QUINN, CAROLINE SPIEGEL: Audible Porn for Women

There are currently 2 billion women in the world who masturbate,  but many may feel limited in their options of getting turned on in a clean, safe way. Founder Caroline Spiegel launched Quinn, an audible porn platform that is changing the way we listen to porn, stay turned on, and get off. Quinn is on a mission to help women expand their sexual imaginations with a new modality.

We talked to Quinn founder, Caroline Spiegel, about her journey of self-expression, creating content, and finding her passion for embracing one’s sexual expressions.

The Childhood

 Born in Santa Monica, California, Caroline grew up with parents who were lawyers and a brother, Evan Spiegel, who ended up founding and becoming the CEO of a very successful tech company, Snapchat. As a creative child, Caroline loved planning parties, designing invitations, and setting the theme. She doesn’t describe herself as a very extroverted person and tends to swing on a pendulum from wanting to either be completely alone or hosting an event. Her latest obsession? Her Australian Bernedoodle, Charles. 

In high school, Caroline worked in a robotics lab and was really interested in studying computer science, which became her major in college. The summer before her senior year, she worked for Protocol Labs which was a startup that was trying to decentralize the internet with huge cloud service facilities. As a programmer, she got the full experience to learn how startup operations looked and also was close to the founder to learn how he ran the startup that was non-stereotypical to the standard Silicon Valley startup. However, her path completely shifted when she entered her senior year at Stanford, and dropped out to become a full-time entrepreneur, as the founder of Quinn. 

 “We are changing the narrative about sex and making it more about the energy and vibe that you have with the person. It is more important to have that than all the other mechanical parts of sex. ” -Caroline Spiegel

Quinn was founded because life is not always picture-perfect, and creativity and freedom of expression have healing powers. During Caroline’s junior year of college, she struggled with an eating disorder, and this contributed to her dropping out the following year. “I took time off in my junior year due to this eating disorder – and ultimately, this was a wake-up call to my body and my sexuality,” Caroline shared. When she was recovering from the eating disorder, she had low libido and couldn’t sexually perform the way she wanted to, or felt like she was supposed to, and so she turned to porn to get turned on. Unfortunately, she found it very dissatisfying. “I started to feel like I wanted something that speaks to my actual desires and what speaks to me in terms of good sex. Late at night in my studio apartment, I stumbled upon audio porn, and I found tons of communities on Reddit, Tumblr, etc., where other audio porn users share and create content,” Caroline said. Most women tend to use their imagination or something from a TV show or movie to masturbate, however, it may be difficult for them to keep those images in their mind to continue the pleasure. This is what Quinn is set out to help solve, or at least facilitate – the imagination. Quinn sets the stage for your next moment of pleasure, for all women who want a new experience, and who are 18 years of age and older. 

Why The Name?

Founded in 2019, Quinn started out as a blog with multiple iterations of the site. The name originated from Caroline’s friend who had a crush on a girl named Quinn and it stuck with her because it represented the sexy, clean, and unique vibe of the brand and the content of the business. In the very early days of the business, Caroline started out by putting all her favorite audios from the internet on a basic website and shared it with her friends and sorority, which helped it quickly go mini-viral. Since this was so popular during the beta test, Caroline decided to pull the trigger, drop out of college and pursue building Quinn full time since it was already taking up a lot of her time. 

Founder, Caroline Spiegel.

After developing the product into an MVP, Caroline was ready for funding and successfully raised $1 million in her pre-seed round in two tranches. The first round was due to investors being excited about the opportunity and the second round was due to the growth of Quinn users. Today, Quinn has expanded into a mobile app from a desktop experience. As a subscription-based company like Spotify, and Headspace, Quinn offers unlimited audio content for $5 a month from content creators who are vetted. You really feel like you are in the bedroom with these creators with content categories ranging from teacher-student, strong language, spanking, butt stuff, romance, encouragement, and more.

What’s Wrong With The Industry?

“Sex is very taboo and conceptualized in boxes. For example, sex on the beach is hot, but sex in the bedroom isn’t. Also, our biggest competitor, Pornhub, creates a lot of erotic content that is free, but isn’t very clean or makes the user feel safe. The way we think about porn right now as a society is not aligned with how our users conceptualize it.  Our users want to be connected to their sexual experience in a greater way and we provide them with an outlet to embrace their sexual desires in a clean, comfortable, and safe space. All of our content is super authentic to make it feel like you’re in bed with that person. There is a lot that goes into dirty hot moaning audio.”

The Advice

What does it take to start something on your own? Caroline shares some advice from her entrepreneurial journey: 

• Word of mouth marketing wins every time, but never underestimate the value of good press. Listicle articles featured on Bumble, Cosmo, etc., have really helped us grow.
  

• Do out-of-the-box ideas to grow your brand organically. Quinn hosts special nights at Soho House for blind speed dating events and also likes to host creative salon-type events to promote creative content and creators.
  

• Theodore Roosevelt once said something about “being the man in the arena.” I personally think you won if you are doing something at all. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Just keep going -- as long as you are being and trying!
  

• When there is so much advice out there, it is hard to figure things out. I think every piece of advice is worth a listen, but it is not worth an internalization of what that person said.
  

• Try to collect as much data as possible on particular issues, ask a bazillion people questions, read everything on it, and also factor in your gut feeling. It is wrong to do everything your gut says but it is also wrong to just listen to Jay on Twitter. It is about finding the right medium for what is right for the business.
  

Interested in getting it on through audio? Check out Quinn and start listening and getting turned on at the same time. 

Photo courtesy of Quinn.

Written by Christina Chao.

DIEM, EMMA BATES: Social Universe for Women & Non-Binary Folks

When it comes to women’s health, careers and networks, there wasn’t an online space that encompassed everything. Passionate about helping women navigate their health and other life events, Emma Bates launched Diem, a social app and online community. With Diem, Emma hopes to improve the lives of women and add more to their shared experiences -- all around the world. 

We had the chance to interview Emma Bates, the CEO of Diem to discuss her childhood and journey leading up to founding the community platform. 

The Childhood 

Emma came into this world in Singapore, where her parents lived for three years. After year two, she and her family moved to the UK and she stayed there up until university.  With a mother who runs her own interior design company and a father who is a CFO with an accounting background, Emma was always exposed to a dual way of thinking, preparing her to be an entrepreneur in the future. When asked to speak about her young entrepreneurial background, Emma says, “I was always inquisitive and always wanted to understand the root cause of what anyone said.” 

While attending King’s College in London, she studied war studies, a combination of history, politics, psychology, and more. Although it was very academic, Emma explored her creative side by starting a blog and doing creative writing (before Instagram) and after graduation, she worked for a tech company that matched creatives with brands and provided opportunities for influencers. Emma really enjoyed working in content production and other manager roles that handled blogs, and social media. 

Like any ambitious individual, Emma decided to move to New York (without a visa) and landed a  job at Away, being one of the eight employees at the time. As the Head of Global Marketing, Emma said, “I started by doing their UK international marketing. I opened up their popup store in the UK and helped with local partnerships, marketing, and building brand awareness.” After a few years at Away, Emma left to pursue other opportunities and founded Diem with a former colleague from Away. 

“I have always been passionate about having a positive social impact on the lives of women.” 

Co-founders of Diem, Emma Bates (right) and Divia Singh (left).

The Aha Moment 

“Starting from when I was in university, I did my thesis in gender and sexual-based violence, looking at areas of conflict and post-conflict and understanding the impact on women and girls, and so this was the genesis of the passion to help women. It is a collection of personal experiences. I didn’t want to look in a forum, and I found myself interviewing everyone in the Away office for answers to some questions like whether or not they take Plan B. I thought there should be a more efficient way to help women find answers to their questions, and so when I met my co-founder at Away, everything started to come together”, says Emma.  

“Diem is a network of social spaces for communities and live conversations, built for women and non-binary people first. An environment designed for us, every feature is considered, every topic or any person that you might want to interact with or find is considered in that, and we are really taking a new approach to how social media can exist as a positive force in people’s lives, especially as a positive environment for helping women to own their potential through these networks, support and information” says Emma. 

What are the content pillars? 

“We started with health and wellness. Now all of the communities that exist are physical, financial, and mental well-being. Anything from career to finance tips, to physical health and wellness, skincare, even pop culture. Basically, anything that you want to talk about as a woman, there is a community space for you, and they are hosted by experts and subject matter experts, or people who are passionate about that topic” says Emma. 

When did Diem formally launch and how did you test the market?

“We never had a launch date, but we had our public-ready product that launched earlier this year, and we are continually iterating on that beta product. Last year, we had two other beta products with which we tested the market to understand the topics that are popular, types of hosts that people might be looking for, but also how they wanted to interact. We use that to inform what our roadmap and the final product will look like. We currently have 3,000 users to date with a waitlist of over 20,000” says Emma. 

What was your biggest obstacle in building this? 

“My cofounder Divia Singh has a background in building digital products. She did digital products for ZocDoc and Away so she has extensive experience in building technology and the process to do so and all of the stuff that comes along with it. We didn’t have too many difficulties on that front, just finding your feet and the right process is a struggle in itself. The main annoyance is people underestimating the opportunity at hand, and so when I talk to investors they think it is a niche opportunity.

When pitching to investors, they say it is a niche opportunity, but it really isn’t, because women are not only the largest influencers and consumers within social networks right now, but they are actively looking for somewhere built for them and that sort of harnesses their lived experiences to create a better digital society and a better digital ecosystem for them to live in. As a CEO that is my biggest irritation, when people think this is a small opportunity” says Emma. 

What is the business model? 

“B2B2C. We’re building an in-app economy — everything you transact on in Diem will ultimately be able to be monetized via in-app currency. We’ve got some very cool plans in the works for brand integrations down the line too! says Emma.   

When it comes to technological capabilities on the platform, what is different for Diem compared to other software tools that are available? 

“We have messaging, audio, and video functionalities within the community spaces. Community spaces can be public or private depending on what the host is looking for. Our biggest differentiators are that you can be discoverable within the platform, it is a social network, people can find your community and they can search by interests or hashtags. You can also be discovered by hosting live events. Depending on how popular your events are, you can be pushed up in the feed for people to discover. Also, we are building out a post perspective, metrics on how engaged the community is, what people are looking for, and what topics they’re interested in. This is only mobile for now.” 

What are some marketing highlights or partnerships executed to get people to sign up?

“This is a platform for hosts, but built with members in mind. Partnerships are more for host acquisition -- it is mostly talking to them and understanding their needs, talking to them about what frustrates them. 80% of our users right now have been driven by community hosts that live within the platform already. Given our approach is B2B2C, we are seeing our users come in in a similar way. We got some really cool celebrity figures that will be coming into the platform later this year or over the summer which I am very excited about. We have an epic expert suite of doctors, nurses, and others with special qualifications in different areas focused on women’s health. Our approach is very host-centric and they can do whatever they want with it.”

THE ADVICE

Emma shared with us some advice and lessons learned from her experience as an entrepreneur, specifically on her journey of creating Diem. 

• Don’t compare yourself to others. It does wonders for your personal and professional life.
  

• Don’t spend energy focusing on inadequacy marketing because you are taking time away from building your natural skillsets and abilities.
  

• No one else is ever going to build a company how you build it. You bring a very unique perspective to the table. Maybe the product category is the same, but you will execute it differently. It is worth knowing what is out there, but it is not worth comparing yourself.
  

• Just keep going! It is about resilience and not as much talked about as a skill set that you need to develop as a founder.
  

• You’re going to get so many no’s, I get nos 80% of my week and you just have to be like I know I’m doing something… and it helps to have a mission. Every time you get that no, you should be like it’s fine, and then use your mission to inspire you.
  
  

Interested in learning more about Diem? Join the waitlist, and get inspired by other women in your community.

Photo courtesy of Diem.

Written by Christina Chao.

