Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / The blueprint for building a slow fashion brand in a very saturated space, with Maggie Winter, Founder of AYR (part 1)

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The blueprint for building a slow fashion brand in a very saturated space, with Maggie Winter, Founder of AYR (part 1) · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  This is Maggie Winter for Female Startup Club.
• 0:12
  Hello, welcome back to the show. It's Dune here, your host and hype girl. Today on the show, I'm chatting with Maggie Winter, the founder of A.I.R. A.I.R. stands for All Year Round. It's a slow fashion brand and its mission is to create confidence through clothing. The brand designs seasonless, ageless, effortless apparel for everyday life. And the company is a hybrid of legacy expertise and future facing vision.
• 0:38
  And this episode is very cool because it has a bit of a different twist into how it got started and where it is today. But before we jump into it, I have a quick favor for you. If you're on your phone listening to this episode right now, could you please take a quick screenshot in the podcast app and share it to your Instagram stories? It helps me know that you really love the show. It helps other ears find us too. And it shows that you're part of our club.
• 1:08
  Okay, let's get into this episode. This is Maggie for Female Startup Club. Maggie, hi. Welcome to the show. Thank you, dude. I'm thrilled to be here. I'm thrilled to have you here. I'm jealous that you're in LA. I'm sure the weather is a lot nicer than London. Wait, did you say you're in LA or you're in Manhattan at the moment?
• 1:29
  You know what? It's two days ago I was in L.A. Now I'm in Manhattan and our team is split between the East Coast and the West Coast. So either way, you're right. Air shows up coast to coast and oftentimes somewhere in between. You're up in the air. I love that. Do you want to give us a quick introduction into who you are, what your brand is and the ethos behind it?
• 1:51
  Sure. My name is Maggie Winter and I'm co-founder and CEO of AIR. AIR stands for All Year Round and we are a digital clothing brand that launched in 2014. And we are a slow fashion brand. We believe in designs that last all year round and our mission is to create confidence through clothing.
• 2:13
  I love that. And I so see how you do that on multiple levels, including through the beautiful people you use on your website as your models and Max's grandma. Are you talking about Granny? Yes. Iconic. I am. I love her. She's a New York City legend. She's our favorite model to shoot.
• 2:37
  And when we shoot her, it's often in her neighborhood in the West Village. And when we go out and take her picture, people stop her on the street and they'll say, oh, Catherine didn't see you at the gym yesterday. Or, oh, you're modeling again. You know, she really has. She has her neighbors and her community and nobody forgets granny. She makes such an impact. She's our ultimate influencer. She's an icon. She's got flair. I can feel it through the pictures. Yeah.
• 3:05
  Okay, let's go back to 2014. I want to go back to the very beginning because your founder startup story is a little bit different to the usual found up story. You were incubated within Bonobos. I think that's how you pronounce it, Bonobos. It's like one of those words that I can't say properly. But I want to go back to that time. How did this brand start? Let's start there.
• 3:28
  Sure. I think that, I mean, no startup's journey is a straight line. I don't think. From all the stories I've heard on your podcast and from all the friends I've talked to, it's rarely a straight line from the garage startup to the great exit. And our story is also unique. We kind of had a Benjamin Button narrative. We started in a more mature place and then we went backwards.
• 3:56
  And it had its advantages and it also had its very unique challenges. I was hired to launch a brand and I was an employee of a company. So I had the best of both worlds. I had support and I had resources.
• 4:12
  And I wasn't personally on the hook for paying salaries or for paying for inventory. And I got to focus on my two favorite parts of the business, which really are product and storytelling. And it was an awesome opportunity. And I was 29 when I started working on air. And I was like, oh, my God.
• 4:32
  And it was kind of that perfect moment of I've gathered experience. I've worked for brilliant people and with brilliant people. I've learned a lot, but I'm still young enough to take a risk. And if it doesn't work out, I have options ahead of me.
• 4:47
  And I was that perfect spot of naive enough and equipped enough to go take a risk. And it was awesome. It was a wonderful environment to learn. But that suddenly came to an end when we were told, okay, the company's not going to fund this brand anymore. And I was given 90 days to finance and form a new company.
• 5:14
  while running our business. And it was really, I wish there had been cameras that would have made a great reality show. It would have been like 90-day fiancée for business and none of those marriages work out. And I can't say that our spin-out process was seamless and without any mistakes. It was completely challenging. It was the hardest thing I've done, but we did it. And
• 5:39
  The good and bad of our origin story is that we were able to start with some scale and we were able to start with outsized resources to fit in just me or just me and, you know, two other people or something like that. And that was wonderful for us in starting to gain traction and gain confidence.
• 6:00
  and to be able to focus on more mature opportunities than we would have if we were doing everything ourselves as one or two or three people. For instance, we were able to pitch to Vogue and we were able to meet with editors and we were able to get early PR support. And I'm not sure if we had started from scratch,
• 6:26
  And we had to finance it all ourselves from the beginning. I'm not sure that we would have been doing that in year one or in our pre-launch. Before we go on, I have a few questions that I want to ask around this period before we kind of keep going down the story because I don't want to get lost and then have to go back. So when you were an employee of this company and you're building this brand, what does that setup actually mean, though? Did you...
• 6:52
  have equity in this sub brand or was it more like, Hey, you're just a straight employee, like building something within. And then how did that shift? Like, how does it work when you, when they were like, Oh, we're going to cut the funding, but you were like, Oh, can I actually like buy this brand? Or like, can I like have the IP of this? Like what's that section of this part of the story? These are all excellent questions. And ones I wish I had asked about that.
• 7:18
  But they're great questions. So we were employees of Bonobos and we had shares as employees in Bonobos. Bonobos co-founder and CEO at the time, Andy Dunn.
• 7:34
  is a really generous leader and he's a person who wants for everybody to benefit from the success of an outcome. And so he was somebody who, um, always wanted for his whole team to benefit in the event of an exit. We had Bonobo stock air stock didn't exist because air wasn't a company. We were just a team within the company, the same as a marketing team or a merchandising team or a planning team existed within the organization. Um,
• 8:01
  And when it was time to spin out, I started making a list and I started asking myself all the questions that you just started to ask me. What are all the component parts of this brand and of this business and what do we need in order to exist independently?
• 8:16
  And the list included everything from IP, a website, to office furniture, you know, literally going through what, as we negotiated the separation of assets, what is heirs, what belongs to the parent company, and then where do we need to fill in and fill in.
• 8:33
  One of the big challenges was that we had product on order and we had a team of a half dozen people. And that meant we had salaries and purchase orders that we needed to pay for. And we didn't have a bank account. So we needed to create one. Wow.
• 8:54
  put a whole bunch of money on it. And I had at that point, I had never made a pitch deck before. I had never met with investors. I had no vocabulary. I had no network. And the one thing I had was a
• 9:08
  really deep desire to see this brand exist and a very strong sense of responsibility to be the custodian of its success. And I just kept going and probably met with 75 investors in order to get 12 yeses. And that was enough to finance the product that we had on order. And from there,
• 9:35
  I kept meeting people and I met investors who were a really good fit for us at the time, who invested in Aire as a company and did our Series A. And that was a big turning point for us in 2016. So it was in our second year as a brand. And that was when the learnings really started.
• 9:58
  Wow, that is so interesting and so crazy. Yeah, I've never had someone on the show share a story that started in that same kind of way in the beginning. And I'm still interested to understand like, with Bonobos, just like one follow on question from here, and then we can move on. Were they like happy to like give you the IP or did they have to keep some equity in the business and be kind of like still a business partner?
• 10:23
  Well, I think you don't have to answer. I'm just trying my luck. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said this is not common. We don't see the template for this playbook often. And so like anything else in business, when you're creating something new, it's a negotiation. And there isn't a standard formula for this is exactly how this goes. And we follow the playbook.
