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PRAISE FOR WHAT IT TAKES
“Raegan Moya-Jones shows entrepreneur hopefuls that it’s okay not to know it all as long as you ’ re willing to do whatever it takes to make your dream a reality.”
—Whitney Port, television personality, fashion designer, and author
“Raegan Moya-Jones is a force to be reckoned with. Funny, creative, and full of gumption, What It Takes gives you the tools you need to create your own success story.”
—Tiffani Thiessen, actress
“Raegan Moya-Jones is the definition of a ‘girlboss.’ I am so inspired by her story!”
—Amanda Saiontz Gluck, creator and writer of Fashionable Hostess
“You might think Raegan Moya-Jones is special: After all, she did found aden + anais (the $100-million baby blanket company) from her kitchen table . . . as a mother of four . . . with no previous entrepreneurial experience. You’d be right. But what makes her special is not just her surprise success story. It is her ability to help her readers seize on the thing(s) that might make us special, too. Take the advice of this outspoken, no-filter, hilarious entrepreneur and she will empower you to see that her secret sauce no fear, no expectations, grit, and vision is available to all of us. Drink up!”
—Daphne Oz, author and television host
“In What It Takes, Raegan Moya-Jones shares an inspiring story for anyone who wants to change their career, play by their own rules, and build a successful business in the process. ”
—Rebecca Minkoff, founder and creative director of Rebecca Minkoff LLC
“From the kitchen table to a global stage . . . Add a little determination, sass, Aussie grit, self-belief, and a sense of humor, and dreams come true. Congratulations on achieving enormous success, giving back, sharing the journey, and inspiring others to do the same . . . And, most important, enjoying the ride.”
—Deborra-lee Furness, actress and founder of Hopeland
“Raegan Moya-Jones is an outspoken, no-filter, hilarious entrepreneur who will empower you to finally make that leap you ’ ve wanted to in your life.”
—Beverley Turner, television and radio presenter
“Moya-Jones will inspire you to greatness with a kick in the ass, laugh-out-loud saga of overcoming adversity, and instill in you a renewed belief in yourself that only someone with her energy and vision is capable of. Pour a glass of wine, read this book, and go out and conquer the world.”
—Geralyn Breig, founder and CEO of AnytownUSA
“Forget what you think you know about women in business. Raegan is here to surprise and inspire you to write your own rules to achieve your career dreams. She is a remarkable woman with a remarkable story everyone can learn from.”
—Rosie Pope, founder and creative director of the Rosie Pope Maternity clothing store and lifestyle brand
“Moya-Jones is a force to be reckoned with. Funny, creative, and full of courage and charming sass. What It Takes will give you the tools you need to create your own success story.”
—Sarah Kauss, founder and CEO of S’well
PORTFOLIO/PENGUIN
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © 2019 by Raegan Moya-Jones
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 9780735214644 (hardcover)
ISBN 9780735214651 (ebook)
ISBN 9780525542865 (international edition)
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
Version_2
To my family: Anais, Lourdes, Arin, and Amelie Rose, thank you all for driving me mad, and keeping me sane. The four of you are my reason for being my earth angels who make complete sense to me when most other things around me don’t. Markos, I could not have done any of this without you, despite the fact that you drive me the most mad of all. Thank you for being my biggest champion and for putting up with me.
I love you all.
I wrote this book for all the women who were told they can’t by people who knew they could.
CONTENTS
PRAISE FOR WHAT IT TAKES
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE TRUST IN YOUR IDEA
CHAPTER TWO
HARD WORK BEATS B SCHOOL
CHAPTER THREE
DON’T LET DOUBT STOP YOU
CHAPTER FOUR REDEFINE RISK
CHAPTER FIVE MUM GUILT
CHAPTER SIX
CASH IS QUEEN
CHAPTER SEVEN
EXPECT SURPRISES
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHOOSE YOUR DANCE PARTNER WISELY
CHAPTER NINE LEAD YOUR TEAM
CHAPTER
TEN
THINK BIGGER
CHAPTER ELEVEN
KNOW WHEN TO SELL
CHAPTER TWELVE
TRUST YOUR INTUITION
CHAPTER THIRTEEN EXIT WITH GRACE
CONCLUSION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INTRODUCTION
You just don’t get it!” my boss hollered, cutting me off midsentence. “You don’t have an entrepreneurial bone in your whole body!”
My boss let’s call him Jack and I were having a heated discussion about some restructuring of the divisions within the company. Among other changes, Jack had just replaced a longtime editor I’ll call her Jill at one of the magazines and given her a new, far less prestigious title (not unlike letting an ousted CEO call herself an “honorary chairwoman” in order to save face). What killed me as I sat there listening to him ramble on was that he kept talking about how “thrilled” Jill was with her new position, what a “great opportunity” this was for her future.
As if anyone has ever been thrilled about getting demoted.
Any other day, I might have been offended by his comment. On that day, however, I had to bite my lip to keep from smiling. Because there was something else I knew that Jack didn’t: I had secretly been running a business at night (actually, in the wee hours of the morning, long after I’d put my daughters to bed) for two years. I was only a week or two away from announcing my resignation to pursue the business full time.
