What No One Tells You About Bootstrapping a Brand

What No One Tells You About Bootstrapping a Brand Speaker 1: A lot of other partners before I met Mercury did not understand that fashion has a unique cycle. Swim especially has a unique cycle. And so a lot of other banking partners, they wanted to see like consistent threshold of sales throughout the year. Then I started asking questions that I was like, wow, this is the thing. I need to get recommendations. And they said, you need to meet Mercury. It was a great fit from the get go. It was the first conversation I had had with a financial institution that I got like a real person and he really listened to me. I mean, no one had listened to me up until that point. They literally just download your Shopify sales and say no. That was the key to unlocking like so much of our growth after that. Speaker 2: Welcome back to another episode of Chew on This. Today's a special episode brought to you by Mercury. We're going to be breaking down what it takes to build a luxury swimwear brand called Change of Scenery and we have the founder here, Jamie Banks, who's actually spending her time to come and break down what it's taken to build the brand and how she's actually been able to use something like Mercury to her benefit. So first of all, before we jump in, Jamie, for the few people who may not know you on our incredible community, can you give us a little bit of your background and how you even got to creating Change of Scenery? Speaker 1: Yeah, sure. Well, first, thank you so much for having me. So much fun to be here with you guys. I've been a designer for a long time. I spent over 20 years building big brands like Kate Spade and Shoshana and Millie in the women's contemporary space. I love working for big companies and being part of a big team. And in the pandemic, my entire team at Kate Spade was shut down. We shut down the Ready to Wear division and I thought I'd worked in corporate fashion forever as a designer. And it really, you know, among other things, I think in hindsight now I can calmly say that it gave me the space to say, well, I'm a designer. I've been a designer a long time, but what if I could design anything? And what if I could design something that I really believe in? And I just always thought, you know, I oversaw a lot of categories at those brands that I worked at, Ready to Wear and Children's Wear, Swim. Licensing and I just always felt that in swimwear there was a woman who was not being addressed and it was me and my friends and women that I say around 30 to 55 years old who had a lot of options for very very sexy swim which was not appropriate for them and also very modest swim that was also not appropriate for them. She wasn't there yet and I set out to create it for her. Speaker 2: Before we dive in, a quick word about today's sponsor, Mercury. If you run an e-commerce brand, you know how messy managing money can get. Accounts everywhere, surprise fees, sending invoices, inevitable delays. That's why we brought everything under one roof with Mercury. Now we've got our accounts, credit cards, capital, all in one platform built for how e-commerce actually works. And on top of that, we're earning 1.5% cash back on all of our credit card spend. We're also sending wires and ACHs with zero stress and zero fees. And we can track every transaction under one clean dashboard. The team at Mercury put together a special offer just for our listeners. So listen closely. When you deposit $5,000, Or spend $5,000 using your Mercury I.O. Speaker 3: card. Speaker 2: Within your first 90 days, you can get $250 back. Do both where you deposit $5,000 and spend $5,000 on your card. You'll actually get $500 back. Go to mercury.com slash Chew on This to get started today. Now, let's get back to the episode. So, Jamie, incredible background, right? You've gotten something that a lot of founders actually don't get to do, which is work a little bit of corporate, get to see that piece of it and then bring all that talent and all those learnings and go into a world where almost nothing is certain, right? And almost build from the ground up. Love the story. Love the reason why you created something that you felt had a white space. I'm really curious. You also have created an element where it's like eco-friendly swimwear, right? Recycled materials. Usually when I see brands like that, first of all, there's something that you deeply care about, right? Which is whether it's environmental elements or How our world is going through some of those challenges. Tell us a little bit more about that background. Why do you feel so strongly about that? Because first of all, as a founder who's I've been able to see an option to create more sustainable packaging, this and that. I think we all look at it and say, oh, well, that's an extra cost. And maybe don't right away turn into and say, hey, we want to do this. So tell us a little bit about that piece because I think that is a big fundamental element to why your brand is what it is and the story you guys tell. So break that down a little bit more if you can. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, so first of all, I don't claim to be an expert on sustainability. I am learning as I go. And it's been so rewarding and so interesting to learn about. I am a mom, I have three young kids, most of my customers are moms. And there's always this element of creating a world for our children's children, right? So, you know, it's, it's a tough dynamic, because I knew when I started the business, I couldn't I couldn't start a modern fashion business without thinking about all of the waste that the fashion industry creates. The fashion industry is I believe the second worst offender of creating waste after like the gas and oil industry. And it's a lot of stuff, right? There's just like stuff. I mean, there's stuff behind me, there's stuff. And if you're going to start a company, you're already doing something not sustainable because you're putting more product into the world. But I had decided to start this company and I decided I had this idea