• 10:47
  we had to negotiate all of this. And yes, Bonobos did retain a minority stake for having incubated us and for having helped support us the first two years that we were in business. And the rest was a combination of founder ownership and outside financing. That's so cool.
• 11:06
  Okay. So as you know, you listen to the show, we love to understand the blueprint for those early days in getting this business kind of like out there on your own. So I know you've already like, you've been two years in business in that time. I'm sure you've had a lot of success with getting PR and all that kind of thing because you've been under the umbrella company. But what is it like when you're, you get some, you know, well, I guess you get this money in your bank account to fulfill the purchase orders. You are able to retain your staff. What happens next?
• 11:36
  What does that like first year look like? Well, the first year...
• 11:42
  was probably still a huge adjustment in terms of what you envisioned. It was that Instagram versus reality thing of you have in your mind what this should look like, what a company should look like, what a young startup should look like and feel like. And then you have the reality of operating it. And it took us a few years to really align the intention with the reality.
• 12:12
  One of the best resources we have is my co-founder, Max, comes from PR. Max and I have been friends for over 20 years. We met in college and we talked, Max's granny is our best model, my favorite model to shoot and air's biggest influencer. And Max's background was in marketing.
• 12:32
  luxury PR, fashion, beauty, PR. And she had worked for huge global brands. She had worked for cool New York startups. And she really is the reason that we were able to build an audience organically for about our first four years. We did not invest much in digital marketing and we did hardly any paid marketing really. When I look comparatively at other DTC brands at the same
• 13:02
  I think at the time my background was in merchandising and I had, I put too much focus, I think on product. And the thing you have to remember for anybody starting a consumer business is that nobody knows about you. Nobody cares. Nobody wants what you're making. Start with zero. You don't start with a percentage of your friends. You don't start with a Gmail contact list. You start with zero. And yeah,
• 13:29
  It's easy when you have a vision for what the whole thing looks like. It's easy to want to start there. And you've got to start with zero. It's less product than you think. It's less units than you think. And at the beginning, we probably focused a little bit too much on product and not enough on audience. And it's only because Max is a PR superstar that we were able to start building that audience organically, low cost. They became very engaged.
• 13:58
  And this is a place where the challenge actually worked in our favor. As an entrepreneur, you have to take every obstacle and turn it into an advantage. And so the fact that we didn't have a lot of cash to spend turned into one of our biggest differentiators, I think, which is that when you don't have money to spend on models and photographers and retouching and big photo shoots, what do you do?
• 14:28
  And it turned out that that type of content was stickier than the really well-produced, beautiful imagery of beautiful people that was flawless. It really looked great, but it also looks ubiquitous. And when you're scrolling through a feed, it looks like ads. It doesn't look like necessarily real people behind it.
• 14:52
  And that's a place where I think that being cash strapped actually became a huge advantage for us.
• 14:59
  With Max doing your PR and like the media side of things, like, yes, you have this approach to your actual content itself. But from the PR perspective, obviously, fashion is such a saturated space and, you know, finding your message and how to differentiate yourself in those messages that are going out in press releases. I'm interested to understand like how she was establishing the brand.
• 15:24
  at that time, because a lot of people I know who listen to the show are building fashion businesses and want to understand, like, you know, how do you stand out from the crowd in such a saturated space?
• 15:36
  Max was wonderful about getting us opportunities to get in front of editors ourselves because a shirt on a hanger is a shirt on a hanger. And especially our brand is really about understated essentials that aren't very trendy. It's not about a label and a logo. It's really about just making a
• 15:56
  perfect white Oxford button down that's just the right amount of oversized and that's super versatile. But it's not the thing that you're going to look at on a hanger and be like, I've never seen one of those before. What is it? I invented something new.
• 16:12
  And so Max really was able to give us opportunities where we could focus on building relationships with editors and influencers. And I think that is exactly what this generation of DTC brands can do at scale, whether it's an editor or a company.