JULY, MUHAMMAD SAIGOL: The Window A/C

The US window A/C market is valued at $2 billion out of which New York City makes up 20% at a valuation of $400 Million. Yup, bet you never thought about those clunky boxes and their ripeness for innovation hanging above your heads? However, one founder did. Muhammad Saigol. Co-founder of July, a DTC window A/C brand that combines millennial design aesthetics with free installation to offer a premium service at an affordable price to city dwellers. 

Having grown up in Lahore, Pakistan for most of his life, co-founder of July, Muhammad Saigol was no ordinary child. In fact, his mother is the chairman of one of Pakistan’s largest media groups, Dawn while his father is an industrialist within the air conditioning sector. Being the youngest of four siblings, Muhammad is also known under the name of Mowgli by his childhood friends, wink, wink. When it came to his entrepreneurial spirit, he tells us how “I had seen my parents run their own companies and make major decisions. It was very much ingrained in me that this was a path I would be interested in.” 

Co-founder of July, Muhammad Saigol above.

The Aha Moment

It was 2019, and “at the time, I was working at Digital Ventures corporate innovation arm of Boston Consulting Group. We worked with traditional large clients and would build new businesses in the digital space. For me, it was a really great way to start to learn what are the muscles of entrepreneurship and innovation that I can apply to build a business. It had been a rough 2 weeks at BCG and I took a walk at 10 pm one evening with a friend after work. I was talking about how I want to use what I have learned to build something new and leverage what I have done with my family and use it here, in the US. On my walk, I looked up and noticed windows and windows of A/C’s hanging out and as I was talking, everything clicked and the rest was history” says Muhammad. 

July is a window A/C direct-to-consumer brand that provides free installation as a service for those in NYC. But, it doesn't stop there. July has reimagined the aesthetic of a window A/C by working closely with Box Clever, the agency behind Away Luggage to patent a design installation system and develop a unique aesthetic. Each A/C comes with a front panel that can be swapped out to match the aesthetic of one’s home. By adding customization to their business model, July is able to partner with artists in the future for limited edition launches to add scarcity and exclusivity to their product while enticing customers.

Their current product offering includes a small A/C unit that comes equipped with 6,000 BTUs for $375 and a medium unit with 8,000 BTUs for $415. You can also add on an air purifier for an additional $30. Both units come with a baby blue remote control, and an app to allow customers to set the temperature of their A/C before coming home on a hot summer day. “There is nothing better than walking into a cool apartment,” says Muhammad.  Take it one step further and July also connects with Alexa and Google Home for Voice control via wifi. Their products can also be found on Goop. Talk about being a fashionable A/C brand! For those not in NYC, July can be installed via a partnership with Handy for an additional $150. 

“We originally tested the market under a dummy website called Don’t be Hot and at the time sold regular A/C’s from Best Buy via a wholesale order of 100 units.”

Start small, prove out the demand in the market and then use your learnings to raise VC funding. That is the exact process that Muhammad took with July, formerly known as Don’t Be Hot back in 2019. Muhammad managed to recruit a former colleague from BCG, Erik Rauterkus as his co-founder as the two had worked on many projects together. Together they offered free installation as their unique selling proposition while price-matching Best Buy’s A/C’s and it worked! The learnings? Insight from customers on their pain points of owning an A/C and its installation system, and in-field marketing of how customers live and their design aesthetics. This allowed the co-founders of July to garner ideas for what their future product should look like and how to offer a better customer experience. 

“The testing originally started out with a survey and a wide group of friends to understand if they owned a window A/C, where they got them from and to familiarize ourselves with the market. We didn’t want to only rely on our biased experiences.” July officially launched in 2020 with VC backing. 

“When it comes to the A/C industry, it is very fragmented. You have manufacturers and even your main brands don’t manufacture their own products, they contract it, similar to the mattress industry. Then you have retailers such as Best Buy and Home Depot where customers buy A/Cs and separately sign up for installation services which get referred to a third party. So along this whole supply chain, the customer ends up paying more for the product, and more for the service versus going to a one-stop-shop. We are a one-stop-shop.” July also picks up existing A/C units from customers and disposes of it properly as A/Cs are a large contributor to global warming. 

“We have created for the first time a brand in this space and I won't underestimate how impactful that has been. Over time appliances have become commoditized and lost their meaning.”

“Traditional A/C’s always advertised around keeping you cold. You see these ads and it always involves someone wearing a winter coat in their house while it is summer outside. We wanted to turn that on its head a little bit because actually, we love summer. We think summer is the best time of the year. It is the time you get to go out, you go to the beach, lay by the pool, etc. We want July to embody the carefreeness of summer itself. We want customers to think positively about their summer experience and when they do, they think of July” says Muhammad. 

The Advice

As most founders will tell you, launching during a pandemic presents a bunch of new challenges no one could have predicted. In order to offset the winter months to spur demand, July launched a beach towel collaboration with artist Amber Vittoria for pre-orders as a gift with purchase. And...it worked! 

For those looking to launch a D2C brand in this crazy world, Muhammad shares some of his advice with us:

• Start small and think about what are the key assumptions of your business you are making and without that assumption, there is no business. Think through how you can test this assumption out before quitting your job.

• When starting a new business there is always a lot of ambiguity, confusion, and unknowns. It feels like such a huge effort to actually hone in and create something, which is why most people don’t get off the ground, flounder, and go in too many directions. Test and learn as you go along to give yourself conviction in the process.

• Think about partnerships in synergistic industries that can help differentiate your brand and provide out-of-the-box marketing growth.

Don’t be hot this summer and buy yourself a damn cool-looking A/C here. 

Photo courtesy of July. 

Written by Alysha Malik. 

ORIGIN, CARINE CARMY: Physical Therapy for Women’s Health

The Femtech market is expected to reach $3 Billion by 2030, and yet there is a huge historical gender bias in medicine. Issues such as postpartum, pelvic floor therapy, incontinence, and painful sex have traditionally been overlooked, deemed taboo, or tackled via invasive procedures. On a mission to provide affordable physical therapy to women across the US, co-founder Carine Carmy launched Origin, to use movement as medicine. 

Did you know that on an annual basis, over 1 in 3 adult women in the US experience health issues that can be treated via pelvic floor physical therapy? “1 in 4 women have painful sex and 1 in 6 women have chronic painful sex. So much of it has to with the over-activation of the pelvic floor muscles which you can treat with physical therapy”, says Carine Carmy, co-founder of Origin. 

Carine struggled with her own health issues for many years which included ulcer colitis and painful sex. “No doctor could tell me what was going on and when I went to see them it would involve giving me a biopsy and highly invasive procedures to try and figure out what was happening. Finally, I went to physical therapy and after two sessions I was feeling much better.” 

The Aha Moment

Co-founders and besties: Nona (on left), Carine, and David (on right).

It was early 2018 when Carine connected with her longtime childhood best friend, Nona Farahnik Yadegar. Nona has just had a baby and was experiencing postpartum incontinence and pelvic pain. “No one had prepared her for this journey and she was left in the dark and told to return back to work and everything would be fine. But it wasn’t fine.” 

Nona ended up finding a physical therapy clinic called Bebé Physical Therapy in LA and was completely healed. The founding team then grew to include Nona’s husband, David Yadegar who had a background in healthcare and finance to build the business. To test the market, the team partnered with Bebé Physical Therapy and retained the clinical team via a formal partnership. This also allowed them to gain an existing database of customers and clinicians. 

By engaging in this strategy early on, Origin (launched in early 2020) is able to claim that they have treated “thousands” of women in Los Angeles and have more than 250 referring providers such as OB-GYNs. 

“We always thought there was going to be a digital component.”

During March 2020 and with the pandemic causing physical stores to shut down, Carine was able to pivot the business model to launch telehealth in less than 48 hours. “We now have 3 physical locations in Brentwood, West Hollywood, and San Francisco that are owned and operated by the Origin staff with a proprietary training program.” By going digital Origin was able to tap into the daily routines of busy moms who sometimes can’t come in for physical therapy, are looking for autonomy or don’t want to be touched by another human during COVID. The digital component increases convenience and retention due to empowering customers to learn the moves themselves. 

The team currently consists of 50 employees, with the first hire being a healthcare operator to set up systems and processes that scale. 

The Marketing

“What we have found is that word of mouth is the most powerful marketing tactic. People are really excited about what they are going through and want to share it with their friends and family. We have an NPS score of 96 which is completely unheard of in healthcare. Not only are we supporting women who have been told for a long time that their pain isn’t real, or doesn’t exist, but we are providing them an opportunity to do something about it. We are currently setting up a referral system to amplify the voices of our clients.”

Origin does a lot of partnerships with doula groups and fitness instructors around women's health. “We also have something called Real Talk in which we speak about sex and pain and how to navigate it with our clinicians.”

The Name

“Amma was the original name, but we found it too limiting. We didn’t want a name associated with the specific phases in life. When choosing a name, we wanted a name that was inclusive of women's journeys from maternity to menopause. We landed on Origin as this idea that through different phases of our lives, we have new beginnings and you can take that origin moment and regain strength.”

“I think in another life I would have become a writer. I encourage people to study what they love in college.”

A graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, with a major in economics, Carine Carmy grew up in LA with immigrant parents from Israel. “My dad sold used cars and my mom was an Architect. Being around small businesses my whole life gave me the spirit of what it means to work for yourself, but also scared me in a big way due to the immigrant small business stories you hear versus the VC-backed startup narrative. It was very different.”

However, if we backtrack to Carine’s childhood, she mentions that she was always “organizing people and things. In high school, I started a radio station and graduated when I was 17. I ended up launching a tutoring program with a friend of mine for SAT prep because I had a hard time getting a job.” Carine’s work experience ranges from being the VP of Sales and Marketing at Amino, a healthcare financial wellness platform as well as previously working at Shapeways before starting Origin. 

The Advice 

Carine mentions how when she was at Shapeways she did a one-hour session with author Jeremy Colonna. His best piece of advice, “know what role you are in and take the authority and responsibility for the ups and downs.” Carine further goes on to say that every founder should have a therapist as a MUST! “The biggest shift for me has been to try and have fun while building this company. I could look at things and say this is high pressure and freak out or say what a gift I have been given. The opportunity to build something for people.” For those in the midst of setting up a venture, Carine advises the following:

• Make sure you want to start a company. The likelihood of success is very low from a financial standpoint and it is very risky. There are a lot of factors working against founders such as pattern matching, and timing.

• Have obsessive conviction.

• Start small, test products, and talk to lots and lots of customers.

• As a founder, be able to constantly adapt to new modes of business such as going from being the head of HR, to head of product to head of marketing and so on.

• Venture capital is not the only way to finance your company!

• Some books to check out: Crossing the Chasm, The Great CEO, and The Invisible Woman.

Interested in improving your pelvic floor? Visit Origin today and let Carine know we sent you. Services span a range of offerings that include sexual health, fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and menopause. 

Photo courtesy of Origin. 

Written by Alysha Malik.

REAL, ARIELA SAFIRA: The New Way to Therapy

Mental healthcare may be synonymous with self-care in certain circles, but the truth is only a small percentage of the US population actually goes to therapy. Affordability is a huge issue - for over 40% of the population, high cost and poor insurance coverage is the top barrier for accessing mental health services. It’s also difficult to even get into the room, with waits of weeks or more for those seeking treatment for the first time. Ariela Safira, the founder of Real, is working to expand access to mental healthcare and provide an alternative to the traditional and sometimes flawed system. 

Ariela Safira has dedicated her entire life to understanding the state of mental healthcare today and is bringing her thoughtful approach to an entirely new model for therapy. We talked to Ariela about her company and the experiences that helped her look at the entire system through a new lens. 

The Childhood 

Ariela Safira is a hustler from New Jersey, where she was raised by parents of two different ethnicities and cultures (Yemeni Jewish and Polish Catholic). She tells us her parents’ different approaches to life impacted the way she thinks, allowing her to challenge and question why the world works the way it does. Ariela didn’t have explicit entrepreneurial tendencies as a child, but thanks her parents for teaching her how to negotiate at an early age and opening her mind up to the importance of mental health. 

