Writing in Someone Else's Voice

Venture in Play — Case 3
A Racine Story

This case finds Romane about eleven months into building Racine. She has paying customers, a working supply chain — and an offer coming that is generous, reasonable, and wrong.

It's about a specific kind of difficulty: not a bad decision, not an obvious one, but the kind that only becomes visible when you measure it against what you came to build.

As you read, notice the moments when you know something Romane doesn't yet — and the moments when she knows something she can't yet say.

Part One — The Call to Kostas

She called him on a Saturday morning in December, standing at the window with the kind of flat London sky that gave nothing away.

She had been drafting the call in her head for three days. Not rehearsing — she rarely rehearsed conversations. Circling the question, finding the right entry point, the way she had once circled a pitch until she understood where it was broken. The question she needed to ask Kostas was not the one she had written in the notebook. The notebook question — Sourcing business or brand? Can't be both for long — was a diagnostic. Kostas did not need a diagnostic. He needed to hear what she had found and give her something she could not find alone.

He answered on the third ring, as he always did, as though he had been expecting the call.

She described the formulator clients — Priya still, and the eleven others who had come after her over the months since, and the pattern that had hardened across all of them. They came for provenance, for the documentation, for the ability to name ingredients honestly on a label. They were not coming for Nikos's family or Daphne's distillery. They were coming for the sourcing infrastructure Romane had built around those things. She described what she had read on Priya's brand website — the mastic referenced but Nikos absent, the story absorbed and the source anonymous.

Kostas listened without interrupting, which was usual, and asked nothing at all, which was not.

You have built something real, he said, when she finished.

I have built the wrong thing.

A pause, though not a surprised one — very little surprised him. You have built the right thing in the wrong direction, he said. The formulator route was always going to tell you something. Now it has told you.

It told me I'm a supply chain.

It told you that people will pay for what you know how to do. That is not nothing. Another pause. The question is whether you want to be paid for the thing you came to do, or the thing you have discovered you can do.

She had known, in the three days of circling, that this was the question. Hearing it stated plainly from two thousand miles away made it heavier rather than lighter.

There is a formulator, she said. In Bristol. She has built something closer to what I had in mind. Brand, not intermediary. She sources well but not from the producers I have access to. We have talked three times — I have been managing the conversation carefully.

How carefully?

Carefully enough that she does not yet know what I am actually thinking about.

And what are you thinking about?

Romane looked at the flat sky. I am thinking that she might be the way through. A partnership of some kind. Her brand, my producers. Or something like that.

Kostas was quiet for a moment. What does she want?

I don't know yet. I haven't asked.

Then ask, he said. Everything else is theory.

Part Two — Margot

Her name was Margot Villeneuve. She had founded Sloe four years earlier from a kitchen in Clifton, with a background in cosmetic formulation and a particular aesthetic — unhurried, botanical, referencing the English countryside in the way that good perfumers referenced landscape without naming it. She had four SKUs and a waiting list for two of them. Her ingredient sourcing was thoughtful and her labelling was honest and she had, in Romane's assessment, built almost exactly the kind of brand that Racine's producers deserved to be inside.

Romane had found her through a supplier directory and spent two weeks reading everything Sloe had published before making contact. The first conversation had been exploratory on both sides — two people who had been cautious long enough to respect caution in another person. The second had been more specific. By the third, the shape of something was becoming visible.

The offer Margot put on the table was generous by any reasonable measure. Sloe would source exclusively from Racine's producer network for three of its four product lines. Romane would supply ingredients with full traceability documentation and producer profiles. Sloe's packaging would carry ingredient origin information — not the producers' names, Margot explained, because the brand architecture was her own and she needed to control the voice — but geographic and method detail that was more than most brands offered. A two-year exclusive arrangement. A pricing structure that represented a meaningful step up from what Romane's formulator clients were currently paying.

And, behind all of it, the term that would take the most work: because Sloe put finished products into people's hands, it was answerable for their safety in a way a supplier never was — a safety file behind every product, signed off by a qualified assessor, with certificates of analysis for each ingredient and an allergen declaration for every essential oil in the formula, held current as the batches changed. Romane's traceability documents were a good start on it. They were not the file. What Racine would need to supply, Margot said, was not only the story of an ingredient but the documented proof of what was in it — the version an assessor could put a name to.

Margot laid it out carefully and without theatre, in the way of someone who had negotiated before and had learned that clarity was kinder than strategy.

I think this could be very good for both of us, she said. You get scale and stability. We get sourcing that means something.

