Remi Founder Freck Beauty interview

We know how daunting it can be to start a new business, especially if you’re disrupting an industry or creating an entirely new one. When there is no path to follow, the biggest question is, where do I start? There is so much to do, but before you get ahead of yourself, let’s start at the beginning. To kick-start the process, and ease some of those first-time founder nerves, we’re asking successful entrepreneurs to share their stories in our new series, From Scratch. But this isn’t your typical day in the life profile. We’re getting into the nitty-gritty details—from writing a business plan (or not) to sourcing manufacturers and how much they pay themselves—we’re not holding back.

Photo: Courtesy of Freck Beauty

About Remi, Founder + CEO of Freck Beauty

Remi is a design-loving, music-obsessed business owner and cat mom to Enzo in Echo Park, Los Angeles. Having grown up in cold and rainy Seattle, Remi was always obsessed with freckles, at a time when it seemed like everyone was trying to get rid of theirs. She started her career as an interior designer, but the idea of a freckle cosmetic was always lingering in the back of her mind. After attending college for branding and marketing, the idea for Freck Beauty’s rule-breaking brand voice and design-forward packaging began to take shape.

She later moved to LA, and after a couple of career changes and attempts at starting her own business, Remi launched Freck Beauty in 2017 with a hero product, FRECK OG – the world’s first freckle cosmetic. Since then, alongside her business partner and COO Des Wilson, Remi has expanded the brand into both skincare and color cosmetics, creating bold, clean beauty products for anyone who cares about ingredients, respects the process, and doesn't care about the rules.

Take us back to the beginning—what was the lightbulb moment for your business?

My background is interior design, and I never thought I would be in beauty. The path to launching Freck Beauty was really formed from a lifelong obsession with freckles. I’ve always wanted to be able to put on freckles since I don’t have any of my own (even though everyone thought I was crazy since this was a time where people wanted to cover and hide their freckles!). 

If ever there was a lightbulb moment, it was when I met my first mentor who had decades of experience in cosmetic manufacturing. She was the first person to say “this is actually a really interesting idea,” and her support gave me the confidence to start trying to put the puzzle pieces together on how I would actually formulate a cosmetic.

Did you write a business plan? If yes, was it helpful? If no, what did you use instead? Why did you take that approach?

Hell no. I mean, I definitely tried because everyone told me to, but it was so daunting that I found myself just doing the steps before writing them down. Sometimes it’s best to just dive in. Even now with my business partner, Des, we prefer to organize with bullet points, cocktail napkins, voice memos, Google sheets, pretty much anything informal. We tend to spend our time executing rather than organizing; not ideal, but that shit’s real. 

How did you come up with the name Freck Beauty, and what are some of the things you considered during that process? What advice can you share?

All of our products have cheeky names, but Freck Beauty is obviously derived from “freckles.” Most people don’t know this, but I had a ton of name revisions from the Kickstarter days to now: Go Freck Yourself (yikes, so agro); Freck Yourself (still agro); Get Frecked (too confusing to brand); Freck (confusion around our hero product name); and, finally, Freck Beauty. Whenever friends or colleagues are running names by me I always ask, “Can you visualize it on a billboard?” I knew Freck Beauty was the right and final name when I thought about it on a billboard over Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park where I live. Simplicity is key, I think.

What were the immediate things you had to take care of to set up the business, and what would you recommend to new founders reading this?

I think it’s really easy to get wrapped up in the housekeeping of a business early on. While that’s important, it’s not the point, and anyone can set up the housekeeping. Really invest the time figuring out your WHY because it's nearly impossible to stay focused, unique, and positioned without it.

What research did you do for the brand beforehand, and can you explain how you found and compiled that research?

I wanted to manufacture a perfect freckle cosmetic for myself and my friends, but before I dove into Kickstarter, I decided to run a Google Survey. It was a minuscule sample size, but I was able to ask 500 beauty-loving strangers a couple of key yes-or-no questions in 2015 like, “Do you think freckles are desirable?” and, “Would you apply freckles if you could?” This really shaped the way I approached the brand, knowing that I wasn’t alone in wanting freckles. 

How did you find the manufacturer or production facility you use, and what advice do you have for other founders looking for a trustworthy manufacturer?

In the case of cosmetic manufacturing, date your labs. Super time consuming, but I would recommend meeting with all the small-run vendors you find from referrals (or Google if you don’t have referrals). Small production runs are barely profitable for labs, so you almost need to sell them on yourself and your concept, because they’re taking on a risk, too—hoping that doing small runs for you will lead to bigger runs. Go into your meetings as your best self, excited about your project, and talk to the lab like they are a potential investor.

How have you funded your business? What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs reading this?

The short story is that I raised a TINY round, bought back those investors after nine months, and didn’t take money again until a pre-seed round in 2019. It was a horrible initial experience. If you’re going to raise money, just make sure that you know and trust your early investors. After that, Des and I basically grew the business by using small private loans. It was ridiculously expensive, but it allowed us to retain equity as long as possible until we were really ready to fundraise.

Do you pay yourself, and if so, how did you know what to pay yourself?

Nada. Des and I both had multiple full-time jobs to pay ourselves (and any hiccups Freck faced) until about two years in. Not only was it not an option to pay ourselves, but we wanted to reinvest into the company by hiring the initial team and expanding our product line. Beyond the money though, I think it’s really important to keep a day job in the early days so you’re not putting too much pressure on the concept or yourself. Starting a business is hard AF without the added stress of having to also make rent every month. Plus, if you find the time to keep motivated after your day job, you know you’re really invested in your idea.

How big is your team now, and what has the hiring process been like? 

We have eight employees now and had just one 18 months ago, which has been a huge learning curve. I didn’t have hiring experience, but I did get to talk with interior designer Amber Lewis at Create & Cultivate Los Angeles and she gave some advice that I’ve never forgotten. I asked her, “When did you know you were ready to hire?” She said, “You just know, but when you’re there, put everything into training them. You’ll be working three times as hard, but you can’t expect someone to think like you if you don’t spend the time.” That’s the real truth.

What has been the biggest learning curve during the process of establishing a business? What mistakes have you made?

Without a doubt, the hardest part has been hiring, letting go, and trusting. In the past, we’ve hired people because we’ve been so overwhelmed and just needed someone. No matter how overwhelmed you are, it takes more time to train a position multiple times. Hold out for the right candidate who you fully believe in, who you’re excited to talk shop with, and who can teach YOU about their specialty. That’s where the most innovative ideas come from.

How did you promote your company? How did you get people to know who you are and create buzz? What challenges have you faced?

I almost completely gave up on Freck OG a year after launch because I couldn’t figure out how to get the product in front of people I knew would love it. I didn’t have the confidence to reach out to influencers and beauty bloggers at the time, and when I finally just bit the bullet everyone I spoke to was really curious about the product and open to receiving samples. I think just throw spaghetti until something sticks! And don’t be scared to try different marketing avenues until you find something that works for your brand. That being said, if you can find a CMO to be your business partner or co-founder early on, that’s a killer move that will only speed up your growth. 

For those who haven’t started a business (or are about to), what advice do you have? 

I love this question. I have a good friend who told me (after the Kickstarter failed and I was trying to figure out a way to market with my embarrassed tail between my legs) that I have “stick-to-itiveness.” That’s always stayed with me. Know that there are going to be so many ups and downs. Take it all in and feel it all. Looking back those are my favorite memories, and I’m so glad I and the team were able to overcome all the obstacles that we learned so much from.

What is your number one piece of financial advice for any new business owner and why?

It’s all about leverage. Keep as much equity as possible, for as long as you can.

If you could go back to the beginning with the knowledge you have now, what advice would you give yourself and why?

If I could go back, I’d ask myself to listen to and trust my voice and point of view more. Don’t worry about following what other people are doing in your industry. The best concepts are ones that no one has come up with yet. Secondly, you can’t do everything yourself. Find amazing, experienced partners who can fill your weaknesses and are ready to sweat it out with you. Des essentially took a percentage of nothing with the vision that we could grow Freck together.

As a co-founder, how have you developed a good working relationship with your business partner? What tips can you share?

Des and I have a really unique partnership in that we have basically no boundaries. We’re best friends, business partners, co-managers. I’m her son’s godmother, and she’s the first person I call to bitch about my ex or neighbors with. We have literally no secrets. Once I helped her get her Diva Cup out. Idk, it just works for us. But doing some serious soul searching before you decide on a partner is key. If you know you need separation from work and boundaries, do you.

Anything else you’d like to add?

In the early days, I thought it would be out of this world insane if Freck Beauty ever made it to Sephora as the world’s first freckle cosmetic. It’s been my absolute dream since day one. We’re launching online on March 2nd and in stores on April 9th, and it’s a pipe dream come true! It’s been a wild and wonderful ride of so much growth and development. If you can see it on a billboard (or on a Sephora shelf) keep it up, you’re onto something big.

MORE ON THE BLOG

Rebecca Minkoff Doesn’t Believe in Asking for Permission—and Neither Should You

“Really, the only person you need permission from is yourself. Not your parents. Not your friends. Not society.”

—Rebeca Minkoff, Co-Founder and Creative Director of Rebecca Minkoff

At Create & Cultivate’s Money Moves Summit, Rebecca Minkoff opened up about her slow-burn success, working hard and never giving up, and leading a company through tough times. In her new book, “Fearless: The New Rules for Unlocking Creativity, Courage, and Success,” she shares even more learnings from her decades-long career. Below is an excerpt from her new book in which she shares one of the most valuable career (and life) lessons she’s learned so far:

The first dress I ever designed for myself was for my bat mitzvah. A few years before, I had seen a polka-dot dress in a store window and became obsessed. It was just a simple A-line shift dress, but to me it was the coolest dress I had ever seen in my life. Even though I couldn’t touch it, in my mind, I knew it was made with the softest cotton I’d ever felt. The sleeves had just enough pouf to be stylish without feeling kooky or too kiddie. I knew it would land right above my knee if I ever had a chance to try it on. Like most kids, I begged my mom to buy it for me. And, unlike most moms, my mother said, “I’m not going to buy this for you, but I’ll buy you fabric and you can make it.” That was a real light bulb moment for me. I had been crafting and making cutesy, fun things like aprons and pot holders, and I’d been using puffy paint and sewing patches on my jean jackets, but this felt like a revelation. If I designed something fashionable, did that make me a fashion designer? That sounded really cool.

Asking my mom for things and having her turn me down was pretty much par for the course. But the truth is, she just wanted to teach me how to figure things out for myself. She didn’t buy me that dress, but she guided me as we made one—and I thought it was even cooler than the one I had seen. Now, I was twelve, and between the idea of becoming a “woman” for my bat mitzvah and having a size AA training “bra” (think: stretchy cropped undershirt), I very much felt like I needed a dress that would highlight and showcase my chest. (Why, you ask, was my focus on my chest instead of on my Torah portion? Tweens aren’t exactly known for their impeccable priorities.) This became my first design challenge. I decided on an empire waist with a square neck and a little princess puff sleeve, and I made it out of white matte silk. I made it just above my knees so that you could see my gams when I sat on the bima (that’s Hebrew for the stage). My mom wouldn’t buy me new shoes for just one night, so a family friend lent me her cream-colored pumps that matched the color of my dress exactly. I wore them with pride even though they were a half size too small. (But I did spend most of the time up on the bima worried that I was losing circulation in my feet.)

Thanks to my mom shutting me down, I got way more out of the experience than just an amazing (go with me here) dress. Sewing something that I could wear gave me confidence. The idea of turning nothing but a piece of fabric and some thread into something I would actually wear out in the world seemed like magic to me. I would do as many chores around the house as I possibly could in order to earn money and then spend it all on fabric. When I was out of fabric and out of cash, I would go through my closet and find pieces that I was tired of, take them apart, and make something new to wear. Taking the clothes apart allowed me to see how the clothes were made, and then I could replicate the look if I wanted to.

When Life Throws You Lemons—or Florida Oranges

I was born in San Diego in the eighties. It was absolutely as fun as it sounds. My early life in California was a truly idyllic time period. The weather was always perfect, my two older brothers and I could go outside and play at night unsupervised, and I spent weekends boogie-boarding or selling jewelry at the flea market while my mom sold her Amway products. My dad had just finished his residency in pediatric medicine and had opened his own practice. He worked a lot, but when he was home, he was all ours. We were not wealthy by any means, but my life felt rich. My elementary school self already knew that I was going to marry Steve and that Sarah, Caren, Rachel, and Tami would be my bridesmaids. I was going to wear a ruffled one-shouldered white organza minidress, and my bridesmaids would each wear their own unique look that reflected their personality, but it had to be coral pink, obviously, because the wedding would be on the beach. Cue the mic drop.

Shortly after I turned eight, my parents told us we would be moving to Florida, where my dad would be taking a short sabbatical. All I knew about Florida was that there were alligators in the swimming pools. I remember coming home and my parents breaking the news to my two older brothers, Uri and Max, and me. They presented it like it was an adventure, and I was completely not on board. As I sat there panicking about losing my friends, my dad sold us on the move with big talk of a house on the ocean, building sandcastles in the front yard, and promises that he would have tons of time off to play with us. So we packed up. Everything I owned, which primarily consisted of Barbies, Barbie clothes, Barbie gear, and a Barbie Dream House, was in boxes and ready to be loaded onto the moving truck. On my last day of third grade, my classmates gave me a memory book full of photos and drawings from my elementary school friends. I’d never held anything as tightly or cried as hard as I did that day.

The Big Adventure

We piled into our sedan, hitched up the U-Haul, and drove across the country in true Griswold-family fashion. It was the absolute worst. The whole time, I had to sit in the middle seat, squished between Uri and Max, because I could never yell out “Not it!” fast enough. At any given point during our drive, I was either being used as a pillow or an armrest. There were a lot of tears: like when my personal stash of mini candies fell out of the trunk into the muddy parking lot, or when we pulled into New Orleans and I felt completely haunted while semi-lost from my family, or when my dad fell asleep at the wheel in the middle of the night and we did not one but two 360s across the freeway. It was the longest, crummiest week of my eight-year-old life. But at least we were moving somewhere awesome, right? Wrong.

The night that we arrived in Florida, we were tired, it was hot, and I was sure that when my dad pulled into the dilapidated, half-rotted apartment complex, he had made a wrong turn. It was just like The Karate Kid, but I wasn’t Danny LaRusso and there was no Mr. Miyagi waiting to give me a shiny yellow convertible. I remember piping up to say, “Dad, you made a wrong turn. We are not at the beach.” He replied, “Oh no, honey. This is correct. We decided this would be much better.” We went upstairs to a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment that was roughly the size of our living room back in San Diego. The place smelled. Mold was everywhere. My heart sank. Even our two dogs seemed grossed out. This was not part of my plan. I woke up the next morning before everyone else. I threw on my Chucks and ran out the door, determined to find the mythical sand and magical beach that Dad had promised. I knew it was all wrong the moment I stepped outside and didn’t feel the tangy taste of saltwater surrounding me. Lo and behold, all I saw was dirt. It could have passed as sand-colored dirt, but it was definitely dirt. That’s what was at the bottom of the stairs. That’s what I was supposed to turn into castles? And where was the water? How was I going to fill the moats of my princess castle without the ocean nearby? I had promised Barbie a beach day, and she was going to be pissed. Even more than me.

I quickly ran back up the steps, found my father, and demanded, “Dad! Where is the beach? And the sand?” His reply: “That’s sand! Right at the bottom of the stairs!” The first few months went like this for everything we did. When I looked for the Floridian version of the fun downtown we had grown up with back in San Diego, where kids could innocently loiter, he told me it was out there somewhere and we would find it. When I looked for the group of really nice, super-friendly girls my age who were destined to be my new best friends, he told me I was sure to meet them soon. When I wanted to boogie-board, there wasn’t even a wave. And what I did find wasn’t helping the situation: I missed the soft green grass of California, but all I had to look at was dry, hard, spiky patches of Florida turf. I had always liked being connected to our Jewish community back home, but the jerky tweens at the temple in our new town made fun of me for my buck teeth and frizzy hair. I was constantly disappointed, and I missed my old life deeply.

The only saving grace was that it was temporary. At least that’s what I thought. Since the plans were up in the air, my parents rented furniture instead of buying it or moving our old stuff out from California. I marked the day our first furniture rental contract was up on the family calendar. When the big day finally arrived, I ran to tell my dad: “Hey, Dad! We have to return the furniture! Does that mean we can go home now?” He turned to me and very casually said, “We’re not going home. We’re going to stay.” My parents had found a small piece of land that was going for a good price and had decided to save up to build a house of our own. I knew at that moment that my fate was sealed. I was stuck there for good. (And, Florida, if you’re reading this, please don’t take offense. I’ve grown to love you, and you know it.)

Even now it stings. I say this fully aware, as an adult human, that I was very lucky to have a roof over my head, to have a loving family, and to always have food to eat, but San Diego was all I knew. When everything you have ever known as a child is ripped from your life, it has a huge impact, whatever your circumstances may be. This was like a bad after-school special, but it was my real life—though it wasn’t the last disappointment I would face, so technically it was training.

So why was Florida so bad? Let’s unpack this:

• It was hot—the kind of hot where you just are never not sweating. All the time. I couldn’t even walk from my mother’s car to the front of the school without my sweat staining my shirt.

• I had very few friends. I thought I had made some, but Chrissy turned out to be a traitor in junior high when she up and decided I was too nerdy and awkward to be seen with in public. I wound up getting bullied left and right and dreaded every morning that I had to get up and go to school.

• My older brothers turned into teenagers and left me behind. While they were suddenly doing all the normal, eighties-movie high school stuff, I was stuck at home, playing with my dolls, and waiting for my hot-glue gun to warm up.

• On top of everything, we were the only Jewish people for miles and miles, which made us the talk of the town.

All of this is to say that I found myself flying solo. A lot. Depending on my mood, it either felt as if I had all the me-time in the world or as if I had been forced into isolation. The upside of it all is that it gave me the space to discover creativity. Crafting saved my life. (Does that sound dramatic? I hope so. I really want it to.) I was a mini Martha Stewart always ready with my Mod Podge and handful of puffy pom-poms. My mom had given me an old sewing kit and showed me the basics. It wasn’t long before I was making scrunchies for myself and avant-garde outfits for my dolls.

Out of everyone at school, my favorite person was Miss Laurie, the art teacher. She had moved to Florida from New York City, where she had been a print designer. Now she handed out construction paper and was on scissor patrol for a bunch of kids. Miss Laurie was kind and soft-spoken, and she used validation and encouragement to keep you going. She could always find something in whatever mess we kids were working on to compliment. After school, she taught art classes out of her home. For twenty dollars an hour (her rate was actually thirty dollars an hour, but my mom insisted that I negotiate her price down), she would teach me whatever I wanted to learn. Over five years, we drew, painted, illustrated, sketched, knit, and crocheted, and, most importantly, she taught me to follow a pattern and use a sewing machine. Thanks to her (and the extreme nothingness of Florida at the time), I found my love of fashion, art, and design.

Don’t Ask; Do

From then on, I was hooked on doing things for myself. When I decided I wanted to go to the performing arts high school that was forty minutes away, I mapped out the bus route and got myself there and back. How much I earned doing chores around the house or scooping ice cream at the local ice cream shop, where I worked after school and on weekends, was how much I could spend. The responsibility was on me. At a certain point, making things, doing things, and figuring things out on my own became second nature to me.

With my love for all things fashion, it wasn’t a surprise that, when I was eighteen, I decided I wanted to move to New York to work in fashion. My mom said, “If you want to go, go.” That was all I needed. She wasn’t giving me permission. She wasn’t saying yes or no. She was putting the responsibility exactly where it belonged: on me. A few years ago, I finally asked my mom why she didn’t help us kids out more. She explained that when she turned eighteen and moved out of her parents’ house, she didn’t know how to do anything. She felt like too much had been done for her, so she had trouble knowing how to live on her own. As a parent, I’ve learned that is the greatest gift we can give our kids—just a push in the right direction. (Thanks, Mom. Love ya.)

I didn’t have a plan. I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it happen. But I knew I was going to figure it out.

Sign Your Own Permission Slip

We spend so much of our lives waiting for permission. As little kids, we ask our parents if we can do just about everything. We ask for snacks, for toys, or if it’s okay to go out and play. We even ask our teachers if it’s okay to go to the bathroom. By the time we’re adults, we’ve been conditioned to look outside ourselves for someone to give us permission to do even the little things.

But do we really have to? No.

Really, the only person you need permission from is yourself. Not your parents. Not your friends. Not society. When we ask someone else to validate our choice before we make it, it puts the responsibility on that person. Suddenly, it’s their problem if something goes wrong. Getting outside validation protects us from feeling like it’s all on us if we screw up. And on some level, we’re all afraid of screwing up.

But here’s the thing: if we get permission to do something, or validation before we do something, we aren’t off the hook. We still have to deal with the fallout. We’re still the face of the mistake. Often, the only person who actually cares, or even knows, that someone gave you permission is yourself, so if you want to do something, do it. If you want to wear something, wear it. If you want to try something new, by all means, go for it. Whatever happens next is yours to own. It’s all you.

