Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / 6 Quick Questions with Emily Harpel, founder of Art of Sucre (part 2)

Transcript

6 Quick Questions with Emily Harpel, founder of Art of Sucre (part 2) · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  Welcome back. Here are the six quick questions. So question number one is what's your why? Why are you doing what you're doing?
• 0:18
  What we just talked about is being able to bring people joy in their happiest moments in really small and creative ways is absolutely why the long hours and the money and the time and the stress and the tears and the hard work are all worth it. To be able to bring people that happiness in a way that they can't really get anywhere else is absolutely why we do it.
• 0:43
  Amazing. Question number two is what has been the number one marketing moment so far? And you can't say TikTok in general. I think that one of the things where I was like, oh, wow, like people actually care about this is without a publicist, without help from anybody, a writer from Business Insider reached out and said, I've been following you on TikTok lately.
• 1:10
  So to talk adjacent, I guess, and I really want to write your story. And that was a moment for me that I was like, wow, you can't pay for this type of exposure. You can't just have people kind of sit up and lean in and to notice what I was doing was huge personally and for the business.
• 1:29
  Yeah. And I guess this also goes to show like, you know, had you have not put yourself out there, that opportunity wouldn't come. I mean, maybe it would have, but the thing to remember is like, when you're putting out a video on Instagram or you're putting out a video on TikTok, the buyers from, you know, stockists that you want to be stocked at, they're on these platforms too, right? They're looking. Journalists, reporters, they're on these platforms browsing. They're looking for things to be inspired by and things to write about. So, you know,
• 1:58
  Yes, it will help your sales and all that kind of thing, but you should post because people are watching. And it only takes one. You don't even need to have a following of 1 million followers. You might have 5,000 followers, but it only takes someone to discover your video. Absolutely. It could be any. I mean, you could have 100 views, but you don't know who those 100 people are. Absolutely. Question number three is, what's your go-to business resource in the form of book, podcast or newsletter? Oh, wow. Wow.
• 2:27
  This may be kind of a cheating answer, so I'm sorry if that's the case. But when you own a business, Google is 100% your best friend. I can't tell you how many times a day I Google the answer to something because I have no idea what I'm doing. I don't have a business background at all, even closer to it. But I think from looking up to people or getting business advice, I really love to look up to other female clients.
• 2:55
  entrepreneurs. There's Baked by Melissa. I'm not sure if you know who she is, but she's really big in New York and she does these tiny cupcakes that they ship everywhere. She's also a handmade business. So I really look up to her and her Instagram and what she's doing.
• 3:11
  Jenny Britton, who owns Jenny's Ice Cream, again, very similar. She has some of the most inspirational, just little blurbs that she shares throughout the day that are really incredible. So I find that following like-minded people and people that inspire me on social media, it pops up on my feed and it really makes my day. And it's not something that I'm searching out for necessarily, but it has even a bigger impact because it comes to me organically. That's so cool. I'm going to look them both up and check out their content.
• 3:42
  Question number four is how do you win the day? What are your AM or PM rituals and habits that keep you feeling happy and motivated and successful?
• 3:51
  I love at the end of the day, at the workday, really having kind of a tally of things that, hey, this is what we needed to get done, which we do a to-do list in the morning. And here's what we hit. And really kind of setting up for that next day and feeling like it was a success. Hey, we hit this number of cotton candy that we needed to get spun. We made that goal. This was the content that I needed to film. These were the meetings that I had to have. And really just in a light way, keeping track of all of that, but also being flexible and
• 4:19
  within it. More than anything for me, it has to feel successful more than kind of checking things off, if that makes sense. So like yesterday, for example, we ended the workday with a high school musical dance party, which happens around here pretty frequently.
• 4:37
  And yeah, it's a fun place to work. I'm not going to lie. And while that may have felt like a weird way to end the day or we posted about it on Instagram, people will be like, do they even work? And we do. We work hard. We have fun a lot, too. But I walked away from yesterday feeling like it was a success, even though we didn't maybe necessarily produce cotton candy yesterday. We absolutely hit those check marks, had a dance party, and it felt like we got everything done that we needed to. Yeah.
• 5:04
  That is so fun. I hope everyone wants to come and work for you. That sounds amazing. Question number five is what's the worst money you've ever spent in the business?
• 5:14
  Oh my goodness. I feel like I could have a long list of this, especially with the online store. It, we spent so much money on packaging and shipper boxes and all of that. I spent, I mean, an astronomical amount of money. Oh my God, please tell us. It was like $40,000 on getting branded shipping boxes that I like all in through all the kind of trial and error and all of that.
• 5:43
  To which they're beautiful. They're pink striped and emerald green on the inside. However, when they arrive at your front door, they're brown and beat up because they're shipped to you. So it's not like they arrive in this beautiful condition and they had so much ink on them that they don't stay sealed because the adhesive doesn't stick to the saturated cardboard or corrugated cardboard. Yeah.
• 6:09
  So that was a very expensive mistake. We did eventually find an adhesive that would work through a lot of trial and error, but we are wrapping up using those boxes and then having to go a different direction. Definitely not getting those reprinted because A, it was so expensive and B, it wasn't what we thought it was going to be too. Oh yeah. Wow. That's crazy. That's a, that's a big one. Yes. It could have been worse, but it was, it was a big one.
• 6:35
  Yeah, that's a big one. This kind of blends into this question, so maybe you'll have a different answer, but maybe not. Question number six is, what's been a major fail that you can share and how you dealt with it? Definitely our glitter bomb packaging, the original packaging.
• 6:52
  one that we had. So actually I have the one right now in front of me. This is what we ended up with. They're these beautiful green pouches that we heat seal. They're great. The original packaging were these plastic jars. And the thought behind that was that it really stayed fresh. We could control all of that, except for the fact that when summer came around, people were begging us for these glitter bombs and we weren't able to test it in the summers because of when the shop ended up opening.
• 7:22
  And the plastic would change size depending on where it was being shipped in the country. So if it was being shipped somewhere warmer, the cotton candy was disintegrating inside of these plastic jars. And so for 4th of July, I had just had surgery.
• 7:37
  It was Emma's like second full week here full time. And we came in and all of our glitter bombs for the 4th of July had melted. And at the time, we didn't understand why or what was going on with them. We had to remake all of them, send them out. We had to refund a lot of money. We had to make it right. And we did. But that was definitely a really big failure in the very beginning. And it took a lot of time to make that right and to develop the right packaging and to learn from all of that.
• 8:05
  but not something we were definitely expecting after all of the research and time that we put into choosing that specific packaging to begin with.
• 8:14
  Oh, that's a tough one. Holy moly. Yeah, so definitely. I feel for you there. That's crazy. Crazy stuff. We talk about that day often around here and how we never want to relive it. That's for sure. Yeah, I bet. Emily, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today and share your journey. I have loved chatting with you and what you're building. And I'm so excited to see what comes next. Thank you so much for having me. This was lovely.
• 8:47
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 9:11
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 9:34
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.
• 9:51
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 10:15
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 10:38
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that. Thank you.