• 16:28
  or a customer sitting at home on her phone, we really have this opportunity to have one-on-one connections with people and to have our personality show through, to make a joke. At Ayer, we take our work very seriously, but we do not take ourselves seriously. Right?
• 16:46
  We really, you know, it's getting dressed in the morning shouldn't be the most important thing you do. And the women that we speak to are very busy women of purpose and they've got stuff going on. And so we try to imbue our brand with a real sense of humor and honesty. And I think that comes across as we're able to meet people. Hopefully it comes across in conversation.
• 17:06
  We don't have a big team. And I write our emails and our catalogs and post our social. It really is a person on the other side, not even a team of people. It's just one. It's just me. And so Max's approach really let us be ourselves. And I think that has been a big differentiator.
• 17:25
  In a world where we're in an industry where big players control so much market share and have giant budgets and can produce so much content at such a high quality, how on earth do you cut through? Well, you...
• 17:39
  find your little space and you be yourself. And she was able to create moments like that for us, where we could meet with a person, have a connection. We hopped on a plane with an editor from Vogue to go to a denim wash house in Kentucky. And it was a crazy day. We went down and back in one day. And I remember having like margaritas at the airport with her. And it was...
• 18:06
  Wonderful. It totally demystified something that can be quite intimidating. But the reason we had that introduction and that opportunity was because we had a founder who had built a career and built trust and her expertise paid us back there in a big way.
• 18:25
  Right. And was that trip, just side question before I continue all my questions, because I have so many still, was that trip taking the Vogue editor with you to the denim factory? Was that you inviting her to come with you and like check out your factory?
• 18:41
  Yes. And it wasn't so, so it was so funny. I remember this was when we were still at our parent company, but we still had a budget and it was a small one because we were a small part of the business and we couldn't afford direct flights for all of us to go. So our team took, took four flights that day. We stopped over on our way and we were able to get her a direct flight and and, and,
• 19:07
  It was awesome to be, we worked with a wash master who does wash development and
• 19:14
  And he's kind of like this scientist wizard, mad scientist, artist character. And he's spent his whole life dedicated to perfecting denim washes. And he would use like powdered sugar in a wash or he'd spray Pam the cooking spray. And then he'd come up with a blueprint that you would put to your factory in L.A. and be able to replicate it.
• 19:39
  You know, he can show you the perfect standard and then you'd replicate that recipe as best you could, probably using different methods and ingredients. But the craft of making clothing is so it requires so many people and so much skill and expertise. We produce globally and we work with some of the best mills and factories in the world and we'll go anywhere in the world where you can make the best food.
• 20:04
  of that product. So the best t-shirt, the best pair of jeans, the best Oxford button down. And it was cool to be able to show one person that, and she had the ability to tell the story in a bigger way. And then we could use, she wrote about air as a gift from the denim gods. And then, you know, in business, you always want to take that, that moment is amazing, but it passes. And,
• 20:26
  And going back to the idea of all year round, it's what you do with that moment all the other days that really matters. And so we were able to take that awesome day and then turn it into a tagline for the brand. And it's something that to this day we still reference because it was such it was exactly what you would want someone to say about your tiny brand that nobody's heard of before.
• 20:54
  That is so cool. It sounds like to me, like in those early years, like to summarize, like how you were building the brand, it was like, you know, focusing on having max building these, getting you these opportunities in press, like very one-to-one relationships, meeting with influencers and just like doing a one-by-one approach instead of a one-to-millions approach kind of thing. And just slowly chipping away to get the word out there and build organically. Yeah.
• 21:21
  From there, when we think about, you know, that period of time, I think we're talking 2016 still, if that was the meeting with the Vogue editor, to like, you know, circa these few years, what have been the major milestones that have leapt you forward? Because I know you guys have had some incredible growth. You've been tripling over here, wait lists over there, millions and millions of dollars everywhere, like doing so much success. How do you get from that early days to here? Yeah.
• 21:49
  The biggest trend, there have been a few there. Here, let me think about this one, actually. Okay, because your question was so beautifully worded. I want to come in clean. Oh, my God, I was not. No, you have to teach me all your ways. Okay, that's a great question. And if I were to distill it to the biggest moments, one that was a huge pop for us, also a max moment,
• 22:16
  Oprah wore our shirt. Okay, so we have a shirt called The Deep End, and it had been in our line for a couple of years at this point. And I will never forget it. I was in LA. I was in the midst of fundraising for the company. We needed more money in order to fund inventory growth for our business.
• 22:36
  And I had just learned that an investor dropped out for $750,000, which was a lot of money for us at the time. We haven't raised a ton of money. I guess it's all relative. But this was a big part of the round that we were trying to do. And I found out we weren't going to participate in the round. And the same day, literally two hours later, Oprah posted on her Instagram wearing our shirt.
• 23:06
  And it was just that really cool moment of the roller coaster of entrepreneurship. The roller coaster ride, right. Oh my goodness. Sometimes I just wish for a couple of boring weeks, just two or three in a row, just nice boring flatline weeks. But it's not like that. And this was in 2019. Oprah wore our shirt and not only did she wear it, she wore it on the cover of her magazine and she has continued to wear it. She has worn it on Zoom meetings. She's worn it on the Drupal.
• 23:35
  Barry Moore show. She's wearing it on the landing page for Oprah's book club. It really is one of her favorite. And this year it was named one of her Oprah's favorite things. And it truly is one of her favorite things. Oh my God. We've had friends screenshot us from being on a meeting. But wait, wait, how does Oprah see your shirt?
• 23:54
  Oprah worked with, I think it was, she was working with her stylist came into our store. This was somebody Max knew professionally and she, her stylist chose the shirt and then Oprah chose it, you know, out of the options. I wish I had been there next to Oprah. I wish I could tell you her thought process or how it works, but I wasn't in it.
• 24:14
  PR isn't my world. So I'm telling you as best that I know, this is how it happened. And so that then has turned into us again, being able to amplify one moment and over time, show it to many people. And we've reposted her Instagram post. We've now been able to talk about this being one of Oprah's favorite things. And this shirt has become iconic to the brand. That is so freaking cool.
• 24:40
  another moment that was wait wait let me just ask you one more quick question before the next moment what's the impact of Oprah wearing the shirt like was there a direct correlation to sales or is it like a long tail thing where like you can't really quantify like how much kind of it did but like what was the impact besides the press impact which I imagine would be crazy
• 25:03
  First, it started as a spotlight and this one product got more attention and we were able to distort it. And I'm not sure it's impossible to separate exactly what was the Oprah effect and what was the then what you do with that, because then we talked about it as much as we could. You shouted about it. Yeah.
• 25:24
  Look, mom, I made it. You know, Oprah's wearing our clothes. That was so cool. So it started as a spotlight and then it becomes a halo. It becomes an opportunity to draw new eyes to the brand, to build brand awareness. And then they'll go to the website and you want to show, obviously, your best styles first and the most. And so it became an incredibly lucky moment that...
• 25:49
  transformed our business, but we were able to support it from a marketing and a merchandising perspective. Then we wanted to add new colors, those, Oprah picked those new colors as her favorite things. And, and we really were able to now this spring and summer, we have dresses and tops and little tanks and skirts that are coming out in the same fabric. And we're going to give Oprah more options to wear in Montecino. It's the O-line.
• 26:17
  Exactly. Some of those moments are totally out of your control. Wow. Okay. That's amazing. Yeah. Some of those moments are totally out of your control and some of them are in your control. And one of the transformative moments that was in our control was launching a catalog channel. That was something that we did in 2020 and we've really been able to build a brand new audience and to re-engage our existing audience through our catalogs.
• 26:47
  What do you mean catalog channel?