“Fearless: The New Rules for Unlocking Creativity, Courage, and Success” by Rebecca Minkoff

$26

SHOP

Taken from Fearless by Rebecca Minkoff. Copyright © 2021 by Rebecca Minkoff. Used by permission of HarperCollins Leadership. www.harpercollinsleadership.com.

MORE ON THE BLOG

How the Founder of Hike Clerb Is Reclaiming Space for WOC in the Outdoors, One Trail at a Time

We know how daunting it can be to start a new business, especially if you’re disrupting an industry or creating an entirely new one. When there is no path to follow, the biggest question is, where do I start? There is so much to do, but before you get ahead of yourself, let’s start at the beginning. To kick-start the process, and ease some of those first-time founder nerves, we’re asking successful entrepreneurs to share their stories in our new series, From Scratch. But this isn’t your typical day in the life profile. We’re getting into the nitty-gritty details—from writing a business plan (or not) to sourcing manufacturers and how much they pay themselves—we’re not holding back.

Photo: Courtesy of Evelynn Escobar

Whether she was hitting her local trails or road tripping through a national park, Evelynn Escobar couldn’t help but notice how homogeneous the outdoors were—and she decided to do something about it. In 2017, she started Hike Clerb, an intersectional women’s hiking group, to reclaim space for women of color in the outdoors. By sharing photos of the group’s excursions on Instagram, it didn’t take long for Escobar to cultivate a diverse and inclusive community of women who also wanted to see themselves represented on the trails—and in other outdoor spaces like beaches, parks, and pools.

Once Hike Clerb reached over 20,000 followers on Instagram, it was clear Escobar had a movement on her hands. And, although the club has always been dedicated to serving the community, last year, she officially registered Hike Clerb as a 501c(3) nonprofit organization. “Everything we strive to do is for our community,” she tells Create & Cultivate about the decision. “Not to turn big profits. Not to make an organization that must run the capitalistic rat race. Something for us, by us.” And her mission has attracted the attention of publications by the likes of Teen Vogue and Condé Nast Traveler, as well as major brands such as Nike and Free People Movement.

Ahead, Escobar shares how she’s paying it forward to her community, partnering with brands to do good, and leveraging social media to start a movement.

Can you tell us a bit about your career background and what you were doing professionally before launching Hike Clerb? 

Before I launched Hike Clerb, I worked in the fashion and beauty industries as a social media marketer.

What was your “lightbulb moment” for Hike Clerb and what inspired you to pursue this path? 

My experience as an outdoorsy Black Latina inspired me to create Hike Clerb. Whether it was hiking alone or realizing just how homogenous the outdoors were on road trips, I wanted to create a solution to the issues I noticed out there.

How did you come up with the name Hike Clerb? What are some of the things you considered during the naming process? 

To be honest, it was something that came very intuitively without much mental exertion. Clerb is just a funny word that I and many friends use when talking about clubs of all types, so it was just a natural fit to go with something that felt familiar and lighthearted.

Last year, Hike Clerb registered as a 501c(3) nonprofit organization. Can you tell us about that process and why you decided to take this route? 

It was actually a decision that I sat with a bit. For us, it was between creating a social enterprise or a nonprofit. Ultimately, the nonprofit won because everything we strive to do is for our community. Not to turn big profits. Not to make an organization that must run the capitalistic rat race. Something for us, by us.

Photo: Courtesy of Hike Clerb

What were the immediate things you had to take care of to set up the organization? 

When I started the organization, a little over three years ago now, the only place we existed was Instagram. I’d post all of our events, recaps, etc. there. Later I created our site and secured our handle on other channels. We are currently in the legal process of securing our trademarks etc.

What research did you do for the organization beforehand? Why would you recommend that due diligence to other nonprofit founders? 

Before embarking on our 501c(3) journey, I took a look at the way other nonprofits in the industry were set up from a financial perspective just to give us a sense of direction. Things like, what type of donation platforms are commonly used? What types of programs and grants exist that we could apply for? Etc.

Did you write a business plan? If so, was it helpful? If not, what did you use to guide your organization instead and why did you take that approach? 

Yes and no. Yes because I do have a business plan in a very nontraditional sense, and no because the bulk of this has been learning as I go. I have a sense of direction and bigger goals, dreams, collaborations, etc. that we are actively pursuing, but at the end of the day, where our strength lies is that we are very much intuitively led and it has allowed us to transcend and innovate in the space like no other.  

How did you fund Hike Clerb? What were the challenges and what would you change? Would you recommend that route to other founders? 

It has been a mix of self-funding and donations from our community. Now we are receiving bigger corporate donations from time to time for collaborations etc. I think it can be hard at first for people to want to invest and buy-in when you’re just getting the funds to get off the ground. Nonprofits don’t magically churn out content, events, etc. out of thin air. There is always a team behind the scenes that needs to be compensated for their labor and creativity that brings the vision to life and a lot of people forget that. The operational costs have to be covered before you can move on to plan b and c, but most people want to invest in the shiny event or program, etc., not the non-sexy organization costs of what’s needed to even be able to run.

Do you pay yourself, and if so, how did you know what to pay yourself?

I do not pay myself from any of the funds we have raised for the organization and it is a very intentional effort to not do so. I value my team and the initiatives and programs that we are trying to get off the ground. As long as I’m able to sustain them, I’m happy to finance myself through my own platform, etc. It was really a no-brainer for me to proceed this way.

How big is your team now, and what has the hiring process been like? 

We are a team of three! Me, as the founder and executive director, Jennifer Martinez as our director of operations who also assists with collaborations and partnerships, and Stephanie Sleiman who is our art director and designer at large. At first, accepting help was difficult for me because I didn’t really know where to start. I had been running things by myself for the first two and a half years before they came on. Both Jen and Stephanie were Hike Clerb members who volunteered their skills and time in any way that I needed and that’s how it all started. There was no formal call to hire. Now that we have a small but mighty team, we are looking to bring on a few more members to really help make our bigger plans come to life.

Did you hire an accountant? Who helped you with the financial decisions and setup?

We do have an accountant who was already someone I had a relationship with because of my personal finances. They didn’t come along until after the 501c(3) status was solidified.

What has been the biggest learning curve during the process of establishing Hike Clerb and running a 501c(3) nonprofit organization? 

The biggest learning curve has been finding the resources needed to really legitimize everything. When it comes to legal and financial recommendations, they can be hard to come by. These things aren’t widely spoken about, but they should be! Just getting everything needed to run smoothly has been a process!

You’ve been featured in Teen Vogue, Condé Nast Traveler, Women’s Health, and many other notable publications. How did you promote Hike Clerb in the beginning? How did you get people to know who you are and create buzz? 

Our main source of news, promotion, etc. was our Instagram! We created content from all of our hikes to promote what we were doing, who our members were, etc., and it organically grew from there.

Photo: Courtesy of Hike Clerb

Hike Clerb has also partnered with major brands by the likes of Nike and Free People Movement. How do you choose which companies to work with and how have they helped you grow and spread Hike Clerb’s mission?  

We are very intentional about the brands that we choose to partner with. They not only must align with our mission and vision but play a role in helping our community in a tangible way. Whether that’s making a donation, donating items to help BIWOC get outdoors, or all of the above! They’ve helped us introduce our work to new sets of eyes which has only strengthened our platform.

Do you have a business coach or mentor? If so, how has this person helped, and would you recommend one to a fellow founder?

I do have many mentors, but not a dedicated business coach per se. I am thankful to all the women of color who have invested their time and efforts in helping me along my business journey. I would absolutely recommend that everyone have at least a mentor or someone in their corner they can turn to about these things.

What is your number one piece of advice for any new founder in the nonprofit (and/or for-profit) space and why? 

Be married to your mission. If your mission is not a natural extension of you—something that comes so naturally to you that you can talk about it in your sleep—then sit on your idea until it becomes that. You should be so clear on why you’re doing what you’re doing that there is no question in anyone’s mind of why what you’ve created exists. When you create out of an authentic place, you’re setting yourself up for ultimate success.

What’s next for you and for Hike Clerb? What are your plans for 2021 and beyond?

World domination! But really, bigger in-person events, more programs, a new way to consume our editorial content, ways to participate across the country, and, for me, a new little addition to my growing team and family.

Photo: Courtesy of Hike Clerb

MORE ON THE BLOG

Tech Entrepreneur and Author Ali Kriegsman Shares Her WFH Secrets

Photo: Eva Zar Courtesy of Ali Kriegsman

Welcome to our monthly editorial series A Day in the Life where we ask successful women we admire to share the daily minutiae of their professional lives, from the rituals that set them up for success to their evening wind-down routines. This month we sat down with Ali Kriegsman, co-founder and chief operating officer of the venture-backed retail technology startup Bulletin and author of the forthcoming book “How to Build a Goddamn Empire,” which hits shelves on April 6th. Below, Kriegsman shares her unconventional definition of success, her go-to apps for staying organized, and her favorite WFH lunch.

Tell us a bit about your business. What whitespace did you see in the market that led you to found Bulletin? What need did you want to fill?

Bulletin is a premium wholesale marketplace where retailers go to discover and shop the best brands on the planet. Behind your favorite spas, wellness centers, cafes, boutiques, and gift shops is a whole hidden $300-billion wholesale economy you, the shopper, can’t see! Those stores—whether they’re physical retailers or online retailers—rely on various tools and services to discover brands and products their customers will love! Bulletin helps some of your favorite stores find the inventory they then sell to their end customers. We’re a business-to-business platform, meaning we don’t service individual consumers, but instead, we serve and support over 7,000 buyers and store owners who run these shops, and we have around 1,300 brands on our platform selling to these retail businesses. Our community is growing really quickly—and organically—so we’ll likely triple or quadruple those numbers by year’s end. 

We launched Bulletin’s wholesale marketplace because we actually used to be retailers ourselves! We were trying to solve our own pain point, while creating a more affordable way for the brands we loved to grow and scale, too. As a retailer running three stores in New York, we used so many different tools and platforms to find great brands and inventory—Instagram, Etsy, Joor—the list goes on. We felt like there wasn’t one cohesive place for us to discover, connect with, and source inventory from quality brands. So we built the solution we wanted to see in the world. Bulletin began as an e-commerce newsletter and pop-up concept in late 2014, early 2015—we did that for about two years before we ever opened our stores. And through that experience and those connections, we learned how insanely expensive it is for brands to get into retail.

Brands typically have to pay upwards of $30,00 (!!!) to showcase at a physical trade show to try and meet buyers. The operative word being “try;” there is literally no guarantee that if these brands pay that price tag, they’ll connect with or do business with retailers who attend. We also learned that vetting and paying for showrooms and wholesale reps was just as cumbersome and expensive for these brands. So with Bulletin’s wholesale marketplace solution, we kind of found a double whammy. 

We’d be able to help retailers like us find and source incredible inventory, and help level the playing field for independent brands all at the same time. We take a 15% cut on sales processed through our platform, so we literally only make money if we bring brands business. It is a wildly different format than the tradeshow, showroom, or wholesale rep route, and especially with COVID threatening those traditional retail channels, Bulletin has become a really attractive solution for brands and retailers alike.

Not only are you the co-founder and COO of Bulletin, but you’re also an author. Your first book, "How to Build a Goddamn Empire," hits shelves on April 6th. What compelled you to write this book and what do you hope people will take away from it?

When I was approached to write a book proposal, I actually knew exactly what I wanted the book to be about and the story I wanted to tell. As a first-time and inexperienced founder, I felt like I couldn’t relate to the glossy, glamorous entrepreneurs crowding my Instagram feed. I was 24 and I was seeing a lot of founders, especially female founders, posting incessantly about their wins whether it was press hits, awesome brand partnerships, rounds of funding. And honestly, I was doing the exact same thing! 

I think women entrepreneurs feel this pressure to be perfect. We’re fighting to hire great employees, maybe get some funding, secure those press hits and grow our businesses. Making everything seem rosy and easy can build that trust with your audience, and your customers, and I think women fear that being candid and vulnerable about the harder and more taxing psychological parts of entrepreneurship might put that growth or your reputation at risk. At least, that’s how I felt. And a few investors even told me that. Once I started getting more candid about my fear of failure, anxiety, depressive episodes, and struggles with our pivot from running stores to running a full-blown tech company, a female investor actually asked me to be a bit less “candid” lest I make the wrong impression or lead people to think I don’t know what I’m doing. She actually went so far as to tell me to “be more like X founder, be more like Y founder” and I found it really disheartening. 

But I didn’t listen. I decided to do the opposite.

I knew first-hand that building something from nothing is a confusing and emotional challenge you sign up for every single day. It's unglamorous, taxing, and endlessly stressful. It's a constant, dirty fight with your imposter syndrome and the intense fear that if things don’t work out, you've failed miserably. And publicly. I wanted to tell that story, so that if other business owners were suffering or worrying they’d fail, or that they were too incompetent to make their dreams happen, they could read my book and feel seen and supported. I wanted to create a counter-narrative to Instagram entrepreneurship and this glamorized hustle we’ve all come to know all too well.

So, while in the thick of scaling my business and a stressful pivot, I decided to write about my experience in real-time. I started writing the book in 2017 and finished it at the end of 2020. I was running retail stores in 2017 and 2018, a tech company by late 2019, and obviously had to stay alive and scale despite the pandemic in 2020. For that reason, the book really reads like both a relatable "how-to" guide and a candid personal diary (deep breaths), because it was written directly from the trenches and from the heart.

The book also features stories from over 30 other female founders who have built companies of radically different stages and sizes, too. By using the questions I'm most frequently asked as my guideposts, I offer candid insights into the nuts and bolts of building a brand from scratch—discussing early failures, picking the right co-founder, securing press, finding funding —to give entrepreneurs the tools that will help take their ideas to the next level. I feature interviews with incredible founders like Meena Harris of Phenomenal Woman, Trinity Mouzon Wofford of Golde, and Polly Rodriguez of Unbound. I’m so inspired by all of the women who are featured.

Most importantly, though, I am really trying to help founders, and especially women, redefine the word "success" with every single chapter. There is intrinsic and long-term value to building something of your own, whether you sell your company, crash and burn, or forever teeter on the precipice. My book argues that "success" has many faces, and sometimes learning, growing, and building something on your own terms makes you successful enough. You don’t need to get caught up in your impostor syndrome, compare yourself to other founders, or worry you’re not going to “make it.” I want more women business owners to love and appreciate the journey, rather than being so hard on themselves and thinking they don’t have what it takes to climb to the top. 

“Building something from nothing is a confusing and emotional challenge you sign up for every single day. It's unglamorous, taxing, and endlessly stressful.”

—Ali Kriegsman, Co-Founder and COO of Bulletin and Author of “How to Build a Goddamn Empire”

Are you a night owl or a morning person? When do you do your most important work and why?

I’m a total night owl. Sometimes I get wild bursts of energy at 11 PM and have to force myself to relax and get ready for bed. I wake up every morning at around 7:45 AM or 8 AM and relish cuddling with my dog and being lazy in the sheets for a while. The mornings are so precious to me. I use them to get my head straight rather than get work done. Candidly, though, sometimes if I’ve been working like crazy at night I sleep in until 9:30 AM and just own it. I used to have a nagging voice guilting me for sleeping in on a workday, but I’ve moved past that now.

I do my most important work after 7:30 PM or so when my entire team logs off. I find Slack to be extremely helpful but also very distracting, and I’ve always been someone with a limited attention span, so Slack culture really messes with me.

I love using Sundays to write. It was really tricky to juggle building a tech platform and pivoting Bulletin while writing this book. I found that Sunday mornings were the best times to write or get more “heady” and strategic work done. I’m using Sunday morning to answer questions for this interview as we speak!

What time do you get up? What’s the first thing you do upon waking?

I usually get up at around 8:00 AM. I’ll either roll around and cuddle with my dog, Winnie, if my boyfriend has taken her out already. If not, I’ll lazily throw on my shoes and a light jacket and take her for a nice walk. When I get back, I’ll feed the pup and get some coffee brewing.

I try to squeeze in a workout before my team logs on at 10 AM. I’ll do Chloe Ting or 305 Fitness, or just blast BLACKPINK and dance and lunge around my apartment. Now that it’s getting nice out, I’ll swap that for a beautiful run in Fort Greene park!

What does your morning, pre-work routine look like?

I’ll brew some coffee or make some iced coffee with Grady's (the best) and oat milk, decide what type of workout I want to do, and make a to-do list for the day. I always make a to-do list before my team logs on in the morning so I have my priorities straight and know what I need to cover or check-in with each of my direct reports. I use a platform called Notion to manage all my personal lists, thoughts, and priorities.

I always put on a podcast while I shower after my workout, usually “The Daily” by The New York Times or NPR’s “Up First,” so I can catch up on the news. My shower time in the morning is super relaxing and I love taking my time.

I’ve just started meditating, too, which has been a nice addition to my morning routine. I’m not doing anything crazy quite yet, but I’ve found a few great meditation videos on YouTube that I’ll queue up. It definitely helps calm and center my mind before the hectic workday, where I’m usually in back-to-back meetings and fighting for a quick break!

Mark Twain said, “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” What’s the first thing you do when you get to your desk?

I clean out my inbox. I am obsessed with maintaining my inbox and keeping everything tagged and organized. I need a visual anchor for what’s going on, what’s urgent, and who needs what.  If I don’t clean out my inbox (I mean, honestly that literally never happens because I’ve been doing it for years now) but if I didn’t, I’d be a HOT MESS. My brain has to get it done before I can move on and focus on anything else!

What are you working on this week?

I’m launching my book in less than a week and also hiring about ten people to the Bulletin team. So my main focus this week is building out our hiring pipeline for all of our open roles, moving interviewees and candidates we love through the funnel and continuing to finesse our new org structure and role guidelines. As for the book, I’m prepping influencer book mailers, writing dozens and dozens of thank-you cards for those mailers, coordinating press with my publicist, creating assets for all the panels we’re hosting for the digital book tour, and just trying to keep the launch train on track. I actually love hiring and recruiting and I’m loving all of the work associated with the book launch, so even though it’s a lot, I’m in a great place and groovin’ along.

What’s been the most rewarding part of running your business? The most challenging?

The most rewarding part of running my business is managing our incredible team, and building a technology product together. We work with so many employees, particularly women, that have been with us for nearly three years and who have just grown and blossomed into such remarkable assets for the company. And they’ve become amazing role models and influences to the more junior employees on the team. I actually went into Bulletin thinking I’d despise management. I’m somewhat of a lone wolf and have always been that way. I was the girl who took over group projects and has always loved juggling various roles and responsibilities solo. But helping these women evolve, learn new skills, and come into their own as leaders and managers has been such a blessing.

The most challenging part of running my business is honestly just keeping my head up. This stuff is really hard. Building a tech company and running a tech platform that thousands of people are using every day is a new journey, for sure. I am on the front-lines with our customers because I run our Growth Team, and my team is in charge of growing our revenue month over month and hitting our targets. I get impatient when we can’t develop or fix the product fast enough. I get anxious when we get negative customer feedback. The pressure to keep growing and to deliver excellence to our customers is something I take really seriously. Sometimes I wear the pressure well and sometimes I just don’t. I’m working on it, but yes, I think the most challenging part of building a technology company and growing this platform is staying positive, light, and optimistic when things go wrong.

Do you ever reach inbox zero? How do you handle the constant influx of inquiries and communication entrepreneurs are so familiar with?

I never reach inbox zero. I try to set boundaries with myself and with my team. My team now knows what to email me about versus what to Slack me about. We try to use other tools like Monday and Coschedule for project management so we aren’t bombarded with Slacks or emails left and right.

I have gotten really good about blocking off time on my calendar when I need a strategy session or a break from the Slack craziness. In those blocks, my team knows I’m head down working on a project or chatting and planning with Alana, my co-founder, so they don’t ping me or communicate with me during those times. 

I’ve gotten comfortable with the fact that I’ll never be at inbox zero, especially during COVID. People, myself included, are juggling a lot and just trying to stay above water. Maybe pre-COVID I wouldn’t let certain emails sit in my inbox for days on end, but now, I’m all about prioritizing who I get back to first and why, but I’m also good at prioritizing myself and choosing to shut my laptop off at 8 PM instead of feeling the pressure to get back to everybody so urgently.

“There is intrinsic and long-term value to building something of your own, whether you sell your company, crash and burn, or forever teeter on the precipice.”

—Ali Kriegsman, Co-Founder and COO of Bulletin and Author of “How to Build a Goddamn Empire”

Photo: Eva Zar Courtesy of Ali Kriegsman

What is your go-to work lunch?

I typically microwave some frozen brown rice, make a Beyond Meat breakfast sausage patty (it's SO good), and throw it on top of the rice with half an avocado and a runny egg!

I also make salmon a LOT because it’s so insanely easy. It’s a great thing to have in the fridge if you have a busy schedule but want to eat healthy and avoid spending too much cash on delivery. I buy a ton of frozen salmon fillets and keep them in the freezer, so I can easily defrost them and bake them for 30 min on 300 degrees for dinner. Sometimes, for lunch, I’ll do that leftover salmon mixed with some lemon and mayo, and slap it on some multigrain toast. Tuna salad, watch your back - there’s a new fishy salad in town.