and this void I wanted to fill. And so it was about like, how can I make the best decisions with the least impact on the planet by doing that? And in fashion, one of the great opportunities is to use materials that are not entirely made from virgin materials. So that was, you know, exciting to learn about fairly easy to do and swim swim. Recycled materials are beautiful and have amazing properties, wicking, water resistance, more than even non-recycled fabrics. They take color really well. So it's a little harder to do like in other categories where like the organic cottons eat the color. And you know, there's trade-offs, of course, to doing it. So you have to like really make it important from the beginning. I sat in a lot of big meetings at big companies that were trying to sort of Right-size the business towards sustainable goals. It's very hard to do when you have your vendors in place, your margins in place, your supply chain in place. You can't just sort of abandon everything and start using recycled materials. They're very expensive. They come from very specific suppliers. So if I was going to do it, it had to be from the beginning. I had to set my margins that way. I had to find my suppliers from those sources. And then I came up against my customer who is not that generation who, well, I'll say there's a generation, a young generation that says they prioritize sustainability, but they are the same generation that buys everything from Shein. So that generation also does not prioritize it against cost and quality. But my customer, who is 30 to 55 years old, I'm here to talk to you about a brand that definitely does not prioritize sustainability in SWIM. And you can't blame her, right? The most important things in SWIM are looking pretty, looking skinny, looking sexy, feeling supported. And we've done polls of, you know, about 800 women. We did a poll and we asked her, like, from 1 to 10, where does sustainability rank? And it ranked on the bottom. Speaker 2: It did. Speaker 1: But, you know, we're just trying to do the best that we can, keeping the costs reasonable for the customer, the customer-facing costs. I think that when she buys the bathing suit, it's not because it's made from recycled materials, but if she finds out, she's telling everyone in the pool that her bathing suit is made from recycled plastic bottles. Speaker 3: It's definitely an awesome point to bring up, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really cool. Speaker 3: Jamie, I love the background of kind of just living and breathing design, being in that space, especially in the corporate side of things and being in a big business and then going and starting your own line because you essentially created a product that you wanted yourself, right? And it wasn't necessarily out there. How do you think this gives you an advantage compared to some of the other founders that are starting brands maybe just to start a brand and You know, hoping the goal is just to make money, but maybe doesn't have that passion for it. Where do you think your advantage here is? Speaker 1: Well, I think it's two parts. Coming from corporate fashion, there are definitely advantages, right? I know how to build a line and a collection. I know how to create product. I know how to select colors and patterns that are not just for me, but are for a broader audience. All of those things I'm really good at. But remember at Kate Spade, which is a very big company, I oversaw a design team. And it's a ton of work overseeing a design team like that. And so, unfortunately, I never spent any time learning what everyone else did. Because there were so many people to do it, right? Like at Kates Bay, there's a giant marketing team, a giant sales team, a giant e-commerce team, and they're all so they're the best of the best at what they do. So you sort of just like stay in your lane, let everyone else do their job, and it all comes together. Because I had never really planned to start my own company. And then All of a sudden, I'm not just designing and doing all the things that I'm good at and I know how to do. I'm doing everything. I'm packing orders. I'm social media. I'm customer service. I'm like doing all the other things and I'm like, oh my God, what did all those people do? Like who were that, you know? So definitely the biggest benefit was not working in corporate fashion and knowing my job in and out. The biggest benefit was all of my friends and my colleagues at those companies that I then was able to lean on and call on. When I started the brand, which I think surprises people because a lot of times people, oh, you were in corporate fashion for 20 years. This must be so easy. And I'm like, no, I barely design. Someone told me if you want to be a designer, don't start your own brand. And I thought that was so true because I'm doing all of the other things. And I think that the biggest lesson about starting my own brand was something that I believe in is I just can't imagine living and breathing this like 20 hours a day, being so deep in it, rolling up your sleeves, not being afraid to be part of all of it, not really having a choice if you don't believe in it. If you're doing it just because you hope you exit one day or you make money one day, it's too all-encompassing to Do something that you don't truly believe in. Speaker 2: It's a great answer and I think one piece to that that I think is super important too is when you're coming in with certain experiences that you know a lot about such as let's say design, like you spent a lot of time managing the team especially at Kate Spade and everything else feels foreign. I think there's also an advantage to that though sometimes because you kind of get to learn things and be really scrappy instead of Doing things in the methods that you feel like you're an expert in some places and I think some of the best founders are the ones that didn't know anything about nine out of the ten things but they were really good at one thing and then they just got really scrappy across the other nine things and I think those are some