The Founder

Hi, I’m Michelle Lavigne.

Before Less & Lavish ever existed, I spent much of my life searching for what it truly meant to feel healthy, beautiful, and well.

Like many women, I spent years believing beauty was something you had to work relentlessly for.

In my twenties, I immersed myself deeply in fitness culture. I trained constantly, experimented with countless approaches to health, tried restrictive diets, followed wellness trends, and spent years believing the answer to feeling my best was always hidden somewhere in doing more.

For a long time, I genuinely believed that if I could perfect every external variable, I could perfect how I felt internally.

Around the same time, I had the privilege of traveling extensively and living in different parts of the world. But it was my time in Italy that left one of the deepest impressions on me.

I found myself drawn to a culture that viewed life completely differently than the world I had become so accustomed to. Meals were unhurried and meant to be shared. People gathered often and leisure wasn’t seen as laziness, it was a way of life.

Beauty seemed less performative and far more natural. There was an appreciation for presence, community, and enjoyment that quietly stayed with me long after I returned home. At the time, I didn’t fully understand how much those experiences would eventually shape my philosophy.

Then I became a mother.

When I had my first son, life felt beautiful in many ways. I had always dreamed of becoming a mother, and stepping into that role felt incredibly natural to me.

But shortly after, I found out I was pregnant with twins. Almost overnight, life became far more demanding than anything I had ever known.

I began experiencing chronic stress in a way I had never understood before.

After my twins were born, I found myself navigating postpartum depression, anxiety, exhaustion, and the overwhelming feeling that no matter how hard I worked, I was constantly falling behind.

And it forced me to confront something I had spent years misunderstanding. I had spent so much of my life believing health was something you built by pushing harder, by optimizing more.

But I slowly began realizing the body cannot truly thrive when it is constantly under stress. I began noticing that when I slept better, I looked better. When I felt calmer, my body functioned better. When life felt slower, I felt healthier. I found myself intentionally creating calmer spaces around me. Curating music that made the home feel peaceful, spending longer days outdoors with my children, and slowly learning how deeply the body responds when life begins to feel softer.

I stopped believing beauty came from doing more. And I started understanding that the body performs best when it feels safe. And it was that realization that changed everything for me. I started spending longer days at the lake with the kids.

It changed how I approached health, how I viewed modern wellness culture, and eventually how I understood beauty itself.

Less & Lavish began with a simple desire to create luxury haircare made with clean and natural ingredients that I could trust for my family.

But over time, it evolved into something much more personal. Today, this brand represents everything I have come to believe. That beauty does not come from endless routines and that REAL health, cannot be forced.

I no longer believe women need more products, more pressure, or increasingly complicated routines in order to feel their best. I believe true beauty begins when we create the internal conditions that allow the body to function the way it was designed to.

More rest. Less stress. Better nourishment. More time outdoors. Slower mornings. Long conversations. Good food shared with people we love.

Moments of leisure that remind us life is precious, and that perhaps we were never meant to move through it in a constant state of survival.

Less & Lavish exists because I believe modern life has become far too loud. And perhaps the most luxurious thing we can give ourselves now…

is peace.

Thank you for being here.

With love and a little luxury,

Michelle