Why not just give it a try?
That’s how one might describe Zaffrin’s mantra. And from our hour-long conversation, you realise it’s not just fluff.
She started a blog about honey simply because she loves honey. Never mind that only 2 people are going to read it: you and your mom (as Zaffrin astutely points out). We so often try to backfill the logic of why we want to do something, or need to do something, that we miss out on the ‘trying’ and the ‘liking’.
Five Dot Botanics, a minimalist plant-based skincare brand, sprung from ideas jotted down in a notebook, and from that very same mantra. Zaffrin launched Five Dot whilst she was on maternity leave from her day job as a media lawyer—coming into the beauty space as an ‘outsider’ and challenging the norms of the beauty industry. Each Five Dot product has only five natural ingredients.
Our chat brings us to what she’s learnt from beekeeping, parenting three children, and gardening. We talk about owning your story, about discipline and compromise, and about what matters the most. We contemplate how learnings from the Five Dot side hustle have cross-pollinated into the way she approaches her day job.
And we also marvel (and laugh) about that one time in her 20s when she took multiple trains across China to turn up at Shaolin to learn kung-fu. True story! There was no kung-fu involved, but she did stay there for a bit, and slept on the equivalent of a plank in a guest house at the top of a hill.
The bottomline: We may not be great gardeners, or successful gardeners. But each of us is a gardener of kinds. Keep trying stuff, even if they don’t work out. We may just enjoy the flowers along the way.
Follow Zaffrin on Instagram, and visit Five Dot Botanics' website here and Instagram here.
Listen to Zaffrin's episode on our Podcast here.