And at the time of Jack’s dressing down, my fledgling company had just hit revenue of $1 million.
Today, aden + anais, the swaddling blanket and baby-goods company I cofounded with a friend and just $15,000 in initial startup capital, is a thriving global business. Beyoncé, Jennifer Garner, DJ Khaled, Chrissy Teigen, Priscilla Chan, Channing Tatum, Pink, Gwen Stefani, Neil Patrick Harris, and the Duke and Duchess of
Cambridge are customers. aden + anais has offices in New York, the UK, and Japan. The company sells more than two thousand products in sixty-eight countries around the world, with revenue in excess of $100 million.
I’ll also go ahead and mention that aden + anais was named to the Crain’s New York Business “Fast 50” list in 2013, 2014, and 2015. Guess who went on to become a C-level executive at Crain’s? My old boss, Jack, the man who basically told me I had no idea how to run a business. (Oh, and one last jab at Mr. You-Don’t-Have-anEntrepreneurial-Bone: In 2014, I was named an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year.)
As much as I love telling that story because the irony is fabulous, there was a time not so long ago when I would have agreed with Jack. Until a few years ago, I’d never thought of myself as an entrepreneur, either. At the time of this conversation, in the spring of 2009, I was celebrating my tenth anniversary working as a sales executive in the research division of The Economist Group. Although, to call myself an executive is perhaps a bit of a stretch I was more of a midlevel salesperson. I didn’t have a single employee working under me until I’d been on the job for more than eight years. And celebrating isn’t really the right word, either. It’s not that I disliked my job, which was to enlist corporate sponsors to fund our industry research reports. I was pretty great at sales. My little two-person division was earning the company upward of $2 million a year. What I was having trouble with were the people. Namely, Jack, who could not understand why a longtime editor might not want to be given a new role.
I had never been quite so forthcoming with Jack before, mind you. I just figured he might want to know that one of his most senior employees was unhappy and, at that point, I had nothing to lose by being honest.
Unfortunately, Jack did not appreciate my honesty. In fact, he was pissed.
“She’s an entrepreneur, Raegan,” he said, his voice rising. “She knows where we ’ re taking the company. She understands.”
I have never been good at holding my tongue. That’s probably the Aussie in me; I have always given my opinion primarily when asked,
but on this occasion I did so freely. In this case, I happened to know that Jack was way off. When it comes to office politics, lower-level employees often know more about what people really think and feel about a company than the people barricaded behind closed doors in the C-suite. And, as a lower-level employee at the time, I happened to know that Jill was evaluating her options. Clearly, she was not thrilled. But Jack refused to listen he didn’t think I could possibly understand, not being an entrepreneur myself. To him, I was just stirring up trouble.
He wasn’t totally wrong about that part, though I do have a penchant for troublemaking. I was a bit of a party-girl mess in high school: skipping class, staying out late, drinking. I had more than a few (albeit minor) run-ins with the local police. I dropped out of university midway through my first semester and spent the early part of my twenties dancing on tables (fully clothed) to encourage the tourists to visit the bar on the island of Santorini in Greece to support myself while backpacking around Europe. As my mum would no doubt tell you (because she’s been telling this story to anyone who will listen for more than forty years), I once locked her out of the house when I was two years old because she told me “ no. ” Because I knew what I was in for once she got ahold of me, I absolutely refused to open the door. She had to crawl through a window to get back inside . . . while she was seven months pregnant with my sister Paige.
Only later did I realize that the traits I was seemingly born with a tendency to push boundaries and question authority, plus a fiery independence—are fairly typical for an entrepreneur.
After running out of money from gallivanting around Europe, I came home to Sydney and went into sales, working for a professional hair-care brand, then at pharmaceutical giants SmithKline Beecham and Pfizer. At every job I was the top salesperson. But despite my track record, I was held back, especially at The Economist. I was repeatedly passed over for promotions and constantly told to stay in my box, to focus on what I was good at. I refused to agree with the boss simply because he was in charge, and it quickly became obvious that my bosses, almost all of whom were men, did not like having
their leadership or decision making questioned by a junior-level, outspoken woman.
I started to dream about what “ my ” company might one day look like all the things I’d do differently, all the ways I’d value and listen to my employees regardless of their position in the company, how much fun it would be to throw the hierarchical nonsense and bureaucratic bullshit right out the window. I didn’t think of myself as an entrepreneur, but I knew that I wanted to do something on my own. Open a coffee shop, maybe, or a restaurant, the venture itself didn’t much matter. I didn’t get joy out of going to work for someone else and was drawn to the freedom I’d have doing my own thing. Part of me wanted to stick it to all those bosses who didn’t think I had it in me, and another part was waiting to find the nerve to make a go of it on my own. What I wanted most, however, was to prove to myself that I could do it.
But I had stayed at these jobs, unfulfilled and unchallenged, because I had yet to come up with the right idea that I felt had real substance and a bloody great chance of being a successful business. And it was really thanks to Jack that I realized, even though I had a lot of pressure at work and at home, having started a family, that I needed to take a risk, to not only dream but also go for it to make the leap and not hold myself back.