Okay, last one. I also always have Tyson crispy chicken in the freezer. I am a total sucker for chicken tenders, crispy chicken fingers, and pretty much crunchy crispy oily chicken in any form. I’ll pop a Tyson tender in the oven for 20 minutes, and then put it in a whole wheat wrap with avocado, my favorite Kensington garlic sauce, some arugula, and some melted cheese. It’s absolutely delicious, pretty healthy, and satisfies all my cravings. 

What advice do you have for balancing the minutiae of day-to-day tasks with big-picture planning?

I am honestly somewhat bad at this and am trying to get better. Because we’re growing so quickly and hiring and building, I get pulled a zillion different ways and have so many tasks that pile up throughout the day. It is a big goal of mine to continue to delegate more, build in time for myself to think and strategize, and get myself out of the minutiae as much as I can.

What are some work habits that help you stay healthy, productive, and on track to reach your goals?

I have been making to-do lists and priority lists for as long as I can remember. I keep different to-do lists in Notion for my book, my personal life, Bulletin, and even keep a real-time log of my thoughts as they come up, whether it about my career, my team, work, or whatever. I find that my mind tends to race a lot so I’m able to stay productive by translating all my thoughts to paper and getting them out of the ether of my mind.

I’m also good about making time for myself, even if I can only squeeze in two or three hours to myself a day. I make time to work out, I make time to go outside and on walks in the park with my boyfriend and my dog. I make time to cook, which I find super relaxing. I make time to listen to music I love and watch compelling documentaries or movies or TV shows. I don’t believe in the endless hamster wheel and have had a full breakdown before when I work too hard and don’t make that time for myself. Rest is important. Scheduling time to relax and process your life is important. And doing it consistently is key! Don’t just make time for yourself when you feel you’re about to erupt. Do it on the daily so you prevent those breakdowns from boiling over. 

Any favorite apps you use regularly?

I use a new platform called Norby to organize all of my link-in-bio information and also manage and promote all the digital events I have coming up for my book. It is so insanely easy to use and it is such a flexible and intuitive platform that I’m able to run so much of my life on it. It’s great.

I obviously use Instagram a lot because I’m running a business and launching a book, but I’m trying to be a bit more mindful of how often I end up aimlessly scrolling and comparing myself to other people. Trying to pivot to use IG for business-only, and really reclaim my free time and headspace! For business, though, I use Canva and Planoly to design and plan my content. I am obsessed with both and find them both really easy to use.

I use Hotel Tonight if I need to get away. I use it once every two months or so and book myself an affordable hotel room in NYC or Brooklyn. I love my boyfriend and my pup and our life in Fort Greene is delightful, but with COVID, I find myself getting this urge to break away and get a change of scenery. Hotel Tonight makes it super easy and I’m usually able to find a hotel for around $100 bucks for the night. I’ll order Seamless to my room and totally indulge and bring a bottle of wine and just chill. It is a miracle app and it has been such a source of self-care for me.

What are you reading, watching, or listening to right now to help you wind down at the end of the day?

I am obsessed with: “The Great British Bake Off,” “Law and Order SVU,” “Ted Lasso” (SO GOOD), “Criminal Minds,” and cheesy true crime Lifetime movies. Honestly, throw me a true-crime documentary, an upbeat buddy comedy, a melodramatic movie about a cult, or a dark psychological thriller and I’m good to go. I’m also a total sucker for WW2 in Color documentaries or mini-series. I watch a LOT of history shows. Sometimes I like watching TV shows and movies that are super mindless and really let my brain release. Other times I like learning and digesting information. It varies.

As for what I’m listening to, I just finished a crazy podcast called “Mommy Doomsday” from Dateline. It’s true crime. Absolutely wild. I also listen to a lot of political podcasts like “Pod Save America,” “Pod Save the World,” and just started “Us&Them” and “Sway!”

As for what I’m reading, I have a rotating list! I just finished Leigh Stein’s “Self Care” and am in the middle of Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing” which I’ll dip into during the week, usually with a bath and a glass of wine. I am reading “Caste” by Isabel Wilkerson on Sundays when I want more time to read. I’m about to dig into “More than Enough” by Elaine Welteroth and if I’m feeling spooky I’ll pick up “The Perfect Nanny” by Leïla Slimani. It is so, so scary but so captivating. 

When do you go to bed? What’s your “optimal” number of sleep hours?

I need at least 7 1/2 hours. My body doesn't function the same with less than 7 1/2 hours. I get cranky, I’m more sluggish and lazy and my whole energy is off. My boyfriend can sleep like 5 hours and be fine which *blows my mind.*

Lately, because I have a book launch coming up and Bulletin’s been crazy, I’ve been working from 9 AM to 10 PM or so. I need about two hours of me-time every day at least, so I usually end up going to sleep at 12:45 AM or 1 AM. I wish I could go to bed earlier, and under normal circumstances, I would, but as a night owl, I get my best book and Bulletin work done from 7 PM to 10 PM, so I need that 10-to-midnight window to do my thing and chill before passing out.

What’s the most rewarding part of your day?

Ending a long, bustling day with my boyfriend and my dog, turning my phone on silent, and cozying up to a book or dinner and a documentary. I cherish my free time so insanely much because as I’ve advanced in my career, that “me” time window gets smaller and smaller. I’ve learned and accepted that sometimes, you go through massive “sprints” in your life where you’re lacking the right balance of work, play, and chill. Right now, I’m in one of those sprints. I feel so extremely fortunate to be launching a book and running a company, and I know there’s a light at the end of the tunnel once this book is out the door and Bulletin has settled into this new growth phase. But for now, I have mini “lights” at the end of every day’s tunnel because I have a partner and a pup who embrace me at night, hold me, shower me in love, and make the day’s stresses disappear.

“How to Build a Goddamn Empire” by Ali Kriegsman

$25

SHOP

MORE ON THE BLOG

How This Stylist Turned Designer Launched a Business During COVID—and Attracted A.O.C and J.Lo’s Attention in the Process

You asked for more content around business finances, so we’re delivering. Welcome to Money Matters where we give you an inside look at the pocketbooks of CEOs and entrepreneurs. In this series, you’ll learn what successful women in business spend on office spaces and employee salaries, how they knew it was time to hire someone to manage their finances, and their best advice for talking about money.

Photo: Courtesy of Karen Perez

Karen Perez never saw herself designing masks. But when the fashion stylist of 15 years was tasked with finding chic, high-end face coverings for her clients during the pandemic and couldn’t find any, she decided to make her own. “I wanted to create a mask that was feminine and chic by highlighting our cheekbones,” Perez tells Create & Cultivate. “A mask that empowered us to still look and feel amazing when we needed to go outdoors.” And the demand for her products has been staggering from the start.

Leading up to the launch of her business, Second Wind, she announced a pre-sale on Instagram, anticipating 100 orders—not 10,000. The overnight success was overwhelming but also posed a major problem: finding the funds to fulfill thousands of orders. “Right after our launch, I decided to create a GoFundMe to raise capital,” Perez explains. “Within a matter of a week, I raised more than $4,000 which made me realize how many people wanted to support my business, my dream.” Including A.O.C. and J.Lo who are just a few of the high-profile women who’ve been spotted wearing her designs.

Ahead, Perez shares her best advice for scaling a business quickly and sustainably, raising capital through crowdfunding, and building a dedicated team.

What has been the biggest challenge in scaling so rapidly, and what advice can you share for fellow small business owners on how to scale quickly and sustainably?

The biggest challenge was finding the right manufacturers in the U.S. so that I can oversee the work. My advice for those thinking of launching a business or fellow small business owners is to always have a targeted budget to work with and set up contracts with your vendors. 

Would you recommend raising capital through crowdfunding to other entrepreneurs today?

The GoFundMe was very helpful and I recommend others to look into this or other crowdfunding platforms. I know some of us are scared to ask for money, let alone apply for loans, but you’d be surprised how many people out there want to see small businesses thrive. 

Photo: Courtesy of Karen Perez

What was your first big expense as a business owner and how should small business owners prepare for that now?

My first biggest expense was supply—and still is. For big expenses, you have to save. It’s hard for me to give this advice because I gave every penny of my savings to launch the business. I don’t advise everyone to do that because I have a different story than others. While it might not be the best advice, if you feel like you have something special and you want to do it right, go all in.

What are your top three largest expenses every month?

1. Product, materials 

2. PR/marketing 

3. Payroll 

Do you pay yourself, and if so, how did you know what to pay yourself?

Technically I don’t pay myself (yet) because every dollar that I make, I put it back into the business. Second Wind still hasn’t even met its first year, and I have to recognize that I still have more expenses to make in order for this business to grow before I can see personal revenue. 

Would you recommend other small business owners pay themselves?

Absolutely! I think it’s important that you pay for the necessities that you need. You really need to learn how to manage your budgets and how to manage your business and personal expenses. Always stay realistic with yourself. 

How did you know you were ready to hire and what advice can you share on preparing for this stage of your business? 

I knew I had to hire right away—as soon as I saw the 10,000 orders! I physically can’t do all of this by myself. I realized I had to take into consideration what I am investing in when hiring staff. When hiring your team, don’t just look at someone who’s going to make your job easier. You need to invest in building a team that is going to be dedicated to building the business with you. 

Did you hire an accountant? Who helped you with the financial decisions and setup? Are there any tools or programs you recommend for bookkeeping?

I hired an accountant and bookkeeper that I work with on a monthly basis. My accountant is also like my financial advisor and has guided me with managing budgets and expenses. My go-to program is Quickbooks. 

Where do you think is the most important area for a business owner to focus their financial energy?

Your financial energy should definitely be put towards your product (materials, supply) and PR/marketing. This is the core of my business and it’s what helps us to continue to grow. 

"No matter how much money you are making, how much money you have to spend, if you stand by your product and business you will see financial gain."

—Karen Perez, Founder of Second Wind

Do you think women should talk about money and business more?

Yes! I think it’s so important. For a long time, women were never thought to be included in these conversations. I think it’s important for us to come together and be open and share advice. I have my go-to circle of friends that are also small business owners and they share advice with me all the time. 

Do you have a financial mentor? Do you think business owners need one?

I have several financial mentors—a mix of both men and women. I think it’s important for others to have one. Don’t be shy to network and ask around/meet with your local business owners. You’d be surprised as to how many small business owners in your area would be willing to chat with you and give you some advice. 

What money mistakes have you made and learned from along the way?

As a new small business owner, you are eager to get things done and sign off on contracts without reading them properly, and when there are problems, you realize you didn’t read the contract correctly. My advice is to READ everything carefully and protect yourself. 

What is your best piece of financial advice for new entrepreneurs?

The best advice is to love what you do. No matter how much money you are making, how much money you have to spend, if you stand by your product and business you will see financial gain.   

Your business has garnered the support of high-profile women by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jennifer Lopez. No doubt, major retailers are asking to carry your products as a result. What’s next for you and your brand? Can we expect to see Second Wind products at Bloomingdale’s or Nordstrom in the future? 

We are excited to announce that we have a confirmed retailer commitment from Saks Fifth Avenue. Our products will be sold online until further notice. This is just the first step to growing into a global brand.

MORE ON THE BLOG

I Spent 3x More Money Than I Budgeted to Launch My Business

We know how daunting it can be to start a new business, especially if you’re disrupting an industry or creating an entirely new one. When there is no path to follow, the biggest question is, where do I start? There is so much to do, but before you get ahead of yourself, let’s start at the beginning. To kick-start the process, and ease some of those first-time founder nerves, we’re asking successful entrepreneurs to share their stories in our new series, From Scratch. But this isn’t your typical day in the life profile. We’re getting into the nitty-gritty details—from writing a business plan (or not) to sourcing manufacturers and how much they pay themselves—we’re not holding back.

Photo: Courtesy of Brittney Ogike

Brittney Ogike knew starting a business would be expensive, but she underestimated just how costly it would really be. “When I wrote my business plan, I didn’t allocate enough dollars to certain areas like buildout and inventory,” Ogike tells Create & Cultivate. “I remember telling our design firm my original budget for the buildout. They pretty much laughed at me and suggested I not work with a firm and go it alone. I had no idea about the amount of money it would take to build the store I was envisioning!”

Thankfully, these expenses didn’t discourage her from bringing her vision to life. As the founder of BeautyBeez, a modern beauty supply store created by and for WOC, she’s bringing an elevated and inclusive shopping experience to women who have been long overlooked by the beauty industry. “For decades, the beauty supply has been left unchanged and wholly inadequate,” Ogike explains. “And more recently, consumer behavior has shifted. Our community has become more conscious of where we spend our hard-earned dollars, but with no place to turn to for our complete beauty needs.”

Ahead, Ogike tells Create & Cultivate all about her business and her founder journey, including the lightbulb moment that inspired her to launch BeautyBeez and the costly lessons she’s learned since becoming an entrepreneur.

Take us back to the beginning—what was the lightbulb moment for your business? 

BeautyBeez was created to fill a gap in the retail industry. What many people outside of the African American community don’t realize, is that ethnic hair care and beauty products are typically sold in small local retailers called beauty supply stores. Every Black woman has memories—both fond and unpleasant—of going to the local beauty supply store with our mothers and shopping for those nostalgic “Black girl hair” products: hot combs, barrettes, relaxers, hair grease, and a whole lot more. It was a space specifically for us! The larger retailers didn’t (and still don’t) carry these items. 

The lightbulb moment occurred when I was shopping for some hair products for my daughter. I was forced to go to our local beauty supply store and left feeling upset about the entire experience. For decades, the beauty supply has been left unchanged and wholly inadequate. And more recently, consumer behavior has shifted. Our community has become more conscious of where we spend our hard-earned dollars, but with no place to turn to for our complete beauty needs. BeautyBeez was created to fill the white space in ethnic beauty. We provide an inclusive beauty experience where women of color can shop, explore and play in a world full of beauty. 

Did you write a business plan? If so, was it helpful, and if not, what did you use instead and why did you take that approach? 

Yes! A business plan was essential in building the framework of BeautyBeez. It helped me establish the mission of the brand, the product offerings, and financials. I also believe it was useful in persuading my family members to join. I still refer to it to this day. 

How did you come up with the name BeautyBeez? What was the process like and what are some of the things you considered during that process? 

When determining the business name, I wanted it to have a few characteristics—unique, brandable, identifiable, and include a personal nod to my family. I wanted a complete departure from the typical beauty supply name with the hopes of establishing the brand as a leading beauty retailer—and not just a beauty supply. The “Beez” in BeautyBeez has a few different symbolic meanings. It acknowledges me (B for Brittney), my daughter (Z for Zara), and the fierce, matriarchal symbolism of the bee animal. 

What were the immediate things you had to take care of to set up the business? What would you recommend to new founders reading this who don’t know where to start? 

The first thing I did was establish the business name. I contacted a lawyer and had them register and trademark the name. Next, I bought the website domain and created social handles on all social platforms, even though I didn’t need them immediately. 

What research did you do for the brand beforehand, and can you explain how you found and compiled that research? Why would you recommend it and why is it important? 

I visited as many beauty supply stores as possible and posed as a customer to figure out how I could fill the white space. I read online reviews to understand the pain points. I spoke with all of my friends about their experiences shopping for their beauty needs and had conversations about how the issues could be resolved. Lastly, I researched the history of the industry. Why was it dominated by a specific group of people? Who are the major competitors? What are the potential barriers to entry? To gather information, I read trade articles, searched the web, and went down every rabbit hole I could find on the topic. It’s important that you’re educated in whatever industry you get into. Stay on top of trends and the laws and regulations that are passed down. 

How did you find and identify the distributors you work with? What are some of the challenges you faced along the way and what advice can you share for fellow small business owners? 

Since I’m a minority in the industry, I faced several challenges trying to open accounts with distributors. I have been charged high minimums, required cash upfront when others are given credit terms and have been flat out denied access. Oftentimes, working directly with the brand was a lot easier to procure products. The advice I would give is to not give up. Reach out to as many different manufacturers and distributors as possible. All you need is one “yes.” And once you get that “yes,” thoroughly research them. Find people in your industry that have done business with them. This will not only help you vet the supplier, but it will also help you in establishing a network of contacts in your new industry. 

How have you funded your businesss?

We are a family-owned company comprised of myself, my husband, and my brother. Fortunately, we are self-funded and haven’t had to seek any outside funding, yet. 

What is the biggest money mistake you made in the beginning and how did you recover from it? 

I’ve spent way too much on inventory. I was so eager to start ordering products for the store that I didn’t fully understand the ordering process with some distributors. They all have different rules and ways of ordering. I should have been more conservative on quantities and asked more questions. I’m currently sitting on hundreds of sewing kits if anyone needs any! 

Did you work full-time at another job while building this one or just dive straight into it? Can you share your experience and what you would recommend to others? 

Yes. I’m moonlighting as a sports manager. My career has always been in sports and I don’t see myself giving up on that work any time soon. I enjoy what I do in both industries—beauty and sports! 

Do you pay yourself? If so, how did you know how much to pay yourself? 

I haven’t paid myself, yet. Once we reach profitability, I’ll be able to start paying myself a minimal salary.

How big is your team now, and what has the hiring process been like? Did you have hiring experience before this venture? If not, how did you learn and what have you learned about it along the way? What advice can you share? 

I have a staff of four part-time employees that work in the store and three corporate team members that assist with operations and branding. Finding great team members is one of the toughest parts of being a business owner. I’m still learning along the way, but the best advice I would give is to hire slow and fire fast. It’s important to take the time to find the right person for the position. Call references, run background checks and do all the things necessary to make sure the candidate is the right fit. If that person isn’t working out, it’s also important to remove them from the position immediately. You can’t let your emotions get in the way, which is a lesson I had to learn. At the end of the day, it’s about your company and what’s best for the business. 

Did you hire an accountant? Who helped you with the financial decisions and setup? 

Yes, I hired an accountant to assist with bookkeeping and monthly financial reports. Admittingly, financials are my weakest skill set. I even audited a college finance class the summer before I started working on BeautyBeez because I know how important it is to understand financial statements and reports. 

Can you share the biggest learning curve or challenge since starting your business and why? 

My biggest learning curve has been the economics of it all. This includes budgeting, forecasting, profit/loss, etc. There are so many financial decisions that need to be made on a daily basis when running a business. Having a comprehensive knowledge of your company’s financial standing is essential for success. I’m constantly educating myself on how to have better margins, determine pricing, and control costs. 

Do you have a business coach or mentor? If so, how has this person helped, would you recommend one, and how did you find one? 

I’m currently in the process of trying to find a mentor or an executive network group to join. Having a mentor or joining an executive group can help you grow as a leader and aids in better decision-making in your business. I would love to have a group of like-minded entrepreneurs to bounce ideas off of or troubleshoot certain issues I’m facing. 

How did you promote your company? How did you get people to know who you are and create buzz? What percentage of your budget goes to marketing and why? What challenges have you faced? 

First, let me say this. If you build it, they will not come! You have to build it, then tell people about it. Marketing was a huge challenge for me in the beginning. I think it was because I was trying to figure out which strategy worked that would give us the best return. We’ve done flyers, banners, a referral program, digital ads, and social media. Social media is where we’ve seen the biggest response. We had to figure out where our ideal customers were. They’re on social! So, we’ve invested a lot of time, dollars, and energy to make sure BeautyBeez is in front of them on all of the social media channels. Presently, we’re spending about 30% of our budget on marketing. 

What is one thing you didn’t do in the setup process, that ended up being crucial to the business and would advise others to do ASAP? 

I severely underestimated my startup costs. I ended up spending three times more money than I previously budgeted to create BeautyBeez. When I wrote my business plan, I didn’t allocate enough dollars to certain areas like buildout and inventory. I remember telling our design firm my original budget for the buildout. They pretty much laughed at me and suggested I not work with a firm and go it alone. I had no idea about the amount of money it would take to build the store I was envisioning! The lesson in all of this is to do your research in determining potential costs and do not be conservative. 

For those who haven’t started a business (or are about to) what advice do you have? 

Just do it! You cannot wait for the perfect moment. I read some advice when I was in the early phase of developing BeautyBeez that said to complete at least one task a day that gets you closer to your goal. It can be as small as research on a particular topic or as big as creating a website or registering your business. I took this approach and a year later, we officially launched. There are going to be many challenges and hurdles along the way. Take them one day at a time. In the end, the gratification you feel once your business launches will be worth it. 

What is your number one piece of financial advice for any new business owner? 

Pay attention to the numbers. They don’t lie. We create businesses for a lot of reasons, but at the end of the day, we want them to make money. Profitability is the goal for most businesses, and to reach profitability, you need to look at your numbers. What is making the most revenue? How can you increase these sales? What isn’t working and costing too much money? These are the questions you should ask yourself every month and make adjustments. Ultimately, if there is no path to profitability, your business will fail. 

If you could go back to the beginning with the knowledge you have now, what advice would you give yourself and why? 

I would say slow down. I was so eager to get up and running that I didn’t fully understand many of the aspects that have now cost us a lot of money in mistakes. Yes, mistakes will happen. But, the goal is to not make expensive mistakes. The only way you can do this is to do your research and make informed decisions. 

