Some of the most sustainable businesses aren’t built through urgency; they’re built through consistency, creativity, and a life that still feels like your own.

In this episode of She Wears the Pants, Ashley Deland is joined by Melissa Griffiths, founder of Bless This Mess, a food and lifestyle brand that grew from a simple family blog into a business reaching more than a million people each month.

Together, they unpack what it really takes for a high-growth woman to build a business that supports her household, evolves with her family, and stays deeply rooted in the heart of the work.

If you’re a woman who is building in the margins of real life - raising children, navigating transitions, holding a home, or growing something meaningful without wanting to lose yourself in the process, this conversation will help you trust slower growth, build with more sustainability, and honor the life your business is meant to support.

In this episode, you’ll learn how to:

• Build a business with consistency so your growth becomes sustainable over time
• Stay rooted in your real life so success does not come at the expense of what matters most
• Adapt to major industry shifts so you can pivot with clarity instead of fear
• Lean into community and human connection so your work stays relevant in an AI-driven world
• Think differently about financial freedom so your business can support long-term family stability
• Protect your sense of self while growing publicly so visibility does not disconnect you from who you are

By the end, you’ll walk away with a more grounded understanding of what lasting growth can look like and why the businesses that endure are often built slowly, intentionally, and in deep alignment with the life behind them.

Meet Melissa

Melissa Griffiths is the founder of Bless This Mess, a food and lifestyle brand rooted in simple cooking, slow living, and family life. Over the past fifteen years, she has grown her business into a trusted platform reaching more than a million people each month, while raising five children and building a life-centered business through seasons of change, motherhood, and reinvention.

Website: https://www.blessthismessplease.com

Instagram: @blessthismessblog

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Ashley Deland:

Welcome back to She Wears the Pants — the place where high-growth women come to build companies that match their calling.

I’m your host, Ashley Deland.

Today’s guest is someone who built a business quietly, consistently, and in the margins of real life. I’m joined by Melissa Griffiths, the creator of Bless This Mess, a beloved food and lifestyle brand rooted in simple cooking, slow living, and family life.

Melissa has been growing this business for more than fifteen years and now reaches over a million people a month, including an Instagram community of more than 135,000 followers. She’s a mother of five who built her business during nap times, at her kitchen table, and through seasons of constant change — moves, remodels, health challenges, and major life pivots.

What began as a way to share recipes with family became a business that reliably supported her household without ever losing the heart of the work.

Melissa, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.

Melissa Griffiths:

I’m really happy to be here, Ashley. Thanks for having me.

Ashley:

Tell us a little bit about you, your background, and how you got started in entrepreneurship.

Melissa:

I really think it’s always been inside of me. I was the little girl saying, “I could probably make dog biscuits and sell them at the farmer’s market,” or “I can wash your car.” I used to trade chores with my siblings for the better-paying jobs. They didn’t want to mow ditches in the Indiana heat, and I was like, “That’s ten dollars — I’ll take it.”

I’ve always loved the idea of building something. It’s looked different in different seasons. In our early married years, we were on-site apartment managers. I cleaned houses. I did all kinds of things.

But food came very naturally to me. I love food. I’m the opposite of the macro-counting crowd. I believe food is nourishment, yes — but it’s also celebration, gathering, memory, and in many ways the staff of life.

When I was a young mom, I had several kids very quickly, and like so many women back then, I had a little Blogspot blog because my family was spread all over the country. My sister was graduating college, my mom was back in the Midwest, and I was out West. So I was just sharing our life, our kids, and little family updates.

Over time, I started noticing women who were pulling away from that purely personal blog format and creating dedicated food sites. Women like Pioneer Woman and Pinch of Yum. I remember thinking, I could do an all-recipe site. I really like this.

I’m old enough in internet years that I used to manually create separate print pages because none of the recipe cards or plugins existed yet. I was literally handcrafting print-friendly pages in the beginning.