It seems I’m not the only one who has the dream and the drive to go it on my own. More and more, women are leaving the corporate world to do exactly what I did which is exactly why I’m writing this book. I knew so little when I started my company, and I’ve accomplished so much in spite of that. I have never considered myself the smartest person in the room, and I don’t have an Ivy League education. I really am a very average person, I promise. If I can do it, you can, too.
And you won’t be alone—so many women are making this leap. Between 2007 and 2017, the number of women-owned businesses grew 114 percent, compared to a 44 percent increase among all businesses. Women make up 40 percent of the new entrepreneurs in the United States, a number that has been steadily climbing since 1996. Women of color have founded businesses in stunning
numbers: from 2007 to 2016, the rate of firm ownership grew at more than four times the rate of all women-owned businesses (467 percent). Not even fifty years ago, women were routinely denied the right to open a line of credit or secure a mortgage in their own name, to say nothing of qualifying for business loans. Hillary Clinton was famously denied a credit card back in the late 1970s, at least two years after passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. She was already a graduate of Yale Law School by then, not to mention a practicing attorney and a professor; she made more money than her husband. Still, she was told to use Bill’s credit card instead.
In the span of just a few decades, we have made remarkable strides, in part thanks to incredible role models who have paved the way, such as Anita Roddick, creator of the Body Shop, which was recently valued at over $1 billion, and Michelle Phan of Ipsy, a subscription beauty sampling business she cofounded in 2011 in her early twenties, reportedly valued at $800 million in 2016.
Despite this progress, most female entrepreneurs will never experience that kind of success. In fact, women-owned firms receive only 2 percent of venture capital funding. Men are still 3.5 times more likely to hit the million-dollar mark; only 27.8 percent of firms with $1 million or more in revenue are owned by women or women in equal partnership with men. In fact, according to a 2014 report, more than 75 percent of women-owned firms won’t reach $50,000 in annual revenue. Nearly half won’t even make $10,000. Those stats, by the way, haven’t budged in about two decades. In other words, women may be starting more companies than ever before, but many of those companies aren’t reaching the levels of success of those of our male counterparts.
Women must really be messing up, eh? That’s the common narrative in our society, and of course the explanation for this depressing problem has always fallen on women. We need to be more confident and less emotional, to worry more about “scaling up ” and less about “work-life balance.” To act like a lady but think like a man. Research and media focus on what’s “ wrong ” with women entrepreneurs, and how to “fix” the companies they run. The prevailing wisdom, for example, is that female entrepreneurs are
more cautious and risk-averse than men and are more reluctant to grow their businesses. Female entrepreneurs are said to have difficulty coming up with the resources to grow their businesses to the levels that men do, and underperform as compared to male entrepreneurs. You might have heard those myths before. You might even believe them. If that’s the case, you might be surprised to hear that some of the latest research indicates there is no statistical difference between male and female performance in these areas. (Don’t worry, we’ll go into this in more detail later on.)
Consider a recent study in the Harvard Business Review analyzing venture capitalists’ conversations with male versus female entrepreneurs. If a man was young, he showed promise; a woman, inexperience. Men were congratulated on their aggressive stance, while women were told to remain cautious and unemotional. When men were cautious, they seemed levelheaded and sensible, where women seemed not daring enough. You get the point—men were praised for their seemingly entrepreneurial potential and rewarded, but the same qualities in women were viewed as downfalls and reasons not to fund them or their ventures.
Which illustrates exactly why women want to start businesses in the first place. Unlike men, women often pursue entrepreneurship because they’ve been faced with fewer opportunities for advancement (true in my case), little to no flexibility (yep), and systemic discrimination (sad but true!) in the corporate world, even when, according to the Women in the Workplace study and Sheryl Sandberg’s Wall Street Journal article, “Women and men stay with their companies at roughly the same rate . . . [and women] seek promotions at the same rate as men. ” So it seems to me that the very last thing we should do is encourage women to create businesses that mirror the very companies they abandoned, or shove them into a one-size-fits-all approach to success—much less perpetuate the systematic sexism they’ve faced inside a corporation.
And in fact, there is a lot of research that runs counter to these beliefs and proves how women are good for and good at business. When women are the direct beneficiaries of credit, their repayment rates are higher than men, both in the United States and worldwide.
Women-led private tech start-ups achieve a 35 percent higher return on investment dollars; when venture-backed, they also earn 12 percent higher revenues. Women who invest tend to trade less and hold less-volatile portfolios, but they actually make slightly higher returns; since 2007, women-owned and -managed hedge funds have had annualized returns of 5.64 percent, as compared to the HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index with annualized returns of 3.75 percent. So shouldn’t we be empowering women to see that our unique perspectives, skill sets, and life experiences, far from being liabilities, might actually be . . . assets? Highly relevant, profitable, productive assets at that!
Empowering women lifts us all up; and when women entrepreneurs aren’t properly supported, all of us are held back. The McKinsey Global Institute estimated that if women reached their full economic potential worldwide, “ as much as $28 trillion, or 26 percent, could be added to global annual GDP by 2025.” The US economy has benefited from the increase in participation among women estimates suggest that the economy is 13.5 percent, or $2 trillion, larger than it would be had women ’ s hours remained at their 1970 levels.