Anything else you’d like to add?

For anyone out there looking for a sign to tell you to start, this is your sign. Start now! Follow your dreams and don’t let anyone or anything hold you back.

MORE ON THE BLOG

Why This CEO Encourages Her Team to Sleep In

Photo: Vlada Karpovich from Pexels

Restless days and sleepless nights are no laughing matter. Three years ago, you could count me among the 68% of Americans who say they have difficulty sleeping. I was working as an economist with the World Bank, and, thanks to an increasingly demanding travel schedule, I was suffering from chronic insomnia. I’d be suffering for months at a time before I could get a handle on my sleep schedule. I was burning out, fast, and I knew that something needed to change. 

Getting real rest—the kind of rest where you wake up feeling refreshed rather than exhausted—is crucial to living a full and healthy life. In my search for a natural sleep solution, I finally tried a weighted blanket, and everything changed.

Weighted blankets work by delivering deep touch pressure (the act of applying even pressure all over the body), which is scientifically proven to reduce stress and anxiety, and promote calm. I had finally found the natural solution that I’d been searching for, but I found that in all of the weighted blanket products on the market, something critical—design, quality, sustainability, or breathability—had been compromised. So, I did what any entrepreneurially-inclined person would do: I set out to make a new one! 

“Our culture is shifting away from wearing career burnout as a badge and embracing the fact that taking time to rest is beneficial to all aspects of our lives.”

I founded my company Bearaby with the mission to destigmatize sleep, make naps guilt-free, and champion rest as a non-negotiable part of a healthy lifestyle. When you make space for employees to incorporate the practices that help them feel refreshed and focused, there is a direct benefit to the quality of their work. I encourage employees to operate on the sleep schedule that allows them to be their most rested. Some people are early birds and some are night owls, so why force anyone to conform to a schedule that might not be best for their overall well-being? That’s why I’ve implemented core working hours from 10 am to 1 pm each day. Outside of that window, employees can make their own schedules. It gives our night owls the option to sleep in if they prefer, and our early risers a bit of a break in the afternoon to exercise, meditate, or even nap! And I’d encourage other leaders to adopt similar policies.

We’ve seen clear benefits from our company work style, and we’ve found that napping and flexibility have positively contributed to our success as a brand. We understand that self-care looks different for everyone, and we’ve found that a flexible work schedule that allows personal practices to be seamlessly incorporated into the workday helps us to stay balanced and creative as a team. Making sleep a priority can have immeasurable benefits for your organization. By meeting the unique needs of your staff, and being mindful of their physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing, you can foster a positive environment where individuals can truly thrive. 

Before the pandemic, the connection between stress and anxiety and sleep health was already well documented. But now, one year in, the impact of mental health on sleep is more visible than ever. The pandemic has taken an enormous toll on our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing, and uncertainty and fear have become constant companions for most people. In our busy, demanding, and increasingly complex world, we must prioritize relaxation and rest for both personal and professional wellbeing. Our culture is shifting away from wearing career burnout as a badge and embracing the fact that taking time to rest is beneficial to all aspects of our lives. It’s not just about our personal health—restful practices are key to producing better work, and increasing productivity. That’s why my modern workplace solution is the comeback of the power nap. 

“It’s not just about our personal health—restful practices are key to producing better work, and increasing productivity.”

With our increasingly flexible schedules and working from home as the new normal, people are discovering the health benefits of taking an afternoon nap during the day. Some of the world's top health experts have praised the power nap as a way to boost productivity and efficiency in the workspace. Napping can be widely restorative and help to improve alertness, performance, creativity, and memory function. 

As an entrepreneur and founder, I believe it’s important to let employees take the breaks they need for their own mental health and well-being. A beautiful community of nap-vocates is also flourishing alongside us. We’re delighted to see a shift in the negative stigma around napping. Instead, it’s becoming a shareable trend, with people proudly showcasing their self-care regimen on their social feeds.

I hope that by building a company that prioritizes individual health and the health of the planet, we’re one step closer to a calmer and more collected world. 

"I believe it’s important to let employees take the breaks they need for their own mental health and well-being."

—Kathrin Hamm, Founder and CEO, Bearaby

About the author: Kathrin Hamm is the founder and CEO of Bearaby, an award-winning weighted blanket company on a mission to free the world of sweaty, plastic-filled weighted blankets. Named one of Entrepreneur’s Powerful Women of 2020, Kathrin’s approach to simple and sustainable self-care without compromise has woken up a tired industry. She aims to destigmatize sleep, make naps guilt-free, and champion rest as a crucial part of a healthy lifestyle. 

It was Kathrin’s personal sleep struggle that inspired her to launch a game-changing product with the brand’s flagship Napper in 2018. During a robust career as an economist with the World Bank, her on-the-road lifestyle began to take a toll on her sleep, leading to chronic insomnia issues. Through the science of deep touch pressure, she was able to sleep better, naturally and without medication. When she couldn’t find a weighted blanket that was breathable, stylish, or sustainable, she knew she had to set out to create one. 

Since then, Bearaby’s signature knitted blankets have garnered a devout fan following and international notoriety, winning both The Red Dot Design Award and Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Award in 2020. The company was also selected as the Sleep Foundation’s top pick for best weighted blanket of 2021.

MORE ON THE BLOG

This Founder Sold Her Engagement Ring and Drained Her 401k to Start Her Business—Now Rihanna Is an Investor

You asked for more content around business finances, so we’re delivering. Welcome to Money Matters where we give you an inside look at the pocketbooks of CEOs and entrepreneurs. In this series, you’ll learn what successful women in business spend on office spaces and employee salaries, how they knew it was time to hire someone to manage their finances, and their best advice for talking about money.

Photo: Courtesy of Denise Woodard

Denise Woodard isn’t averse to taking risks. After her daughter was diagnosed with severe food allergies, she took the plunge and left a steady paycheck and a nearly decade-long career at Coca-Cola Co. to fill the void for delicious, allergy-friendly snacks in the packaged food industry. With her desire to create safe snacks for her daughter, her experience in consumer packaged goods, and her wide network, there was just one thing standing in her way: capital. Despite Partake Foods gaining traction and securing local placement in Whole Food and Wegman stores, funds were tight early on. “In the beginning, I sold my engagement ring and drained my 401k,” Woodard tells Create & Cultivate. “The possibilities with Partake made those sacrifices worthwhile.”

Fast-forward to 2021 and those possibilities have certainly panned out. Partake Foods is now stocked in nearly 3,000 stores, including retailers such as Target, Whole Foods, and Sprouts, and Woodard recently made headlines as the first Black woman to raise $1 million for a food startup. In fact, more than half of the $7.5 million she’s raised for her startup is from Black investors—including Marcy Venture Partners (the VC fund Jay-Z co-founded), Grammy Award-winning artist H.E.R., and Rihanna—and that’s intentional. “As a Black and Asian woman, it’s important to me that I am bringing profit to Black investors that are going to take the returns and successes and reinvest them into other Black founders to keep that money circulating and growing,” explains Woodard.

Create & Cultivate recently caught up with the founder and CEO to talk about how she bootstrapped her business (and later raised VC funding), why she believes women should talk about money more, and the enduring legacy she wants to leave behind.

You left a nearly decade-long career at Coca-Cola Co. to launch Partake Foods after your daughter was diagnosed with severe food allergies. Take us back to the beginning—what was the lightbulb moment for Partake Foods and what inspired you to launch your business and pursue this path?

Well, actually, it was our sitter Martha (who now owns shares in Partake!) who said to me, “Vivi’s diet is so boring! You should really do something about that.” What she meant, knowing me and my experience in consumer packaged goods (CPG) food and beverage was “DO something about it.” So, I did. I wrecked my kitchen recipe testing the first cookies, but I knew I was on to something when Vivi genuinely loved them.

You recently raised $5 million in Series A funding from investors, including Rihanna, which makes Partake Foods her first investment beyond her personal ventures—no doubt you’ve learned a lot along the way. What are three crucial elements everyone should include in a pitch deck when raising money and why?

The pitch deck is absolutely important, and Partake’s deck has evolved substantially. It’s gotten shorter, if you can believe it, the more we’ve grown. And that’s what I think I would offer to those seeking pitch deck advice. How can you tell your story as impactfully and concisely as possible? Prioritize your why, your market opportunity, your growth projections, and your potential exits. Know your numbers and keep it tight. Can you ride in an elevator and pitch in the time it takes to get from the lobby to the board room? If not, tighten your story.  

More than half of the $7.5 million you’ve raised for your startup is from Black investors, including Marcy Venture Partners (the VC fund Jay-Z co-founded), and Grammy Award-winning artist H.E.R. What advice can you share for entrepreneurs on partnering with the right investors? What do investors need to bring to the table other than just money?

It’s been very important to me, as we’ve grown, to look at a few things when bringing on investors. First, I acknowledge the areas in which I want to lean on advisors. I am always learning, it’s in my DNA. I’m very curious and love studying the stories of businesses that succeed and fail. I also enjoy hearing from other people’s experiences, so having investors around me that bring a variety of expertise and disciplines to the table is critical.

Also, as a Black and Asian woman (my father is Black, my mother is Korean), it’s important to me that I am bringing profit to Black investors that are going to take the returns and successes and reinvest them into other Black founders to keep that money circulating and growing. Black business is not a charity. It’s a solid investment. It’s good business. Working with Black investors who see this and are willing to invest in Black and brown founders (especially Black and brown female founders) now, not just because it’s cool, is a legacy thing for me.

Startups led by Black women receive less than 1% of venture capital funding, and you recently made headlines as the first Black woman to raise $1 million for a packaged food startup. Why do you think there is still so much inequality in the venture capital world, and what advice can you share for WOC entrepreneurs who are currently seeking funding?

Project Diane and Digital Undivided do a lot of good work in this space, and I appreciate that they’re driving meaningful awareness around the details of this. Recently, they released their updated report that noted 93 Black women (of which I am one) and 90 Latinx women are the only ones on record to raise more than $1M publicly. That’s it. I think it’s important to contextualize and continue to reiterate that only 183 Black and brown women of record have achieved this. It’s not because of our ability, it’s because of an opportunity gap. And because of the oppressive systems that have kept us outside the leadership programs, the C-suites, the board rooms, the country clubs. It’s generations of being kept out and then “allowed in” when it’s convenient for white people in power. We are mentored much more than we are hired. 

Non-whites are no longer the minority—that language should be retired. And Black and brown female founders are showing significant business growth. Forbes reported late last year that “majority Black women-owned firms grew 67% from 2007 to 2012, compared to 27% for all women, and 50% from 2014 to 2019, representing the highest growth rate of any female demographic during that time frame.” 

We have buying power and can harness our communities to support each other. I am very grateful to be embraced and publicly supported by many in the Black community. Those who are white and in allyship with us can seek out and buy from us. And those allies in positions of power can invest in us. Again, not because it’s charity, but because it’s a solid investment.

Where do you think is the most important area for a business owner to focus their financial energy and why?

This is a subjective question, but to date, I do as much as I can with “sweat capital.” In the beginning, Partake was self-funded and self-distributed. I didn’t hire a full-time employee until 2020. All of our early dollars went to operations. But now, we have a larger and more balanced budget to ensure that we’re investing and reinvesting in areas that make the most sense for our growth. The safety and quality of our products are top priorities for us because customer enjoyment and trust are most important to us—for the short and long-term, it always comes down to enjoyment and trust. 

What was your first big expense as a business owner and how should small business owners prepare for that now? 

Buying ingredients in bulk took getting used to!

What are your top three largest expenses every month? 

They all tie back to operations. We are consistently buying for production, producing for current and forecasted orders, and shipping to distributors and retailers.

Do you pay yourself, and if so, how did you know what to pay yourself? 

I pay myself a modest salary, yes, but in the beginning, I sold my engagement ring and drained my 401k. The possibilities with Partake made those sacrifices worthwhile. It’s my, and my husband Jeremy’s, hope that we’ll eventually be able to repurchase an engagement ring one day!

Photo: Courtesy of Denise Woodard

Would you recommend other small business owners pay themselves?

This is really a personal decision, but my husband and I live and work in the NYC metro area, and our circumstances mandate a two-income household. 

How did you know you were ready to hire and what advice can you share on preparing for this stage of your business?

For the past few years, I have worked with trusted marketing and PR consultants, but gaining distribution in multiple regional stores (Whole Foods Market and Sprouts) and the possibilities of national distribution that came to fruition (Target, Trader Joes, Kroger), I knew full-time leadership and support was critical to getting everything done well. We now have a full-time team of six and the plan is to grow to 10 to 12 by the end of this year. 

Did you hire an accountant? Who helped you with the financial decisions and setup? 

Yes, we have a consulting accounting team. 

What apps or software are you using for finances? What’s worked and what hasn’t?

We use Quickbooks Online. 

Do you think women should talk about money and business more? Why? 

Yes, the more we share, the more we bring to light the disparity that women, especially Black and brown women, live with every day. Not talking about it keeps things status quo. We need to move away from the status quo.

Do you have a financial mentor? Do you think business owners need one?

I have many trusted investors who have decades of experience building CPG businesses like ours, and I do check in often with them on a variety of questions. I wholly recommend seeking out mentors who have done the doing in your industry! 

What money mistakes have you made and learned from along the way?

One of my most memorable to date was in buying booth space at a large industry trade show a few years ago. I felt pressured to be there because of the other brands that were attending. With the money I spent, especially when you factor in travel expenses, I could have covered more ground hopping on the phone, flying to see individual buyers, or even cold emailing on LinkedIn. It just reiterated to me that this is my journey, and it doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s. 

With that, it’s important to note I wholly believe in real-life events. I’m always so grateful to get to connect with customers face-to-face, and I can’t wait for the world to open back up again so we can get back to offering samples of our products in grocery stores and at local consumer-facing conferences.

What have been some of the hardest money lessons you've learned along the way?

I have to spend money to make money. I know this intellectually, but my scrappiness and upbringing ingrained in me the need to make the absolute most with what I have. 

What is your best piece of financial advice for new entrepreneurs?

Know your numbers. Know your burn rate. Know how much it costs to acquire a customer (if that’s relevant to your business). Stick to your budget. Do everything you can to make the most of every dollar.

MORE ON THE BLOG

How Bertha González Nieves Grabbed a Seat at the Table (and a Glass) to Became the First Female Master of Tequila

How many times have you peered voyeuristically into the lives of people you admire via social media and wondered what it must be like to do their job? We’ve all been down that research rabbit hole on our quest to create and cultivate the career of our dreams, but often we’re still left pondering the realities of their day-to-day—so, what is it really like? In this series, I Want Your Job we uncover the truth by getting into the nitty-gritty details about what it’s actually like to work in your quote-unquote “dream job” and if the reality stacks up to the expectation.

Photo: Ball & Albanese

Bertha González Nieves fell in love with tequila almost immediately. Two days into a three-day trip to Tequila, Jalisco, the heart of Mexico’s tequila industry, she already knew she wanted to pursue a career that involved working with the history-rich, blue agave-derived spirit. In fact, she even went so far as to call up her parents to tell them that she’d discovered what she’d wanted to do for a living.

She landed a dream job at Grupo Cuervo, the oldest tequila producer in the world, but after 10 years, she decided to take a risk and launch her own small-batch premium tequila brand, Casa Dragones in 2009. Fast-forward 11 years, and her passion hasn’t wavered. “I have such passion for tequila and Mexico that it’s an honor for me to be part of an industry that contributes to the cultural relevance of Mexico internationally,“ she tells Create & Cultivate. But being at the helm of an independent, small-batch, tequila producer hasn’t been easy.

Ahead, González Nieves explains how she grabbed a seat at the table to become the first female master of tequila, how she’s paying it forward to other women coming up in the industry, and how she’s pivoting the company in the wake of COVID-19.

On getting her foot in the door in the tequila industry…

I fell in love with the tequila category when I was 22 years old and was selected by the Japanese government to represent Mexico in a global program in Japan.

As part of my training, I traveled extensively throughout Mexico, learning about the country’s economy and various industries in order to represent Mexico as a young ambassador to Japan. My travels included a three-day visit to Tequila, Jalisco, and after the second day, I called my parents and told them that I had found what I wanted to do. I wanted to work in the tequila industry.

After university, I worked for Booz Allen & Hamilton in the marketing intensive group doing consulting for top global packaged goods companies and then received a master’s degree from Northwestern University.  Once I graduated, tequila was on mind and in my heart, so I went knocking on the doors of the tequila industry. 

I worked for the Beckman family from Grupo Cuervo for 10 years, the oldest tequila producer and an eleventh generation-run company. I fell in love with everything about the tequila production process and its connection to the culture and history of Mexico. While there, I had key roles both in Mexico and globally, but at some point, I realized the brand would never truly be my own. 

I’m an entrepreneur at heart (and actually, I come from a family of entrepreneurs, so it’s in my blood!), so I knew I’d never be fully satisfied until I had my own company, which eventually inspired me to start Casa Dragones.

Photo: Courtesy of Bertha González Nieves

On laying the groundwork for starting her own company…

I earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Universidad Anáhuac in Mexico City and a master of science degree in integrated marketing communications from Northwestern. I’ve also had the opportunity to take executive courses at Harvard Business School, Wharton Business School, Columbia Business School, and other top schools. I would say that while much of my studies helped me prepare for the business world, nothing has been as valuable as actually working in the industry itself. Taking the time to become an expert in the tequila industry is what has set me and the company apart. 

On pursuing entrepreneurial ventures from a young age…

Since my teenage years, I’ve been creating and participating in small entrepreneurial ventures like creating a holiday card business in Mexico City, co-producing a film, and working for Mexico City’s top magazine. I also worked throughout my university years in Mexico City, all jobs that weren’t related to tequila. These combined experiences were an important part of my preparation to become an entrepreneur and enabled me to be able to recognize my passion for the tequila industry. For the generations that are coming up, it’s important that you are curious because finding your passion and purpose will enable you to have the focus to discover your potential. 

On becoming the first-ever Maestra Tequilera…

A Maestra Tequilera or Maestro Tequilero are the lead people in charge of the production of tequilas in a tequila company. He or she is the person within a production house that is in charge of defining the brand’s unique formula. I’ve been aware of how male-dominated the tequila industry is from the beginning, but I’ve always focused on my ability and my passion instead of my gender. 

I am part of the founding professors that started with the Program of Tecnico Tequilero in the Universidad de Guadalajara that now is a master’s program. It’s important to give back to the tequila’s appellation of origin and make sure that the next generations can have more academic programs so they can take the category further.  

I want to help break down barriers and provide a path for other women who are interested in the spirits industry. Women in Hospitality and Women of The Vine & Spirits are important organizations that I’m a part of that empower women in the industry through networking and events. More than half of the Casa Dragones team is made up of women, so this is very important to me.

On being at the helm of her own company…

No day is the same in my role as CEO, which is part of why I love the job. Building a company from scratch you realize very quickly that the only constant is change. I divide my time between Tequila, Jalisco, Mexico City, and New York plus all of the work travel with my team across both the U.S. and Mexican markets and travel for events with wholesalers and customers. Between January and March, for example, I traveled every week at least once, maybe even multiple times a week. Last week, I was in tequila bottling the first batch of a new style we are bringing to market this year, and today I’m in New York, soon to be flying out to Las Vegas. I know now why they say, “running a company.” Running is a verb for a reason—you’re on the run on a permanent basis.

Photo: Courtesy of Bertha González Nieves

On taking the highs and lows of entrepreneurship in stride…

Being an entrepreneur and building a venture is a journey where the highs are high and the lows are very low. It can be glamorous at times, but mostly you need to roll up your sleeves and accept that you are making difficult decisions every day. You have to have thick skin and be quick on your feet to think critically about each decision you make. 

On advice for professionals trying to break into the industry…

My best advice is to make sure you have a full understanding of the category, a clear route on how to bring products into the marketplace, and have a unique selling proposition. Surround yourself with the best and most professional mentors you can find and also secure smart capital. Make sure there’s a long-term view because building a venture is not a 5k, it’s a marathon. Perseverance, dedication, passion, and knowledge are the key ingredients to finding success in any industry. 

On pivoting in the wake of COVID-19…

As a small-batch producer, we felt the impact of COVID-19 immediately. With bars, restaurants, hotels, nightclubs all closed, we lost a large share of business overnight and had to pivot quickly. It was important for us to stay connected and support our restaurant and bar community, so we started donating a portion of our online sales to the United States Bartenders’ Guild and the James Beard Foundation Open for Good campaign.

We also developed a “Cocktails at Home” program with out-of-work bartenders in the U.S., Mexico, and London, directly supporting them with small grants in exchange for original cocktail content online. One of my favorite initiatives to date has been providing sustainable 375ml Blanco glass bottles for our restaurant partners, such as ATLA, Lola Taverna, and Moby’s to use for their to-go cocktail programs.

In June, we introduced our latest sipping tequila, Casa Dragones Barrel Blend, in Mexico and the U.S., so we’re constantly pivoting and finding new opportunities to engage our loyal customers with extraordinary experiences. As entrepreneurs, change is the only constant.  We need to look at every challenge as an opportunity to grow, change, and innovate.  