really, really cool stories. So kudos to you on On building that and that too at a point in where, you know, some people are like, hey, I'm just going to stick to corporate and ride this wave out. But, you know, speaks a lot to your passion. So that's awesome. I'd love to understand one of the larger challenges in not just the space you're in, which by the way, understanding where apparel and swimwear and all those, one of the things that I'm super grateful we don't have to deal with is the fact that you guys have to not only create a design, but then you need to get six different sizes for that design. Naturally, one product concept is immediately six SKUs, if not more. It blows my mind to think if you have over 20 designs, you have tripled the amount of SKUs we even have sold, period, at Obvi in six years. I want to understand, you know, how has that part been, which is swimwear does require a lot of design, a lot of style, a lot of fashion. Then you have fast fashion that you're competing against and you also have this, you know, element of where you have sustainability so your costs are a little bit higher. How'd you go about just managing and thinking about cash flow just from the get-go? Speaker 1: You know, I think maybe that's one of the The other nine things that I blissfully didn't understand in the beginning, which maybe did make it easier. I know enough that I have worked at brands that bra size, for example. So when you bra size swim, so you're thinking like six sizes, right? Extra small, small, medium, large, extra large. We don't go up to extra, extra large, but some brands do. So that would be six, right? So, we basically have five styles per every size, color. It multiplies, like you said. Now, people always say to me, well, why don't you bra size? Like, why aren't you more inclusive? Why don't you have plus sizes? Why don't you have fatigue? Because the answer is, all of that costs money, right? So, if you start bra sizing, that's 34, I don't know how much you know about women's bras, but that's 34A, B, C, D, double D, 36A, B, C, right? So, I mean, that could be like 40 SKUs for one style. I don't have that kind of money. I think most brands don't have that kind of money or the bandwidth for that sort of inventory. And then, of course, then you don't even have the chance to sell almost all of those sizes in a retail space. It can only be sold online or in special, right? So, the demand for it isn't that high. But what surprised me the most was, well, in the beginning, I sort of thought I could do everything because I didn't know, right? Well, you don't know what you don't know. And I said, oh, we're going to have plus size and we're going to meet our customer where she is and we're going to do this and we're going to do that. But then like when it came to place the order, I was like, oh, wow, like all this stuff costs money. And also the factory is not willing to make like a few pieces of all those things. And I do get DMs on Instagram or emails and people are frustrated and they say, why don't you make long length? Why don't you make extra, extra large? And the answer is really, like I said, everything costs money and paired with the fact that I'm not going to just do all of these things out of the gate if we're not able to do it well. So we will do extra, extra large and extended sizes one day when I have the bandwidth and the human resources and the time and space and capital for inventory to do it well. But yeah, I don't know a little bit. I knew that it was tough for inventory because I've always been like around the conversations about the orders. But I guess it was really when it came to like write the order that you're like, oh, wow, this is no factory is going to accept this and also like this is going to cost a fortune. Speaker 2: No, it's super, super helpful. And I think just the fact that you mentioned like you were going up against the fact that it could be a lot more SKUs, which is in its own battle of how much do you want to be able to customize for your customer. And sometimes you just have to know your own limits and guardrails. So that's super interesting. I'm curious on when it comes to looking at these large inventory orders, especially like you have eco-friendly materials, which I'm sure maybe have even longer lead times and there's probably a lot of planning and preparation going on in your business and brand. Tell me a little bit about capital, right? When did it finally make sense to go to whatever, whether you were using a traditional banking partner or you were using certain fintech tools, how did you look at financing in general and maybe call out some of the things that you kind of stumbled upon the way if there were any cool tools? Speaker 1: The real answer is I didn't for so long. I never asked. It took a really long time after starting the business to learn how to ask questions about anything. I mean, all those friends in my network from my previous roles, it's not like I opened the brand and I said, oh, everybody, I need help or whatever. That took a long time to ask for help. But then I started realizing that the more I talked about what I was going through and what was challenging at the business, The more someone might hear and have like a great idea. But when it came to financing the business, I really didn't ask questions for the longest time. And I just always thought that you either had to get friends and family money, which I wasn't willing to do. I always thought I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. And or you could raise money. You always hear about raising money. It's like very sexy to raise money. Right. And I wasn't really willing to do either of those things. So I just sort of kept like I grew up hopping along by selling and then taking the money and reinvesting it into the business and then selling. It was like on a hamster wheel. And at some point I looked at the P&L and I wasn't even buying enough inventory to make any money, right? Like you have and this took such a long time for me to understand because I'm a designer by background. Like I never saw the financials at any of the companies I ever worked at. All of my fixed costs, right? Like it doesn't matter if I buy a hundred of a style or five of a style. The photo shoot is the same. The model costs the same. The photography costs the same. The sampling costs the same. All of those things are fixed. But if you buy a hundred, obviously you can amortize that cost of the model and the photo shoot and whatever over more sales. If you buy a thousand, even better. And I just, I never had the money to buy more inventory. And I really didn't have the demand at first either. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: But as the business started to grow and we started to get more interest in wholesale and like a bigger reach. Directly to customers, I started thinking about two things. Well, I'm not even buying enough inventory. Even if I sold all of the inventory at full price, I'm not going to make any money because my fixed costs are what they are. And also I like hit a wall with word of mouth, right? Like I have this beautiful website. I think it's beautiful. I didn't design it so I can say it's beautiful. It's not like a store on Main Street that gets foot traffic, right? If you don't buy ads, nobody will go to your website. It seems so simple, but this took me a very long time to understand. I thought that I would build this beautiful website and everyone would say, oh, thank God. Thank God this beautiful website exists now and we're going to buy stuff on it. But nobody's going to find your website and there's so much competition. So it came to a point where like it didn't make sense. It wasn't worth it to do the business if I was just going to keep buying so little inventory. I needed to buy ads to drive people to the website. And those two things require money, coupled with the fact that I was basically out of human resources, which is me. And I was driving myself into the ground, working until two or three in the morning, doing literally every single thing for the business. And I was just taking all the money to buy more inventory. And there was no money to get better photography, to have better ads and pay for ads and all these things. And I still didn't ask for help, but I met on a panel that I spoke on, I met another banking partner that I just ended up having a conversation with their CEO and for the first time learned about inventory financing and that that was an option and that there are Like very modern financial partners that are not the traditional either like VC or small business loan or things like that, that specifically work with e-commerce brands and that they don't fund human resources necessarily, but that you could have them help you fund inventory and then your capital would be freed up to do other things. And I really, if I sound like I know what I'm talking about, this was like a very long road to get here. And then I hit the stumbling block that a lot of other partners before I met Mercury did not understand that fashion has a unique cycle. Swim especially has a unique cycle. It's that sales are very high around resort time in November and December, around spring break and around summer, but there's like real peaks and valleys in a seasonal business. And so a lot of other banking partners, they wanted to see like consistent Threshold of sale throughout the year, which I don't have. I always think about the Christmas tree sellers, like how do they get financing? And yeah, it just through then I started asking questions that I was like, wow, this is the thing I need to get recommendations and through a networking group of men called Entreprenista, which is all women, all female entrepreneurs. They always have great recommendations. And they said, you need to meet Mercury, this would be a great fit for you. And it was a great fit from the get go. And it was the first conversation I had had with a financial institution that I got like a real person. Sal is, he's my guy. He's still my guy. Everyone else was sort of like passing me off or I never even spoke to a real person. And he really listened to me. I said, look, I've been like hitting this stumbling block that like our sales are fine all year, but they have these real peaks in certain seasons. And like, can you really take that into consideration? A lot of times the orders get placed by specialty and wholesale accounts. And I have to buy the inventory six to nine months in advance. And he really listened to me. I mean, no one had listened to me up until that point. They literally just download your Shopify sales and say, no. And, um, and he like was so patient with me, um, teaching me and helping me understand what my options were and opening my eyes to things I never even knew were an option. And yeah, that was the key to unlocking so much of our growth after that, which was, yeah, real pivotal moment in the business. Speaker 3: That's amazing. I think a couple of things that you mentioned, which was the fact that Mercury was able to understand the ebbs and flows of your particular business versus had you have gone to maybe a traditional bank just to have them kind of like, give you a big fat no, right, right off the bat. I think one, it kind of gets things up and running, right? So now you're at a point where you can fund the business, you can, you know, get the inventory and now really comes down to, listen, it's on you to sell through, right? Given. Speaker 1: This is the problem with inventory. Speaker 3: This is the problem with any business, right? You have the inventory, you gotta sell it. Speaker 1: Now you have to sell it, yeah. Speaker 3: I'm very curious, right? Obviously, now you're in a good position where, okay, now you can kind of get things going, right? What were some of the things that you did initially to kind of kick this off? Any strategic moves that you made that, you know, obviously you had to stretch a dollar, you know, more than most, but what were some of the things that you guys did, you know, earlier on? Speaker 1: Well, I mean, obviously I used the money to buy more inventory than I had been, which