To grow the economy and help those in it, we need women to participate and lead. We need to end the sexism pervasive in America and entrepreneurism. We need women to take the leap into the unknown to benefit themselves, their families, the economy, and our society at large.
One of my favorite quotes has always been “Leap, and the net will appear ” by the American essayist John Burroughs. More than that, it’s been my guiding principle it was the first quote I added to our conference room wall at the office in Brooklyn. When I started aden + anais, I knew nothing about textile manufacturing or supply chain management, or about anything other than sales. When I pitched the owner of a baby boutique in the early days of the business, she told me she was interested and asked if I would send over a line-sheet. “Sure,” I said. Then I hung up the phone and immediately Googled line-sheet to find out what she was talking about. What I knew was
that if I didn’t go for it, if I didn’t leap and follow my dreams, I’d regret the decision forever.
Only now am I beginning to understand that decisions like these have made me something of a rarity in the business world. Several years ago, a journalist from a prominent business publication asked me to explain the “secret” to my success. So I told her: Believe in yourself, work really fucking hard, and never ever give up, no matter how tough it gets. You might be a working mum, thinking about escaping the confines of an unfulfilling job. You might be on to a huge idea, with the determination and eagerness to try it out. Perhaps you ’ re dreaming about the opportunities and ideas you come across on a daily basis, as a stay-at-home mum or a recent college graduate. You might have the desire for the kind of financial freedom for yourself or your family that a nine-to-five career could never create, or you might just have the desire to see a brilliant idea brought to life. Or like me, you might be ready to burst out of the confines of bullshit corporate red tape and hierarchy to set your own direction. No matter your circumstance, if you ’ re feeling trapped and want more, I encourage you to take the leap.
I can’t offer you step-by-step instructions to building a business or a road map to success, because, I’m sorry to say, there is no magic formula. There is no one “right” way to become a successful entrepreneur (lord knows I am proof of that). But I can tell you that I’ve succeeded only because I leaped even though it was scary and people thought I was nuts. Hear me when I say that if I can do this, anyone can. You can. I hope that my story inspires you to blaze your own path forward. I truly believe that every woman, if she so desires, has the potential to reach a leadership position, start a business, and hit (and surpass) $1 million in revenue, not by emulating men or abiding by the status quo, but by embracing yourself as a woman, and having the courage to leap.
CHAPTER 1
TRUST IN YOUR IDEA
Iwas sitting on the floor of my friend’s nursery in Los Angeles when the idea came to me.
“Claudia, we need to go into the muslin wrap business!” I said. “And we should call it ‘Aden and Anais,’ after the babies!”
It was May 2004, and I was holding my infant daughter Anais, who was swaddled in a sheet of gauzy muslin. A second muslin blanket was stretched out on the floor; it was “tummy time” for my friend Claudia’s newborn son, Aden.
Claudia was one of my closest friends. When my husband, Markos, and I moved to New York in 1997, we knew no one. Actually, Markos knew one person: the ex-girlfriend of his best friend. Awkward. But Claudia and I hit it off the moment we met and became good friends; she even lived with us for a time. When she met her husband she settled in California and we remained close despite the distance. I was a bridesmaid in her wedding and, should the worst happen, a legal guardian to her children. Because we were Australian, we both knew about swaddling, but had struggled to find swaddling blankets for our babies stateside.
Muslin swaddling blankets “ wraps, ” as we called them back home had been a parenting staple in Australia for as long as I could remember. In fact, for Aussie mums-to-be they’re as essential as nappies (that’s diapers if you ’ re American). We used them as burp cloths and nursing covers and stroller shades, as changing pad covers and security blankets, and, obviously, to swaddle our babies. One of the great things about muslin which is really just a gauzy, open
weave cloth, a fabric that’s been around since biblical times is that it’s lightweight and breathable. When used for swaddling, it keeps babies warm while reducing the risk of overheating. It also gets softer with time, rather than falling apart after a few dozen washings. So I was pretty much blown away when I started shopping for baby gear during my first pregnancy, and I couldn’t find a single muslin blanket anywhere in the United States. I asked shopkeepers at trendy boutiques and chain stores alike, and they all looked at me like I was crazy. I tried searching online and still found nothing. Eventually I phoned my sister Paige, also a new mum, and had her ship over some of the Aussie stuff, which is what Claudia and I were using that morning in L.A. Without even trying, I’d identified a gaping hole in the market. I knew that if Americans were introduced to the product, they’d soon find it as indispensable as we did. Going into business just seemed sort of . . . obvious.
Well, it seemed obvious to me at least.
Claudia, on the other hand, wasn’t so sure at first. “Maybe we should just reach out to one of the Australian companies instead?” she suggested. “Maybe we could become a distributor in the States?”
She had a point. Certainly, it would be easier to become a distributor for an existing brand than to make and manufacture a product ourselves. But as I looked again at her son on the floor and at my daughter in my arms, I thought: How hard can this really be? We weren’t talking about much more than a large square of cotton cloth. And besides, the Aussie wraps I’d grown up with were boring, predominantly white, and sold in cellophane packaging. I knew I could make them beautiful. I could design them with vibrant colors and patterns. I could take white cotton muslin and turn it into something people coveted.