Photo: Courtesy of Bertha González Nieves

On the Casa Dragones project she’s most proud of…

Since we started our company, we’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the most talented artists, chefs, and mixologists in the world. Reflecting back, these collaborations—from special art edition bottles to special pairing dinners to mixology jamming sessions—have been some of the most rewarding for me in my career. In  November 2019, we celebrated our ten-year anniversary over Day of the Dead weekend in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, which is Casa Dragones’ spiritual home. We invited everyone who supported us over the years to celebrate this incredible milestone with us. 

Our chef friends Enrique Olvera (Cosme, ATLA, Pujol), Daniela Soto-Innes (Cosme, ATLA), Elena Reygadas (Rosetta, La Panadería, Café NiN), Blaine Wetzel (The Willows Inn), and Donnie Masterton (The Restaurant) created a 100% plant-based dinner for over 360 of our closest friends and partners in the oldest operating bullfighting ring in Latin America. It was a magical celebration, showcasing our journey of craftsmanship, and our commitment to creating exceptional tequila and exceptional experiences. If we hadn’t remained committed to this ideal, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

On getting the most out of every workday…

Productivity is like being on a diet. Sometimes you’re productive and some days you don’t meet your expectations. It takes discipline to deliver at your highest level of productivity on a constant basis and keeping the balance between work and personal is essential to achieving this. Some distance between the two helps give clarity on what your priorities should be. With all of my travel, I have become very efficient at working on planes and figuring out how to be productive even when I’m not in the office.

MORE ON THE BLOG

Starting My Business Was One of the Biggest Risks I’ve Ever Taken—But I Don’t Regret It

This article was originally published by Mogul Millennial on March 24, 2020, and has been shared with consent.

“

No matter what, you have to stay the course, even when you’re not making a lot of money in the beginning.

”

—Denequa Williams-Clarke, Founder Lit Brooklyn

At Mogul Millennial, we believe that when we avoid the important conversation around money, it becomes a silent tool for oppression for the Black entrepreneurial community. It’s hard to learn about something when you’re discouraged or scared to talk about it, and as a result, cannot really learn in order to grow.

In our series, All About the Benjamins, we’re challenging Black entrepreneurs to give us the tea on their financial reality—how much money they’re making (or not making) if they are profitable, how they were really able to launch their business, and so much more.

In this edition, we were able to catch up with Denequa Williams-Clarke, the founder of LIT Brooklyn, a luxury, eco-friendly candle company. After deciding she wanted to launch a candle company, Denequa taught herself how to make candles, and since then, has been able to partner with top brands and has grown her passion into a profitable business. In our chat, we learn more about how Denequa launched LIT, and her financial experiences in the early days as a new entrepreneur.

An entrepreneur at heart.

One of my first jobs was actually my start in entrepreneurship. When I was 12 or 13, I had a printing company with one of my cousins and I was selling greeting cards. There was this CD ROM, when they were a thing, called “Create a Card,” and I used that to create greeting cards around the holidays and business cards for people. The biggest thing that I learned from this experience was customer service. Even at that young age, I treated my business very seriously from how I packaged it, and even the time frame of how I delivered my products. But I think other than that, I have to credit my parents for teaching me about business. They were immigrants and a lot of things that I’ve learned in business came from them. As an immigrant, you have to be super-resilient, and that’s definitely a trait that you need in business. Also, you need to be reliable, trustworthy, and a person of your word. No business could have taught me what I’ve learned from watching my parents.

Photo: Courtesy of LIT Brooklyn and Mogul Millennial

For Denequa, it was all or nothing.

I’ve always loved candles and I think my love for candles and my love for making people feel good about themselves, inspired LIT. The lighting of candles and the ambiance that it provides, I love being a part of that experience. Back in 2015, I was literally in the living room watching TV, and I told my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, “Yo, I think I want to start making candles.” The idea came easy to me because I love candles so much and I wanted to do what I loved.

When I decided to launch my business, I was doing it full-time. The money that I had saved from my last job helped me start my business. I literally just went all in. I know I had a lot of balls to do it. Looking back, I had a lot of balls and a lot of bills. Starting this business was probably one of the biggest risks that I’ve ever taken in life, but I don’t regret it.

I will say a disclaimer and note that there is definitely a certain kind of love that you have to have for starting any type of business but especially a business when you’re investing your own money into it because you have to have a mind frame of all or nothing and that’s not easy. You have to automatically go into it without even thinking that there’s going to be any loss at all; you have to fully believe in it 100%. I definitely experienced that a lot of that when I first started my business. I know people around me didn’t understand the importance of candles, but I didn’t let it stop me. 

It took spending money to make money.

My business was very expensive to start. Honestly, I never really calculated how much money I used when I first started. I do remember that there was a lot of trial and error and testing involved. There was a lot of spending on things like tumblers, wicks, glassware, waxes, and several other things. I never really took the time to think about the money aspect. Early on, I was so obsessed and invested in the final product that I never really thought about everything else that was going on.

In my first year of business, I did do a lot of sponsoring products and that was an expense. I also did a lot traveling to make sure I was at different pop-ups and events in the city, which was a huge expense too. In the early days, it was definitely a lot of money that was spent, but I wasn’t tracking it like that.

Plant your seed, and then watch it multiply.

When I first launched my business, my price points were a lot higher, and that was, of course, all with trial and error. About six months into my business, I did a whole rebranding, where I offered a travel-sized candle and I offered a different color jar. I found that the person that I was getting my supplies from was able to offer me a cheaper cost, so then in return, I was able to offer my customer’s a cheaper price. Once I did the whole rebranding, that’s when I started to see an increase in sales. My customers were getting the same quality product but just in different packaging.

I  didn’t really see any real, consistent sales coming in until like a year or a year and a half later in my business. Keep in mind though, that’s a part of the game. No matter what, you have to stay the course, even when you’re not making a lot of money in the beginning. 

“

You don’t become a self-made millionaire overnight and people have to know this coming in. Entrepreneurship is hard.”

—Denequa Williams-Clarke, Founder Lit Brooklyn

In every success story, there’s a gap of trials and errors that is untold.

To be honest, in the beginning, there was definitely no paying of a salary. I sustained myself because I was lucky to be able to still live at home with my mom.

After my first year of business, my mom started seeing people and brands writing about my business. For example, I was featured in Essence and got to be in a Budweiser commercial. I think for an immigrant parent, my mom was like “I don’t know exactly what the hell you’re doing, but it has to be something because people are talking about you.” From there once the traction started to pick up, belief started to come in. She knew that I wasn’t just sitting around and that my business was a real thing. Being able to stay at home was a huge help because I was also able to save money.

Often times, people don’t really talk about things like this, and I think that’s why success stories are so jaded. It’s so many loopholes in everyone’s story. The reality is that when you have a business, what you make goes back into the business. Even if you have a $5,000 day, you don’t really have $5,000, sis. That money goes back into supplies, back into your product, your tech, etc.

There is a lot of factors that go into the money that’s made as an entrepreneur, and I don’t think people are honest when having that conversation. You don’t become a self-made millionaire overnight and people have to know this coming in. Entrepreneurship is hard.

Started from the bottom now we’re here.

After all of the trials and long nights, I’m profitable now, but it didn’t happen until after the year and a half mark. Most of my revenue, and my profitably, has come from the help of my consumers, and their word of mouth marketing. The awareness that I’ve been getting since I launched from people that love my brand has been huge and impactful.

To keep up with Denequa or LIT, follow them on Instagram here, or visit the site to pick up your candle!

Photo credit: Courtesy of Denequa Williams-Clarke and Mogul Millennial

Mogul Millennial, Inc. a media-tech platform curating actionable resources for Black entrepreneurs and corporate leaders #forusbyus. Follow @mogulmillennial on Instagram and Twitter, and check out our website at www.mogulmillennial.com.

MORE ON THE BLOG

I Left a Steady Paycheck in Corporate America to Start My Own Future Fortune 500 Company

We know how daunting it can be to start a new business, especially if you’re disrupting an industry or creating an entirely new one. When there is no path to follow, the biggest question is, where do I start? There is so much to do, but before you get ahead of yourself, let’s start at the beginning. To kick-start the process, and ease some of those first-time founder nerves, we’re asking successful entrepreneurs to share their stories in our series, From Scratch. But this isn’t your typical day-in-the-life feature. We’re getting into the nitty-gritty details of launching a business, from writing a business plan (or not) to sourcing manufacturers and how much founders pay themselves—we’re not holding back.

Photo: Courtesy of Dorian Morris

As you may have gathered from the headline, Dorian Morris is ambitious. The Harvard Business School alumnae was busy climbing the corporate America ladder with her sights set on becoming one of the first Black female CEOs of a Fortune 500 company when she decided to take the leap and launch her own inclusive beauty startup instead. With an impressive résumé—which includes stints at CoverGirl, Sundial Brands, and Kendo—she was more than prepared to take on the competitive multi-billion dollar beauty industry.

Determined to disrupt the space, she founded Undefined Beauty, a clean, conscious, inclusive brand focused on democratizing beauty and destigmatizing what Morris calls "plant magic.” From manufacturing to marketing, she uplifts oft-overlooked communities by partnering exclusively with female-founded, minority-owned, or LGBTQ businesses. Needless to say, this is just one of the many reasons we’re proud to partner with Morris and Undefined Beauty for our inaugural Small Biz Pop-Up in Los Angeles where locals can safely shop the brand’s limited edition Glow Detox bath soak via Postmates or via contactless shopping, thanks to Square, when visiting the IRL pop-up at Platform.

Ahead, Morris talks us through her impressive career journey, from climbing the corporate America ladder to bootstrapping her own future Fortune 500 company. Trust us, you’re going to want to keep an eye on this space and add Undefined Beauty’s Glow Detox to cart, if you haven’t already.

On establishing a solid résumé…

“My background is a beautiful mosaic of retail, consumer packaged goods, and beauty, ranging from merchandising at Macy's, classical brand building at General Mills to learning the ins and outs of the beauty business while at Kendo, and continuing to evolve and master other beauty categories while at Sundial Brands and leading CoverGirl U.S.”

On building a future Fortune 500 company…

“While at Harvard Business School, I honestly thought my purpose was to lead a large Fortune 500 as one of the first Black female CEOs, but now, as I embark upon this startup journey, it's quite a different yet exciting adventure to be building my own future Fortune 500 company, from scratch. Each experience on my professional journey has built key tools that I can now leverage as an entrepreneur, including how I want to operate as well as how I do not want to operate, because actions are what determine your company values and culture.”

On leaving corporate America…

“After leaving corporate America, having built successful brands for other people, I felt it was my time to create something special and powerful for myself. As a beauty junkie, I'm always dissecting ingredient lists and realized there are a lot of less-than-ideal ingredients in our everyday products that aren't necessary. As the industry shifts towards greater transparency, I felt there was an opportunity to focus on clean, non-toxic beauty but do so in an accessible, approachable way.”

On discovering the benefits of cannabis…

“I discovered the beautiful benefits of cannabis, specifically CBD, via a former colleague. As I started my product development research in 2018, I found there wasn’t an efficacious yet fun and accessible CBD brand, focusing on the destigmatiation of cannabis while elevating conscious capitalism in the process. I created Undefined Beauty to fill this void: clean beauty meets adaptogens (CBD) meets social impact.”

On democratizing beauty…

“Undefined Beauty is a lifestyle brand focused on changing the narrative around clean, nontoxic living, democratizing beauty and infusing social impact in the process. I believe in plant power and the role adaptogens play in helping us individually become our best self, both inner and outer beauty, with CBD being for the first adaptogen I chose to highlight in my first collection, Indigo Rose. I want to empower women and men everywhere to explore, embrace, and celebrate their own unique beauty while also giving back to the community: purposeful beauty, unleashed.”

On tapping into conscious capitalism…

“I expanded the concept of conscious capitalism by launching Undefined Collective, a disruptive retail platform that is focused on elevating female-founded, minority-owned, LGTBQ, local and CBD brands because one plus one can equal five when indie brands come together. I have over 50 brand partners that have come together around this aligned vision and have executed a successful physical brick-and-mortar pop-up in Oakland, California, and more importantly, we have been able to educate the community on the amazing benefits of cannabis and demystify its internal and external benefits. Undefined Collective is continuing to evolve and I'm working on something special in the Arts District of Downtown Los Angeles that will launch very soon.” 

On destigmatizing and elevating CBD…

“The cannabis industry was built off the backs of the Black and Brown community, which are being denied access to the commercialization opportunity now that the regulatory landscape has shifted. Undefined is focused on destigmatizing and elevating CBD and taking it one step further. My goal is to infuse social good and purposeful impact into my business model to drive sustainable impact.”

“First, across my supply chain, I exclusively partner with female-founded, minority-owned, or LGBTQ businesses, from my labs to my warehouse to my designer—it’s all about business empowering business. Secondly, once I scale, I would like to focus my social impact lens on female incarceration, given the unfortunate situation that many in jail are there because of cannabis. As the daughter of law enforcement (my mom is one of the first Black female California Highway Patrol sergeants and is now a cannabis evangelist as the store manager of Undefined Collective Oakland), I’ve seen the broken law enforcement system and have family members that have been incarcerated for drug offenses (and some that are still in jail), so I’ve seen first-hand how difficult it is to reacclimate post-release.”

“I want to bring positivity from something that once was negative. I operate by the model ‘do good, be good,’ and Undefined can be the bridge by providing employment opportunities and forging strategic partnerships to be part of the solution. As one of the few bootstrapping, Black female-founded CBD brands, I feel representation matters both in showcasing we are here in the space as leaders and also in helping write the future of this dynamic, evolving industry.”

On taking the leap without a business plan…

“I didn’t create a formal business plan because I felt that in the ever-changing, evolving beauty space, sometimes you need to jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down. Where many founders stumble is getting caught up in analysis paralysis and you hesitate and miss key moments to drive the trend. Timing is everything. In addition, you have to be adaptable, fluid, and flexible because, ultimately, it’s the consumer who decides what brands win and what brands flop. I think you will never have all the answers and the best approach—especially when building a bootstrapped brand like Undefined—its to embrace an ‘iterate the great’ mindset, be strategic about staging risk, and continue to listen and evolve based on learnings and consumer shifts.” 

On landing on the name Undefined Beauty…

“Finding the right name was a fun process. I traveled to Atlanta to have an ideation sesh with my best friend who is a former indie beauty founder as well (she has a successful beauty line in Ulta) and has been an invaluable confidant on my startup journey. We went old school, with large poster boards and markers, brainstorming words and ideas that captured the vision I had for Undefined. The concept is really about challenging the status quo, changing the narrative, breaking the rules, and approaching beauty and wellness through a clean, conscious, inclusive lens. It’s about redefining, reframing, and rejecting what beauty and wellness have historically stood for; there’s more than one way to be, live, love, consume, appreciate, vibrate. It’s about celebrating the beauty of choice.”

“In ideating names, Undefined was the clear winner. I personally hate rules and being told what to do and Undefined embodies this mindset that rules are meant to be broken, especially when the rules were set up by a patriarchal system that did not (and still does not) want diverse and underrepresented community to thrive. It’s about taking our power back. Not conforming. Embracing individuality, quirkiness, duality, fluidity, and uniqueness. Not putting limits on yourself and moreover, recognizing you are not alone and you are more than enough.Beauty starts in your head, not in the mirror, and Undefined is about reinforcing and celebrating this new and important approach to beauty and wellness.”

“As a Black, queer, female founder, leading with purpose is part of my brand DNA, and it shows up in how I personally lead—focused on radical transparency—and it also shows up in how I communicate, inspire and educate my community, a.k.a. my Undefined Crew. My advice would be to find a name that represents your vision but also ensure from a business perspective, you can secure a URL—mine is a bit nonconventional since the basic version wasn’t available so I use un-definedbeauty.com—as well as social handles that embody the name. Sometimes you have to get creative and that’s ok. For example, my socials are @UndefinedBeauty_Co and @Undefined_Collective given some iterations were already taken.”

On setting up the business…

“My first step was selecting a brand name then securing URLs, social handles, applying for trademark protection. Next, I started to build the Instagram community—since I was starting from scratch months ahead of brand launch, it was about setting a tone for the type of content and community I wanted to create. Next, I started to build out briefs on the product parameters and innovation I felt was missing in the marketplace, which helped inform which types of manufacturing partners made sense to engage. Next, I started to work on the brand DNA which included creating a logo, color palette, and communication tonality. Closer to launch, I created an e-commerce site—very scrappily—using WIX and eventually moved to Squarespace—but if I was to start over, I would build off Shopify from the beginning which has a lot of integral functionality built-in.”

On differentiating the brand in the market…

“Understanding your unique value proposition is important because this will help clarify your differentiation in the market as well as provide parameters and boundaries as you build and grow. You have to understand who you want to target because if you want to target everyone, you’ll end up actually connecting with no one. Understand and research your category, competitors, ingredient benefits and trends and understand where the whitespace is that you can authentically compete.”

On finding the right manufacturers and production partners…

“This has been an important learning. Given I was a corporate beauty vet, I understood who the large manufacturers players were across categories but most have a very large minimum order quantity (MOQ), so I opted to work solely with female-founded, minority-owned, LGBTQ-founded suppliers which actually ended up being a competitive advantage as they typically have lower MOQs, allowing me to move faster to test innovative concepts.”

“It’s a win-win as conscious capitalism model is close to my heart and I’m helping empower communities that have been historically left to the fringes. Honestly, finding the right partners is a bit of trial and error but tapping into events and forums like Indie Beauty Expo, CosmoProf, MakeUp in LosAngeles, and Expo West, which bring together the business-to-business (B2B) suppliers has been invaluable. It will be interesting to see how these in-person events evolve in the post-COVID world.”

On building a financially stable foundation…

“As a bootstrapped founder, I self-funded launch and leveraged pitch competitions to help provide some financial fuel to the business. It’s definitely a slower build, but for me, it felt right, and I can build a sustainable foundation instead of driving growth to appease investors. I was lucky to own real estate in San Fransisco that I purchased while at Sephora and Kendo which allowed for Airbnb income to help me cover my living expenses, but I’m still in a place where I don’t pay myself so every dollar of profit is invested back into the company.” 

On being strategic and getting creative…

“I’ve been very strategic with every dollar I spend, and I actually don’t think of things as mistakes; they are all learnings to help you do things better going forward. My advice is to stage your risk by keeping your MOQs low and find creative solutions if you end up with packaging overstocks, which actually given the current supply chain disruptions, for me, has been actually a blessing in disguise.”

On working another job while building the business…

“I was consulting for a previous employer, General Mills, in the beginning of the Undefined exploration process, but as it started to take over my mindshare, I gracefully bowed out of the consulting engagement to fully commit to Undefined.” 

On getting out of your own way…

“Self-doubt and imposter syndrome are real—don’t believe it, get out of your own way, and remember that the universe always has your back.”

On valuing collaboration over competition…

“I lean heavily on my network of fellow startup founders to find creative solutions to challenges, information share, and help uplift one other. It’s truly collaboration over competition.”

To discover, support, and shop all of the brands featured at the Create & Cultivate Small Biz Pop-Up, head to our C&C Small Biz Pop-Up hub.

MORE ON THE BLOG

"I Maxed Out All of My Credit Cards and Lived Off Savings"—Now She's Built a $100M Company

You asked for more content around business finances, so we’re delivering. Welcome to Money Matters where we give you an inside look at the pocketbooks of CEOs and entrepreneurs. In this series, you’ll learn what successful women in business spend on office spaces and employee salaries, how they knew it was time to hire someone to manage their finances, and their best advice for talking about money.

“I took a risk and bet on myself. That’s the hardest part. If you don’t bet on yourself, who else ever will?”

—Gail Becker, CEO of CAULIPOWER

Money: like religion and politics, it’s off the table but if there’s one thing we need to talk about more, it’s money, especially as women. Why? Because more women than ever before are starting their own businesses and they’re growing at twice the speed. In fact, a new report found that 42% of all firms are female-owned and women started 1,817 businesses a day in the past year. Despite that, women-owned businesses still struggle to get crucial financing so we need to ditch the taboo and open up a public dialogue to better understand how to raise it, manage it, and grow it. 

Someone who is boycotting that ban is the founder, and CEO of CAULIPOWER, Gail Becker. Since 2017, Becker has built a $100m company and completely disrupted the food industry to become the #1 better-for-you pizza in the U.S. At our recent LA2020 conference, Becker had some no-filter money advice, especially around the topic of raising it. Having taken on two rounds of investment for CAULIPOWER, she knows each entrepreneur must make the right choice for them.  “Just because you can raise more money, doesn’t mean that you should” she told the audience. “It’s not a symbol of how successful you are… or will be.”

Becker also decided against a friends and family round for her startup. “It made me nervous to play with my friends’ and family’s money,” she explained. “I waited as long as I could before seeking outside funding. I used all of my own money initially and maxed out all my credit cards.” There are different ways to fund your business and, ultimately,  it needs to come down to what you feel most comfortable with and what your business needs are,” she explained. “I took a risk and bet on myself,“ she said. “That’s the hardest part. If you don’t bet on yourself, who else ever will?”

