u/Stunning-Initial9542

Single mom. Two boys. Running a business. Active court case. School Pickups. Client management. All of it at the same time.

Some days I wake up and genuinely don’t know how I’m going to get through the next 24 hours. Not in a dramatic way. Just in a this is a lot and no one is coming to save me kind of way.

I started my business because I believed what I was building deserved a seat at the table. We’ve grown consistently year over year and I’m proud of that. But the behind-the-scenes? It’s relentless.

Being the first and last call for everything.
What keeps me going is my boys. And honestly the vision. I can see exactly where this is going and I refuse to let the hard days win.

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes want to put it all down and just breathe.

To every woman doing this building something real while holding everything else together, how do you keep going? What’s your anchor?

I run a made-to-order fashion brand doing ~$175K/year. Built it from scratch, profitable, growing. Never received funding. Everything from my savings. And right now chargebacks are threatening to shut the whole thing down.

Here’s what most people don’t tell you about chargebacks as a small business:

It’s not just the money. When your chargeback ratio crosses a threshold, your payment processor flags you. I use Shopify. Too many flags and they close your merchant account. No merchant account means you literally cannot accept payments. Business over, not because your product is bad, but because a handful of customers discovered they could dispute a charge and get free merchandise.

Made-to-order makes it worse. My pieces are custom. By the time someone files a chargeback, the garment has already been produced to their measurements, shipped, and received. I’ve seen people wear the item and still dispute the charge. There’s no inventory to restock. That’s pure loss every single time.

The dispute process is stacked against small businesses. You submit evidence, you fight it, and half the time the bank sides with the cardholder anyway regardless of proof. It takes hours of your time per case. Hours I don’t have.
I’m now having to rethink my entire payment structure: deposits, contracts, everything!! just to protect myself from bad actors.

Has anyone navigated this? What actually worked ? Stripe, a different processor, contracts, anything?

Who’s going to watch Senegal Vs France?