Ashley:

Did you expect back then that it would grow to this level?

Melissa:

I wanted it to. I always had that intention.

I had this sweet neighbor who shared a fence with me. We both had little girls around eighteen months old, and we would toss the girls over the fence to play together. I always called it my “money blog,” and I’m sure I talked her ear off about it.

So yes, I always wanted it to become a business. I don’t think I could have imagined exactly where it would go, but that hope was definitely there.

Ashley:

And when it finally started becoming something real, what changed for you?

Melissa:

It never really exploded. It was more of a slow burn.

It grew incrementally. In the beginning, I made enough money to buy birthday presents without putting them on someone else’s credit card. At that point, I was a stay-at-home mom. I didn’t have a traditional career. I had children.

Then it grew a little more, and I could help pay for family vacations, Christmas, and bigger expenses. Year over year, it often doubled. But when you’re starting at five thousand or ten thousand dollars, it still takes a long time to become meaningful income.

In very true small-business fashion, it took me about three to five years to make what I’d consider a normal full-time salary. Then it kept growing from there.

I was never the viral creator. I was never the overnight success story. But it eventually got to the point where my husband, who was already helping with a family business while also working a corporate job, was able to leave that job because it no longer made sense for both of us to be stretched so thin.

Ashley:

Looking back now, what do you think you were doing early on that helped that slow burn become real growth?

Melissa:

I think I was really good at using what was available.

At the time, Pinterest was working well. Facebook was working well. Email mattered. But I also think a huge part of it was consistency.

People still email me and ask, “How did you do it?” or “What would you tell someone starting out?” And I always answer. What I usually say is this: You have to do it, and then you have to keep doing it.

“Show up messy” was always my way. I had babies in between all of this. I was nursing. There were seasons where I absolutely did not produce the same amount of content my peers were producing. But I was still showing up in some form.

And then in the seasons where life was less intense, I would pour more into it. I’d write more posts, spend more time on it, and push harder because I had the capacity to.

What I didn’t do was sacrifice everything else in my life just to build the business. I think that’s part of why it grew more slowly — but I also think it’s part of why it lasted.

Ashley:

I think that’s such a testament to being a woman who built a successful company with wisdom, authenticity, and a very grounded head on her shoulders.

There’s this narrative in entrepreneurship that says success only comes when you put everything on the altar — your family, your health, your peace — and just sacrifice it all.

And you kind of did the opposite. You built around life instead of against it. I love that success followed you there.

What does the business look like now? Because the blogging world, social media, and the internet as a whole have changed dramatically. What are you seeing in your industry and in the way you now serve your audience?

Melissa:

A lot has changed.

Information-based sites like food blogs, home blogs, gardening blogs — all of those spaces that have historically produced free, useful content — have been hit really hard by AI.

Search used to work differently. If you had strong content, great SEO, the right keywords, proper alt text, and enough depth, you had the chance to rank. I was number one for “cornbread recipe” for years. And now if you search that, you’ll get an AI snippet, maybe Reddit, maybe some social, and then maybe later a real person’s article.

What’s painful is that those rich snippets were built on the backs of people like us. Bloggers have spent the last fifteen years creating the knowledge base that those systems now pull from.

So yes, I’ve been hit hard because I did very well with search. I understood SEO early, I worked on it carefully, and a lot of my traffic came from Google. That world has changed dramatically.

Now there’s a huge conversation happening around what comes next, how we pivot, and how we keep showing up.

And I think what’s going to matter more and more is a smaller, more loyal, more authentic audience built around a niche topic.

AI can talk all day about gardening. But someone actually growing a garden in your USDA zone is still going to give you better information. AI can talk all day about sourdough. But someone making sourdough in a real kitchen, with real weather, real kids, and real life happening around it, is going to help you troubleshoot in a far more useful way.

So I think the era of mass-produced information blogging is largely over. And now those of us who spent years learning how to do this have the opportunity to become more helpful in a more human way.