So, we tapped the powerhouse founder and CEO to share more of her money lessons, mistakes she’s made, and advice for small business owners. Read on and grab a pen, you’ll want to write these down.

On bootstrapping the company in the beginning…

When I first started CAULIPOWER, my goal actually wasn’t to make money. My dad, who was an entrepreneur and a Holocaust survivor, had recently passed away, and it made me recognize the fragility of life.  I had been working my way up the proverbial ladder of corporate America, and then decided that I really didn’t like the view.  I wanted to do something more meaningful with my life and I realized that I needed to make a change. That, along with my frustration in what I was seeing in the freezer aisle, created an ‘aha' moment that inspired me to launch CAULIPOWER.

My dad had left me with a small amount of money, and I knew the best way to honor his memory was to follow in his entrepreneurial footsteps.  I knew how hard my father worked for every dollar he made, so I spent each one cautiously. I also put in a fair amount of my own money and lived off my savings. On a personal note, it was an interesting transition for me. I was coming from a comfortable job in corporate America with a comfortable salary, and I was used to a certain lifestyle.

When I started CAULIPOWER, I said goodbye to that life and paid attention to every dollar that I was spending, both personally and for the company. I downgraded my lifestyle significantly, saying goodbye to any shopping (outside of the grocery store) and vacations, and even sold most of my former wardrobe such as purses and shoes online. Even that wasn’t enough to sustain the launch of CAULIPOWER, so I maxed out all of my credit cards and tapped into more of my savings.

While this was the right decision for me, everyone has to choose the route that makes sense for them. For me, this was the only way I could bring my vision to life. I was nervous to take money from friends or family, but that doesn’t mean that’s the wrong choice for others. In hindsight, I have several friends and family who now wish I would have asked. At the time, I just followed my gut and made a choice about how I could make things work without negatively impacting others.

On raising money twice since then…

I raised money for a few reasons. First, the frozen food industry is an extremely cash-intensive business. You have to make the product before you can sell it, and there’s a pretty quick need for money given cash flow. When it comes to raising money, timing is incredibly important. I learned quickly that you should try and build the business as much as possible before you raise money. Why? The smaller your business is, the more of the company you will have to give away when you raise money in exchange for equity. Ideally, it’s best to try and hold off until you’ve made some actual sales.

Having said that, one of the worst things you can do is starve a business from cash. Cash is like fuel. We need it to make our products, to pay for promotions, to hire staff, and to market the brand. The timing of it all is a delicate balance between raising too much money, forcing you to give away more of the company when it is of the least value and starving the business, stunting its growth and first-to-market advantage.

“Just because you can raise more money, doesn’t mean that you should. It’s not a symbol of how successful you are or will be.”

On the most surprising part of the venture capital process…

I was surprised at how personal the process became. It would be easy for someone to interpret reactions as a reflection of the quality of one’s idea. If a VC didn’t want to invest in CAULIPOWER or wanted to wait for more data, I questioned myself. What did that say about my idea? The reverse was also true. When you find a partner that believes in you and is prepared to invest money into your business,  it can be an incredible confidence boost. It’s a moment when you finally think, maybe this idea is not so crazy after all?!

One of the biggest mistakes that some people make during the fundraising process, is the instinctual desire to take money from the first person that offers it. You should always try to take ‘“smart” money—money from people who know more about the industry, category, and process of building a company than you do. What’s most important is to take money from people who will work hard for you and your idea.

Another part of the fundraising process that surprised me was how similar it was to, well, dating?! Remember, they’re not just interviewing you; you’re interviewing them too! You have to ask yourself ‘who do you want to be in the trenches with you for the long-term? Who will be there for you when the times and decisions get tough—because they will! Who shares your vision?

On the most common mistakes people make when raising money…

Raising too much. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. The ability to raise large amounts is not an indicator of the success of your business, rather it’s an indicator that a lot of people will be counting on you and you better deliver.  It’s important to raise what you need, which should be enough to hold you over for a while, but not forever. From there, you can build the company to something bigger, then raise more money when it becomes more valuable. My first round of funding was $2M.  

“One of the worst things you can do is starve a business from cash—cash is like fuel. ”

On the three crucial elements, every pitch deck should include…

First, you need to show the potential of the company or the white space. Why is this the right business at this time? What hole are you filling that currently doesn’t exist? Another crucial element is the data. You should try and show as much data as you can, even if you have to buy some of it. Show the real performance of your product if it's currently in stores, or use other competitive data to give a sense of how it might do. If it’s not already in the market, you need to prove why you believe it would do well, and this is best accomplished by definitive proof points. Show them that you have done your homework and that you don’t expect anyone to just take your word for it.

Finally, you need to show your passion. Most investors are not just investing in the business; they’re investing in YOU, the entrepreneur. If you're not passionate—and confident—about your own idea, then it really doesn't matter how good of a business plan you have.

On how much she paid herself in the beginning…

I didn't pay myself in the beginning. I lived off of my savings from about May 2016 to September 2017. Once I got VC funding, they made me take a salary and I’ve had the same one ever since. For comparison purposes, it is less than 1/5th of what I used to make when I worked in the corporate world… but I couldn't be happier.

On her first hire…

My first hire was someone who helped me fill out the deluge of paperwork I was facing from the retailers, brokers, and distributors. I realized all the time I was spending with paperwork was a huge opportunity cost and that my time would be better spent in other areas of the business. 

On the first big expense as a business owner…

The first order I placed to make the first product.

On when she hired an accountant…

One of the best things about the economy we live in is that you can hire contractors to help you with just about anything. Thanks to some referrals, Google, and some other people I had met in the industry, I came across an agency that performed CFO duties for-hire for small companies. As soon as I got my first order, I knew I had to hire them. 

I strongly believe that the most important thing to know as a first-time entrepreneur is to know what you don’t know and then hire around it. Many entrepreneurs mistakenly believe that they somehow need to know all aspects of their business. Nothing could be further from the truth. Know what you know and then hire experts to fill in the gaps.

“Know what you know and then hire experts to fill in the gaps. ”

On the most important area for business owners to focus their financial energy…

Put it into making the best product or service you possibly can. At the end of the day, you can have everything else figured out, but if you don’t have a product that people want, nothing else matters.  

On why women should talk about money and business more…

When I was in my first marriage and at my old job, I’m embarrassed to admit that there was a lot I didn’t know about my own finances. I wasn’t financially illiterate, but I never made it a priority to become informed. When I got divorced, the need to become financially literate hit me in the face. I remember thinking, “I will never do that again.”

On having a financial mentor…

I did have some incredible people in the industry (and outside of it) that I looked up to, asked lots of questions of and with whom I’ve stayed connected. I never really had a financial mentor, but then again that wasn’t the primary reason why I started CAULIPOWER. My initial goal wasn’t to make lots of money; it was simply to help people have access to better options. If that’s why you start your business though, then that’s fantastic and finding a financial mentor might be the right choice for you. Now that I am running a business and am responsible for other people, the financial decisions I take on have tremendous importance.

On the money mistakes she’s made and learned from along the way…

I think it all depends on whether you’re new to your industry or if you have a background in it. If I had any sort of experience in the frozen food space prior to launching CAULIPOWER, I probably could have made some different decisions. Since that wasn’t the case, I placed a lot of trust in other people. I trusted that they knew more than I did and there’s a fair amount of trust that I probably placed blindly. In some cases, that ended up having a high price tag associated with it.

“If you’re not passionate—and confident—about your own idea, then it really doesn’t matter how good of a business plan you have. ”

On her best money advice for new entrepreneurs…

You don’t have to know all of the answers. You just have to know enough to hire the people who do. Just because you may not be a financial wizard, it doesn’t mean you shouldn't go into business. Just surround yourself with the right people who can teach you…and ask lots of questions. Daily.

I don’t equate money and happiness. The experience of launching and building CAULIPOWER showed me that one of the reasons I was so hesitant to leave my stable career is that I thought I had a great life. There was this inherent fear that if I lost all of those trappings that I had grown accustomed to, I wouldn’t be happy.

Today people who know me often hear me say “half as rich, but twice as happy” and no sentiment could be truer.  Now, I realize that those things didn’t matter at all and the chance to build CAULIPOWER, take a bet on myself and help other people along the way has been the greatest professional joy of my life. I hope these words help to realize the same in you.

To learn more about CAULIPOWER and try their delicious pizzas, visit eatcaulipower.com.

From Scratch: How This Founder Turned Her Passion for Fashion Into Financial Success

Written by Jackie Sedley.

We know how daunting it can be to start a new business, especially if you’re disrupting an industry or creating an entirely new one. When there is no path to follow, the biggest question is, where do I start? There is so much to do but before you get ahead of yourself, let’s start at the beginning. To kickstart the process (and ease some of those first-time founder nerves) we’re asking successful entrepreneurs to share their story in our new series, From Scratch. But this isn’t your typical day in the life. We’re getting down to the nitty-gritty from writing a business plan (or not) to sourcing manufacturers and how much they pay themselves, we’re not holding back. If you want to know how to start a business, you’ve come to the right place.

Photo: Courtesy of Printfresh

The world of fashion is ever-changing. Just ask Amy Voloshin, the creative director and co-founder of Printfresh; she has been immersed in the world of style and design since early childhood. After studying textiles and fine arts in college, Voloshin took her knowledge of design and her eye for aesthetics and turned it into a stylish and über-successful textile company.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was Voloshin’s design company. While she makes it look easy, putting out fashionable accessories, cozy sleepwear, and beautiful stationery is hard work but Voloshin has mastered the art of leadership through years of experience in her field.

Thankfully, Voloshin let us pick her brain and learn more about how her company came to fruition, what she’s learned along the way, and how important it is to keep up with the constant shifts in the world of business.

CREATE & CULTIVATE: Did you write a business plan?

AMY VOLOSHIN: I’m a planner so I always write a business plan for my new ventures. It helps me think through a lot of the details that I’ll need to tackle to get going. I think it’s important to jot down the basic outline of what you are selling, how and where it will be sold, who will be on your team and what roles you will need to fill in your first year. If you self-fund like I’ve done,  it’s really just whatever will be helpful to you and to those helping. I also use the business plan as a place to store a lot of research—I love researching, so it’s a great place to collect ideas and thoughts on how other companies are executing similar businesses. 

How did you come up with the name? What was the process like?

Our name came from our first business, Printfresh Studio. That business is all about designing prints for the fashion industry.  As that business matured and everyone kept asking us “Where can we buy your prints?” we always had to shrug and tell people we don’t know or couldn’t tell them due to the non-disclosure agreements we signed.  So when we decided to take the plunge and start our brand, we brought the name along. When we started out we thought we could put crazy prints on everything but instead decided to stay focused around our love of textiles - hence all the sumptuous velvet journals.  Now that we are expanding into pajamas, I’m really excited to use more prints in our collections.

What were the immediate things you had to take care of to set up the business?

Getting the name sorted out was really the first part since so much of the branding and design can’t begin until that is set. In this day and age of social media, having a good handle is important for social marketing.  Getting the domain is important too, but with the new suffixes that are out there now, there’s more flexibility than there used to be when everything was only .com. Trademark is something we worked on as well, but that can wait till you get things into the market. Definitely get your website up and a fun splash page and start collecting emails. You never know when things will change with social media, but email has been a really consistent place for us to get information to our customers about new products and sales.

What research did you do for the brand beforehand? Why would you recommend it?

I’m what my business partner would describe as ‘an exhaustive researcher,’  which is funny since he worked in clinical pharmaceutical research before teaming up with me. I sometimes research something to a point that might be inadvisable! But, there is so much product out there and so many companies, so it’s important to find ways to stand out in a positive way. It’s important to answer some questions—is someone out there already doing what I want to do? Is what I’m going to do providing something different and exciting that doesn’t exist already at a good price? It’s also important to know when to stop researching. With all the online resources out there it can be easy to research too much and delay the fun parts like designing.

“I’ve learned that listening to the expertise of others can help you avoid making costly mistakes and can also help open doors that may otherwise have taken forever to get open. ”

How did you find the manufacturer/production facility that you use? Did you have any bad experiences?

Being alumni of Urban Outfitters and calling Philadelphia home, we are blessed with a great network to tap into.  We had a lot of friends that were able to make connections to some fantastic factories in India and China. There are so many factories out there but it’s important to find ones that have experience making the type of product we are looking to develop, and that their ethics in terms of labor and environmental concerns are the same as our own. I travel to India and spend a lot of time meeting new partners, working in factories, and ensuring that the partnerships are the right ones. For example, we were able to find a factory for our pajamas that do so many great things environmentally, like use solar power and recycle gray water for use in their garden.  

Did you self-fund the company? Did you raise seed money or initial investment money? What would you recommend?

We self-funded the company and had some help from our family. We’ve always self-funded our ventures—I like the freedom of being able to find our own way. It’s something I’m open to in the future, but I wanted to develop the company independently and experiment. If we pursue investment money in the future, it would probably be to invest in advertising and marketing to help expand the brand and become more known in the US market.   

How much did you pay yourself? How did you know what to pay yourself?

Haha, yeah, that’s a tough one. In my first business, I started, it took about six months to be able to pay myself a small income. We’ve reinvested all of the money that we are making back into the company. Fortunately, we have some real estate ventures that help us live modestly while the business grows a bit bigger. It’s one of those things where it’s just a moment in time and hopefully, through working really hard we will see a return in a few years on our investment of time, energy, and money. 

How big is your team now? What has the hiring process like?

Printfresh is a small team of five and we all work across some of the other companies we operate (like the fashion line Voloshin). We’ve been hiring for over a decade for Printfresh Studio, so I feel like I’ve learned a lot along the way.  One book that helped me figure out how to hire better is The Who Method by Geoff and Randy Smart—it really helped us set up our hiring process and we use that methodology all the time. It’s helpful to have a set way of interviewing for the team to follow.

For a start-up especially, hiring those who have skill sets I don’t have has been important. Also, hiring for work ethic and the ability to finish projects independently has been critical for our start-up. When hiring, I like to spend a really long time getting to know applicants—typically, I’ll meet with them for 1-2 hours and really try to understand why they are leaving their current job, why this company is the right place for them, do our values synch up. I want to make sure that we will work well together since we will be spending so much time together. 

Photo: Courtesy of Printfresh

Did you hire an accountant? Who helped you with the financial decisions and set up?

We’ve been using QuickBooks for 13 years and have had our accountant for almost the same length of time.  When we first started, we used the accountant that my grandmother, and then my father, used in their businesses. Then, we got to the point where we needed someone who could come in and review the P&L with us on a quarterly basis. This has helped us really understand the numbers and trends in a way that allows us to make changes as necessary.

What has been the biggest learning curve during the process of establishing a business?

With this business, the greatest learning curve has been really learning to listen to our customers. We have never had the opportunity to work with consumers directly and seeing how people interact with our products and the reactions they have has been really informative. Really understanding why the consumer likes certain items has helped us continue to develop new and innovative products (like our upcoming mindfulness morning rituals and night time reflections guided journals).

How did you get retailers to start stocking your product? Were you told no? How did you handle that rejection?

I decided to take the plunge and signed us up for the National Stationery Show two years ago. We built an amazing booth with the help of our friend Luren and showed up at the show to try and get as many customers as possible. We printed a ton of tote bags and gave them away at the show and it got everyone talking about it. We picked up 30 stores at that show.  But more importantly, we met our real-life fairy godmother, Tara Riceberg, who has this amazing store in L.A. called TWEAK and she introduced us to Karen Alweil, who is now our wholesale sales rep. She’s gotten us into over 300 stores over the last few years. Rejection, though, is a daily constant for anyone in our business. As we go after bigger retailers, we just need to remember that ‘no’ usually just means ‘not now.’

“We’ve always self-funded our ventures—I like the freedom of being able to find our own way.”

Do you have a business coach or mentor? How has this person helped?

We have had some sort of mentor from the very early stages of starting our business. I’ve learned that listening to the expertise of others can help you avoid making costly mistakes and can also help open doors that may otherwise have taken forever to get open. Early on we used SCORE, which is a national organization with chapters all over the country. We have also used the SBDC (Small Business Development Center) at the University of Pennsylvania with a lot of success. Over the last few years we have been working with our mentor Steve Smolinsky—he has years of experience and a great perspective that helps us avoid obstacles before we even see them.

I was also able to find mentors through doing the Philadelphia Fashion Incubator, which connected me to some amazing industry veterans who have been very instrumental in helping me navigate areas of the business that I lack experience in. I highly recommend having a mentor—it’s amazing to have a life-line to reach out to during some of the challenges that arise when running a small business. There’s lots of information on the web, but not all of it’s perfect or right for your business. Having great mentors with real-life experience and who know you personally can really help you find solutions that you may have not arrived at otherwise.  

How did you promote your company? How did you get people to know who you are and create buzz?

We are definitely still learning! Marketing has changed so much in the last couple of years and I think all businesses are challenged by keeping up with the changing technology and the way it’s being used.  Printfresh Studio is so B2B (business to business) that we never had to market to the consumer. But we are slowly starting to figure it out. We spend a lot of time on getting great photos of our products and try to stay in touch with blogs and people who share our interests. Sending small gifts to people who you want to use your product and have a platform to share them on has been working as well. 

What is one thing you didn’t do in the setup process, that ended up being crucial to the business and would advise others to do ASAP?

If you are sure you have a great product, then getting it out to the media is important. Whether you find the time to do it yourself or you hire a great PR company (like Push the Envelope PR), it’s something that needs to happen ASAP.  We only recently focused our energy on it and are kicking ourselves for not doing it earlier. We didn’t really know how to go about finding the right PR company and didn’t know what to look for.  

For those who haven’t started a business (or are about to) what advice do you have?  

My top tips would be to: write a business plan, read as many books as you can about the industry you’re getting into, figure out how you’ll be different, and get yourself in an incubator or something similar as soon as possible to start growing your network. 

View the new Printfresh collection at printfresh.com and throughout the U.S. in specialty boutiques. 

Photo: Courtesy of Printfresh

Money Matters: "Make a Profit So You Have the Space to Experiment and Make Mistakes."

You asked for more content around business finances, so we’re delivering. Welcome to Money Matters where we give you an inside look at the pocketbooks of CEOs and entrepreneurs. In this series, you’ll learn what successful women in business spend on office spaces and employee salaries, how they knew it was time to hire someone to manage their finances, and their best advice for talking about money.

Photo: Courtesy of Keep Cup

When Abigail Forsyth launched her reusable coffee cup 10 years ago in a bid to eradicate disposable single-use cups, she had no idea it would become the global brand it is today. Now, KeepCup has sold over 12 million reusable cups, is used in over 65 countries and their customers have diverted an estimated 8 billion disposable cups from landfill each year—not to mention she’s kickstarted the global movement to eradicate disposable coffee cups. Forsyth is a leader in the global movement to inspire reduce and reuse, with a passion to reduce the use of single-use items. 

But her career didn’t start off this way. Forsyth actually had a successful career as a lawyer before joining forces with her brother to launch Bluebag cafe. This is where her awareness around single-use coffee cups was heightened and soon after, KeepCup was born. But despite the global growth, Forsyth has managed to stay completely self-funded without taking any outside investment (which she recommends to fellow entrepreneurs, too.

Read on to hear her money advice, mistakes, and financial lessons learned along the way. You’ll want to write these down.

On why she self-funded the business…

We had a small loan, some grants from the City of Melbourne and Design Victoria, cash flow from our café business Bluebag, and presales off of the KeepCup product prototype. Yes, I would recommend other entrepreneurs to self-fund their businesses. We are fortunate enough to sustain our business and grow without taking on outside investment, which means we have been able to remain nimble, iterative and independent. You need to make money to stay in business, so be wary that outside funding can compromise your ability to have a vision beyond shareholder value.

On how much she pays herself…

We are a certified B Corporation which means that, as a business, we have to meet certain standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability and balance profit and purpose.  In line with this, my earnings are capped at 10x the lowest-paid employee.

On how much to pay employees…

We have looked at payscale, similar job descriptions, and have occasionally worked with recruiters to determine appropriate living wages for all our employees. Last year, we recruited a people and culture manager, and took the time to benchmark salaries and review our remuneration structure. Things can change as the business grows, and you have a mix of old and new employees, so we had to revisit our structures and processes.

“You need to make money to stay in business, so be wary that outside funding can compromise your ability to have a vision beyond shareholder value.”

On the most important area for business owners to focus their financial energy…

Right now, all businesses must focus on carbon neutrality: decarbonizing and dematerializing their operations, use their business to make a positive contribution. There’s no business on a dead planet.

Focus your financial energy in places that align with your company’s mission. At KeepCup, our mission is to inspire the world to reduce and reuse, and we’re committed to championing the cause for a more sustainable future. In everything we do, we adopt sustainable business practices from manufacturing to our office space, all the way down to the actual product. 

We’re really focused on adopting and setting best practices in sustainable product design and business, even if this means it is at an additional cost to our business. For example, we donate 1% of global revenue to environmental causes and are a certified B Corporation, as we are committed to driving the transition to the circular economy and promoting reduced consumption, reuse and repair. 