It was not the first idea for a business that had popped into my head. I’d had loads of them over the years, in fact, and I can tell you that not one of them had anything to do with babies. I didn’t have a burning desire to make a product for mums. I didn’t have a burning desire to make a product at all. My motivation was to be the master of my own destiny, to work for myself rather than “the man. ” The baby blanket idea just happened to be the first that, upon further
inspection, seemed viable. The more I thought about it, the better and better it sounded: Here was a practical product for a proven market that I could actually improve. Better still, the potential for growth blankets! clothes! sleep sacks! bibs! was exponential.
The thought of improving swaddling blankets was intriguing, but it was more than that I knew it was an industry-changing idea. The swaddling blanket would be a unique product in the multibilliondollar baby industry. It would solve a problem for mothers and create a completely new market segment in the US. I felt within every bone in my body that finally this was a great idea to pursue.
It didn’t take much convincing to get Claudia on board she saw the hole in the market as much as I did. It was just a matter of agreeing on the right way forward. What’s more, while we had our big idea, we still had much to learn. I figured that first on the to-do list was signing up a manufacturer. I thought (naively) that I’d be able to find one somewhere in New York (the garment district was less than two miles from my apartment, after all) or at least somewhere within the lower forty-eight states. So, in my spare time, I started doing research. I made calls. I asked around.
At first, this was not an all-consuming project. I was already busy balancing the demands of my full-time job at The Economist with my responsibilities as a new mum. I wasn’t in much of a hurry to get to market, but no matter how many calls I made or how much research I did, it felt as if I wasn’t making any progress—at all.
This was incredibly frustrating. Muslin was available everywhere in Australia, in the usual boring prints and colors, with its typical stiff feel, so I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t find it anywhere in the US. Every time I visited a store, the salesperson had to ask me what muslin was. In retrospect, I think part of the reason there was such a hole in the American market was that the very few individuals who knew what muslin was thought of it in its true, raw form: scratchy and stiff, almost like cardboard. They couldn’t easily make the connection between a cheap workhorse fabric and a luxurious, extra-soft baby blanket.
Another part of the problem, I would soon discover, was the collapse of the textile industry in the US. A flood of cheap foreign
imports and the growing strength of the dollar along with advances in technology and the higher cost for domestic labor (compared to foreign labor) had driven pretty much everybody to use offshore mills just a few years before I started my search. Further complicating matters was the fact that none of the few remaining manufacturers seemed to have any idea what I wanted or, to my total surprise, even understood what I was talking about.
Before long, I resorted to cutting up pieces of my Aussie muslin. Whenever I found a potential manufacturer, I’d send or show the sample to them: This! This is what I mean! Can you produce this fabric? None of them could.
Actually, a few of them could, but only at a ridiculous price point.
Think: $150 and up. For a four-pack of muslin baby blankets.
Over the next nine months or so, my enthusiasm waxed and waned; for a few weeks here and there I’d be laser focused and looking for leads, but then I’d get busy with work and my daughter and not think about the business at all for a while. I had a lot on my plate, as any new mum knows. I was being pulled in multiple directions and living the reality that there are only twenty-four hours in a day. But I truly believed in the idea of aden + anais so I gave it all of the little free time that I had.
One morning I went into work and struck up a conversation with Brenda, our receptionist at The Economist. Somewhere between talk of our kids and bitching about work, the mail carrier came around to drop a huge stack of letters, magazines, and packages on her desk. Right on top of the pile was an issue of Women’s Wear Daily. Since I love a sample sale and a five-inch heel as much as the next woman, I asked Brenda if I could borrow it. As I was flipping through the magazine, I came upon a full-page ad for an Asian manufacturing textile show happening in New York just three days later.
I couldn’t think of a reason not to go. I figured I might as well take my sample of Aussie muslin over there and check it out.
There must have been fifty vendors in that showroom, each of them milling around in their little booths. I started going up to them one by one and asking the same question I’d been asking for a solid
year now “Can you produce this fabric?” but the answer was always a version of what I had already heard: No.
I don’t know what that is.
We can’t make that.
After a half hour or so, I was discouraged. After an hour, I was ready to head home. The entire exercise had been such a waste of time that I almost didn’t bother approaching the man in the very last booth by the exit. But I decided to show him the muslin just for the hell of it. His name was David Chen. Like the other vendors, he wasn’t familiar with the fabric. Unlike the others, however, he offered to take the sample back to the factory he worked for to take a closer look.
It would turn out to be one of many serendipitous moments in the history of aden + anais. Because two weeks later, Chen emailed me with good news. For the first time, the answer was yes.
Claudia and I were in business.
We still had a long way to go. Finding a manufacturing partner at that textile show in New York had been lucky, but we weren’t ready to launch a real business yet. My goal from the beginning had never been to simply replicate the Aussie muslin products. What that muslin lacked was softness and beautiful design that would make people want it. I wanted to make it better, so the manufacturer and I set about making the fabric softer by upping the thread count and pre-washing the blankets. He was a creative, persistent partner who was willing to work with me and engage in a lot of back and forth to get the product right mainly, him sending me samples of muslin and me promptly returning them to China with lots of feedback on how to improve them.