Romane said that she would think about it carefully, which was true, and that it was a strong proposal, which was also true, and which told Margot almost nothing about what she was actually thinking.

What she was actually thinking was that she had spent eleven months building toward exactly this moment and that the moment felt wrong in a way she could not yet name precisely enough to say out loud.

She drove back to London in the early evening, the motorway unremarkable, her mind running the agreement forward in time. Two years of Sloe's scale. Stability she did not currently have. Real income. Her producers valued and well paid. The story told — partially, through Margot's editorial voice rather than Romane's own, but told.

She stopped for a charge outside Swindon and sat in the car for a few minutes after paying, not ready to be moving again.

The story told in Margot's voice. The producers known to Margot but not to the person who opened the bottle. The safety file — the proof a shipped product needed to exist at all — compiled and kept in Sloe's name, one more record of Racine's ingredients that Racine would not hold.

And underneath that, a smaller thing that unsettled her more than it should have. The file wanted the opposite of what she sold. She sold wild sage off one slope, a distillery running within hours of the cut. But a wild-harvest oil shifted from batch to batch, and the small producers she had built the whole idea around did not send allergen declarations with their invoices. The documentation she had built was made to earn a customer's trust. It was not the documentation that proved a product safe to a regulator — and those were not the same document.

The agreement exclusive, which meant Racine's network was Sloe's network for two years, which meant that the thing Romane had built was tethered to someone else's vision of what it was for.

She started the car and drove.

Part Three — Claire and Kostas

She told Claire on a Sunday, over a video call Romane had been putting off for two weeks. Claire was in Cambridge, in the study Romane had seen in the background of every call since before Racine existed, with its one good lamp and its settled disorder of papers and its permanent suggestion of serious work being done nearby.

She described the Margot offer in the same order Margot had laid it out — exclusivity, documentation, packaging, term, pricing, and the safety file behind all of it. Claire listened without saying anything, already running the numbers.

This is exactly what I would have designed for you, she said, when Romane finished. Not unkindly. With the warmth of someone who was also, privately, relieved.

I know, Romane said.

Scale and stability at this stage are not a compromise. They are the thing that makes everything else possible. You can build toward the brand from inside a working business rather than from outside one.

I know that argument.

Romane. A pause — the one she used when she wanted to say something direct and land it gently. You have been living on belief for eleven months. This is a floor. You build from the floor.

She called Kostas that evening. He was less measured.

She wants your network, he said.

She wants to work with my network. There is a difference.

Is there?

Yes. A beat. I think.

What does the agreement say about exclusivity?

That Racine's producer relationships are exclusive to Sloe for the duration.

So if I introduce you to my cousin's lavender farm in the Argolid — which I have been meaning to do for two months — that farm becomes Sloe's farm. Not Racine's farm. Not yours.

She had not thought about it precisely in those terms. She had thought about the producers she had, not the producers she had not yet found. Yes, she said. That is what it would mean.

Then she is not buying your ingredients, Kostas said. She is buying your future.

She was quiet. Outside the window, December in London continued to be December in London.

You are not wrong, she said finally.

I am often wrong, he said. But I know what it looks like when someone is trying to buy something the seller does not know they are selling.

Part Four — A Supplier in Thessaloniki

There was a memory she had not thought about for two years.

It had come from a city she had never visited — Thessaloniki, a name she had learned from an invoice, a name attached to a supplier who grew calendula and wild chamomile in the valleys north of the city and who had, for four months in the second year of the venture she had built with Cveta, been their most reliable source.

Cveta had managed that relationship. That had been the arrangement — Romane handled the customers, Cveta handled the producers. It had worked well enough for long enough that Romane had stopped thinking about it as a risk.

The meeting was a routine visit. A new product line, a quantity increase, a handshake on terms they had already agreed by email. Cveta had confirmed it twice. It was in both their calendars.

Romane learned later that it had conflicted with a friend's wedding in Skopje, that Cveta had assumed she would mention it and hadn't, that the supplier — a man named Alexandros, seventy years old, three generations of calendula in the same valley — had waited in his office for ninety minutes before calling Romane directly. That was the call. Not the apology call, not the explanation call — the call from Alexandros himself, precise and unhurried, saying that he had found another buyer and that if Romane wished to continue the arrangement there would be a revised price to reflect the inconvenience.