On the first big expense as a business owner…

Our first big expenses were committing to tooling and the endless road of website development.

On how much they spend on office space…

Too much! We have just spent a year refitting our HQ in Melbourne, Australia to make it consistent with our company values and vision for a more sustainable future. It is a very well insulated solar-powered building with plenty of natural light and green space.  Most of the furniture is second hand, and is beautiful, but does not use new resources.

“Build your business from the ground up on purpose beyond profit.”

On when she was able to start saving income…

The savings wax and wane depending on where we are at with things like product development, website updates, and premises etc. I like to have something set aside for opportunities or issues that might come up.  As well as committing to providing 1% of our revenue to environmental causes, we are committed to being carbon neutral by 2025.  We will see where that journey takes us. I’m also really interested in rehabilitating the natural landscape, particularly in Australia. We have just donated $100,000 for bushfire relief and commit 1% of our revenue, as opposed to profit, to environmental causes.

On setting up the business financials…

When we set up our accounting system I made a lot of noise about how it was overcooked for the simplicity of the business 10 years ago, and that decision has held us in good stead. We always had an external accountant, and our internal accountant was one of our first hires. There is a story about me paying the invoices and throwing them into a tomato box as a filing system, which may or may not be true!

On the tools, she uses to stay on top of the business financials…

In my view, the most valuable tool is a great finance team, and a great set of reports to check the ongoing health of the business. In terms of software, we use Microsoft Navision and Power BI.

On what she wishes she’d done anything differently financially…

I wish we had created a better structure at the outset in partnership with my brother. When we started the business, we were young singles—priorities shifted as the business grew. We also progressed in our personal lives, started families and our individual priorities shifted. Separating business ownership from your role in the business at the beginning is really important. 

“Make a profit so you have the space to experiment and make mistakes.”

On why she thinks women should talk about money and business more…

Women should absolutely talk about money and business more.  I feel a real sense of responsibility to do right by people and the planet, but it’s really important to acknowledge and talk about the fact that this has not been at the cost of financial success. It creates the space for change. 

It’s been really important to me as a woman, to be commercially successful and financially independent, this gives me a voice to talk about the values I believe in and press for change.

On having financial mentors…

No. I don’t have a financial mentor, but I think business owners may very well need one depending on their circumstances. There is an endless parade of people who will line up to tell you what to do and how to do it, and whilst relying on expertise is very important, it’s equally important also ask whose interests they serve.  No one will care about or think about your business more than you.

On the money mistakes she’s made along the way…

Throughout our 10 years in business, the biggest lessons I’ve learned have been around understanding margin, understanding the cost impact of waste, balance sheets, and profit and loss and having the right insurance. I would not say these are mistakes, I would say it has been a journey in deepening my understanding and balancing the internal needs of the business with the external environment in which we operate.

On her best money advice for new entrepreneurs…

Build your business from the ground up on purpose beyond profit. I truly believe businesses ought to serve a purpose that is of benefit to people and the planet. Businesses must serve the communities in which they operate, respect the natural resources (which in my view belongs to everyone), respect their employees and protect the natural world.

If you aren’t in business to dematerialize and decarbonize the economy, you are in the wrong business.  I think the world is hopefully waking up to the futility of balanced books on a dead planet. We are all in this together.

On the hardest money lessons she’s learned…

Make a profit so you have the space to experiment and make mistakes.  

Create & Cultivate 100: Entrepreneur: Gwyneth Paltrow

We talk a lot about career leaps at Create & Cultivate and if there’s one person who has perfected the art of the pivot, it’s Gwyneth Paltrow. From Pepper Pots in the Iron Man franchise to the icy beautiful Estella in Great Expectations (and who else was glued to Paltrow’s Georgina Hobart in The Netflix’s hit show The Politician last year?), the esteemed actor has enjoyed a very successful career with numerous industry accolades (including an Academy Award) for her work but perhaps her biggest achievement is becoming an entrepreneur.

In 2008, Paltrow embarked on her second life by launching a humble newsletter from her kitchen called goop—yeah, you might have heard of it! Since then, she has successfully transformed that email into the multifaceted content, e-commerce, and experiential lifestyle platform it is today—and we hear it’s worth a cool $250 million. Now, that’s a boss we want to emulate.

Keep reading to hear from Paltrow on why she believes goop has struck such a chord with readers, the lessons she’s learned as CEO, and the three traits you need to be a successful entrepreneur.

CREATE & CULTIVATE: You launched goop in 2008 out of your kitchen as a weekly newsletter and now it's a go-to destination for millions of people around the world for information for health/wellness but also as trusted e-commerce for clean products from home to beauty. What do you attribute to that success? Why do you think it has resonated so much with audiences? How do you feel about the growth and its success? What are your hopes for the brand?

GWYNETH PALTROW: A lot of the success is rooted in the authenticity of what we were trying to create. I was passionate about wellness and food and great product, but I didn’t think I had the authority to run a business. We were content only for a very long time, and out of that content came a need, determined by our readers, to curate incredible products to go along with our stories. We started very slowly, with one-off collaborations with brands we loved, which always sold out right away.

Once we'd built a strong multi-brand assortment, we realized that we had the authority and the white space to create our own efficacious, well-made products. But it was all very organic, and it took a long time. We started the business in 2008 and we didn't fully realize the business model until much later, starting in 2015 when we took venture money.

While we're firmly rooted in contextual commerce, the model is still evolving. We didn’t know that experiential would be such a huge driver of the business. Over 57% of our brand partnership deals have an experiential element. From a consumer standpoint, we're becoming almost as well known for our experiential activations, such as our In goop Health summits, live podcasts and retail stores, as our core businesses.

“I’m a perfectionist, and I can be very demanding of myself, which is something I’m trying to work on personally.”

You began your career as an actor and made the pivot to become the CEO of goop—How would you describe your leadership style? What kind of boss are you? What have you learned about yourself and about being a leader through this process?

I'm a perfectionist, and I can be very demanding of myself, which is something I'm trying to work on personally. I expect a lot from my team but in the same respect, I try to lead with empathy. I want my team to feel that they have autonomy and to cultivate an environment where people can take risks, be collaborative and not feel paralyzed by the fear of failure.

As we scale, we're less like the little family we were for the first iteration of the company, but it's crucial to me that we sustain our values. It's not a top-down thing; everyone in the company needs to feel responsible for the culture we create.

In your opinion, what are the top three traits of a successful entrepreneur?

Self-belief, the willingness to be vulnerable and ask questions and to hire people who are smarter than you are.

What is the best advice you’ve received? 

Never give up.

What is the #1 book you always recommend?
Dream Work by Mary Oliver.

VIEW THE FULL CREATE & CULTIVATE 100 ENTREPRENEUR LIST HERE.



Create & Cultivate 100: Small Business: Ally Walsh

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the many interviews we’ve conducted at Create & Cultivate it’s to never let competition stop you from starting a business you’re passionate about. So, when Ally Walsh, a model/creative, and Casey Wojtalewicz, a musician/writer had the lightbulb moment to start their own coffee bean company they didn’t think about a saturated market, they just threw their ongoing passion for the java juice into their own brand and launched Canyon Coffee.

Now that little lightbulb is a shining spotlight that has successfully disrupted a space that desperately needed newness, and they’ve garnered a cult following in the process. Read on to hear how Walsh did it and her small business advice for those who want to take the leap too.

CREATE & CULTIVATE: In an interview, you said that Canyon Coffee came about one day when you and Casey (your partner and co-founder) were sitting around the kitchen table and you just decided to make it happen. Can you take us back to that moment? How did you take your lightbulb moment and turn it into a product and profitable business

ALLY WALSH: The light bulb moment was really a culmination of different events and ideas coming together over several years. It drew from our ongoing passion for coffee and relationships made within the field, knowledge of the industry and awareness of a gap (or opportunity), and the organic creation of a brand we had more or less been developing, unintentionally.

I'd say it felt a lot like connecting the dots, the opposite of forced. The brand creation and business strategy came after this moment, but we felt that by creating something rooted in an authentic passion—something that made our lives better on a daily basis—we couldn't go wrong!

Did you know anything about making coffee? How did you learn? What were those first steps? What is one thing you didn’t do in the setup process, that ended up being crucial to the business and would advise others to do asap?

Yes! The love and passion for coffee were there long before Canyon. Our learning curve took a big leap forward when Casey broke the french press one morning and brought home a Chemex to replace it. Not that the Chemex is superior—it just turned us on to how different coffee can come out through different brew methods. We slowly began perfecting our homebrew.

Casey took a deeper dive when he started working in the industry as a barista. As far as the setup process, I'm not sure what we would do differently. We knew we had a lot to learn, so we just went at it with curiosity. We didn't start by asking for or raising a bunch of money, because we wanted to learn every part of the business for ourselves before handing it off to others. I think if we were to do it again, we'd start off by making a greater budget/plan and starting off with more cash. But we'd only do that now because we have years of experience and would know what to do with those finances.

“Take whatever time and space are available to get in touch with the things that you’re really passionate about.”

When you hit a bump or hurdle in your career, how do you #FindNewRoads + switch gears to find success?

In a way, Canyon is almost an example of that. Both Casey and I come from careers that promise less long-term security than others (modeling and music). We didn't hit any big bumps, but Canyon was obviously a departure and a new road for both of us. It came about pretty organically.

Every situation is different when we encounter bumps or hurdles. My best advice would be to take whatever time and space are available to get in touch with the things that you're really passionate about and see what opportunities come to you that resonate with that. For us with Canyon, it was coffee!

Talk us through the bootstrapping process. How did you self-fund your business? Would you recommend that route to other entrepreneurs? Do you have plans to scale or raise?

We literally got going with a credit card. We've basically sold everything we produce, have been profitable from the beginning, and put everything back into growing the business. We were able to start with so little because, through connections and relationships, we were able to bypass the regular large expenditures and risk of building a roasting operation from scratch. I'd recommend that approach for first-time business founders, though the funding could also come from a family member who believes in your idea.

For us, as a model and musician, we didn't feel raising money to start a coffee company was going to be very successful, and therefore we didn't consider it at the time. Now that we've proven ourselves, raising the necessary capital to scale is a lot more realistic and our options are better. We do have plans to scale, and we want to consider all options. Maintaining our ownership of what we've built through love and sweat is a priority.

You've achieved so much success, but knowing what you do now, what do you wish you could go back and tell yourself?

Whenever I think of my younger self, I always want to tell her to not stress so much—that 90% of what she was stressing about was so inconsequential. And my future self will probably say that to the “me” now too!

When you're a small business owner, you have to fall in love with the numbers. What have been some of the hardest money lessons you've learned along the way? What is your #1 money tip for small business owners? Why?

Wrapping our heads around cash flow. It's different with every industry. In our case, we're a manufacturing operation, so it's not as simple as "Product A costs $X, and we sell it for $Y." There's a lot more that goes into it, and we produce multiple times a week. But it's so crucial to figure out and to stay on top of accounts receivable because we've definitely hit points whereby not staying on top of our accounts to pay on time, led to us to be late to our vendors. We hate that and strive to be a great customer to the companies that enable us to do what we do.

I'd say the #1 money tip that we've really begun to think of, for businesses at our stage, is to only raise or borrow money for quantifiable things that will turn a profit—like inventory. It always sounds really appealing to raise money and hire someone, but it only makes sense if there's a solid plan for how the business is going to scale to afford that person when the funding is through.

Creating buzz so people know about your brand can be challenging for small businesses. How do you market your business? How are people aware of your business? What are some unique social/marketing tools you've used to grow organically?

We've grown our brand exclusively through social media and events. We did two to three pop-up events a month during the first year of Canyon, and it went a long way. People would often remark ‘you guys are everywhere!’ because the events would have a life of their own through social media afterward. We also retain and grow our base through emails, which we're careful to stay consistent on but never inundate people's inboxes. We also try to focus on creating content that we actually find interesting. It's not always about coffee.

What has been the toughest business decision you've had to make? And how did you turn it into an opportunity?

We say no to so many opportunities. The hardest ones have been opportunities for shops and roasting spaces of our own. One such ‘no’ turned into a wonderful opportunity. The relationship with the brothers behind our now-partner shop, Neighborhood, started off with them asking if we were interested in starting a shop. We said, truthfully, no, that wasn't our mission. But we got along great with them and built a lot of trust and mutual respect. We began helping them with the shop in a consulting capacity, and it turned into one of our best accounts. We're excited to have them as partners and continue collaborating with them on more projects.

“We didn’t start by asking for or raising a bunch of money, because we wanted to learn every part of the business for ourselves before handing it off to others.”

What are some of the biggest mistakes you made early on and how did you recover from it? Or are you still making mistakes?

We'll always make mistakes. I think mistakes are inevitable. But when you're new and small, it's important to recognize that you're more likely to make mistakes and limit the size of those mistakes. You learn a lot from them. For example, don't invest in a huge inventory of something you've never sold if you don't have to. Start small to test it out. As we get bigger, we become more sure of certain things and feel more confident in our ability, so it enables us to take bigger risks. This doesn't mean we're not going to make mistakes, but at some point, you do have to take risks in order to grow.

Where do you see Canyon Coffee headed? What are you manifesting for 2020?

I see us continuing to grow. We've been growing at a really great rate organically since we started, and a lot of our time and effort is focused on maintaining that rate in a sustainable way. I see us entering into more key partnerships with shops, cafes, and hotels as more businesses recognize we offer support for those services, and I see us connecting with more people who order our coffee and make it at home. Turning people on to the beauty of a coffee morning ritual is really what it's all about for us. I also see us finally bringing a Canyon shop to life here in L.A., for people to come and experience us firsthand in a way that's intentional for us.

Photographer: Jenna Peffley

Hair: Styled by OGXpert & Celebrity Hairstylist Jillian Halouska

VIEW THE FULL CREATE & CULTIVATE 100 SMALL BUSINESS LIST HERE.

Create & Cultivate 100: Entrepreneur: Giada de Laurentiis

Giada de Laurentiis doesn't take no for an answer. In fact, it only gives the celebrity chef fuel to work harder and prove them wrong. Despite all of her success as a globally-revered celebrity chef, Emmy award-winning television personality (she has eight shows on the Food Network), New York Times-bestselling author (she has nine cookbooks including a series of children’s books), and NBC Today Show contributor, Laurentiis’ biggest obstacle has been getting people to take her seriously.

“I was in a field that was very heavily male-dominated—I didn't look the part,” she told us at the Self-Care Summit. “It's best that we just show them—actions are always louder than words. You show them every day and you don't get emotional. Men do not work well with emotional women. Be consistent with your work and that’s when they know, and start to take you seriously.”

Read on to hear more of her sage career advice, how motherhood made her better at her job, and what she attributes to her success.

CREATE & CULTIVATE: You are one of the most recognizable faces in the food world—you’re now a globally-revered celebrity chef and Emmy award-winning television personality with eight shows on the Food Network, nine New York Times bestselling cookbooks (including a series of children’s books), and you’re also an NBC Today Show contributor. Tell us about the first product you made under the Giada brand and what it feels like now to be a household name around the world?

GIADA DE LAURENTIIS: The first products I launched under my name were Sicilian sea salt, a herb de province mix, and a few pasta shapes. I knew that I didn't want to put my name on a product unless a story could be told and I had a story and great recipe with those ingredients when paired together, but unfortunately, a lot of people would buy the items separately, like just the salt or just the pasta, and that was disheartening for me. After that first product launch, I decided to partner with Target because they had the shelf space to show the story I wanted to tell with my products. The story behind anything I do has always been key for me and it still is to this day.

You launched your lifestyle and e-commerce platform, Giadzy.com in 2017. Can you talk through why you created the brand? What the response has been like? And how you manage to fit it in with all of your other commitments?

Giadzy first started as a passion project because I wanted to have a direct voice with my fans and I wanted to talk to them about what they're interested in, what kind of recipes they wanted to see. A lot of the stuff I do is evergreen because other companies push for it to last forever and please the largest number of people, so I really wanted to do something that was different. What was refreshing about launching Giadzy is that I could narrow the focus and talk more about being a mom and my genuine interests and have more of a conversation directly with my fans.

“The more that people tell me no, the more I’m going to prove them wrong and work harder.”

In those the first stages building Giadzy and the Giada brand what were some of the obstacles you faced early on and how did you overcome them?

I think the biggest obstacle was people taking me seriously. I was in a field that was very heavily male-dominated and I didn't look the part—I was ‘too little’ and ‘too cute.’ And I was constantly told that no one could trust a skinny chef (people still say that to me to this day). So I didn't fit the mold and I think that's what the problem was—when you love something so deeply, but somehow you don't look the part and maybe don't act the part, it's really hard to change peoples' minds. So I think my biggest challenge was getting through that.

We read that every millionaire has at least 7 streams of revenue and you’ve definitely nailed that—what advice do you have for other women looking to emulate your success and financial freedom?

Diversify your portfolio, don't put all your eggs in one basket—but you need to think about what baskets you're putting them into. For me, I started with television shows and from television shows, I went to cookbooks and from cookbooks, I went to products and then eventually I went to restaurants. The goal for me was to not always be on television.

For years I was on planes and in different places for months at a time and it was taxing on my body, so I tried to find ways to not always be on camera. Also throughout everything don't forget your core business and try to have every additional source of income you have, be an arm to your core business and feedback into it.

You were the first woman to open a restaurant on the Las Vegas Strip with “Giada in The Cromwell” in 2014. You followed that success with “Pronto by Giada”, also in Las Vegas at Caesar's Palace last year. What were some of the obstacles you faced as a woman in the traditionally male-dominated restaurant business?

It was really hard. I didn't really want to do restaurants. I really just wanted to be the owner of the place my grandpa had when I was little, but Caesars kept knocking at my door for years until finally one day they showed me a space that was a two-floor parking garage that overlooked the strip. The view was incredible and my name would be right on the strip and I thought I'm going to go for it.

But it was really hard because the industry is so male-dominated and a lot of the men I was working with quite frankly didn't know how to talk to women and I found myself yelling in board rooms which I'm not proud of. There were many times I thought, ‘this is going to be the biggest mistake I've made,’ but at the end of the day it put me on the map and it got everyone to take me seriously. Plus, Vegas is an international city so all of a sudden my brand went from being in the U.S. to being known internationally. It was hard but so worth it.

In among all of this professional success, you had your biggest personal achievement, giving birth to your beautiful daughter, Jade. How has motherhood changed your relationship with work? Do you think it has given you an advantage? Why/Why not? and how?

I thought getting pregnant would end my career, I didn't think it would be possible to juggle everything. Surprisingly though, Jade helped me overcome a lot of those fears and realize that I could still have a career. She also taught me how to cook quickly. I think before I had Jade my recipes were a little longer and a little more complicated, but becoming a mom made me better at what I do because it taught me how little time we actually have for food, but how important it is. Jade also made me think of how important my culture is, which from a young age had taught me the importance of sitting down and eating together with family. So in short, I learned a lot of things from Jade and she truly made me better at what I do.

With success comes opportunity but that also means you have your hands full. What keeps you inspired and motivated to keep going even on your most challenging days?

I'm not done yet. I feel like there are more conversations to be had, especially with helping women and helping moms. I think there's a lot of stuff going on that women don't share about aging, career, relationships, etc. I think that through food, culture, and self-care we can get to a point where we take care of our body and mind first and have better all-around success.

“I think that through food, culture, and self-care we can get to a point where we take care of our body and mind first and have better all-around success.”

You are an incredibly successful and accomplished businesswoman, but unfortunately, women at the top are still rare—women hold 6.6 % of Fortune 500 CEO roles and while female millionaires are on the rise, men are still ahead—we’ve heard it can get lonely at the top, so I’d love to know, who do you turn to for business advice? What is the best advice you’ve received? Or your favorite piece of #realtalk?

My Aunt Raffy has been a mentor to me forever and also my chef friends, as well as my lawyer Eric Greenspan. I used to actually cook for Eric and his family before I got my Food Network deal. He's the person I turn to all of these years later and look to him to make important decisions. My grandfather used to say, “you always want a doctor and a lawyer at your table, so if you get sick you have someone to take care of you and if you get in trouble you have someone to get you out of it!”

What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs and young chefs? How can they achieve the same success you've experienced? What key characteristics do they need?

You really have to believe in yourself. I always told myself, ‘the more that people tell me no, the more I'm going to prove them wrong and work harder.’ I thought as long as I continue to give people great recipes, eventually, I'll break them down and eventually they'll trust in me. But I knew I was going to be in it for the long run and honestly it's taken 18 years and it hasn't been until the last five or six years that I've really felt like I've risen to the place I want to be. So don't forget that it's a journey and make sure you ask yourself if whatever you're doing is what you really want to be doing, otherwise it's going to be tough.

VIEW THE FULL CREATE & CULTIVATE 100 ENTREPRENEUR LIST HERE.

Create & Cultivate 100: Small Business: Chelsea Moore

Every successful business idea comes from a need, a gap. It's in this whitespace where Chelsea Moore and her two co-founders, Jenni Olivero and Sabena Suri stumbled upon the idea for their gifting company, BOXFOX.