Ultimately, it took us more than a year to get the quality of our muslin where I wanted it, above the quality and softness of the blankets I could find in Australia, but it was worth it. I knew our little company would live or die based in no small part on quality. If we
had a chance in hell of succeeding, the product we brought to market had to be perfect.
And we weren’t just entering the market we were creating a new category in it. Because people in the US generally hadn’t heard of muslin, we had to educate our customers as we built our business. Despite the fact that every maternity ward swaddled, American parents generally didn’t. As a mum, I’d found that swaddling was essential to soothing my babies and keeping myself sane. It calmed them down and helped them sleep, and I felt other parents were missing out on these major benefits of the practice. I didn’t realize that I was becoming a swaddling evangelist; I just came at it from the experience of a mother who believed in the product and wanted it for her own children.
While I was figuring out how to make our blankets, Claudia was busy with the paperwork, filing our articles of incorporation, and looking for a design outfit to help with our logo, packaging, and branding. I’d had a vision for the look of our product, too, and it was largely a response to the existing market. When we launched aden + anais, baby products primarily came in pastel colors, with traditional, whimsical prints: think chickens, ducks, teddy bears. We threw that right out the window. (I am so not a chicken and duck girl.) I wanted vibrant colors and bold patterns, simply because that’s my personal taste and that’s what I wanted for my daughter and my future children. We wanted high-quality, well-designed products that didn’t feel like typical baby goods.
In one sense, our designs were a bit polarizing in the beginning. If you play it safe and go with basic designs any grandparent would choose, you may do OK, but no one will love your product. No one will say, “My god, I love that design,” because it’s status quo. I wanted to create eye-catching patterns that made people stop and notice. I wanted people to love them.
Unfortunately, I am the world’s worst artist you do not want my “artwork” adorning anything in your baby’s nursery. While I’ve never called myself a creative person, I love design and have been told that I have an eye for it. Coupled with a strong opinion, I used those qualities to guide me while working with professional designers who
were willing to take direction from a mere salesperson and run with it.
In September 2005, in the midst of all of this, my second daughter, Lourdes, was born. I brought my prototypes with me to the hospital and gave them to the nurses so they could wrap Lourdes in muslin. They went gaga over them, asking, “What is this fabric?!” As they wrapped my beautiful, healthy baby girl in one of our blankets, I was thrilled. I had trusted my initial instinct, but now I was even more sure that my idea would work out. Soon, all my samples disappeared, swiped by the Mount Sinai team of very excited nurses. I knew American mums would have the same reaction.
But I didn’t know anything about textiles. Or fashion design, the retail industry, manufacturing, or the baby product business. I didn’t have a warehouse or a factory or a workspace or a salesroom. I couldn’t sew anything to save my life. But while I didn’t know anything about launching a brand, I did know a thing or two about mums and their babies. I also knew deep down that this was an idea to follow, and that if I could just take one step after another, I could turn this into a success. I didn’t stop to wonder if this was the “right” kind of business to start. It’s a good thing, too, because if I had listened to the most common beliefs around women and their businesses today that it’s too hard to start a business, that women struggle because they only start “girly” companies I might never have moved forward.
There’s a lot of discouraging stuff out there. In the fall of 2011, a young reporter headed to Santa Clara, California, to cover the DEMO technology conference, an annual event that spotlights new technology and provides entrepreneurs with a platform from which to debut their products and services. As this reporter wandered around the space, she noticed that the majority of the women-led start-ups were positioned in traditionally “female spaces, ” rather than fields that were considered to be more reputable, like science and tech. Taking her frustration to social media, she tweeted:
Women: Stop making startups about fashion, shopping & babies. At least for the next few years. You’re embarrassing me.
As you might imagine, this did not exactly go over well. In fact, the tweet pissed off a whole lot of people. They called it “ crass, ” “confusing,” “ignorant,” and “badly worded.” It inspired a slew of rebuttals and think pieces, the general consensus of which seemed to be that women should support other women; that we should applaud any and all women entrepreneurs, regardless of the industries they’re in, just on principle.
What very few people bothered to ask, however, is why “girly” companies are looked down on in the first place. Could it be perhaps that our society, especially in the business world, deems “ women ’ s work,” and feminine traits in general, as inferior?
Evidence supports this; you just need to look at the strides women have made in business. In 1982 we started earning 50 percent of bachelor’s degrees. Today, that number is closer to 60 percent. As of 1987 women earned more master’s degrees, and since 2006, more doctoral degrees than men, too. And yet, even in 2017, women as a whole still earn only 80 percent of what the average white man earns. The numbers are even more dismal for women of color: African American women earn 63 percent of what white men earn, while Hispanic women earn just 54 percent. You’re likely familiar with the common reason given for this gap: that women choose to enter professions where they are paid less in exchange for more flexibility, that women “opt out” en masse to take care of their families (ideas I’ll discuss further in chapter 5). But a recent study indicates that virtually every field experiences a corresponding drop in wages once women move into it. This report, in the academic journal Social Forces, shows wages between 1950 and 2000 fell precipitously for everything from designers to biologists once women started showing up in larger numbers. As one of the study’s coauthors explained to the New York Times: “It’s not that women are
always picking lesser things in terms of skill and importance. It’s just that employers are deciding to pay it less.”