Ashley:

That’s such a major pivot to be in the middle of. What do you see as your next step now that AI is changing so much?

Melissa:

Honestly, I’m in the middle of figuring that out right now.

We also made a huge cross-country move six months ago, which completely shifted our life in the best possible way. I sent my homeschooled kids to public school. We moved. We changed a lot. So I’m looking at my life and work in a very different context now.

And I’m asking myself how I want to spend my time.

I think for me, that may look like building a smaller niche community where there is more collaboration and less of me just talking at the internet. I hope there will be more classes, more person-to-person connection, more real interaction.

Before we moved, I was teaching sourdough classes, kombucha, and canning in my home. I loved it. And I learned so much by being in a room with real people because they asked the best questions. I could see where my teaching had gaps. I could see what wasn’t fully landing.

So I think there’s something there for me — more human-to-human work, whether online or in person. I don’t know the exact shape yet, but I know I want to show up in a more human way.

And honestly, podcasts have been such a gift. I’ve done more in the last six months than I did in the six years before that because it feels so good to talk to a real person. I’m so happy to see your face and have an actual conversation.

Ashley:

I completely agree. One of my predictions with AI is that it’s only going to drive people back toward community, real-time relationships, in-person conversations, and deeper spaces of connection.

Entrepreneurship is already lonely. And when we sit at home clicking away all day, we can forget why we even started this work in the first place.

So I really do think people are going to lean back into community, live events, podcasts, and relationships because that’s where we remember why we do this and who we’re actually here to serve.

Melissa:

Yes, exactly. There’s so much value in being in relationship with your audience because that’s how you actually understand them and serve them better.

Instagram Stories created little pockets of that. Some people are finding it on TikTok. I have a friend who writes emails and then spends hours every week responding personally to people who reply. And I love that for her.

I really do think that’s where we’re heading — back to relationship, back to roots, back to the human part of why we started.

Ashley:

Exactly. It really is like a pendulum.

Melissa:

It is. We started in such a personal, intimate era of blogging and online connection. Then it swung really far in the direction of “No one cares about your grandma, just give me the recipe.”

And now it’s swinging back, and people are saying, “Wait — was that recipe actually from your grandma?”

Ashley:

Exactly. It’s like black Converse. They were in, then out, and now they’re back again.

If we really look at patterns and history, they repeat. And I think you’re right — people are going to want to reconnect with where they came from, what matters, what feels real, and the deeper callings that were placed in them.

Melissa:

And I also think it’s creative. Entrepreneurship is deeply creative. Most of us start as creatives in some form. Then we figure out the marketing, the systems, the SEO, the email strategy — all the other parts.

But the creativity is what was always natural. And I think creative people are often very good at community because they care about that human side.

Ashley:

Yes, absolutely.

You mentioned earlier that your family recently moved, your kids are now in public school, and your husband — who had previously stepped away from traditional work — has re-entered the workforce in a new way. What does that season look like now?

Melissa:

It’s been such a big shift.

He has re-entered the workforce, and it’s actually been wonderful for us. I’d love to listen to some of your episodes on retirement because that whole subject felt very confusing to me as a female entrepreneur making strong money. I didn’t know what retirement planning was supposed to look like for me. I didn’t have a 401(k). I didn’t know if I should be doing the stock market or something else. I felt messy there.

So I leaned into real estate because it felt more tangible.

We ended up buying a large apartment complex here, and my husband is essentially the superintendent. He works there every day, and it has been such a good thing for our family.

When he first came home from traditional work, we really struggled. He grew up in a very traditional, patriarchal household, and I think when your identity and purpose are deeply tied to earning, it can be really disorienting to lose that role — especially as a man.

It was hard on him. It was hard on our family. We did a lot of therapy. He’s done a lot of growth. And what he came to realize is that he genuinely wanted work. He wanted purpose. So now this building is part of our retirement plan, and also part of his fulfillment.