• 26:50
  Oh, meaning that that is a way that we're acquiring new customers and we're able to. A catalog. You're sending out a catalog. Yes. Is that what we're talking about? Yes. Got it. I'm like, this is TV. Where are we at here? Okay. Got it. Okay. Catalog channel. Right. So like direct mail. Yes. And I don't think catalogs are unique. Obviously anybody with a mailbox is seeing that lots of brands are doing it. The way we do it is a little bit different. It's not, you will see Max's granny in it. You will see Max in it.
• 27:18
  We shoot the catalogs ourselves, very lo-fi. We were just shooting one over the weekend in LA. And we'll just go, three of us. We don't use a ton of photo equipment. We just have like a point and shoot handheld camera.
• 27:34
  We take snapshots, we play music, we have a great day. We come back, write a little vibey copy, make some dad jokes, put it, and then upload it and send it out in the mail to you. So it's not really polished and it's not triple distilled, triple filtered through two teams. And it doesn't have the level of production that most of the other catalogs in your mailbox probably have. But in the spirit of leaning into the things that,
• 28:03
  our challenges and making them work to your advantage.
• 28:07
  think that that differentiates us. I love that. That's so cool. Gosh. And so that's obviously working for you. And you started that in 2020. What are the kinds of initiatives that you're focusing on at the moment? What's like the recent stuff that's working? Oh my goodness. The recent stuff is new product. It is so exciting to be investing in creating new product. It's like the most fun part of the job. And
• 28:36
  getting to work on perfecting new pieces for our audience is probably my number one favorite thing to do. And, you know, now that we have done these Oprah and the catalog, these have all contributed to a business that is up 800% over 2019. So,
• 28:55
  We've grown it tremendously. That means we have that many more people to talk to. And now we're in a different place than we were at the beginning when nobody knew. And now we actually have an engaged, awesome audience of people that we can share new product with. So I'm dying for these like amazingly soft ribbed tanks that are made in Peru of products
• 29:21
  pima cotton there and they're mixed with spandex and it's just the most comfortable tank top and it's i have one sample and i have worn it to death like i take it out of the hamper before washing because i can't i just need to wear it one more time before i wash it that's coming soon and working on a perfect oversized slouchy blazer really comfortable easy pieces like if you were going away for a trip
• 29:47
  No matter where in the world, if you're going to London or LA or New York or Iowa, anywhere you're going, you'd pack a few comfy, comfy pieces in a backpack and be ready to go. We're making those pieces.
• 30:01
  I literally, before we got on this call, I was showing my husband some of the clothes on your website. And I was literally like, this is like what I want to travel in. And I literally said that I was like, this is my perfect like airport outfit because it's like comfy, not tight, but still very chic, very sophisticated. And like, it's a vibe. It's a real vibe.
• 30:20
  Dune, you're a marketing genius. That has actually been one of our big hooks, actually. Like Travel and Leisure wrote about the best travel genes. And then in Wall Street or Wall Street Journal had done an airport style piece. And of course, we haven't been. Then we took a little break from traveling. And the biggest traveling we were doing was from like the kitchen to the pouch.
• 30:43
  But they are now that we are traveling again, they are the best versatile, comfy pieces. And you can like roll off a red eye into a meeting and not have to not have to go change your outfit.
• 30:55
  put on a lippy, some earrings, and you're good to go. When you say you are up 800%, are you able to paint the picture of where the business is doing, say from 2016 when you started out on your own to now, even if it's a seven-figure ballpark, eight-figure ballpark, nine-figure ballpark, where's the business today versus where it was then? I'm doing some quick math. We're up 25 times where we were in 2016.
• 31:25
  Well, well, whoa, that's amazing. The challenge is though, when you start something, even if you're growing 46%, 83% year over year, those are terrific numbers. But if you're, when you're growing off of a small number, they're still quite small numbers. And those of us who have been employees at big companies.
• 31:49
  are used to small growth maybe, but over really big numbers. And you've just worked at a bigger scale. And I think it's an easy thing when you're starting off to assume, if that's your frame of reference, that that's where your brand will be in no time. And that simply isn't the case. For some people, it is. For us, it wasn't. We had to start with a small number. We always grew. And we always grew above...