“I think mental healthcare is a much bigger part of my upbringing than entrepreneurialism itself,” Ariela said. “My father was raised in a commune, so he loves the world and cares deeply about his friends and his family, and taught me what it means to empathize and care for others. We didn't have the language to use the words therapy or psychiatry, but definitely thought about what it means for someone to be understood vs. not understood.” 

Ariela went to undergrad at Stanford, where she studied math and computer science and spent a lot of time in the product design department. When a close friend of hers went through a significant mental health struggle, Ariela was exposed to the mental healthcare system as it is today - severe, institutional inpatient programs and disjointed care, that isn't designed around the patient’s whole wellbeing. 

“It was the first time I saw a rehab, the first time I saw what therapy and meds looked like with a mature mindset,” Ariela said. “I didn’t think the system made sense so I pretty much threw myself at it.”

While at Stanford, Ariela participated in a class called Innovation in Mental Health, which she applied to using her initial concept for Real. The instructor, Dr. Nina Vasan, ultimately became Real’s Chief Medical Officer (but more on that later)!

Postgrad, Ariela spent time working at IDEO (founder David Kelly is also the founder of Stanford’s Design School), where she dove into research and innovation studying the mental healthcare system as it relates to design. After interviewing dozens of people who have participated in mental healthcare institutions like providers, architects, administrators, and the patients themselves, Ariela discovered that there is not a lot of thought and logic that goes into the design of mental health facilities. One example she uses is that although doctors instruct nearly every patient in inpatient care to exercise, the institutions themselves will not be set up with exercise equipment.

“There aren't people in the field who are questioning this,” Ariela said. “The majority of the people in the field are clinicians, and it’s not their job to think about how we redesign the system.” 

Destined to expand her approach to mental healthcare in some form, Ariela began a graduate degree with Columbia’s Clinical Psychology program to become a therapist. She quickly realized that the traditional path was not for her - she wanted to rethink the entire system rather than join it. Thus, a founder was born. Bada boom. 

“While I was at Columbia I saw how problematic the system is from a training perspective. It’s both damaging to the therapist and the end clients. So I dropped out of the program to found Real,” Ariela said. 

Ariela dedicated herself to Real full-time in 2019 and brought on Dr. Nina Vasan as CMO (Chief Medical Officer) to oversee and validate the clinical efficacy of all therapeutic programs. Fun fact: Gwyneth Paltrow is also an investor in the company. 

The Real Model

“The actual experience of therapy is intimidating - to go to a room with a stranger for 45 minutes and just talk about where you're at. We don't have the language to talk about body image, infidelity. We have to take ten steps back and understand how to talk about our mental health.” - Ariela Safira

Launched in April 2020 at the onset of the COVID Pandemic (what timing - the world needs therapy now more than ever), Real started with a brick-and-mortar studio concept that rapidly pivoted into a completely accessible, digital care model. The initial digital program, Real to the People, was launched in 8 days when the need for online care became obvious. Now the online platform is a full-scale program focused on group therapy, with therapist-led roundtable pathways and dedicated curriculums around specific areas of need.

More importantly. what makes Real’s therapy model unique is its quantitative, achievement-oriented coursework. Members complete various modules and levels of treatment when working through Real’s curriculums, and all of the progress is tracked so improvements can be measured (That’s a first!).  Data on upcoming therapy and completion stats are available to members at all times through Real’s website. Also unique about Real’s approach? No wait times, stuffy Midtown office, or uncomfortable couch required.

“At this point, we have an omnichannel approach to care,” Ariela said. “There is a brick-and-mortar studio format, with our first studio in Flatiron in Manhattan, and this digital platform, that truly democratizes care.”

Ariela views success as creating a world where the norm is that everyone takes care of their mental health. She wants access and participation in therapy to be the mainstream, not a luxury or something extra. True to that goal, Real’s memberships cost less than $30 a month and are available in a variety of time commitments. 

“We’re targeting the therapy curious. Not those that have already felt comforted by or can afford today's mental healthcare system,” Areila said. “I think the vast majority of people are at a place where they do want to understand themselves more deeply, whether it's because they identify as being clinically depressed or want to better get to know themselves.”

On Building a Team

“You should be hiring people who are here to work on a mission and not on a specific product. I don't remember a time when I had to motivate the team to work on the digital platform.” - Ariela 

Ariela tells us it is equally important to find the right people to hire as it is to nurture the team you build. Early hires at Real were a head of experience, a head of marketing, and Taryn Laeben (of other success stories Mirror and Casper) as interim COO, who Ariela now sees as a pseudo-co-founder. Ariela’s approach to hiring - build out a document that lists the companies, in any space, who are setting the bar for success in each area of expertise you need. Once you have a sense of the landscape, start the poach.

“Look at companies that were successful in what you’re looking for, whether it's launching a new partnership targeting a certain demographic,” Ariela said. “All efforts go into recruiting those 8-10 people [who made it happen]. Don't waste time on people who aren't a good fit - find your tier 1 folks and don’t talk to anyone else until you've talked to those people.”

As for how she fits into her team, Ariela sees herself as an endless researcher, always pushing boundaries and asking why. 

“Deep curiosity fuels innovation more than confidence,” Ariela said. 

The Advice 

Ariela has spent her career asking questions about one industry, and now she’s turning it on its head. We asked her advice for those looking to take on traditional systems with a new approach.

• Do sleep.

• Be open to questioning yourself, and be able to share when you've changed your opinion with new information.

• Be mindful of the areas you aren’t strong in. Be open and interested to learn what you don’t know.

Ready to level up from therapy-curious? Check out Real at https://www.join-real.com/. 

 Photo courtesy of Real.

Written by Kendall Embs.

ALULA, LIYA SHUSTER-BIER: The Platform for Cancer Patients

Approximately 1 in 4 Americans will be afflicted with cancer in their lifetime. Cancer is an overwhelming disease with many logistics and unknowns, all of which can be pretty daunting. While working through her mother’s cancer diagnosis and treatment as well as her own, Liya Shuster-Bier is now helping others care for cancer patients with a solution to help aggregate all of a cancer patient’s needs in one place. Alula, which launched in January 2021, is a radically honest resource that supports people, families, and friends through the entire lifecycle of cancer.

We interviewed CEO and Founder Liya Shuster-Bier about her journey with cancer, closing her fundraising round, and creating a new product in a niche category. 

“We are really colliding consumer health with traditional consumer DTC to build a modern anti-cancer lifestyle brand.” -Liya Shuster-Bier 

It is fairly easy to shop for your friend’s wedding or baby shower since you can access a registry, but what if your friend receives a cancer diagnosis? Cancer is also unfortunately a life moment that many may encounter in their lifetime, and one that many loved ones struggle to shop for. As a cancer survivor herself, Liya Shuster-Bier was determined to solve this problem of shopping for a cancer patient and thus, Alula was born. 

Alula features a marketplace of products guided by medical experts and curated by cancer patients who have been there. It serves as a place where a cancer patient can have all their shopping needs met without the hassle -- a place where loved ones can help purchase new favorite items for their cancer patient to help them throughout their cancer journey. 

“A discovery platform for patients and caregivers.” 

“Alula is organizing your support system outside the hospital room. We like to say that doctors treat cancer and Alula treats living with it,” said Liya. Alula is truly the one stop shop for everything a cancer patient needs; where you can register for products/services you need, organize logistical care across your support network, read about cancer and lifestyle content, and connect with others in the community. 

The Aha Moment  

Imagine hearing that your mother got diagnosed with cancer, and then a few months later, you also received a cancer diagnosis. Liya Shuster-Bier knows this firsthand, and wanted to help make it easier for cancer patients to shop for their new lifestyle.

After her mother’s diagnosis, Liya would shop a lot with her mother to help her purchase new products, and what was most surprising was the amount of time spent shopping for a variety of OTC products/services that were never utilized before. She found herself shopping for all types of products in different aisles like the baby and geriatric aisles, and realized this burdensome experience could be made much easier. Liya’s mother also kept asking why there was not a one stop shop for everything related to cancer patients, and this began to spark Liya’s curiosity of this untapped consumer segment of the cancer patient. When Liya herself got diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma while her mother was rendered in remission, she felt this pain point on a grander scale – not just for herself personally shopping for things she needed, but also for her support system that wanted to show love to her on her journey battling cancer. It was then that Alula was born. 

“Alula is reframing and curating different types of products for the cancer patient and is the first brand that is organizing the cancer patient as a consumer segment,” said Liya.

Alula currently operates through an affiliate program with the brands selling through its marketplace. The platform aims to help brands discover a new consumer segment in cancer patients and acts as a discovery platform for patients and caregivers. Alula also adopted a medical advisory board that is blessing everything from an oncologist's perspective, in addition to frequently collecting data on patients and caregivers through interviews on what they are using to get through treatment and recovery. “Our patients needed these products yesterday and we want to focus on optimizing for speedy fulfillment and educating them on what they need,” said Liya. 

The Childhood

Liya, the oldest of three, was born in Baku, Azerbaijan in a Jewish enclave, and left as a political refugee at just 18 months old. After moving around the world, Liya and her family were granted political asylum and found themselves settling in Forest Hills, Queens in New York. Attending public school in the city her whole life, Liya decided to make the switch to a more rural location, moving to Hanover, New Hampshire to enroll at Dartmouth College. 

Both parents had civil engineering degrees, but Liya wanted something different. At Dartmouth, Liya majored in Geography and Government because she “was really obsessed with how capital shifts across place and creates inequity in various forms,” ultimately dreaming of a job at the World Bank. Her first job out of college was a coveted spot on the corporate derivatives team at Goldman Sachs, where she worked on major companies like Walmart, Apple, Google, analyzing currency fluctuations on their balance sheets and income statements. 

“I loved the pulse of the trading floor and the analytics that helped these companies protect their earnings. I loved translating what was happening politically in a certain country to what that meant economically,” Liya said. After a few years in the corporate world, Liya fed her social impact appetite leaving Goldman in 2013 to join a startup in Boston where she designed social impact bonds with governments across the country. After a couple of years, she then decided to pursue her MBA for more managerial experience and got accepted into Wharton. 

Six months into Liya’s MBA, her world was forever changed. Liya’s mother got diagnosed with breast cancer, and a few months later, Liya got her rare cancer diagnosis. It was this time, and everything leading up to this moment that she knew she had to do something to help other cancer patients adapt to their new normal. Liya started Alula during her cancer treatments, and was inspired by her community and loved ones to keep following her dreams of creating the business, while also fighting cancer. 

As a cancer patient and founder, Liya found it difficult to decipher between what was bringing her down -- was it the cancer or the grind? However, she found that she needed to prioritize her health, as well as ensured that her team also prioritized their health for the business to run smoothly. It was a challenge to balance the overall business needs during treatments, but even in difficult times, Liya’s strong conviction to getting things done and helping people proved successful. Her inspirational story, life experience, and strong appetite for helping others paid off. In 2020, Liya had spoken to 95 investors and closed $2.2 million in her pre-seed round.

The Advice

Liya’s advice for launching a startup: 

• Your deck has to give your elevator pitch for you. Put your personality into your deck because investors will invest in the founder as much as the idea.
  

• Invest in the technology for investor pitches. Do the $15/month Zoom subscription because it's more important to have a seamless meeting experience. Make sure you are also investing in a Wifi booster so you can present your pitch seamlessly.
  

• Build a fast-growing startup, while taking care of yourself and your team. Have specific work systems and architecture in place to keep you and your team healthy.

What’s Next for Alula

“We are really de-stigmatizing and democratizing everything a cancer patient needs to heal and to recover. There is a lot of focus on the medical bill component, but what I was stunned by in my own treatment was how medical bills were a singular part of my many, many expenditures. It took me getting cancer twice and also living it with my mom to understand the universe of things you need and what you need to pay for. Alula is organizing this all into a singular place,” Liya said. 

In the future, the team is also planning to build registries for users to raise money for specific care. Alula is also aiming to make the overall transaction and registry process easier, like automating patient thank you notes and other small features to help facilitate transactions within the platform.

