Let Go and Haul: Thanks Dad
Week 24, 2018 – Brooklyn
Journey: where we’re at
This week we had everyone in the house! We did our first “All Humans” (my rebranding of All Hands) and went out for dinner after to celebrate the fundraise and kick off working together. In my excitement I totally forgot to take a photo. I will fix this soon because I know you wanna meet the whole team!
This week was spent deep in product and infrastructure planning. We went in with a big goal we need to get to by Q4 and emerged with the first chunk work work broken down into pieces (risky bits first!) and milestones in the calendar. Feels great to have a map.
In other news my Instagram account was (finally after many years of being under attack), hacked. @han was stolen and it looks like all my data is offline now too 😱Strong passwords and 2FA can’t save you. Terrifying. I’m working on getting it back (still) but you’re reading this and you like, work at Instagram please help me! 🙏
Journal: what I learned
I was having dinner last night with my friend Daniel, and I ended up telling him how I got into design. “How did I not know this story?” he exclaimed. “Have you told anyone this? You gotta save that for something!” And I learned that this is interesting and relevant and I decided today was the perfect day to start writing it down.
Entrepreneurship runs many generations deep in my family, and when I was a kid, I did what many kids in my family had done before me: I went to work with my dad. My dad and his sister ran the family retail business – high-end women’s fashion.
When I was a kid, my favorite thing to do was organize all the thread in the alterations department. After a long day it would get messy and color coding the hundreds of spools back onto the pegs for the seamstresses was so satisfying. Soon, I learned that as the boss’ daughter, it’s important to lead by example and so I got put to work emptying the all the wastepaper baskets, sweeping, and the other things a leader does to show they are in service to their team.
Later, I got put to work in in the receiving room, unpacking the European fashion that Donovan’s sold, and learning the names of all the big designers and understanding the fabrics the clothes were made of. As a young teen I learned to carefully go through the order, counting all the items, pushing racks of clothes into the industrial steamer (that I was slightly afraid of getting stuck inside), converting all the sizes into the North American system, and finally ticketing them to go out onto the floor for merchandizing. I loved merchandizing. Receiving was too linear for my brain, but figuring out how to display things so people would buy them was exciting. As I folded thousands of sweaters I ended up making my first few sales and eventually it was decided that I was mature enough to start working the floor.
This was a real job now, and it was hard work. I learned to sell. How to be focused but not pushy, how to think on my feet when faced with a niche requirement, but most importantly, I learned confidence in the sales process. I learned the thrill of closing a big sale, I learned the silent little prayer we did as the customer walked out the door hoping the item would not get returned. I prided myself on my ability to help a woman look 100x better in an evening gown with the right lingerie underneath (and then selling her both haha!) I loved seeing people figure out how to express themselves through fashion, feel good about themselves. Working retail is no joke. You work Sundays, holidays and Christmas eve. You’re on your feet all day – in heels. You’re at the mercy of weather, trends, the economy. Being a buyer and trying to guess what people will wear in a year is one of the most insane jobs I have ever witnessed, possibly even more of a gamble than being a tech entrepreneur.
But the job at the store I loved the most was windows. It started with me being small enough to crawl into a particularly awkward window and have my dad talk me through how to carefully take apart the extremely expensive Hindsgual mannequin. When I was done doing that first window, I knew right away it ticked all my boxes. I helped out with windows more and more until one day the person who normally did them was out, and one of the windows was featuring a bunch of items that had all sold out which meant we needed to redo it pronto, and I got the job of staying late to do it alone. I asked my dad what he wanted in there and he said the cashmere sweaters that had just come in. I wrinkled my nose. Cashmere sweaters were so boring. Conservative old lady stuff I thought. (I have since developed a serious appreciation for cashmere sweaters but at the time I was more interested in wearing Juicy, Se7ens and blasting Dre from my car). Yep, it was the early 2000s, and Lost in Translation directed by Sofia Coppola had just come out. Everybody was taken by (then) rising star Scarlett Johansson, and in particular the scene where she’s aimless in a hotel room in Tokyo wearing underwear and a cashmere sweater.
I called my dad to tell him I was doing something “a little different and more edgy” but don’t worry I said, it will be “really really cool. Trust me”. He did! Cool dad! I did the window exactly like the movie, it was perfect. It carefully walked the lines of refined and sexy with a nod to the pop culture at the time. It was way edgier than what we normally did though, and the next morning the staff was like waaaaaat where are the pants. Guess what happened?
We sold a lot of sweaters.
That was the first time I felt the power of design. Being able to so clearly connect a weird creative idea to a business outcome was something I wanted more of, and that’s what pointed my internal compass to design school.
As for business, I learned all of it from watching my dad first. Many years later when I told him I wanted to pursue entrepreneurship, and knew I had knowledge gaps I had to fill, I got that box set of HBR's 10 Must Reads for my birthday with a card that said “DIY MBA”. Those are some of the most worn, marked-up books I own.
Thanks Dad.
Jams: what I’m into
This song that was blasting on my street this afternoon in Brooklyn. I love my neighborhood.
The new Rico Nasty album yesssss
This YouTube playlist of TRASH inspiration Anton and I put together when we first got excited about this. (Some things maybe a bit NSFW, it’s art).