She remembered sitting very still at her desk in the flat she and Cveta had shared and understanding two things simultaneously. The first was that the price increase was the least of it. The second was that she had built the part of the business she could see and left the part she could not see entirely to someone else, and that this was not a structural problem. It was a trust problem. And the trust problem had been there, unexamined, for four months.

She had spent three weeks managing disappointed customers, explaining delays she did not fully understand herself, maintaining a composure she did not feel. Cveta had eventually visited Alexandros and returned the relationship to something functional. The five percent increase stayed — a risk premium, Alexandros had called it, and he was not wrong. The relationship between Romane and Cveta had returned to functional in the same way and at the same cost.

She had been glad to close the business.

What she remembered now, sitting with the Margot agreement on her kitchen table, was not the crisis. It was the four months before it — the period when everything had appeared to be working and the problem had already been there. She had been looking at her customers. She had not been looking at her producers. She had not been looking at Cveta.

More than a decade on, she was being asked to sign something that required her not to look at the producers again. Not because Margot was unreliable — she was, by every measure, the opposite. But because the agreement made the producers Margot's concern, not Romane's. And the thing Romane had learned, expensively and permanently, was that what she did not look at became a problem.

She closed the agreement document and sat for a moment in the quiet of the kitchen.

Then she opened her notebook.

Part Five — The Mission Statement

It was three sentences. She had written it six months earlier, in the notebook she had been carrying since November of the year before, on a Sunday evening when she had needed to understand what she was actually building.

Racine exists because the best things come from somewhere specific. We source ingredients at origin, from producers who have tended the same land for generations, and we bring those ingredients into products that carry their story — not as a label, not as a marketing claim, but as the actual reason the product is what it is. The customer who opens a Racine product should be able to close their eyes and smell where it came from.

She read it twice.

Then she read the Margot agreement again, from the beginning.

The disagreement between the two documents was not dramatic. It was the disagreement between Racine and Sloe — between whose name the story was told in, whose editorial voice shaped what the customer received, whose vision determined which producers mattered and which did not. The agreement did not ask her to abandon anything she believed. It asked her to make those beliefs available to someone else's project, under someone else's name, for two years.

She had believed, when she drove back from Bristol, that the wrongness she had felt was about control. Sitting with it now she understood it more precisely. It was not about control. It was about authorship. She had left Mercer Braun to write something in her own voice. The Margot agreement was an offer to ghostwrite for a brand she respected.

Ghostwriting for a brand you respected was not a small thing. It was, in many ways, a reasonable professional life.

It was not what she had come to do.

She made a cup of tea and stood at the window for a few minutes, watching the street below. Then she sat back down and found Margot's number in her phone and stared at it for a moment.

→ Use the Mission Statement Builder — three questions, fifteen minutes, worth doing before the decision ahead.

What This Case Is About

Romane does not win this case. She does not lose it. She does something harder: she says the thing she had been avoiding saying, to the person most affected by it, without the cover of having resolved it first. That is not courage in the dramatic sense. It is a specific skill — the ability to name an unfinished truth rather than wait for it to become a finished one. Most founders never develop it. They wait until the thing is resolved, or until the relationship has deteriorated enough that honesty costs less than it would have earlier.

The formulator route had been a discovery. Not a mistake and not a detour — it was always going to tell her something, as Kostas had said, and it had. It had shown her what people would pay for and what they would not quite pay for. It had shown her the distance between the business she could build and the business she had come to build. That distance is not always navigable. Sometimes the thing that is fundable is not the thing that is meaningful, and the founder's task is to find the version where both are true, or to decide which one she can live with.

Romane's mission statement was not a business document, and that is why it worked. She had written it on a Sunday evening with no audience in mind, which meant it had no reason to flatter the thing she was building. Held against the Margot agreement, it did not argue. It simply showed her the shape of what she had said she wanted next to the shape of what she was being offered, and let the difference speak.

The Cveta memory arrived not as a warning but as a shape she recognised. Dependency is not always forced. Sometimes it is offered generously, in good faith, by someone who cannot see what you would be giving up because they do not know what you came to build. The risk in the Margot agreement was never unreliability. It was the slow replacement of Romane's authorship with someone else's, one reasonable compromise at a time.

The hardest founders' conversations are not with adversaries. They are with people you respect, in negotiations where the other side is acting in good faith, about the difference between what is on the table and what you came to the table for. Romane has had that conversation. What she does not know yet is whether Margot, sitting now with the weight of what was asked, will find a way to say yes.

Venture in Play is part of the Work in Play platform — narrative case studies for founders, leaders, and people with something to build.