Lastly, Alula will be a space for the community, where patients get a shareable profile as part of a dashboard of their cancer treatment. The patient will have the ability to customize knowledge, products, their registry, and more, to different parts of their community. “We are building the foundation for patients to share each other’s profiles through the Alula platform because we believe the community of content-led and commerce strategy is what will keep the patient and their loved ones buying through Alula,” said Liya. 

Do you know someone diagnosed and suffering from cancer? Show your support and care by sharing Alula with them.  

Photo courtesy of Alula. 

Written by Christina Chao. 

LANTERN, LIZ EDDY: Prepping for Death

Death is a part of life. It’s the one thing every single human being has in common: we will all experience the death of a loved one, and eventually our own. Planning for the future is uncomfortable to many, and dealing with a loved one’s legacy after their death is a heavy load to place on the plate of someone who is grieving. Lantern is a new company lighting the way with a set of solutions that guide people through every step of the pre-death planning or end of life process. CEO and Co-Founder Liz Eddy is extremely mission-driven by nature as a result of her own life experiences with grief, and she’s the perfect person to build the tools we all will need when dealing with death. 

Childhood and Background

Liz grew up in suburban New Jersey with the cosmopolitan influence of Manhattan ever-present in her community. Her earliest endeavors focused on improving the lives of others and educating people on tough topics - in middle school, Liz won the Cease Fire New Jersey essay contest with her piece on gun control. When she was 15, she started a company with two friends that provided a curriculum around dating abuse and domestic violence to her high school. Organic growth took over and quickly the curriculum was used in high schools and universities across the country!

“It made me completely fall in love with the startup energy and pace, but also made me realize I needed to be doing mission-driven work. I loved the idea of doing things around topics people weren’t talking about,” Liz said.

Liz went into a full-time role in mission-oriented work at DoSomething.org right out of undergrad (Liz has a Business and Design degree from Parsons!). Through DoSomething, she became an early team member at the Crisis Text Line, the first free, 24/7, national support line in the US. Her skills in communication and community building made her the right fit to jump into developing the entire go-to-market strategy for the project, at the age of 23.

“It was this strange thing where I felt totally unqualified but our team was like, ‘Hey, we’re launching to people in your age group - you know what people are looking at; you know how people are going to find this.' We ended up reaching every area code in the US within 3 months, faster growth than Facebook.”

The Aha Moment

“Grief is a sort of superpower. I think grief has made me very resilient, very focused, really passionate, but on the flip side, you deal with the loss and the lacking of that person and the fear of other losses. It's a counterbalance.” - Liz Eddy 

Liz’s intimate experiences with grief and loss compelled her to create the solution now offered through Lantern. She lost her father as a young girl, and in 2018 she lost her grandmother. Liz was tasked with handling all of the arrangements for her Grandmother’s funeral and legacy and found many obstacles in navigating the process, on top of dealing with grief. 

“I expected Lantern to already exist because there’s a startup option for everything on the planet. I thought you could find all the information consolidated into one place,” Liz said. “For the end of life and death, it’s super fragmented and expensive, especially online. It was hard to find help in a tough situation.” 

So, Liz set out to create the company she wished she had found at the time - a guiding light for dealing with a death or planning for your own. Lantern offers a step-by-step checklist that helps you cover every base of funeral planning, documentation, and closing out any personal affairs for a loved one you’ve lost. The Lantern system also enables you to create your own end of life plan with detailed guides and support. Lantern’s goal is to lighten the burden of coping with the end of life and death. 

“One of the things that I'm the most excited about is creating a way for the end of life planning to become the norm. I think we are very comfortable at this point thinking about retirement and getting life insurance set up. Those are things that are directly discussing death. It’s something we do and we move on, but the end of life planning isn't like that yet. It's more of an uncomfortable thing, and that’s what needs to change. Lantern as a product is a piece of a larger puzzle of changing the way we talk about death,” Liz said.

Alyssa Ruderman (on left), and Liz Eddy (on right).

On Finding A Co-Founder 

When looking to start Lantern, Liz turned to a long-time work bestie from her days at DoSomething.org, Alyssa Ruderman, who now serves as COO. Liz credits Alyssa with being a brilliant systems thinker who likes to solve tough problems. 

“Alyssa and I were naturally meant to be Co-Founders. Our relationship is built on ideas. We own so many domain names. Nothing had ever sunk in like, we should leave our jobs for this, until Lantern,” Liz said.

Looking ahead, Liz and the team are focused on building the Lantern product to serve enterprise customers and working on partnerships and affiliate strategy. Closing a fundraising round this fall, Liz is optimistic about the future for her rapidly growing category.

“One of the things I like to remind people is we are only touching such a small population at this point because we're fighting against something people aren’t talking about. As a business we can't just be a product, we have to be starting a movement. We’re trying to create conversation in the larger cultural context, and bring together the industry as a whole,” Liz said.

The Advice

Liz is a passionate founder working in an industry that requires an extra degree of compassion and care. Follow her advice to turn your ambitions into reality:

• If someone is creating something really phenomenal and doing what you want to do, join them instead of duplicating it.
  

• On the flip side, if what you want to do doesn't exist or you can do it in a way no one else can, don't let anyone stop you.
  

• Someone doesn't have to lose for you to win - you don't need to step on anyone to get to where you want to go.
  

• Operate your business with kindness and treat people with kindness. As entrepreneurs, we should be raising each other up!
  

If you’re facing the difficulties of a loved one’s death or are ready to think about what you want regarding your own, Lantern is here to make it not-so-scary! Explore their resources and get the checklist here.

Photo courtesy of Lantern.

Written by Kendall Embs.

JIGGY, KAYLIN MARCOTTE: Puzzles Worth Framing

As the world moves through a pandemic, it definitely feels like pieces of our lives are falling apart. Socializing has come to a decline leaving boredom on the rise. Luckily, founder Kaylin Marcotte launched Jiggy, a D2C puzzle company, to help us put the pieces back together. 

When it comes to purchasing adult puzzles our options tend to be pretty limited. Between animal prints, cottages, and scenic views, nothing ever seems worth framing. We caught up with Kaylin Marcotte, founder of Jiggy to chat about her personal journey. 

“I found myself doing puzzles all the time, but the options in the market were cheesy, outdated, uninspiring, and super old school. I was spending so much time with these designs that the idea of launching Jiggy just came to me as I thought, why was no one elevating this experience?”, says Kaylin. 

Jiggy is a D2C adult puzzle company that makes puzzles worth framing. Jiggy partners with female artists from around the world and licenses their art onto puzzle pieces. “Each artist gets a percentage of every sale.” Each Jiggy also comes with puzzle glue so that customers can bind the pieces together and hang it using Jiggy’s partnership with a family-owned framing company in Ohio. “We have an affiliate relationship with them.”

“Our goal is to reconnect people with their downtime while supporting female artists.”

Jiggy was launched in November 2019, but the idea came to Kaylin back in 2017 when she was working at the Skimm, a subscription newsletter for a millennial audience. “I remember coming across their newsletter back in 2013. They had just launched a year prior and were fundraising and growing their team. I was working at IBM at the time as a consultant and felt ready to dive into something where I would have a lot of ownership and responsibility. I reached out directly to the founders and met with them in the West Village in NYC. I was their first hire for a company that is now greater than 60 people.” Kaylin led the Skimm's brand ambassador program, community building, and grassroots marketing. 

“I was staring at screens all day long and wanted a way to unwind and get away from technology at the end of a workday. I had tried meditation and yoga, but nothing stuck with me. I started doing puzzles and it clicked. I found them very relaxing and cathartic.” 

As we roll out into mid-2020, Jiggy has seen an uptick in sales due to the pandemic. It seems as if people are looking for new activities to fill their COVID days. “March was a great month for us! 95% of our sales come from our website. However, we have also started to explore retail partnerships with cafes in Brooklyn and engage in brand giveaways.” Unfortunately, due to the rising demand, Jiggy was running out of inventory fast. In an effort to continue supplying products, they launched a campaign called Originals. “The Originals campaign allowed artists to paint directly on a pre-cut blank puzzle to create a one of a kind piece that would then be auctioned off. The proceeds would be split with the artist and a COVID relief fund. It was a creative way for us to solve a challenging problem.” People have been able to win puzzles from Sophia Bush, Allison Williams, and Lili Reinhart. Future collaborations include Demi Lovato, Social House, and Rebecca Minkoff. “We launched this at a time when artists were struggling due to galleries being closed.”

The Challenges

“Given my background in marketing, content, and branding I found the manufacturing world to be such a learning curve. I thought getting something made would be very straightforward, but it is all about finding the right factory and creating the right partnership.” Kaylin has also found product design and forecasting inventory a particular challenge as a first-time founder in a time when established brands are struggling to keep afloat. “We have two manufacturers, one overseas in Hong Kong which produces our higher quantity designs, and a local manufacturer in the US that we use to launch smaller quantities to test out new designs. Every day I find it hard to hold people accountable because the world is constantly changing.” 

Founder, Kaylin Marcotte.

The Childhood

Kaylin was born and raised in Pasadena, California. She has two siblings and grew up to parents who were both accountants that met at KPMG. As a child, she was always involved in projects at home with her family since her dad loved physics. “We would do a rube goldberg, domino effect project.” Later on, she attended Barnard College, with a major in Political Science and Psychology, and created an Entrepreneurship Club on campus. “In my senior year, I developed the idea and strategy for a small bank to grant students microloans to support women entrepreneurs.” Kaylin goes to give back further to the community by launching Project Plastick in 2018 with her sister to help reduce the amount of plastic waste in the world. 

The Advice

As a bootstrapped company, Kaylin invested her personal savings of $40,000 to launch Jiggy. “I thought about fundraising, but wanted to make sure the unit economics work organically, and I can be profitable before taking outside capital.” Her team consists of two part-time employees, an intern and she is now looking to hire a full-time head of operations. “The constant advice I heard before launching was to create an MVP and move fast. If you are not embarrassed by your first product launch, you were too slow about it. I actually felt that with a product-based business, that advice didn’t quite fit, and instead you should start building traction and interest, but get the product right from day one.”

For those looking to launch a product-based business, check out Kaylin’s advice below:

• A good early-stage CEO should manage cash flows, set the future direction and vision, and reprioritize the day to day. 

• You should constantly be firing yourself from roles in the company by hiring the best person and instead focus on your strengths in order to not become a bottleneck.

• Stay nimble with manufacturing by setting up two locations, one locally and one internationally. Use the local manufacturer to test out new designs with low quantities while sending your evergreen products with high orders overseas to receive a bigger margin. 

• If you are building a product-based brand, you should have a differentiator and this can take a long time, but it is worth it. 

• Start gaining traction while you wait by collecting emails, launching a landing page, and social media account. 

• Sometimes all you need to do is differentiate the consumer experience versus building something from scratch. 
  
  
  

Looking for a new activity in your COVID downtime? Check out Jiggy here or gift it to a loved one just because.

Photo courtesy of Jiggy. 

Written by Alysha Malik. 

THE GOODS MART, RACHEL KRUPA: The Healthier Convenience Store

As individual food and beverage brands turn towards sustainability, and good for you ingredients, retailers have not kept up and customers are left shopping online. In an attempt to clean up your local bodega and provide a higher offering with organic foot traffic, founder Rachel Krupa launched The Goods Mart to foster community, clean ingredients, and conversations. 

Rachel Krupa wasn’t always the owner of a retail store, The Goods Mart located on 189 Lafayette street in NYC, across the street from our favorite boys over at KOIO. In fact, she spent her last eighteen years in PR working with brands within the food and wellness industry. “I started my career in PR working for Lizzie Grubman Public Relations. But, before that, I was interning in PR in the political field but didn’t like wearing nylon clothing. I had a degree in political science and public relations.” 

“I have one rule in life. If I am not happy with what I am doing every day, then why am I doing it?”

“This was the catalyst for starting my own PR agency. I quit in 2010 and started Krupa Consulting. It was really tough getting my first client, but all you need is one and then you grow based on referrals.” Rachel started her agency by focusing on restaurants and later entered wellness. After 3 years (and a decent Rolodex) she decided to only work with founders who are changing the narrative and shaking up their category in some sustainable way. Her clients include WTHN (previously featured on RADICHE), Shake Shack, Miss Grass, Sustain, Our Place, By Chloe, and more. “It’s about telling the story of the company from the business side, but also from the ingredient side and defining why it is cool.” Over the years, Rachel has been able to build strong relationships with publications such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Well + Good, and Fast Company. 

By working closely with these founders, Rachel gained further insight into the marketplace and realized that there was no retail store, similar to a 711 business model that was selling good-for-you products in a convenient way. Alas, she decided to launch The Goods Mart in 2018 in LA and then NYC. 

Unfortunately, her first store in LA didn’t work out according to plan as the rent was very high and the foot traffic low. It was her first time operating a retail store, and looking back there’s a lot more to it than one would think. Our advice? Margins, margins, margins! Plus foot traffic and lots of it. She shortly closed the LA shop and opened one in NYC. 

“We want to create a closed-loop system.”

The Goods Mart sells snacks, food, coffee, CBD drinks, and Kombucha. Their product assortment is a mixture of new-comer startups and legacy brands, well-known snacks to establish a clientele, and reassure visitors that this space knows what is up. Instead of tipping, they allow customers to donate their tip to a charity from their network. 

Their product offering includes brands who don’t use any artificial colors, artificial flavors, growth hormones and are GMO-free. If you are a beverage brand with single-use plastic packaging, they will not work with you (victory to the glass!). 

However, as we all have experienced with COVID, retail has been taking a major hit these days and for some, it feels like the world is ending (especially in NYC where every store seems to be boarded up these days). In order to pivot and stay with the times, The Goods Mart is now offering a Surprise Snack Program in which consumers can create their own snack box to send or donate to other humans. If you are into paleo, vegan, gluten-free, and low sugar options, this one is for you!

The Advice

Rachel shares how everyone has their own journey and path in life and we shouldn’t compare our timelines to others. Her advice for those looking to start something:

• There is never a right time to launch something, it is never going to be perfect. 

• Have a team that is smarter than you and can bring skills that you don’t have. 

• Know that when you have a setback there will always be a lesson learned. Hence, there is never really a wrong way to do something because it is the path you had to go through to get it right. 

• No one really knows what they are doing, but be confident in the decisions you make to find the right answer. 

• When it comes to PR, as a publicist you should never guarantee placement to founders, but instead, try to over-deliver on your promise. The hustle will get you there!

Bored at home and feeling the munchies? Try out The Goods Mart snack box to indulge in a healthier way of refueling your body. After all, you are what you eat.

Photo courtesy of The Goods Mart.

Written by Alysha Malik.

LALO, MICHAEL WIEDER: Baby Gear that Grows With the Family

When it comes to babies, they grow up just so darn fast. Sometimes within a blink of an eye or a celebration of a fallen tooth. As a result, parents are spending a fortune trying to play catchup with their baby’s needs. In an attempt to save your wallet, store visits, and growing pains, Lalo develops premium, modern baby gear for millennial parents.

For those who don’t know, the baby gear sector is deemed a $10B dollar market. However, Co-Founder of Lalo, Michael Wieder realized very quickly that when it comes to shopping for baby products, parents tend to get overwhelmed by their unlimited options. As a result, Lalo focuses on two core products, the Daily Stroller ($515), and a 2-in-1 high chair and play chair combo called The Chair ($195). When it came to designing these products, Michael wanted to create solutions that would grow with the baby. Thus, parents are able to decrease the height of the high chair as their child’s height increases, allowing him or her to become a crucial member of the home dining experience. The Lalo stroller can also expand as your family expands, fitting up to two kids. Talk about a bargain! Available in multiple colors, Lalo leaves gender biases out the window. And while we are still on the topic of gender, did you know that back in the day the color pink was originally meant to represent boys? It’s true.

We caught up with Michael Wieder, the co-founder, and CMO of Lalo to chat about his personal journey with family planning in the Lalo Loft, located in Soho (during pre-Covid times when face masks were not a fad). 

“There were multiple aha moments of how crazy this industry is, and how underserved parents are at this moment when they are going through so much. Your life literally changes and your responsibilities change”, says Michael.

Going back to his childhood, Michael grew up in Plainview, New York, a suburb of Long Island. He attended the Ross Business School of the University of Michigan and instead of taking up a job in a traditional field such as banking, law, or consulting, he decided to start his first company within the music and event production space. “I was managing up and coming artists, producing concerts, and events. I ultimately networked my ass off and ended up becoming a sports agent.” 

The Aha Moment 

Michael later went on to work at WayUp as Head of Brand Marketing. “I remember the CEO of WayUp told me that my best friend already works there. He was referring to another colleague whom he thought I would vibe well with.” Fast forward to today and that colleague was Gregory Davidson, who is Michael’s co-founder and the CEO of Lalo. 

On Making That First Hire

When it comes to hiring your first team member, many startups struggle with defining that role and its responsibilities. “Our first hire was a Customer Service Associate. We had a bunch of freelancers that we worked with for product design. I handled marketing, brand, technology, and partnerships while Greg handled operations and logistics.” Michael felt that as a D2C business he wanted to wow his customers with over the top service. Speaking of great service, while Lalo operated out of a WeWork, Michael actually ended up hiring his first team member by stealing her from WeWork (she was the Community Manager). “WeWork has a great training program for its hires.” 

 “Think about who your customer is. If you don’t define the customer at the onset, you’ll have a tough time defining your brand. If you then innately know your customer, you can create the pillars that are right. Just by thinking about them as people, you can build a brand in relation to those people.”

In order to do this, Michael sent out thousands of surveys to people to gather data and design a brand that would appeal to parents in New York City as well as those in St.Louis. Guess what? It worked! This strategy also helped Lalo gain a track record of celebrity followers organically within their first week of launch! “Jessica Alba just started to like our photos on Instagram, and when we jumped on a call with her, she told us that she loves and uses our products.” Without paying a cent for influencer marketing, other celebrities have publicly endorsed Lalo’s products, including Khloe Kardashian and Shay Mitchell. Talk about generating free buzz!

Michael also gave much thought into the product pricing, and settled on a middle ground pricing strategy similar to suitcase brand, Away. “We landed on a price that would attract parents with less disposable income to buy into higher quality and longer-lasting brand, while also attracting new parents who want to splurge.” 

“Community is also a big part of why we created this business. A lot of parents suffer from fear and anxiety around shopping for baby products. We wanted to create a place where people feel welcomed to test out our products, hang out, and feel loved.” For those who don't know, the Lalo loft is a mixture of residential and commercial space. It is a showroom in the front with an office in the back (similar to Casper’s first office back on Bond St in the early days). 

The Name

As catchy as it sounds, Lalo is an acronym that stands for Love All Little Ones. Michael was touched by the recent stories of migrant children in detention at the border. “We believe that every child regardless of where they are and where they come from deserves the same amount of love.” The brand is designed to sell love, not fear, and make parents and all children feel taken care of. 

The Advice

Launching a company in the baby care space is no pat-a-cake endeavor. It is filled with strict product safety regulations, alongside emotional customers. Michael shares his top tips for those looking to start a baby gear brand:

• Target angel investors and small funds. It is important to do your research and know what sector and stage each fund represent. It is important to choose strategic investors who can add value to your company versus just writing checks.

• Be smart about managing your cash. Future funding isn’t guaranteed, especially in this time of the coronavirus, so balance your growth and profitability.  

• Don’t compare your growth to other companies. Every company should be focused on building their own playbook.

• Define your ideal consumer early on. Build a brand in relation to their needs, vernacular, and aesthetic.

If you are expecting a baby or know someone who is share the Lalo love with them by mentioning “radiche” for a 10% discount. Offer expires on May 30, 2020. 

Photo courtesy of Lalo.

Written by Alysha Malik. 

EDN, RYAN WOLTZ: The Efficient Grower

It's a commonly held belief - no home or office is complete without a little foliage. Indoor plants reduce the stress of those around them, purify the air, and provide a sense of purpose to their caretakers. Those benefits, as well as the opportunity to grow herbs or leafy greens, make healthy plants a highly desired item for apartment dwellers and people looking to bring the outdoors inside. Founder and CEO Ryan Woltz combined his engineering background and love of nature to create Edn, a complete indoor gardening system that enables anyone to grow a variety of plants on their countertop. 

From his time as a collegiate serial entrepreneur through the ringer of Shark Tank, we got the inside scoop from Ryan on Edn’s origins and what we can expect as the innovative company grows (pun intended).

“As a young kid, I was always super interested in computers and robots, that type of stuff, but also being outside in nature.” - Ryan

When looking back at his childhood, Ryan showed the signs of a budding founder as early as the 3rd grade when he participated in an entrepreneurship program at his elementary school in Pittsburg. His early endeavors and participation in sports fostered his competitive edge, and while at Clemson for college he simultaneously ran several businesses. Talk about being a hustler! 

“I had a newspaper, a t-shirt company, a moving company, we made ice luges, I also made jewelry,” Ryan said. “The newspaper advertised parties, and I was the social chair that planned those parties. I had a pretty good business going on.” 

Ryan also dove deep into studying civil engineering and spent the money he made in his businesses experimenting with chemicals in thermochromic dye and color-changing fabrics. The application he was ideating was totally novel at the time but was later commercialized by several companies that took it to market separately from his collegiate experiments.

The Aha Moment

“I thought being a civil engineer meant I'd be outdoors solving problems, but I started missing nature,” Ryan said. “I bought houseplants, but I always forgot to water them and take care of them. As opposed to running out and getting more plants each time I was forgetful, I thought there had to be a better way.”

Ryan had worked as an engineer for over two years when he built and programmed his own automatic watering system for his once-neglected houseplants. 

“It looked crazy at the time but I thought it had potential. I could no longer screw up gardening,” Ryan said.

In 2015, with the idea for Edn and an early prototype under his belt, Ryan quit his day job and chose Denver as the city where he was going to build his company. He began developing different solutions for indoor gardening and got into Techstars where he had a crash course in pitching, team building, and goal setting. For Ryan, one accelerator was not enough - he also took his company through the XRC Labs program!  

“Being ok with failure is important, that's the only way you will succeed.”

In 2017 Ryan had just closed his first round of funding for Edn when he had the opportunity to pitch on the TV show Shark Tank. He showcased the prototype for Edn’s SmallGarden, which is a tech-enabled planter that gives its users an instant green thumb with built-in lights and soilless seed pods.

Ryan gave us a behind-the-scenes review of the Shark Tank process, which starts with a pitch to producers that results in many participants being cut before pitching the Sharks. The final pitch lasts over an hour, and Ryan successfully obtained 2 offers before declining to take any funding (note to Shark Tank junkies - the terms offered are notoriously unfavorable to the entrepreneurs). With four months until the episode aired, Ryan had to produce the SmallGarden on an aggressive schedule to meet the demand that would come from exposure on the show.

“We got 1000 units made. I set up an assembly line, warehouse, and we manufactured them all in Colorado,” Ryan said. “I learned a ton about building products at scale, and when you make them yourself you realize they should be as simple as possible. When Shark Tank aired we sold $100,000 worth of gardens.”

By the summer of 2018 Edn had developed its next iteration of the SmallGarden, which added functionality and is controlled via a convenient app. The app allows users to control the amount of light exposure and water release which ultimately controls how fast or slow your plant grows. Hence, if you are traveling and won’t be back for some time, you can slow down the growth for your lovely fruits and vegetables so that they don’t go to waste. 

“We completely simplified it - it has only 16 parts, which include the automated garden, LEDs, water sensors and wifi connection. We injection-molded all of our plastic this time,” Ryan said.

“This operating system brings nature indoors and into the 21st century.” 

Ryan’s time is now focused on positioning Edn to be the best choice for people who want to bring the joy of plants into their homes. 

“People love plants for so many different reasons,” Ryan said. “ You can eat them, but they also are beautiful, they can make you more productive, they smell nice. There are all the use cases and we don’t want to be scattered in our approach.”