It pays its mortgage now, and in fifteen years it may become a larger piece of our long-term wealth plan. We could sell it, or we could hold it and benefit from the income. But either way, it’s been a really good, maybe slightly unconventional, path for us.

And most of all, he has something that is his again. He likes fixing things. He’s an engineer. He’s mechanically minded. He likes the people. So it’s been really fun to watch him step into that.

Ashley:

That’s such a powerful reminder that there is no single business plan or lifestyle formula that fits every family.

There are seasons. There are pivots. There are evolutions. And sometimes those shifts are exactly what allow you to become the woman, entrepreneur, and family unit capable of your next level.

Melissa:

Exactly. And those hard years made this season possible.

Even though he’s working again, we still have the flexibility that entrepreneurship gave us. We can show up for our kids’ basketball games in the middle of the day. We can structure our life with more freedom. So yes, we work hard — but we also get to build around what matters.

Ashley:

Financial freedom is still such an underdeveloped conversation for women in business.

I see so many women treat financial literacy the same way they treat marketing — “I don’t really understand it, so I’ll avoid it.” And that’s part of why I do the work I do.

Women do not have to sit on the sidelines anymore. You can understand your finances. You can understand wealth building. You can understand how to structure your future and support your family.

Because the truth is, we’re not all going to have million-dollar years forever. Some businesses scale steadily, some don’t. The future is never guaranteed — so sometimes we have to intentionally create it.

Out of all of this, what do you think you’ve learned most about yourself and entrepreneurship?

Melissa:

That I really love people.

And also that the internet doesn’t know all of you.

I’ve had good boundaries over the years, so when comments come in that are harsh or biting, I can remind myself: They don’t know me. They’re seeing one version of me.

Growing up on the internet has honestly been a wild experience. It was a coming-of-age experience for me in some ways. I’ve been online for a long time, and being visible in that way has helped me grow into myself more honestly and maybe more quickly than I would have otherwise.

It taught me to be okay with the different versions of me.

Ashley:

That is so true.

I once had a mentor tell me, “You’re going to be a big deal, but I worry about how you’ll handle criticism,” because back then I was much softer. I didn’t yet have the emotional protection I have now.

Being visible is a real thing. You’re showing up from a place of service every day, and not everyone responds well to that. It’s a very real part of entrepreneurship.

I’m going to close with our signature She Wears the Pants question.

Looking back on your journey of wearing the pants, what message do you want to leave for future generations of women in business?

Melissa:

The world is your oyster.

This is the time. We have opportunities that our grandmothers did not have. We can have our own money, our own credit cards, our own businesses, our own choices — and we need to keep showing up for that.

Progress is never perfectly linear. Sometimes it feels like two steps forward, one step back. But we still have to be proactive in saying, This is my right. This is my life. This is my space to take up.

You have permission to take up space. And by doing that, you help preserve and extend the progress women before us worked so hard to build.

Ashley:

I absolutely love that.

Melissa, for the women who want to stay connected to you and learn more about your work, where can they find you?

Melissa:

If you need a recipe for dinner tonight, I have almost 2,000 on my site — so you can search something like “chicken noodle soup Bless This Mess Blog,” and that’ll usually get you to me faster.

And on social media, I’m @blessthismessblog. I especially love Instagram. If you want to follow along with my new, very cold life in Vermont, come find me there.

Ashley:

I love that. Melissa, thank you so much for sharing your insight, your wisdom, and your energy with us today.

Melissa:

Thanks for having me.

Ashley:

Thank you for tuning in to She Wears the Pants — the place where high-growth women come to build companies that match their calling.

If this episode moved you, challenged you, or gave language to something you’ve been carrying, send it to a woman you want to see rise.

And if you’re ready for deeper strategy, identity expansion, and high-level support, you can find me on Instagram at @ashleydeland.

Until next time — keep rising into the woman your calling requires.