Entrepreneurship is no different. Just look at headlines like “Are Women Starting the Wrong Types of Businesses?” in Forbes, “Why are Women-Owned Firms Smaller than Men-Owned Ones?” in the Wall Street Journal, and “Are Women Starting Too Many Fashion and Baby Businesses?” on Jezebel. Not only are we criticized for starting the wrong kinds of businesses, but critics also claim that ours underperform, partly due to the fact that women tend to start service-based companies. More than half of women-owned businesses are crowded into the healthcare/social assistance, professional/science/technical, administrative support, and retailtrade service industries. Services, while important to our economy and viable as a business model, are not typically positioned for scalable growth. A small, local daycare center, for example, will find it more difficult to hit a million dollars in revenue no matter who’s running it. A self-employed tax-prep professional might not crack seven figures, either.
However, these service businesses are not all inherently feminine; salons and daycare centers certainly are a common example, but law, accounting, and architectural firms, medical centers, repair outfits, and science organizations also fit the bill. And the fact that so many women ’ s businesses are in the service sector doesn’t mean these companies underperform. In fact, one of my closest friends, Leslie Firtell, founded Tower Legal Solutions, a legal-services company, which she scaled to $80 million. And through both the EY Winning Women and Women’s Presidents’ Organization (WPO) networks, I have met women who have scaled their service-based businesses to over a billion dollars. That’s billion with a big fat capital B.
Women should be able to start whatever businesses they want, with support and without judgment. I happen to have a vagina and, having had four children, I happen to know a thing or two about babies. Naturally, my focus as a woman tends to be on things that are female-focused, so I see no problem with starting a business aimed at women. Leslie, the founder of that $80-million legal-services company, is a woman who is also a take-no-prisoners, hardcore
lawyer. That was her world and what she knew, so she started a company that matched her expertise. Like her, I was uniquely positioned to understand the opportunity that was in front of me, and it would have been absurd for me to say to myself, You know what? I’m not going to start a baby blanket business—that’s too girly.
The simple truth is that plenty of traditionally feminine businesses are scalable, and in fact go on to make millions: Skinnygirl, Birchbox, Ipsy, The Body Shop, Build-A-Bear Workshop, Polyvore, Rent the Runway, Stitch Fix, IT Cosmetics all are wildly successful, “girly” companies created by and for women.
Quite a few men have gotten in on the action, too, including the founders of Etsy, Diapers.com, ShoeDazzle, and Pinterest. I don’t hear anyone complaining that they should start a more male-focused business instead. Are they getting paraded around because they’re selling baby products and women ’ s shoes online? No. They’re just building successful businesses and being lauded as smart, savvy entrepreneurs.
Furthermore, we ’ ve known for years that women control a majority of global consumer spending, both through influence and direct buying power estimates range from $18 trillion to roughly $30 trillion annually. The market for female-centric businesses isn’t likely to shrink, so it’s demonstrably untrue stupid, even to suggest that women are a niche market not worth pursuing.
So let’s take a moment to think about that our power. These are the issues I was grappling with and fighting against when starting aden + anais. I was trying to come up with a more useful way to frame the discussion around success in business when I ran across marketing guru and bestselling author Seth Godin’s post about the difference between entrepreneurs and freelancers. Godin explains that a freelancer is someone who gets paid for their work, charging by the hour or project. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, build a business bigger than themselves, focusing on growth and on scaling the systems they build. While a freelancer is looking for a steady stream of clients, the entrepreneur’s goal is to “sell out for a lot of
money, or to build a long-term profit machine that is steady, stable, and not particularly risky to run. ”
You might evaluate your current situation, decide it isn’t working for you, and choose to do your own thing. In this situation, success often means earning the equivalent salary of a previous or similar role, or in Godin’s words, becoming a freelancer. Or you could go into business for yourself to build a multimillion-dollar company, which Godin distinguishes as becoming an entrepreneur. People who go into business for the motivation of earning an income aren’t interested in growing a business, and yet they are lumped in to the statistics with those who are.
There’s nothing wrong with being a freelancer or starting a business because you want flexibility in your schedule and a steady income. It takes initiative and drive to make a living on your own.
However, the argument against any “girly” company that allegedly underperforms is impacted by those of us who leave our jobs to freelance, and we won’t be able to see the full picture until we drill further down into the numbers.
All of this is to say that you should pursue what you want, without letting misleading stats or haters hold you back. Take the leap to do whatever it is you ’ ve been wanting to do, but don’t shy away from thinking bigger. Imagine if you were to grow your business to a global scale, if only for a moment.