• 32:19
  50% or more. But when you're starting off a small number, you still feel like you're, when does that breakout happen? And it takes an awful lot of time, really. 10 years to overnight success. That's what they say. That's right. That's exactly what it is. What is your best piece of advice for entrepreneurs in the fashion industry coming into 2022?
• 32:45
  On a tactical, practical level, do not buy too much inventory. The three biggest places any consumer business invests, it's usually inventory, marketing, and people. And marketing spend, you can usually turn off pretty quickly. People spend is really painful to diminish. It means you're letting people go.
• 33:11
  But inventory is impossible to get out of. When you are booking inventory, you're impacting lives and livelihoods of people globally who are working at mills or at factories to produce product that you've ordered. And so you're committed to that cash.
• 33:32
  in a slow fashion business like ours, you're often buying product six months plus in advance. And the world can change as we know in six months, it can change in six days. So it's a risky place to put cash. And there's nothing wrong with a wait list. There's nothing wrong with building demand and building anticipation and really focusing on community and engaging in conversation with your audience in the meantime. So I would say,
• 34:03
  Be very, very careful about how much inventory you purchase. Buy less. Always test before you invest. That's my tactical, practical advice.
• 34:13
  Spiritual advice is that you can do anything, but you have to do it. And you should go in with that mentality of it's going to start with at some point you're probably going to do every job. And that's the best way to learn. And to assume that, oh, I'll hire a team. Somebody else will do this. That'll be I want someone is unrealistic. Yeah.
• 34:34
  And it's best to go in with that understanding that it's going to be you. You've got to figure it out yourself. Don't rely on someone else outsourcing to someone else who you think is going to make everything work for you because nine times out of 10, it's not how it works. Yeah, the cavalry isn't coming. You're going to have to figure it out for yourself. And that is the trade-off of being an entrepreneur versus being an employee. And there are so many advantages to both positions.
• 35:05
  the trade-off of support versus autonomy and really figuring out what your flow state is and where you can produce your best work and make the best contributions, something you've got to examine for yourself and be honest with yourself and continue to reevaluate as you go because both are great positions to be in. And it's really about finding the right flow state for yourself.
• 35:33
  Yeah, it's so true. I feel like I talk a lot about this on the show and on other people's podcasts. It's really important to self-audit yourself too, to figure out what you actually enjoy doing in the day-to-day and where you are actually thriving. Because of course, there's all these things that it's made to sound glamorous and blah, blah, blah. But entrepreneurship is hard. You've got to really audit yourself to figure out what you love doing on a day-to-day
• 36:04
  deeply painful to do because I have learned that it is next to impossible to learn, do, report, and teach at the same time. And when you're starting a thing and for the next 10 years after that, you're often in situations for the first time that you're ill-prepared for and you feel completely unbiased.
• 36:28
  ill-equipped to handle, but you figure it out because you have to. And then the next time you have some experience to draw from. But it's really hard. Sometimes I do feel that feeling of getting tossed in the waves. And when that happens, I call friends who are also entrepreneurs, who are founders, and I'm like, oh, I'm going to be a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a
• 36:50
  Um, and it can be the loneliest place to be until you talk to somebody else who completely gets it and is like, Oh, a hundred percent been there, done that. So good to have those moments of kind of connection and compassion. And that gets you through to the next, uh, toss in the waves experience. And then other times it feels like,
• 37:14
  floating or surfing. Like it's really fun. And it just depends, I think on not even the day, but the time of the day, it all changes very quickly. I hear you. It's ups and downs. It's ebbs and flows. A lot of water analogies. A lot of water analogies. I'm here for it. I miss the water. I want more water in my life. Hey, it's elemental. Elemental is air.
• 37:41
  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.
• 38:06
  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.
• 38:28
  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.
• 38:45
  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.
• 39:10
  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.
• 39:32
  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.