Edn is planning to roll out more ways for people to win the green thumb war. Keep an eye out for larger plants in the product line, and for talk of Edn in the press. They’ve been featured on the Today Show, and continuously get organic media traction.

“We’ve been super lucky - people are really interested in our space. I think the product and the vision has a lot to do with it,” Ryan said.

The Advice

By our calculation, Ryan is at least a fifth-time founder! Here are his tips for anyone at the helm of a burgeoning business:

• As the CEO you have to work on the business, not in the business.

• Be confident in yourself but lean on your support system.

• Spend time building your time and realize you can’t do everything yourself.

• Understand that you are going to wear many hats as a founder and business leader.
  

Can’t seem to keep your plants alive or looking to grow an indoor vegetable garden during Covid? Grow with Edn here. 

Photo courtesy of Edn. 

Written by Kendall Embs.

MAX-BONE, PARISA FOWLES: The Unleashed Designer

 As design-forward, modern-day consumers, we want to purchase products that appeal to our emotions and personal space. However, when it comes to shopping for your pet, your options are pretty limited as far as design and aesthetics go. Like many of us, this is something dog owner Parisa Fowles-Pazdro struggled with, which led her to launch Max-Bone, a direct to consumer lifestyle pet brand. 

When Casper, the mattress company, launched dog beds back in 2016, it made its decision solely based on data. At the time, the data showed that the majority of folks in New York owned a dog rather than having a baby. Fast forward to today and the pet industry is a booming one, currently valued at $75 billion dollars. We were able to visit Parisa Fowles-Pazdro, founder of Max-Bone in their Hamptons re-tail (see what I did there) location to chat shop. 

“I had never grown up with a dog and had traditionally been very scared of them. It wasn’t until my husband Max got me an English Bulldog, Macintosh, that my world was transformed both personally and professionally,” said Parisa. 

Parisa was born in Iran and fled the country at a young age due to the revolution. As a result, she grew up in Sweden with Swedish values and aesthetics. “My parents always wanted me to become a doctor of some sort, so I entered the world of Dentistry and eventually moved to London to work in this field. However, I hated it. I hated the blood, saliva and literally the entire process!” Parisa said. Random fact: apparently dentistry is classified as one of the top 19 jobs where you are most likely to kill yourself. Eek! No wonder Parisa wasn’t having fun. 

Life Before Max-Bone

Believe it or not, Parisa actually had a prior brand called Max Fowles back in 2008. “My husband was a big believer in me and encouraged me to quit my job and start a fashion line. Even though I didn’t have any background in fashion, I was able to put the supply chain together and ended up moving to NY and then LA as London didn’t have garment manufacturers readily available like the U.S does.” This totally explains the dominance of the fintech startup scene in London as most fashion and CPG brands probably have a hard time setting up shop! 

Under Max Fowles, Parisa bootstrapped the company and was the only employee working full-time. “We sold high-end fashion clothing such as leather jackets and got orders from Moda Operandi. Even Vogue had written about us, but as the company scaled, the margins didn’t make sense. So in 2010, I decided to close the business.” 

The Aha Moment

“When Macintosh entered my life, everything changed.” It was 2015 and Parisa was looking to purchase a dog bed, but was left with very limited options. “I realized that there was nothing in the market available that could hold up to the style, quality and aesthetic modern consumers such as myself were looking for.” 

As a designer with a well-decorated home in LA, Parisa started contacting manufacturers to design her own dog bed, but unfortunately, Macintosh would end up peeing on it, destroying the $2,000 creation. “He also shed like mad, so I started putting a jumper on him for our car rides. Slowly, I started to build out his wardrobe and created a dog clothing collection by streamlining my production process where each product is made in-house versus running around to different vendors to retrieve snaps and buckles. Unlike humans, dogs don't complain about fit! I also had all of the PR contacts from my last company which allowed me to successfully market this new collection.” Parisa realized the potential and growth in the pet sector and decided to officially launch Max-Bone in 2016. 

“We cater to all dog sizes.”

When it comes to marketing today, it is all about the collaborations, or collabs, as the cool kids say. COL-LABS! (Ok I’m done now). This tactic helps spread awareness and reach new customers. In the past, Max-Bone has created a capsule collection with Disney in addition to collabs with Illesteva, Wag, Rover and 11 Howard. It has also been endorsed by celebrities such as Kendall Jenner, Reese Witherspoon, Lena Dunham, Beyonce, Selma Blair and more. 

Max-Bone also believes in retail as a customer acquisition strategy and has engaged in multiple seasonal pop-ups over the years in locations including NYC, LA, the Hamptons and Aspen to cater to their prime customers. “I believe in organic growth and executing a D2C model where margins don’t get cut by the wholesaler.”  

On Finding An Investor

As a second-time founder, Parisa knew that she didn’t want her latest business to be bootstrapped and instead preferred to take external funding via strategic investors. “I find that the network strategic investors bring is more important than the money. Money is widely available today, but I look for investors who like to get involved, come up with new ideas, and have PR connections or contacts that can help grow my brand.”

The Advice

Today, Max-Bone’s product line has expanded to include pet grooming, treats, accessories, clothing, and toys. Their price point starts at $14 for a toy and ranges to $300 for an XXL dog bed.  When it comes to launching a D2C pet company, Parisa shares her advice with us:

• Create something that is missing in the market, but has demand. Do your research to figure this out and when you do, act fast. Don’t wait too long!

• Learn quickly from your failures and understand the value of money.

• Try to streamline your production process for efficiency. 

• Don’t buy into your own press. True success is what occurs behind the balance sheet.

• Create a business that has the margins built-in from day one or you will not be profitable. 

Do you feel awkward that your fur baby is walking around naked? Yes, it’s a thing! Visit Max-Bone to provide your pet with elevated, high-quality products and join the tribe of celeb parents. 

Photo courtesy of Max-Bone. 

Written by Alysha Malik. 

RADAR, SPENCER HEWETT: The Lasting Inventor

Digitally activated systems and e-tailing may be the most talked about subjects today. But how can one forget the good old brick and mortar store? A place where people, products and purchases interact in real time. Lucky for us and our love for in-person connections, Spencer Hewett is making sure that retail is remembered and re-energized through RADAR.

While tech entrepreneurs were focusing on digitizing the Internet over the past decade, Spencer Hewett was secretly inventing a technology that does quite the opposite. RADAR is a first-of-its-kind fully integrated hardware and software system that uses RFID and computer vision to help retailers easily locate and manage inventory while allowing customers to shop products as easy as an e-commerce transaction. 

Six years in the making, Spencer recounts the rise and return of RADAR as he celebrates the company’s latest round of $16 Million in funding! Yes kids, hard work and patience really do pay off.

“One thing I learned from The Thiel Fellowship is that companies only die when the founder stops working on it!”

Spencer was born in Illinois and raised across six states. His early childhood years included playing with dolls (thanks to his two older sisters) and mainly building and selling computers. He even made his high school pocket money selling second-hand designer bags for his mom’s friends on eBay! All of which led to studying computer engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. 

Yet in 2012, he would quit university as a sophomore and be awarded The Thiel Fellowship, a $100,000 prize and an opportunity to move to Palo Alto. “My application essay was about automating checkout. I still remember receiving an email from them asking to get on a call to further discuss my application the night of my take-home algorithm exam. Turns out that it was CNBC filming live reactions of all 20 folks who had been accepted into the prestigious program.” Feel free to scavenge the Internet for footage of Spencer screaming f*** and running down the dorm hallways with $2 champagne being sprayed on him. 

The Rise of Radar

Rewind back to 2011 and the early seeds of RADAR came in the form of Shopit – a company Spencer had built using RFID tags to map out stores. Considering this was more of a feature than an actual product or service, he was later inspired to fix long shopping lines. This aha-moment happened while interning at eBay, and specifically waiting in line for over 30 minutes at a Victoria Secret semi-annual sale during lunch (he blames it on his co-intern at the time).

“This was the first level of improvement in checkouts – a kiosk that one could walk up to, scan their items in hand, and be charged right away. It was after many iterations and a crash course in fundraising Silicon-Valley-style through YCombinator, that I raised my first $600,000 in investment.” And then came a moment of self-checking (no pun intended).

The Challenges

Spencer’s goal was to create a system that would know what everyone was picking up so that the store could charge them for items on their way out (autonomous checkout as we like to call it). So how does this work you might wonder?

“We built a system of antennas that would power RFID (radio frequency identification tags) and locate them in addition to using computer vision to locate people and objects. Our technology then matches the location of the product to the person. Typically in this space, accuracy is measured around 2-3 meters in 2D. We were trying to get it down to 10cm. While experiments in the Lab went very well, once the environment changed, the radio properties would affect how the signals between the tag and reader would bounce off the walls, thus shifting the data. This was a physics problem, not a software one.”

To fix this, Spencer literally went back to the books! With the mentorship of an MIT professor (who had invented RFID), he studied the law of physics. Between 2013 and 2016, he learned, ran out of money and turned his apartment into an Airbnb operation, finally to have launched RADAR as we know it – a system that works within a realistic environment giving an accuracy of 10cm in 3D! (Essentially you can apply all of the KPI’s and metrics from an e-commerce site to the physical store.) 

“The long-term vision for the company is to index every single object in the world.”

Today, RADAR counts 13 employees, including COO, Michael Murphy (former Head of RFID at Inditex, the parent company of Zara), and Adam Blair, CTO (former chief engineer at Boeing has launched 18 satellites and founder of a company that built RFID systems for Intel).

Even more impressive, RADAR has signed three major publicly traded billion-dollar apparel companies, two being active investors. While the company currently focuses on inventory management to drive revenue for retailers, it’s not the end goal. In Spencer’s words, “Walmart sells 80 billion items per year. If we are able to index all of it, that’s 80 billion items in the world that can be tracked. Imagine picking up a bottle of water from Walmart, throwing it in the trash and the trash can knows that its plastic and recycles it automatically. We are excited about adding intel to everything and having companies build consumer-facing platforms upon it.”

The Advice

As a Thiel Fellow, YCombinator participant, a young CEO and a mastermind in creating something that never existed, here is Spencer’s humble advice to aspiring entrepreneurs:

• Don’t start something if you just want to make money. It’s not enough of a motivation factor to get you through near-death experiences and hard times.

• Don’t be afraid to ask people for stuff.

• While fundraising, be transparent with investors. Acknowledging all the downsides and challenges of your business shows that you are approaching your business in a realistic manner.

Want to chat with Spencer about the future of retail or simply grab a drink with him at Soho House? Email us and we’ll put you in touch!

PS. Check out his boss sister, Denise’s RADICHE feature here. Don’t you wish for some Hewett genes? We sure do!

Photo Courtesy of RADAR.

Written by Radhika Mehta.

SCRIPTD, DENISE HEWETT: Unscript Hollywood

For Decades, white males have dominated the casting and direction of the entertainment industry. As a result, American culture and its youth have been influenced by only one perspective. This is now changing. In hopes to eliminate the barriers to entry and spread inclusivity Denise Hewett built Scriptd to level the playing field for screenwriters and content producers. 

America is vast and diverse and finally, we are seeing a full spectrum of representation. Beauty brands such as Fenty, Huda Beauty, and Flesh have all launched in the past two years to capitalize on the inclusivity. As the population for African-Americas, Asians, and Hispanics grow, we are witnessing a new era of these performers on screen in leading roles. Hence, if there was ever a time for an Asian individual to become an actor, this would be it! (Shout out to Crazy Rich Asians!) But what if you had no connections to the big shots in Hollywood and are mad talented, as a writer, that is? 

“Scriptd was built initially as an industry database. Anyone can upload content. All voices are valid. We work between writers and buyers and are eliminating the barriers to entry by empowering women and people of color.” 

Lack of diversity was one of the many problems Founder of Scriptd, Denise Hewett set out to solve. As an Executive Producer for Hollywood, Denise had her fair share with the inner workings. “After a certain point of working in these environments, you realize that it is completely skewed. I had lost a lot of work opportunities due to individuals hitting on me and making me feel othered.  As a woman, I clearly saw a huge opportunity for a shift in the entertainment industry. We know what makes money is inclusive content, but yet, no one has built the tools for it.”

