I’ve started and stopped this idea more times than I’d like to admit.
For the past few years, somewhere around the start of every September, I’ve found myself sketching out the same idea: a small autumn brand, coffee, candles, something for the dog. I’d get a few weeks into it, life would get loud again, and it would stop again. This year, I picked it back up. Here’s why.
Artie
The actual reason this became real, rather than another abandoned September idea, is Artie.
In 2025, Artie survived something that very easily could have killed him. He’s not a rescue dog, he was always mine, but what happened to him, and what it took for him to recover, changed something in how I think about time. Slow mornings stopped being a nice idea and started being something I actually protect. Paying attention to small good days stopped being a platitude.
The Fall Company started as “a brand about autumn” and became “a brand about the things Artie taught me without meaning to.” Coffee, slowness, and a dog who came back from something he shouldn’t have.
Why coffee, why autumn, why now
Autumn was never a marketing choice. It’s the season I have always paid the most attention to, feeling a magical connection to it.
It's the season in which I was born, and it's a time of year that I associate with more many happy memories than I can count. One of those memories is watching Halloweentown every year as a kid, sitting in front of my vintage TV-VCR combo for hours.
I love the giddy feeling of putting up the autumn decorations, snuggling up under a warm blanket, and making plans for Halloween.
There's the really special golden light, the first cold mornings and the kind of coffee that only tastes right once the weather turns. Building a brand around a season I already loved meant that I wasn’t inventing an aesthetic; I was finally giving shape to one that I already lived in.
Coffee was the obvious first product choice for me because it's the one drink that genuinely brings me a lot of joy. The Brighton Coffee Festival is a fixture in my calendar, and sampling new varieties of coffee from around the world is one of my hobbies. I love coffee culture and enjoy spending time in cafés, as well as improving my own barista skills on my home coffee bar. So, yes, choosing coffee as my first product was the most logical step I could have taken.
The part that matters most
Ten percent of every sale goes to dog welfare charities, and I mean welfare in the fullest sense, not just rescue, but the vet bills, the recovery time, and the prevention work that stops things like what happened to Artie from happening to other dogs in the first place. Each year, I’ll publish exactly where that money went. I think a promise like that should be checkable.
This is a side project, not my income, and I want to keep it that way for a while. It means I get to build this slowly, honestly, and without the pressure to make it bigger than it needs to be.
That’s my answer to “why now.” Not a perfect amount of free time, there’s no such thing, just Artie, a season I already adored, and a reason finally strong enough to make me stop starting this idea over every September and actually finish it.
Leslie x
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