After a close friend became sick, Moore and her cofounders, Jenni Olivero and Sabena Suri, realized there was a serious lack of options that could show you were “there” for someone even when you couldn't be there physically. “We wanted something that went beyond flowers and the typical overpriced (and wasteful) gift basket,” she tells Create & Cultivate. “Our standards were high: we wanted something presentable, personal, and with a purposeful product that was simple to send.”

So, they did some research and discovered a lot of people were also looking for a modern and seamless gifting experience, too. It didn't exist, so they built it and they’ve been disrupting the space ever since. Now, five years later, they have an easy-to-use consumer platform with a pre-curated ready-to-ship collection, a Build a BOXFOX platform where customers can build their own gifts and care packages from all the best brands in one place, and a corporate gifting arm called BOXFOX Concierge, with a dedicated sales team and a members-only platform.

Read on to hear more about how they are redefining the gifting model, how they work together as co-founders, and why they decided to bootstrap the business over raising VC.

CREATE & CULTIVATE: As the co-founder and CEO of BOXFOX you have your hand across all areas of the business—but for those of us who don't know what it's like to be a CEO or aspire to, can you share what your role entails? Can you give our readers a snapshot into what your day-to-day of a CEO looks like? Does the reality of your role stack up to your expectations?

CHELSEA MOORE: Here at BOXFOX, as co-founders, we lead equally, so we share a lot of the long-term planning, people management, and financial responsibility. However, we've all settled into the verticals we spearhead, with each other’s support, of course. As the CEO, I oversee all creative, marketing, legal, and web development. On a daily basis, I'm either diving right into emails, design work, photography, approving content calendars, web development projects, putting out fires, or planning meetings. Being our CEO is everything I expected, in that I believe there is sometimes stuff you want to do and stuff you have to do, and I was prepared for that roll-up-your-sleeves reality. The one aspect of the job I wasn't expecting though was how much more complex it all gets as you grow. There's more to oversee, more to manage, and more at stake.

Gifting is such a saturated space. What makes BOXFOX different? How have you differentiated the brand so it stands out above the competition and in a crowded industry? Why do you think BOXFOX has been so successful?

We didn't invent gifting, but we did make it modern in a way no one else was doing. We prioritized being a business built with scalable customization at its core, empowering customers to gift well and often. For B2B, corporate gifting lacked a ‘go-to’, elevated, all-in-one solution. BOXFOX has built a brand with a diverse, loyal following who seek approachable, no-fluff, tech-forward, personalized service to make life easier for everything from small tokens to grand gestures. We're proud to share an office space with our warehouse and be an approachable, authentic gifting resource for our loyal customers.

“Do your research, be prepared, and be ready to work 10x harder than you could have ever expected.”

You proudly run a self-funded startup, so can you talk us through the bootstrapping process? Would you recommend that route to other entrepreneurs? Do you have plans to scale? Do you have plans to raise?

For us, bootstrapping from the start was intentional: we wanted to prove the effectiveness of our business model, perfect our systems, and decide what type of company we wanted to build—how quickly or slowly, how much control we wanted to maintain, and what our priorities were. Early on, our goals were to achieve steady, organic growth, build a meaningful workplace, and reinforce the human side of e-commerce. We weren’t necessarily thinking about an exit strategy, which raising money would have necessitated, so it wasn’t the path for us.

Of course, there are so many businesses that raising makes sense for; the best advice I’ve ever gotten is to truly think about what your priorities are, and whether those objectives line up with taking on capital. It all comes down to what kind of business you want to run.

When you're a small business you have to fall in love with the numbers, what have been some of the hardest money lessons you've learned along the way? What is your #1 money tip for small business owners? Why?

Do not be afraid of numbers—run into their arms and embrace them. Understanding them is the key to really understanding your business. If they intimidate you, take classes on Skillshare or Lynda, find a family friend who will sit down with you for an hour and explain more advanced concepts. Don't just find accountants and bookkeepers who you delegate to, find ones that will educate you and make you a stronger business owner.

What were the immediate things you had to take care of to set up the business?

I'm not sure if there is a perfect order for these initial items, but we bought our website domain, went through the city/county/state to set up all business license documents, got a CA resale ID, and then started our social channels about six months prior to launch. Then in the meantime, we were building our website and coordinating our first BOXFOX box samples.

There are three co-founders at BoxFox—do you recommend having partners in business? Why? What is the secret to a successful working relationship?

I think every business can have different needs when it comes to solo founders versus co-founders, but for us, it has been such a blessing to have each other on this journey. We each bring complementary strengths to the table and different backgrounds which only bring out the best in each other and our business. The secret to our successful relationship is a shared long term vision for where we want this to go, respect for each other's personal and professional needs, and over-communication.

When you hit a bump or hurdle in your career, how do you #FindNewRoads + switch gears to find success

On a business level, there can be setbacks or mistakes and our company philosophy is always to analyze, find the silver lining, and never make the same mistake twice. When it's a personal bump or hurdle, like creative burnout or management overload, I've always believed in taking action. Identify the issue, come up with a plan, and move forward, because life is way too short. Before BOXFOX, I was so unhappy at my old job, but after a month-long pity party, I quit and we set off on this entrepreneurial journey.

You have had so much success, but if you could go back to the beginning with the knowledge you have now, what's one thing you would tell yourself and why?

We have such great lawyers, accountants, insurance brokers and outside partners that we rely on so heavily. It can be scary to reach outside of your immediate circle to find the experts you need, but if I could go back, I would have prioritized finding these superstars sooner.

“The biggest lesson we’ve learned along the way is that business is personal and management is a muscle that has to be strengthened.”

Creating buzz so people know about your brand can be challenging for small businesses. How do you market your business? How are people aware of your business? What are some unique social media and marketing tools you've used to grow organically?

We didn't have the money for digital marketing or PR in the beginning, so we got creative. We have a very strong visual identity, so we took the time to perfect that and lean into free tools, like Instagram and Pinterest. Beyond that, we leveraged our network and told everyone we knew and met about our company and mission. We definitely got lucky with some organic press hits in the beginning too. As we've gotten bigger, we've experimented with PR and digital marketing in small bursts of concentrated effort, but the overwhelming majority of our traffic is still organic or word of mouth.

What are some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned along the way and what have they taught you?

The biggest lesson we've learned along the way is that business is personal and management is a muscle that has to be strengthened. Leading a company requires empathy, interpersonal skills, a desire to connect with employees, partners, and vendors in a meaningful way. It takes practice, and it's never perfect, but the reinforcement of those skills has happily become a big part of my life.

What advice would you give to young entrepreneurs who have an idea but don’t know where to start to execute it?

Do your research, be prepared, and be ready to work 10x harder than you could have ever expected. I always share with fellow entrepreneurs to just get started. Perfect those product samples, start setting up the business paperwork, test the software. Once you get going, it really will snowball from there. Also, never agree to start doing anything without a signed contract (you will thank me for this later, I promise!).

Photographer: Lexi Hatch

 VIEW THE FULL CREATE & CULTIVATE 100 SMALL BUSINESS LIST HERE.

There Was No Plan—This Founder Started a Side Hustle to "Make a Few Extra Bucks" and Now It's a Thriving Business

This post is in paid partnership with Bootaybag.

We know how daunting it can be to start a new business, especially if you’re disrupting an industry or creating an entirely new one. When there is no path to follow, the biggest question is, where do I start? There is so much to do but before you get ahead of yourself, let’s start at the beginning. To kickstart the process (and ease some of those first-time founder nerves) we’re asking successful entrepreneurs to share their story in our new series, From Scratch. But this isn’t your typical day in the life. We’re getting down to the nitty gritty from writing a business plan (or not) to sourcing manufacturers and how much they pay themselves, we’re not holding back. If you want to know how to start a business, you’ve come to the right place.

“Failure is part of the journey and the reward doesn’t come without a lot of dark, scary moments. We’ve all been there, and we’re in this together.”

—Ellyette Gheno, CEO and Founder, BootayBag

When you’re looking to start your own business, most of us have a five to 10 year timeline in mind before we start making money. Of course, the end goal could be to build an empire but no-one expects for that to happen quickly. But it seems like Ellyette Gheno’s company, BootayBag was an overnight success.

Having grown up with entrepreneurial parents, Gheno was practically born with founder genes in her DNA. So it comes as no surprise that within a day of thinking up BootayBag—a monthly underwear subscription that delivers right to your door—Gheno created a website and launched a side hustle. What started as a way to “earn a few extra bucks” has successfully disrupted the $52 million underwear market (which is expected to grow annually by 3.5%) in just five years and her little aha! moment is changing the game.

So, we tapped the CEO and founder to learn more about her incredible journey from lightbulb moment to starting an undie revolution.

Be sure to keep reading until the end for our exclusive discount code that gives Create & Cultivators 20% off their first month when signing to any monthly subscription.

Did you write a business plan? If yes, was it helpful? If no, what else did you use instead?

“I definitely could have used a business plan. I started BootayBag as a total side hustle to make a few extra bucks, there was no plan. However, if I could go back in time I would have started with a clear vision of what I wanted to create, and what the end goal was. At the very least I would have liked to set intentions, even if it wasn’t a business plan. This would have helped me to later understand my ‘why’.”

How did you come up with the name? What was the process like? How did you know it was the right name?

“So this is my story and I’m sticking to it—guaranteed a laugh. I grew up in the Bay Area obviously listening to rap music. I had seen and heard ‘booty’ spelled as ‘bootay’ and that is the creative genius behind the spelling of BootayBag. After the name was born I had a domain within 24 hours. Looking back I maybe should have run it by someone beforehand."

What were the immediate things you had to take care of to set up the business?

“First came the website and then social channels shortly after. All of the legal stuff came later due to the limited funding I had for the business at the time.”

“A big moment for me was learning to never let myself get too comfortable. I now enjoy being uncomfortable because I know this is how I grow and where positive change comes.”

What research did you do for the brand beforehand?

“My research came at the extent of my self desires. I was solving my own issue of hating digging through sale bins and not wanting to shop for underwear (because what young woman does)? I had undies in my drawer that I am embarrassed to say were beyond their intended life span. I knew that if this was the case for me it had to also be the case for most of my girlfriends. Lucky for me, it ended up being the case for most young girls outside of my inner circle, and that helped me discover my ‘why’ behind the brand.”

How did you find the manufacturer/production facility that you use? Did you have any bad experiences? What did you learn?

“This is a hard one. I have learned what I know now about manufacturing because, unfortunately, of many bad experiences. I would advise to always ask questions, seek insight and advice from others, and basically trust no one. Ha, ha! Be sure to check references, run small tests and batches, and never give them all your money upfront.”

Did you self-fund the company? Did you raise seed money or initial investment money?

“BootayBag has been totally self-funded. Looking back, I am actually so thankful for this as I was able to make mistakes with my own money versus someone else. I had the advantage that I didn’t need funding to bring my vision to life in the beginning stages. However, it is definitely more of a step-by-step, slow-moving process when you’re bootstrapped.”

Photo: Courtesy of BootayBag

How much did you pay yourself? How did you know what to pay yourself?

"In the beginning when it was just a side hustle the whole point was to pay myself. But when I decided that this wasn’t going to just be a revenue stream for myself but that I wanted to make hires and build a brand, I came last on the payroll scale. It still always goes back to what I am trying to do—if I need to make a hire and I can’t afford to do it, I take a pay cut.”

How big is your team now? What has the hiring process been like for you?

“Hiring is hard because your team is seriously so important. I love the saying, ‘You can’t have an A team with B players.’ I’ve failed a lot in this department, especially in the beginning. I just felt lucky to have anyone work for me at the time which I later learned was the totally wrong approach. The best way to learn how to hire is to be prepared as if you’re the one being interviewed. Know who you are interviewing, ask all the hard questions, call the references, and give a training period for you to work alongside them.”

“It always goes back to what I am trying to do—if I need to make a hire and I can’t afford to do it, I take a pay cut.”

Did you hire an accountant? Who helped you with the financial decisions and set up? What do you recommend?

“No, I didn’t at first however, I quickly learned it is so critical to do so—that was a big ‘omg’ moment. Please, for the love of God, get an accountant. At the very least get someone who you pay as a consultant to help you set it all up. Cash is key, and how you set up terms, cash flow modeling, payroll, budgets, and tax compliance is so important. You have to have a professional in the field to guide you through it. We can’t be good at all the things—get help.”

What has been the biggest learning curve during the process of establishing a business?

“A big moment for me was learning to never let myself get too comfortable. I now enjoy being uncomfortable because I know this is how I grow and where positive change comes. Every moment that I think I have everything figured out, I don’t! Lol. Reality settles in and all of a sudden everything I thought I knew is wrong and it’s a whole new perspective. I almost fear the comfort level because I know something is around the corner. I can now thrive being uncomfortable because I know this how I grow and how good change comes.”

“No one should know your numbers better than you.”

How did you get retailers to start stocking your product? Were you told no? How did you handle that rejection? What advice can you share?

“We are our own online retailer as of now, however, rejection comes more likely than not in other directions. Every time we drop a new style that not everyone likes and it feels like rejection. I know we can’t cater to everyone, but you still try to and think you just might one of these times. The only advice I have is that they aren’t rejecting you, it’s not personal and it happens to everyone.”

Do you have a business coach or mentor? How has this person helped? Would you recommend one?

“Mentors are key. My favorite (and most shocking) discovery with entrepreneurs is they will most likely help you if you ask for it. The key here is to be very direct with what you want from them and be respectful of their time. Utilize your network and continue to grow it with every opportunity you get.”

Photo: Courtesy of BootayBag

How did you promote your company? How did you get people to know who you are and create buzz?

“I knew what felt like absolutely nothing, about anything. In the beginning, I started with a concept that I knew I needed and felt like other girls might need too. I tested locally first with pop-ups and events, and put it out there on social media to see if the concept stuck before I put any money behind it. Being very open to everyone’s opinions, ideas, and feedback is what helped me grow the idea into a brand.”

What is one thing you didn’t do in the setup process, that ended up being crucial to the business and would advise others to do asap?

“I wrote myself off in the finance section right away—I don’t do excel, I am not good with numbers. Well, tough luck to me. No one should know your numbers better than you. So with that I learned how to manage and own that even though I didn’t want too."

“We can’t be good at all the things—get help.”

For those who haven’t started a business (or are about to) what advice do you have?

Do it! But do it the safe and smart way... where you can test the waters without putting your whole life savings into it from the get-go. If this all went away tomorrow, I’ve grown so much and learned more about myself, managing people, and business than any other course of life could have taught me. 

Anything else to add?

I would love to touch on how important it is to support one another in our individual journey’s, both professional and personal! This is why I love love love and am continuously inspired by Create + Cultivate so much. It can feel so lonely and scary, but you are not alone in it - someone has already paved the way for you. Ask for help, learn from other peoples failures who did it before you. Failure is part of the journey and the reward doesn’t come without a lot of dark, scary moments. We’ve all been there, and we’re in this together.

Photo: Courtesy of BootayBag

EXCLUSIVE DISCOUNT CODE FOR CREATE & CULTIVATOR’S

If you’re interested in getting 20% off your first month, then use our exclusive discount code CC20 when you sign up to any monthly subscription at their website, bootaybag.com

A Day in the Life: Glitter Guide's Taylor Sterling Shares Her #1 Ritual for Success

Ever wondered what people do at work? If you’re a voyeur like us, then you’ll love our series A Day in the Life where we get a real behind-the-scenes glimpse into the professional lives of CEOs, business owners, and entrepreneurs we admire. From their morning routine to the rituals that set them up for success and questions such as “do you ever reach inbox zero?” because we all want to know how to streamline our lives.

Photo: Emily Scott

In a media-saturated world, it can be hard to decipher the realness from the noise but there’s one site we always have bookmarked: Glitter Guide. From fashion to home décor, beauty and wellness, founder Taylor Sterling has always served up engaging, educational, and topical content we love—like this story about about the myth of “age-appropriate” clothing—and that’s something she, along with her digital lead, Samantha Welker has decided to shift her focus towards with the new site redesign.

Sterling and Welker both made a conscious shift to focus on the brand’s core values rather than what "performs" the best. “Our new motto is ‘we want hearts, not eyeballs’ and we hope our audience will connect with our new creativity-focused content,” Welker tells me. We can’t wait to see more. We are always so inspired by Sterling and the content she creates so we wanted to get a sneak peek into a day in her life.

Ahead, Sterling gives us a snapshot of her day, what it really takes to be a founder, and key advice to propel your career.

What does an average day in your life look like? 

Most days aren’t all that glamourous. I wake up at 6 a.m. with the kids and get them ready for school and out the door. Then until about 3:30 I’m usually sitting at my desk working on assignments and having meetings. The rest of my day is dedicated to getting my kids from school, spending time with them and getting them ready for bed. 

What time do you get up? What’s the first thing you do upon waking?

Usually it’s 6 a.m. First it’s a quick snuggle with the kids (who wake me up) and then I immediately get some coffee. 

Are you a night owl or a morning person? When do you do your most important work and why?

Naturally I’m a night owl. Growing up I always felt the most creative and productive at night. However my husband is the opposite and he’s trained me to get to bed earlier. Also, since having kids it’s been crucial for me to change my ways. Now I’m most productive around 9 a.m. 

What does your morning, pre-work routine look like? What rituals set you up for success?

This past year I’ve really slowed everything down and made more time for self-care. That means that in the morning after the chaos of getting the kids to school I come back home (where I work) and I spend about 30 minutes doing a speed clean of the house. I’ve found I work better when it’s tidy and I don’t feel anxious about having to clean it later. I usually listen to a podcast while I clean or some relaxing music. Then I try to fit in a quick workout. Usually something at home or a run. I usually start work around 9:45 a.m. after I have made time for these things that help me feel centered. 

Photo: Emily Scott

Being a founder means you are wearing so many hats and across so many facets of the business. How do you manage your time effectively?

This used to be a huge struggle for me. I felt like I was doing everything and involved in everything. I started to burn out. We didn’t have good organizational systems. Once those were put into place and the entire team felt confident in their roles and obligations it freed us up and we weren’t juggling as much. 

Do you ever reach inbox zero? How do you handle the constant influx of inquiries and communication entrepreneurs are so familiar with?

This is going to sound so bad, but I’ve become really lazy with my emails. I used to be addicted. I would always respond to everything I could. Now that my team isn’t on my emails much I can be better about batching. Some days I don’t even check it. You have to get comfortable with missing something. It’s really felt like a weight has lifted. I know that’s not for everyone, but it’s been a relief. 

What are some work habits that help you stay healthy, productive, and on track to reach your goals?

Staying healthy and having good work habits is a huge priority. I want my team to know it’s something I value and I hope they will do the same. My team uses Asana and Slack daily and they have been game changers for us. I know that if I have a day where I can’t work as much, as long as I get my daily tasks done then it’s going to be okay. I carve out time for me and also my family. Work is something I’m passionate about, but at the end of the day it’s still work. My life is way more important. 

When do you go to bed? What’s your “optimal” # of sleep hours?

Ideally, I like to be asleep by 10 p.m. to set myself up for success. 

What’s the most rewarding part of your day?

I love days where I have taken care of my needs, had a productive work day and my family is happy. I always feel like I’m on top of the world when that happens. However, usually something in that mix gets thrown off. 

When did you know you wanted to start your own company? What was your journey like?

I never really went into it thinking, I want to start a business.  I just knew what I wanted to create and it happened to turn into a business. I think that’s the case for a lot of creative entrepreneurs. It’s almost better that I was naive and that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I had to learn by doing. I’ve made so many mistakes over the past  ten years. As painful as that is, it’s crucial. It’s how I’ve grown. I’m thankful for it. 

Photo: Emily Scott

What advice do you have for aspiring female founders?

Always trust your gut. I’ve made the mistake of ignoring it before, but it never leads you astray. 

What are some of the biggest lessons you learned along the way?

I think one big lesson for me is that you are going to have ups and downs. It’s natural. It’s how you handle those downs that are really going to define you. Don’t let them distract you. Stay focused but flexible and you can come back up again. 

How do you combat the loneliness often felt by CEOs at the top?

Thankfully my team is so tiny that I don’t ever feel this way. I feel more lonely from us being a totally remote team. Using things like Slack, Google Hangout and having face-to-face meetings when we can really help. 

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given?

“Keep your blinders up.” This isn’t really the best advice, but it’s one I think of often. It’s a reminder that when you get distracted by what others are doing it can be a real downer. Stay positive and focus on what you love and things will often fall into place. 

What’s the worst piece of advice you’ve been given?

I’m not sure I’ve ever had bad advice. It’s usually more that people sometimes don’t get my industry or my situations and give advice based-off their own experiences. You have to keep that in mind when asking people. 

What are some exciting projects you’re working on this month? What are you most excited for in 2019?

Glitter Guide is about to relaunch our entire website. It’s getting a new look and will be much more user-friendly. With that we’re also changing a lot of our content. We want to connect to people’s hearts and tell stories that have meaning to us and those who we’re working with. We also want to explore creativity and how we can cultivate creative energy. I’m so excited for this new chapter.

Up Next: A Day in the Life: Inside the Cool and Colorful Life of Justina Blakeney of The Jungalow

MORE ON THE BLOG