With no tech background, Denise sat on this idea for 1.5 years until she finally decided to build the tools herself. Scriptd launched in 2015 as a platform for anyone (women, people of color, non-American citizens and white men) to upload their scripts and use upvotes and ratings to display the best performing content that resonates with the public in real time. Buyers can also browse the platform to produce these scripts into films based on data. This lowers their risk of developing a concept that might flop in theaters. Fun fact: 90% of the scripts that have been auctioned are written by women or people of color! Ohhh yeah! (Does the happy dance). 

Product-Market Fit

For most tech companies it is all about proving product-market fit when approaching investors for funding. “By working in the business, I had a lot of friends who wrote TV shows. They were our early writers. We had 50 to 100 scripts before we launched and now have over 1,000.” 

Having bootstrapped the company herself via friends and family round, Scriptd has relied on word of mouth marketing and organic press to spread the word. “There is a lot of magic in the universe. My tech director built the platform for equity while working at Dreamworks!” Scriptd also participated in a media tech accelerator to help raise funds, build their new product and perfect their pitch.

The Childhood

Born in Florida, Denise moved around a lot as a child. Seven times to be exact. She was captain of her dance squad in high school and was always hustling side gigs from helping out florists to working in nightlife entertainment, fashion editorial, content production and even waitressing. Today, her side gig is DJing where she has performed for Oprah, Glow Recipe, Soho House and more. I have to say, we are big fans of her music! 

“I never set out to be an entrepreneur. Since I moved around so much all I wanted was stability and roots. I wanted a stable job! However, I grew up in an entrepreneurial family, where both my father and brother are CEO’s.” This helped Denise get the push she needed when starting out. 

The Advice

Denise tells us how important it is as a solo founder to find a mentor, advisor, and therapist you can rely on. “I think everyone should go to therapy. It is a place to deposit your fears, stresses and heal. It has been game-changing for my life! The way I move through struggles today is very different than before. Being an entrepreneur you can’t blame anyone else for your issues and when they surface you need a business coach or life coach to serve you. I am lucky that my therapist functions as all three.”

Her additional takeaways:

• If you are a young entrepreneur or have not worked at many companies you should go through an accelerator since it provides you with the basics of running a company and validation for investors.
  

• Try to compensate your co-conspirators, but if you can’t and they are willing to work for equity, feel free to explore that option.
  

• Don't hold your dreams by their neck. Let your company live and breath, trust the journey. Give your idea space to form.
  

• Be radically obsessed with what you are building. We are living in a time where it is very trendy to be an entrepreneur. It is not for the faint of heart as not everyone should be a founder, it takes grit.
  

• If you are obsessed, you will figure it out.
  

• When the going gets tough, double down on your vision.
  

• Get a therapist!
  

Scriptd currently holds readings in Los Angeles where actors can also participate to get spotted by industry folks. If you are a writer or an actor, sign up for Scriptd today to help disrupt Hollywood. When not DJing or working, you can find Denise obsessing over skincare as her new hobby. For women entrepreneurs, in particular, she recommends reading the book, LeapFrog to kickstart your venture. 

Photo courtesy of Scriptd. 

RED ANTLER, EMILY HEYWARD: The Brand Catcher

The New York startup scene has exploded in the past decade, especially within the D2C space! Unsexy markets and traditional industries are being shaken up due to the power of the brand. Companies such as Casper, All Birds, Burrow and Snowe are all the brainchild of creative brand agency, Red Antler, whose visual aesthetic and creative direction turns startups into gold. 

Co-Founder and Chief Strategist of Red Antler, Emily Heyward has always envisioned a world where design and branding can help break barriers and fuel growth for non-traditional brands. “Our model is very unique in that we choose our clients based on the problem they are trying to solve. ” This new approach to help small companies disrupt their industry has benefited greatly as Casper, one of Red Antler’s early client revealed revenues exceeding $600 million in 2018 since their birth in 2013. 

The Early Days

Emily graduated from Harvard and met her co-founder, JB Osborne back when they were working at Saatchi & Saatchi together. “He left to work with a New Zealand based agency who wanted to set up shop in NYC and asked me to join as he was pretty much running the show there (JB is currently the CEO of Red Antler). We quickly met our third co-founder, Simon, and together envisioned an agency that caters to helping smaller brands be heard. However, the New Zealand agency did not align with our vision and wanted larger, more established brands. As a result, we parted ways and the three of us set out to create Red Antler.” 

In terms of the corporate structure, JB, the CEO, heads business strategy development, networking with investors, structuring deals and evaluating new business opportunities. Emily works on the brand strategy side and is deeply involved with clients to establish the positioning and brand story, while Simon

leads all creative and comes from a visual background. They truly make the perfect mix for an award winning agency!

“A lot of my best ideas come when I am walking around the city with my dog and right before I fall asleep at night. Creativity happens when my mind is clear!” 

Looking back to Emily’s childhood, she always enjoyed planning creative projects and indulging in arts and crafts. “I would always play imaginary games in the yard with my best friend. No structure, no toys or tools, just our minds and the ability to invent stories.” Hence, some would call Emily a storyteller from birth (as would we). “Brands come to us because they know that we can create the foundation. We rarely execute on campaigns, but build holistic brand experiences.” From logo creation, naming, website design, visual aesthetic to brand voice, Red Antler does it all (or at least the important stuff). 

When trying to name Red Antler, Emily stumbled upon a wikipedia page that informed her that antlers have the fastest growing cells in the animal kingdom. “We loved that as an image as we wanted to name our company after words related to growth.”

How To Get Chosen By Red Antler:

What makes a good brand? Check out what Emily has to say about getting in the door:

• We want to work with businesses that actually have a reason for being, something the world needs. Ideas that look towards the future and how things can be better.

• Chemistry is very important! What we do is so emotional so a good working relationship, trust and having fun are big elements.

• Make sure that the founding team really believes in the power of a brand as an ongoing driver of their businesses. A brand is a living, breathing, integral part of how you are going to grow over time.

When not working, you can find Emily staying inspired by reading books unrelated to her industry, spending time with folks and engaging in random activities. “What I do in my spare time is as important as what I do in the office. It keeps the creativity flowing.” Fun fact: she also keeps a spreadsheet of pizza places in NYC that she orders from and is constantly updating it! 

Photo courtesy of Red Antler. 

SOHO HOUSE, MICHAELLA SOLAR-MARCH: The Eventful Homemaker

Welcome to Soho House, a members’ only club for people in the creative, arts, and media industries. What started out as one house based in Soho, London, has now expanded to over 23 clubs internationally. However, what differentiates this club from any other is its events, programming, and members. We sat down with the Global Director of Member Events and Programming, Michaella Solar-March to discuss how she got to where she is and why she loves her job.

Australian born and bred, Michaella Solar-March initially started her career as a breakfast radio host in college back in Sydney, Australia. “I would wake up at 4 am every day, and this meant that I had no life but was extremely passionate about what I did and essentially this laid down the foundation for me and developed my strong work ethic.” As a radio jockey (RJ), Michaella had to be abreast of all the trends ranging from arts, food, and culture.

“I am generally a very culturally curious person so this line of work really suited me.”

Michaella always had an interest in music, bands, and community. Fun fact: she helped bring Spotify to the USA when working with Splendid Communications! Flash forward 15 years later and Michaella is doing the exact same thing now, in some ways. “I link trends with brands and find ways to share stories and bring ideas to life.” After working in radio for a few years, she moved on to work for a record label in Sydney, followed by an experiential marketing agency in New York, where she met her husband and soul mate. “We dated for one year and then he proposed, and four months later, we were married. I now have a little toddler on my hands and being a mum is both very rewarding and challenging.”

The Dream: New York

“After living in New York for 6 months, I felt extremely overwhelmed, like a fish out of water and went back to Australia for holiday and remember my mom telling me that if this is your dream, get your sh*t together and you will be fine. After working the agency life for a while, I decided to start my own consulting firm, No.9 Creative in which I worked with brands such as Sonos, Pepsi and Soho House to help them identify how to transform spaces into experiences. Soho House decided to keep me on the remaining year and ended up offering me my dream job as a full-time position.” 

Before Michaella, Soho House did not have anyone managing their events programs on a global scale while following a brand guideline/manual on execution. Michaella also experimented with events in non-house location to test their appetite for the opening of a potential house and believes that Sydney would make a ripe market.

“Hospitality is always a yes industry, which is what I had to learn at Soho House.”

As a global leader, Michaella tells us that it is tough to always be on due to the different working time zones. When we asked her about the future of hospitality, she believes that it will be a combination of co-working spaces and living spaces (aka We Live, run by WeWork). Other new spots such as The Assemblage, The Wing, NeueHouse, etc have all popped up trying to create a “members’ only club,” but few have the international prestige that Soho House brings.

The Advice

We asked Michaella for some advice on being an intrapreneur in this big bad world:

• You don’t need to stick it out. If you are in a position that is not right for you, don’t do it. The happier you are, the more productive you are.

• Sometimes your strengths are not your passions and you need to separate those two and learn from experiences.

• Work with as many people as possible to become a fully rounded person.

• You are never an expert and you are never done. You are always a student and need to approach every interaction with an open heart, open mind, and open ears.

Soho House currently hosts 12,000 events per year. When crafting an event concept, Michaella says that it should be dynamic (encourage people to talk to one another and connect) as well as educational, you want to learn something new, but in a fun way. “The best events for me are the ones that encourage true networking and true human connection,” luckily over at RADICHE, we do just that!

Photo courtesy of Michaella Solar-March.

PARTICIPATION AGENCY, JESSICA RESLER: The Real Participator

When it comes to applying for jobs, candidates are always placed in a box. If you don’t meet the employer's criteria or end up knowing more than the job scope, they don’t know what to do with you. Sound familiar? According to Co-Founder and Creative Director of The Participation Agency, Jessica Resler, this is your “woke” moment to become an entrepreneur and start your own thing. 

Sometimes being a generalist can be your greatest strength. We live in an economy that is becoming highly specialized. Marketing, for instance, is becoming extremely fragmented: email marketing, SEO, AdWords, digital, programmatic, etc. It is impossible to be an expert at everything and if you are someone who enjoys learning and maintaining a vast breadth of knowledge, then entrepreneurship might be the best path for you. You understand the vernacular and who better to manage a team than someone who gets the timeline, challenges and solutions available with these platforms, right? 

We sat down with Jessica Resler, Co-Founder and Creative Director of The Participation Agency located in the Lower East Side, NYC to chat about entrepreneurship, creativity, and experiential marketing. “I have always been my own boss in some capacity. I went to FIT and studied fashion, but quickly became interested in statistics and financial modeling when I joined NYU for my MBA. By understanding both the creative and financial sectors of business, I was able to better advise brands on how to create lasting marketing campaigns.” 

The Validation

Jessica originally never wanted to attend college but wanted to work instead. After much negotiation with her parents, she was able to do both. As a result, she had the resume of a 29-year-old when it came time for graduation at the age of 22. “I experimented with freelancing and most of my gigs came through my personal network. Don’t worry about starting your own thing in the early years of your career. That will come later. It is all about the opportunities and experiences at the moment as a creative that will foster your growth and unleash your future potential.”

“I remember when I was approaching my MBA graduation that I told myself if I won the business competition (a live case study presentation), I would start my own thing. I put a team of three people together (the average was 5) and spent most of my time meeting with the client/ business to further understand their needs and problems. By spending so much time with the client and building a rapport, I was able to take home that prize. This gave me the confidence I needed to be able to venture out on my own.”

Today, PA is a self-funded agency, with clients ranging from Oreo, Red Bull, FourSquare, and Joe & The Juice. Every year the agency puts together its own event to establish itself in the market and attract press, leading to an increase of business deals. This year, they launched Outpost which is a roadside micro-community that caters to musicians who tour the United States. “We give them a place to rest, energize and connect with their fans. Brands can also sponsor these experiences and it’s a great way to connect with customers on an intimate level.” 

Why The Name?

