Delusional Optimism

The world of a soap-making CEO in Bellingham

Story by Haley Ausbun | Photos by Lincoln Humphry

“I barely remember bad things that have happened,” Anne-Marie Faiola said. “Literally I gloss over them. I also have this unfailing belief that the world is good and that if I work hard enough I’ll land someplace in the positive.”

Faiola, 40, describes these personality traits as delusional optimism. She is the founder and CEO of Bramble Berry, a multimillion-dollar soap supplies and DIY hand craft provisions company from Bellingham with over 85 employees.

Faiola is a big deal in the soap-making world. She has won both Business Person of the Year and Business Woman of the Year for Washington state. Strawn said when she attends the Handcrafted Soap and Cosmetics Guild, Faiola is like a celebrity. People watch her and ask her to sign books.

A daily 20-minute meditation helps her maintain a constant happy composure, but she has always had a habit-based routine that regiments around 95 percent of her day. A former college professor once compared her to a boring automaton.

“What he didn’t understand is when your life is that regimented and you’re so focused all the time, you know exactly when you can be spontaneous without losing anything,” Faiola said. “Consistency is one of the keys in moving forward with any of your goals, in business or personal life.”

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Faiola’s Brands

“The delusional optimism can get super annoying for team members,” Faiola said. “I’ll be like ‘It’s gonna be fine,’ and they’ll be like ‘No, it’s definitely not gonna be fine.’ That’s why I’m so lucky to be surrounded by pragmatic people.”

Amber Strawn, chief marketing officer and 12-year Bramble Berry employee, said they often joke that Strawn is the dream killer, the one to turn down some of Faiola’s creative ideas. Their dynamic creates a balance of Faiola wanting to try new things, and Strawn looking for a practical way to execute those plans.

“Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but it always keeps us on our toes and trying new things, which keeps it interesting and fun,” Strawn said. “We call her the one up in the crow’s nest, telling us where the land is, and we are scurrying around the ship.”

The company’s needs sometimes supersede happiness, Strawn said.

“We kinda tape it down a little bit, just to stay on track. We are a business and need to hit our goals and keep everything moving along. We can’t just always do the things that make us happy,” Strawn said. “But that is infused in Bramble Berry from the ground up.”

Faiola thanks her team for the company’s success, and said it wouldn’t be where it is today without them. They make her job easy and fun.

Bramble Berry consumes Faiola’s creativity, until a few years ago when she realized her customers’ creative journeys didn’t start and end with bath and body products and she expanded on.

“All I know is that right now, exploring creativity in all these different areas is giving me a new life and new love for what I’m already an expert in — bath and body products. It’s a beautiful, virtuous, cycle of creativity spiraling upward to more creativity,” Faiola said.

Faiola’s office is perfectly designed. Carefully placed crystals and minimalist pastel decor sit on the waiting area table. It’s almost like a Pinterest board sprung to life. Strong notes of soap waft in from another room. In her office is a desk, a large meeting table, and a couch set. The bookshelf holds wine bottles and notebooks that read “Best Day Ever.”

Handmade calligraphy photos stick on the whiteboard wall. A quarterly meeting just took place where a team of 20 people decided on Faiola’s creative projects for the quarter, consisting of projects such as pasta or cheese making. She said this helps her inspire the company.

On the whiteboard, there are five profiles. They are customer personas, a summarization of Bramble Berry’s audience; who is buying and what they want to buy. Their names are Lauren, Jennifer, Brooklyn, Garrett and Carol.

“You make more money as you get older, usually,” Faiola said when asked if Bramble Berry’s customer personas differ in economic range.

Faiola’s initials are displayed throughout her office. The letters are arranged like a company-crafted logo.

Faiola is herself many brands. Come Make With Me, “Soap Queen TV” and her Soap Queen blog are all sub-brands of Bramble Berry, where Faiola showcases her creative endeavors. Best Day Ever is her lifestyle brand, which started after she wrote a book of tips for leading a happy lifestyle.

Faiola said inspiration for this lifestyle brand was reading 52 books a year. She realized 10 years ago a pattern of daily habits to be successful and happy that was being expressed in these books. In Faiola’s Soap Queen blog she began to write out these thoughts and, eventually, turned them into the book “Live Your Best Day Ever: Thirty-Five Strategies for Daily Success.”

When the book came out, she felt panic, insecurity and doubt.

“I realized ‘Oh my god, who am I to write a book?’” Faiola said.

Reaction to the book reassured her. She now sells the Best Day Ever bottles of wine and notebooks that display in her office.

Faiola’s philosophies

As an entrepreneur, Faiola said, you have to do what others won’t do to get what others won’t have.

“No one loves your baby like you do,” she said.

Faiola also believes that happiness is a choice. She said there are little things you can do each day, such as getting a good night’s rest, eating right and exercising will allow you to feel joy every day.

“When you have this habit-based lifestyle, it’s easier to have room for happiness. It helps keep all the other needs met,” Faiola said.

Everyone has bad days but the lows are what make the highs approachable, she said. You need to figure out what made that day disappointing, turn inwards and ask yourself, what happened? For Faiola, just acknowledging why she’s upset takes the sting out of the emotion.

A lot of bad days are about someone else reacting to you, Faiola said. You need to figure out it’s not about you, it’s them.

