Let Go and Haul: My grandmother’s stick-to-it-ness
Week 34, 2018 – Brooklyn
Hi! I’m back from Canada with a very special story of entrepreneurship for the labor day long weekend.
Journey: where we’re at
The team made a ton of progress while I was away, which is really one of the best feelings leading a team. Knowing you can step back and everything will be fine is a style of working that took me so many years to accomplish. On Friday we were at the NYU career fair (for free, yay! thanks to our awesome partnership with NYU Future Labs) with a few open positions for a business and film intern. We’re also starting a search for a dev ops human. If you know anyone who might be into these, please tell them about TRASH!
We’ve prototyped and run two experiments since our product deep dive the week before I left – paying down our uncertainty and tackling the riskiest things first. We’ve learned a lot and are moving into decision making and turning the corner back into production mode with more app updates. More on that soon!
Journal: what I learned
My trip back to Canada ended up being much more sombre than I expected, it was also a goddamn miracle. My grandmother’s health had been rapidly declining over the summer and I wanted to make a trip back home to see her. Frustratingly, I’d been waiting months for my new work and travel card (that allows me to re-enter the US). I was anxious I wouldn't be able to make it, but miraculously, my card arrived a few days before I was due to fly. I was able to see my grandmother who was suffering from Alzheimers in her last days before she passed away. While the disease had wreaked havoc on her mind, she was still able to recognize me briefly – which was so special. I have no doubt that she was holding on for all of us to come home. She knew.
As a tribute to my incredible grandmother, who was the OG of being a total boss, today’s email is a story of self-made entrepreneurship and sticking to it – adapted and contextualized from the speech my father gave to her family and close friends last week. She will always be a constant inspiration to me, and I hope to you too :)
In 1950, Karen married her first husband Donovan, and the two of them learned the business of retail from his grandparents who had a general store. By the 1960s they were able to open their own store, but this one was going to be a clothing store – Donovan was a creative person and Karen had an eye for aesthetics too. The couple opened Donovans Fashion for Women, a high-concept shop selling designer outfits and evening wear in Edmonton Alberta.
Not long into the venture, Donovan became disabled and Karen (who also didn’t have the opportunity to ever graduate from college) was dealt a difficult hand with her husband’s health (and death a decade later), a mortgage, three young children, and a small business with issues.
She tried to ask Donovan for his advice with the problems the business was facing, but unfortunately, he’d lost this ability. With vultures in the background trying to buy the business assets for pennies on the dollar, Karen took over, telling them to “get lost”. They told her she would fail.
She quickly decided if she was going to turn the business around, she was going to do it her way, and her heart wasn’t in evening gowns. With the women’s lib movement of the late 60s was heralding change, her plan was to sell pants to women at a time when very few others were doing it yet in Edmonton. Women were going to work, and they sure weren’t going to do it dressed like Audrey Hepburn from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. They wanted fashionable, comfortable, easy to care for separates and sportswear. Karen had a knack for this way of dressing, always looking casually elegant and practical at the same time.
First she closed a small expansion store that was losing money and using up resources. She found a loophole in the lease that allowed her to do this and boy, did she use it. This allowed her to focus on one store, stepping up to take over general management, and most importantly: buying.
Karen started buying Anne Klein, replacing the inventory of gowns with pantsuits. With this line doing well, she started buying sportswear from Ports International (now known as Ports 1961). She had an absolute hot cake with that one, and it turned out to be her big break, putting the business on the path to success. Due to supplier lead times shipping merchandise to western Canada, she would overstock key Ports items in the rafters (literally), so she wouldn’t miss a sale.
As Karen took on a bigger role, so did her children. Very close with her family, she would later teach her children the business of retail, but at that time – with the assistance of many housekeepers over the years (her eldest was 12 when he fired the first one) – Karen expected a tidy house and dinner on the table when she got home from work so she could relax with her family. The next morning she would be up at 6am to attend to her stocks (she was excellent at investing) and east-coast calls, booking in her orders with Toronto before starting her day at the store.
Seizing the moment selling workwear to women, Karen made decisions in split seconds and used her confidence to assume business risk. The invention of Ultrasuede in the 70s (a faux suede you can throw in the washing machine) was a huge money maker for her, and she started traveling to New York to buy more sportswear to meet demand. As a woman working in male-dominated industry and traveling alone in the 70s, she was often a target for men trying to play her in business and otherwise. Just as she’d told the vultures who tried to buy her business out from under her to “get lost”, she told the creeps to “get away”.
Karen earned the respect of many men in the fashion business, in particular, her lifelong friend Sol Goldstein who owned the label Miss Style. These two worked the women’s winter coat business like no one else could. Edmonton is on the 53rd parallel, and at that latitude the winter gets cold and stays cold. With her business selling sportswear ticking along, outerwear was an obvious next. Karen had exclusive deals with Miss Style on fabrics, carrying the best selling coats in colors her competitors didn’t have.
Karen made decisions and stood by them. She spent money on advertising as investing where others would hold back. She drove business hard and played a very serious hand when doing a deal. She delegated, entrusting others to get jobs done. She had a special quality in business and life she called “stick-to-it-ness”, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Even though she faced adversity, she never let her past hold her back. Karen always looked towards the future, unwilling to be defined by the challenges life threw at her or the societal expectations placed on her. Cutting her own cloth with grace and grit, Karen’s spirit says: “stick to it”.
Thank you grandma, for teaching me so much about business and life.
Jams: what I’m into
This excellent video on the making of Hong Kong’s neon signs from Phoebe:
…as well as this gorgeous one on glass blowing via Arkadiy.
On Saturday I was at the last Warm Up of the summer at MoMA PS1 and Lizzo put on a show that I can only describe as a force of rainbow sleeves, dancers and badass lyrics. If you haven’t listened to Lizzo yet you should. The video for Fitness is a good place to start: