since).

The worst of it was Sanibel Island. Our flagship there wasn’t damaged — it was destroyed. The causeway itself was broken. There was no version of “open next month.”

Triage like a nurse.

Fifteen years of nursing turned out to be hurricane training. In an emergency you don’t treat everything at once — you triage. People first. Then the stores that could reopen quickly. Then the long-term patient: Sanibel.

We stabilized what we could and made an unfashionable decision about the rest: we would rebuild, even though rebuilding would take years, and even though we were a small public company that would have to report every painful number along the way.

Tell the story while it hurts.

Within months, I was telling the story out loud. Retail expert Bob Phibbs gave a full episode of The Retail Doctor podcast to it — episode 801. The title he chose says everything about how it felt:

Retail has no time for disaster.

I told it again on From the Corner Office, in an episode called “Soap, Suds and Surviving Hurricane Ian”, and the Business Observer covered the recovery that November. I’m glad I didn’t wait for a tidy ending. The raw version helped other Florida retailers in the same flood line — and honestly, telling it helped us too.

Reopen the doors.

The rebuild took more than three years. On January 31, 2026, our Sanibel store reopened. I won’t pretend the date is just a line item — for everyone who packed sandbags, filed claims, and held the team together, it’s the line item.

The comeback shows up in the filings, too. Our fiscal 2025 results release (March 31, 2026) reported $12.3 million in revenue, e-commerce up 15%, wholesale up 30%, and net loss cut by 25% — the company’s audited, publicly filed numbers, reported while we were still paying for the storm. That chapter is part of the public-company story.

Rebuild more than buildings.

The hardest part of a three-year rebuild isn’t construction — it’s keeping a team’s faith through it. The six undamaged stores carried the company while the four hurt ones healed, and the people in them carried each other.

Southwest Florida is not an abstraction to us. It’s where I was born, where I nursed, and where our first customers lived. When the Business Observer wrote about our recovery that November, the story wasn’t really about a soap company — it was about a region refusing to stay knocked down.

Today the company stands at 13 Florida stores (the company’s count) — more than we had the day before the storm. That isn’t luck. That’s a decision, made daily, for more than three years.

Keep what the storm taught.

Three lessons I’d hand any founder before their own disaster, whatever form it takes. Take care of your people first — they are the company; the drywall is not. Tell the truth in public, early — your customers, your landlords, and in our case our shareholders can handle bad news better than silence. And decide what you’re rebuilding for — we rebuilt Sanibel because the mission that started in 300 square feet doesn’t abandon a community that’s hurting. That’s the whole point of it.

When citybiz later asked what carried the company, my first word was “resilience.” Ian is the reason it came first.

If your business is staring at its own version of the storm, reach out — I’ll tell you the unpolished version too.

— Deanna