“For example, someone took offense to something I said. They were so angry they cried about it. But the thing I said wasn’t that interesting or bad,” Faiola said. “I had to dig deep, ‘Tell my why this offended you? What’s your history with that word?’ It turns out this was old stuff I just triggered. It wasn’t about me, it was about them.”

Faiola said it’s also hard in these instances to not hold other people’s drama.

“I want everybody to like me,” Faiola said.

Faiola’s friends

Faiola’s friends outside work credit her with bringing fun and positivity to their lives.

“She has a tight schedule, but she packs it in with friends around all the corners of her life. I’ve never felt overlooked,” said Lisa McShane, a political consultant and Faiola’s friend of 13 years.

Faiola is a force of nature, McShane said. Along with her high energy, intelligence and devotion to her loved ones’ well-being, Faiola is relentlessly curious.

Lydia Bennett, commercial real estate consultant, broker, and another longtime friend of Faiola’s, said she’s never said anything negative about anyone or anything.

Both Bennett and McShane talk to Faiola about local and national politics, exercise, and hang out over glasses of wine.

Typically, when Faiola wants to spend time with friends, she suggests a hike or run, hardly ever a lunch. In one of Faiola’s Soap Queen blog posts, she recalled deciding to let go of a friendship where they often sat around and ate Doritos and Oreos while watching “90210.”

“If you don’t want to be turned into the habit, quit hanging out with the person who enables the habit,” Faiola’s post reads. “Go outside, take the sweatpants off and make some new friends.”

And Faiola did just that. Her friends are generally financially successful, empowered women who engage in active hangouts and well-informed discussions.

“We like to be around other people like us,” Bennett said.

Faiola’s family

Faiola grew up in Chehalis, Washington, her first home in the suburbs with a community pool. They moved to an 18-acre lot on the outskirts of town when she was 13 years old. Her father, Richard Faiola, describes a home surrounded by woods and deer, the vast-acre land they owned decorated by her mother’s landscaping projects. Friends often came over for pizza and she took lessons and practiced on their baby grand piano.

“Anne-Marie didn’t struggle economically as a kid, but she might like to paint herself that way,” Richard Faiola said. “She wasn’t spoiled, we didn’t hand her anything. We gave her a car, but not much else.”

Anne-Marie Faiola began making soap at 14, and as a teenager without internet, Faiola’s first five batches of soap were failures. She would get tallow, or animal fat, from the butchers in Lewis County, to make soap.

“What’s really funny is I’m vegetarian,” Faiola said.

After high school graduation, Anne-Marie Faiola planned to pursue a career in criminal justice, not soap. Contact lenses prevented her from the dream of being an FBI agent, but that didn’t stop her from studying psychology with an emphasis in criminal justice at Saint Martin’s University. She sold soap on the side.

Anne-Marie Faiola then worked as a correctional officer at a medium-security men’s prison. She co-taught anger management and victim awareness classes. She cried in front of prisoners during the victim awareness class, and remembers they responded with compassion.

But transferring to a minimum-security prison is where she struggled. Inmates often broke her heart, she said, returning to the 90-day facility after release. Her father said Anne-Marie Faiola was too fair-natured, at one point alone in a kitchen full of knives with an inmate. At least two people snuck out on her, Richard Faiola said.

“I came home one day and realized the tidal wave of hopelessness and despair in the prison system wasn’t going to be solved by me,” Anne-Marie Faiola said.

So she quit her job and sold $1000 of soap her first weekend at the Mount Vernon Tulip Festival. Anne-Marie Faiola said she wanted to inspire and give a viable option others to leave jobs that made them unhappy.

“She took a $60,000 BA in criminal justice and announced, ‘Daddy, I’m going to make soap,’” Richard Faiola said.

About six weeks after quitting her job, Anne-Marie Faiola decided to sell soap supplies, and Bramble Berry began.

“The bigger calling was to be a partner with people on their creative journeys,” Faiola said.

Anne-Marie Faiola largely brushes off setbacks, her father said. But some setbacks have changed her.

Faiola divorced at 27, and she said this very public failure was a pivotal moment for her. Because Washington state has community property laws, Faiola said she had to fight to keep her business — all she had once her ex-husband got their house.

“I was homeless. I had to put [my 20 employees] needs above my need to collapse into a little hole and be so embarrassed I would never come out. I realized this business was bigger than me now,” Faiola said.

As she couch-surfed between friends, Faiola never missed a day of work.

“I didn’t feel happy. The world was gray dammit. That felt like a failure,” Faiola said. “I just continued plodding along.”

Today, Faiola has a home she is delighted to be in, somewhere she doesn’t need to escape from. She has craft stations throughout the house, which sometimes drives her husband insane.

Faiola’s husband, Chris Renoud, is an engineer with his own firm, traveling often for work. Their children, ages 4 and 6, are fun and energetic.

“They’re genuinely fun. I was really scared about having kids because I love my career so much, but now I realize that was a silly worry,” Faiola said.

Faiola said their children take after her entrepreneurial spirit.

“My son sells bath fizzies at the farmers market, and he made $500 in 2017. He did some private orders too. He’s 6 years old and pays his sister to work in the stand for him,” Faiola said.

Faiola’s creativity, endurance, happiness and structured lifestyle shape every facet of her life. Her philosophy to choose happiness is the kind of targeted idealism that allowed her to create the company, family and social life she has today.

“I think in order to be an entrepreneur, you have to have this sheer sense that the world is conspiring to do good for you. Period,” she said.