From the beginning, my dream was to build a big, successful business. Starting aden + anais didn’t give me more time or flexibility with my family. In fact, I worked harder as an entrepreneur, particularly when I was still working my full-time job at The Economist, than I ever did as a salaried employee. But I was OK with that; I wanted to build a $100 million company. That big goal inspired me to work as hard as I could to make it happen.
Like that fateful morning I had with Claudia, you might have your own moment in which the seed of an idea is revealed. Listen to yourself and that little voice telling you to go for it. Don’t let misperceptions about women-led businesses stop you. Ignore the criticism. Do what you know, what you ’ re passionate about. Stop asking yourself whether you ’ re starting the right business and start
asking yourself whether your idea is viable and scalable, whether you have an existing customer base that you can grow, and whether you are filling an existing need or solving someone ’ s problem. Then, and most importantly, be prepared to work harder than you ’ ve ever worked before.
You wouldn’t be alone in doing so. I’ve met plenty of women over the years who think big. Women entrepreneurs regularly reach out to me asking for advice and input as to how to grow their businesses. My friends are of the same mind-set, too. Of the female entrepreneurs whom I hang with, each is interested in making their company as big and successful as they possibly can.
I had my “big idea” right there on the floor of Claudia’s nursery —in the spring of 2004. As it turns out, a company that sold muslin swaddling blankets checked all the boxes: It was viable, scalable, had a customer base that could grow, and solved what I saw as a problem. All I had to do was figure out how in the hell to make the blankets.
CHAPTER 2
HARD WORK BEATS B SCHOOL
Ibelieved I had the right idea, but what I definitely did not have was an MBA or even a bachelor’s degree. Let’s face it, I didn’t really have any business experience outside the realm of sales. I wasn’t a twenty-something technophile working out of a garage in Silicon Valley, either. I was a wife, mother, and full-time corporate cog in her thirties. Not exactly what you might consider a typical entrepreneur.
I grew up on the outskirts of Sydney, Australia, a mere fifteen minutes or so from some of the world’s most beautiful beaches and about a twenty-minute drive to Sydney’s Central Business District. Truly, it was an incredible place to spend my childhood—surrounded by coastline, close to the city center and all its vibrancy. Where I lived, however, was very much typical suburbia: brick houses on quarter-acre lots, rotary clotheslines dotting the backyards. (Those clotheslines, by the way, are called Hills Hoists—they look a bit like naked umbrella frames if you ’ re not familiar and they are iconic in Oz. There’s not an Aussie my age who doesn’t remember climbing and swinging on the clothesline as if it were a jungle gym.) I went to a very average public school, in a suburb that in many ways resembled midcentury American suburbs. But while I was born in the late 1960s, the environment in our home was perhaps more reminiscent of the early 1950s.
Dad would come home from work and my mum would immediately put a meal in front of him. Then he’d sit in front of the TV with his scotch, or he’d be out with his mates having a drink at
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Perhaps, of all the occupants of the whaleboat, the calamity to their leader hit the cowpuncher the hardest. The strongest natures feel the most, especially for others, and no one could say that there was any strain of weakness in Bucking Broncho.
Jack's bandages were constantly renewed, and fresh soaked in salt water. He proved a good and tractable patient, and no one heard any complaint leave his lips.
Only an occasional fleeting look of agony in his sightless eyes showed the chafing of the restless spirit within.
Soon after midday, Jim, who was standing up in the bows taking a glance round the horizon, suddenly gave a shout of surprise.
"Land ho!" he cried.
Right ahead, where the horizon grew indefinite and seemed to melt away into the midst of the tropical heat, there lay an island, clear cut and distinct. The black reef, the low beach, the very palms showed up in dark clusters of straight stems and bushy foliage.
"Hurrah! An island right ahead!" he went on.
Tari and Broncho scrambled up and clambered forward.
After a long look, Tari said quietly,
"Dat am ghost-island!"
"Ghost-island? Precious little ghost about that," asserted Jim confidently
"It's an atoll, I expect," called Jack from under the awning. "Surely we can't have drifted as far north yet as the Paumotus! By my reckoning the nearest island is over a hundred miles off."
"It's a coral island—I can see the cocoanut trees," the boy sang out excitedly.
"I'm afraid Tari's right, son," said Broncho, after a long scrutiny. "It's a mirage!"
"A mirage?" exclaimed Jim incredulously, in tones of deep disappointment.
It was a wonderful sight. There lay the island, plain to see, and no one but a trained observer could have detected that it was a sham.
But Tari and Broncho were right. Many a mile had the cowpuncher ridden in chase of just such a lifelike image on the prairie without getting any nearer.
"These here mirages is just a deadfall, an' many a poor cowman has panned out through trailin' after them," observed Broncho.
"Well, the island that mirage reflects is somewhere down under the horizon," said Jack. "Just take its bearings, one of you, and we'll shape our course for it directly the wind condescends to blow."
"It's north-a-half-west," said Jim, after a look at the compass.
All that long afternoon, whilst they drifted helplessly, the fairy island hung over the horizon in the north.
Soon after darkness had fallen Jack startled the whole boat's crew by saying very quietly,
"Boys, it's my watch on deck now. I've got my sight back."
There was a wild, hoarse cheer, a buzz of congratulations, and night set in.