It started with a canceled contract — and a brand new couch.
Rachel Kelly had just accepted her first full-time job after years of freelancing. She’d signed the offer, celebrated with champagne, and ordered a couch, ready to step into her new “grown-up” life.
A week before the job began, she got the call: They’d changed their minds.
“It was like a record scratch,” she told me. “But it was also this weird gift — I had to decide what to do next.”
That “next” would become Make Lemonade, a Toronto-based coworking space built for women entrepreneurs — and one of the city’s most vibrant creative communities.
But her story didn’t stop there.
🍋 Making Lemonade (Literally)
“I wanted to create something that didn’t exist,” Rachel said. “A space that felt alive — full of color, creativity, and connection.”
She was just in her twenties when she opened Make Lemonade. The space quickly filled with freelancers, artists, and women in business who were craving more than coffee-shop isolation.
For a while, it was magic.
Then, like so many stories, came 2020.
The pandemic hit. The coworking world went silent.
“I remember thinking, ‘Okay, we’ll pivot online for a few weeks,’” Rachel said. “But then it stretched into months, and I was sitting at my laptop again — the exact thing I’d wanted to get away from.”
By the time she closed the physical space, she’d built a thriving online community — but her heart wasn’t in it anymore.
“I realized I was doing what I thought I should do, not what I wanted.”
From Coworking to Floristry: A New Kind of Creative Life
One night, she came across an article about a woman who’d left her banking job to become a florist. Something clicked.
Soon she was taking workshops, visiting flower markets at dawn, and freelancing in floral design.
“I thought, ‘This is it — this is what I’ve been craving,’” she told me.
It wasn’t an easy transition. She kept her online community running for a year while learning floristry on the side, gradually closing one chapter as the next began to bloom.
Now, years later, her days look completely different: early mornings, buckets of color, the quiet focus of arranging something beautiful by hand.
“It’s hard work,” she said. “It’s physical, it’s messy, it’s imperfect. But it’s real.”
And for the first time in years, she feels creative again.
Redefining Success
Rachel’s story isn’t just about business pivots — it’s about emotional reinvention.
When I asked what success means to her now, she paused.
“Success is loving who I am, what I do, and how I do it.”
It’s a definition that shifts with her — from running a coworking space to creating wedding arrangements to painting on canvas again.
“For so long I said I wasn’t an artist,” she admitted. “Now I know I’ve been one all along.”
Her art is no longer just about florals or community — it’s about living creatively, on her own terms.
The Lesson in the Lemonade
Rachel’s courage comes from tuning into her intuition, honoring discomfort, and listening to the quiet voice that says, this isn’t working anymore.
That’s the magic of her story — she keeps creating beauty out of uncertainty. Again and again.
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