“I am always looking for mentors, and it was actually one of my mentors that helped my co-founder and I name our agency. Back in 2011 (the year PA launched), the term “collaboration” was huge and brands wanted influencers and collaborators to come onboard. We believed that a synonym of this could be termed as participation. Participation can also be linked to the typical saying of asking clients how they much they would like to invest in a project, or, how would you like to participate? So that was also used as our mantra.”

The Advice

For those looking to get involved in the experiential marketing sector you need to possess the following traits:

• Start building your network and curating your personal brand.

• Find a company that relates to your personality as culture is a BIG fit.

• Always be optimistic, different obstacles will be thrown at you every day.

• Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty and do things outside of your job function.

• Keep an open mind.

Today The Participation Agency has grown from 0 to 32 team members ranging from people in Texas, New Jersey, New York and the West Coast. When not running PA, you can find Jessica painting on the weekends with her talented boyfriend, Gosha whose work you can find here. 

Photo courtesy of The Participation Agency. 

FLAWLESS, CHRIS MERKLE: The Shazam For Beauty

Ever come across an image of a beauty product you love, but are unable to find the right shade? Founder, Christopher Merkle launched Flawless app to shade match users uploaded images with beauty products. From luxury to budgeted brands, Flawless creates a customized, unique experience based on your needs and preferences. 

As a college dropout, Christopher Merkle never experienced life in its traditional way. “I’ve always had a side hustle. Whether it was selling personalized stationery, cutting my neighbor's lawn, or customizing rocks.” It was his insatiable hunger for learning that led him to become a coder at the age of 13. “I remember my dad being obsessed with computers, however after interning in college (Georgia State University), for large corporations I felt that I knew digital better than traditional folks and would be better off working for myself.” 

Chris dabbled with a couple of projects before launching Flawless. Some of them include creating a database of college internship opportunities as well as launching Razur Agency in 2008. “I was a photographer at the time, between the ages of 18 - 24 years old, capturing nightlife, editorial, music events and fashion shows. I came across a client who wanted help with website design and I ended up teaching myself on the spot.” Things took a quick turn as Chris paused his photography career to launch Razur as a strategy and consulting agency that also specializes in design and app in-house development. 

The Aha Moment

“When I was a photographer, my girlfriend at the time, 9 years ago, was going through Vogue magazine and wanted to find the same lipstick shade as a model in an ad. I thought that what if I took a photo of this shade and used technology to color match it? Back then I had no experience with beauty.”

Through Razur, which is still up and running, Chris moved to New York City and got introduced to multiple beauty brands. Fast forward to 2016, invest $100,000 and boom, the app is live in the app store. Seems easy yeah?

The Do’s And Don’ts For App Marketing

Chris tells us how “your first app as a prototype can literally be a piece of shit as long as there is one unique value proposition that you are testing and providing benchmarks for.” He further goes on to share the following advice with us:

• Be prepared for everyone to say that your app sucks, but only listen to those who are avid users as this will help you create your product faster and identify the pain points.

• You don’t need to have a lot of money to start an app on your own. Tap into different resources such as General Assembly where students need real business case studies to apply their learnings and get a job.

• Invite all of your friends to use the app, see who downloads and post on your social media to get feedback.

• Have a unique name to stand out in SEO and search inside the app store.

• When pitching to investors you need to prove that your idea has attraction and you made it work with a limited budget. People don’t want to give you money to prove a concept.

“Traditional beauty retailers don’t have technology in their DNA and if they don’t know how to talk tech, they won’t be able to get things done.”

We like to refer to this shift as digital Darwinism, where the CEO’s of tomorrow will have a technology or supply chain background (yes, this is even true for fashion brands). When it comes to utilizing the Flawless app, Chris has customized each experience based on a questionnaire users have to answer stating their skin type and price preferences. You can explore products based on celebrities and makeup artists picks (under the discover section) as well as by categories such as girls night in, sick day, date night, etc. Flawless also recently launched their ‘Discover Weekly’ section based on the millions of data points collected over the last year to provide 1:1 recommendations for products and looks based on your makeup style and skincare. 

Currently, Flawless is building out a neural network for skin analysis to correctly match foundation to your skin tone based on your phone's camera. If you’re wondering how they make money, it’s done via sponsorship, white label licensing of their technology and affiliate marketing.

“As an entrepreneur your biggest skillset needs to be the ability to influence people to donate their time, be on your team and believe in your vision.”

Browsing the web, reading a magazine or hanging out with a friend and spot a look you love? Snap it, share it, shop it, be Flawless. Interested in meeting Chris to chat about the future of beauty, hit us up and we can put you in touch. 

Photo courtesy of Flawless.  

BULLETIN, ALANA BRANSTON: Mission Driven Retail

The retail landscape is drastically changing. It’s not about products anymore, but about the experience, brands can offer through a physical location. However, most startups don’t have the budget to create their own physical store. Meet Bulletin, a store like no other offering multiple brands the chance to showcase their products at a low cost in high traffic locations in New York City. Curated for women, by women.

After hearing about Bulletin from multiple friends and entrepreneurs alike, we had to reach out and get up, close and personal with the founder, Alana Branston. “I grew up in an entrepreneurial household where both my mother and father had their own business. My father ran a vintage car dealership and my mother was a freelance photographer.” Before starting Bulletin, Alana had dabbled in the #bossbabe life via selling belts made out of ribbon in college as well as starting a company prior.  

“I wanted to work with emerging brands and build an e-commerce platform in which we would sell curated products.”

Sounds similar to Bulletin? Well, it was. The early seeds of their business were planted long before Bulletin came into being. However, by being an e-commerce only platform, Alana struggled with maintaining customer satisfaction and experience since vendors wouldn’t deliver on time (yeah, it was a drop ship model). In return, this would hinder her brand’s reputation in the market. By not being able to scale the business and the on-going lack of inventory control, Alana decided to close shop. 

“I used to work at Contently (content marketing startup) and met my co-founder Ali Kriegsman sitting right next to me at the office. Together, we would pitch the wonders of content marketing to retail brands to show how it improved their sales.” Hence, the original concept of Bulletin was derived from creating an online shoppable magazine in which customers could read about cool brands that were hyper curated (kind of like RADICHE) and shop their work. 

“We spent a lot of time making the website look beautiful with our imagery and would release each issue under a theme. However, we did not have much funding so we were not putting a lot of money behind it. We applied to Y Combinator in 2015 and that’s when the major shift happened for us.”

The Pivot

Alana got into the Y Combinator Fellowship which was an experimental program for early-stage startups that ran for only two years. “Once we got into this program, we quit our jobs, received a seal of approval and got a $20K grant. We also ended up getting into the core program in 2016 and moved to San Francisco to revamp our business model.”

What did you learn from Y Combinator and how valuable was it for where you are today?

“Our main problem was how do we grow our online marketplace? YC was really good at giving us direction and encouraging us to scrap our original idea. Had we not done it, we would have probably still be stuck on creating online content linked to shoppable brands. We got great advice such as go and talk to all the brands you sell for and ask them what they need help with and what they are struggling with as a business? And what we kept hearing was that accessing physical space was a really big problem and brands wanted to be able to tap into this ecosystem.” 

“Fast forward to April 2016, we shut down the online marketplace and started to provide a physical space for brands to be in. We rented out parking lots, warehouses, and literally anything over 10,000 square feet.”

Alana and Ali were engaging in these physical marketplaces every single weekend from April to October 2016 until they finally stumbled across a more permanent store in Williamsburg, where you can still visit their original emporium. 

The Branding

Bulletin went through a rebranding in April 2017 after they finished their YC program which was also during the election period. Most folks were anti-Trump which sparked the idea to create a retail concept that empowered women on a daily basis. “We wanted our store to have politically led products and a political message (products made by female founders for women). Once we relaunched the Williamsburg store with a consistent message and brand, our sales spiked because now we were mission-driven.” 

With e-commerce brands like Everlane opening up their own retail stores, we asked Alana where do you see the future of retail heading?

“I think that experiential is going to be huge! With Amazon and e-commerce brands in general, you need to build a store knowing that customers are able to buy the same merchandise online so you have to add in an X-factor (the experience) which gets folks to visit your store. This could be community-driven events, store design, etc. The days of building a standard retail store are over.” 

Prior to starting Bulletin, Alana had previously worked at 3x1 Denim brand in which she learned a lot about transforming the average retail model to incorporate a more experience driven one. 3x1 has their notorious store in SoHo with a factory hidden behind a glass wall, where customers can customize and create bespoke denim pants.

The Advice

• Don’t hold inventory and don’t drop ship! Create a business model based on consignment.

• Got an idea? Start out while you still have a full-time job and build the groundwork of your company before quitting.

• Try to get into an incubator or receive funding from friends and families to validate your business model.

• If you keep trying and keep going, something will emerge.

Interested in selling your products with Bulletin? Contact us and we can put you in touch! 

Photo courtesy of Bulletin. 

CREDIT WITHOUT BORDERS, KOBINA ANSAH: The Global Swipe

New to the United States? Welcome! You will probably encounter your first roadblock towards trying to live ‘the American dream’ when it comes time to sign up with a cellular provider, rent an apartment or apply for a credit card. All of these procedures require a social security number, something international students typically don’t have in their early years. Founder of Credit Without Borders, Kobina Ansah caters to this underserved market by providing credit scores and cards without demanding an SSN. While some would call him a life saver, we like to say he’s part of the RADICHE family- spreading financial love one credit at a time. 

CEO and founder of Credit Without Borders, Kobina Ansah was born in Canada to a Ghanaian family. Fun fact: his name means a male child born on Tuesday. “It wasn’t until I spent a year in Ghana during 3rd grade that I realized the opportunity I had by living in the United States. I focused all of my attention towards education and graduated from Cornell’s hospitality school as I loved the idea of working directly with people.”

The Aha-Moment

“After working as a Real-Estate Analyst within the consulting sector, I decided that I wanted to start something of my own. In 2012, I got into Wharton Business School and my vision was to start a business, but I needed a framework. Working in hospitality, my network was limited. I wanted to expand and create something that deals with finance, engages with consumers and integrates my passion for culture.”

Kobina’s real aha-moment came while he was at Wharton and chatting with a friend, who mentioned her challenges in trying to rent an apartment as an international student (for those who don’t know, you have to put down a large security deposit). “I initially thought I would cater apartment rentals to international citizens, but quickly pivoted due to its scalability and transitioned towards credit cards.”

Unlike other categories such a fashion or CPG, with a financial product, you can’t take pre-orders since it is a highly regulated space. Kobina shares his learning with us:

• It took two years to put everything together.

• There is no global credit score system, so people aren’t able to transfer their credit scores when they move countries.

• Find a lawyer that is specific to your industry so that you can build a framework and tackle industry-specific challenges. The more niche and specific the lawyer's practice, the better.

“Our biggest challenge was to find a bank that was willing to partner with us. We had literally spoken to 50+ banks about this opportunity as well as won the BBVA Open Talent 2015 fin-tech competition.”

Kobina was finally able to find a regional bank that was willing to take a chance on him. Today, he is serving students in over 30 schools across the U.S. and is now positioning the company for a nationwide program launching this fall. Since this is going to be the first credit card for most international citizens, it is important that they don’t fall into debt and reduce their credit risk. Therefore, Credit Without Borders provides a summary of your expenditure to showcase which categories you spend the most in as well as spending trends. “We are taking a lot of time educating our customers on how to use credit cards appropriately and help them grow. Our idea is: if we give you a $500 credit line today, we want to get you to $3,000 line tomorrow.”

The Advice

Despite Credit Without Borders, Kobina has launched multiple companies in his past. One of them was similar to Airbnb, but before it’s time. As a result, Kobina has learned a thing or two about what makes a B2C company thrive: 

• Make sure the economics makes sense.

• Make sure the market size is large enough.

• Make sure you build out the right team via direct referrals versus online applications.

Interested in working for Credit Without Borders? They’re going to be hiring very soon. Contact us and we’ll put you in touch. 

Photo courtesy of Credit Without Borders.