was great because then I wasn't selling out anymore, which I used to think selling out was a great thing, right? It sounds so good to say sold out, sold out, but actually all it is, is a missed opportunity. It just means you didn't buy enough for the demand and you missed out on a lot of sales. Now that I understand and balance sheet a little bit more, you actually make more money as a company if you don't sell out and you have a little bit left because then you didn't lose out on all the sales. You know, my best-selling styles from Resort from December sold out by January. They were meant to last me through now. And so I missed like four months of what could have been amazing sales and it was really because at the time I didn't have, you know, the capital to fund that inventory. So just for that example and that kind of reason, just getting more inventory was great. It freed up, by using the capital that I had borrowed from Mercury, I had other capital freed up and decided to invest more in Instagram ads. And last summer was the first time that we really made like a true investment in meta ads and we had a 6x return and continue to see that kind of return. And coupled with that, You can't just like have ads. You have to make the ads. So I've really been investing more in photography. You know, I was trying to be so scrappy in the beginning. You come from somewhere like Catespeed where there's like full production teams and like amazing photo shoots wherever they want them to be in Morocco and like the middle of Times Square. Like, you know, we would like whatever the theme was of the season, like we would get a real camel or like the best celebrities and all these things, right? Then all of a sudden you're like, oh God, how do I do a photo shoot without all of that? And I was doing it in my backyard, like at my pool in New York, and with great photographers, like really talented people. But Tori, who's my consultant for MetaAd, she said, I'm going to be honest, like, Instagram knows that you're on a beach in New York. Like, every all of your competitors are on a beach in Turks and Caicos. And your images, no matter how talented your crew or your photographer, your models, they're never going to be as good as everyone else. And I said, Well, I can't fly to Turks and Caicos. And, and I found out about, again, by asking questions, and now I had like a little bit of money to spend on this. There are these production teams that they produce your whole photo shoot. You don't even go. My partner is called Sea Sky Productions. They're amazing. They're wonderful and so talented and they travel around the world the whole year bringing fashion brands to like these unbelievable locations. My photo shoot is in Portugal in two weeks, but sadly I will not be in Portugal, but my photos will and the photos are so beautiful and they just Made my brand feel more luxury and the Instagram ads work better and you know, I was able to use some of the capital to partner with a really high-end showroom in New York City and the showroom can only be successful if my images are really high-end. So you really like you need the capital for a lot of things, but I'm glad that I didn't have it in the beginning. I'm glad that I had to learn how to be scrappy and I sort of like Didn't have like millions of dollars to blow. I had to make decisions in a really careful way and I really had to learn still. It's not like, you know, I'm not I'm not borrowing like tons and tons of money, but it's enough to. To make these small climbs up the hill. Speaker 3: Let's be honest. No one starts an e-commerce brand because they love managing finances. But the further you scale, the more critical it becomes. At Obvi, we got tired of logging into five different tools just to see where our money was going. That's when we made the switch to Mercury. Now, everything's under one roof. Accounts, credit cards, capital, all in a single dashboard that's actually built for how e-commerce works. We're earning 1.5% cash back on every single dollar spent, sending wires without delays or sneaky fees, and getting funding with terms that actually make sense. And for our listeners, Mercury's putting together something special. Deposit or spend $5,000 in your first 90 days and you'll get $250. And if you do both, you'll get $500. Go to mercury.com slash chew on this to get started today. Speaker 2: Now, let's get back to the episode. Speaker 3: I think it also allows you to kind of invest in other opportunities that you may not have been able to, right? Like, obviously getting, you know, marketing up and running on Meta and Instagram, maybe even TikTok. But I think even something that allowed us to scale in the beginning was even getting some partnerships with mom and pop shops, right? Which gave us a little bit more runway in terms of just kind of Selling through a little bit more inventory at one time versus, you know, one at a time on DTC. I'm curious if you kind of ventured down more of maybe the wholesale route to see if you can kind of turn over, you know, inventory a little bit more quickly. Speaker 1: Yeah. So I believe in specialty like very much, especially for something like swim, right? Like a lot of things you can order online these days, but you really need to try on a bathing suit. It's very, very personal. I, my whole career, have always, like, really admired listening to the sales girls with their, like, very close relationships with the specialty stores. And you're right. They are sort of, they're not really mom and pop and swim. They're oftentimes mom and daughter. Um, or like the mom started the store and then the daughter's taking over or something like that. And these are stores where like you walk in and the women working there have been working in swim a very long time and they take one look at your body and they hear your story and your challenges and they pull out bathing suits you never would have tried on your own. And this is really important for the discovery of a new brand. So if I'm one of those brands that like a customer might not walk over to because they've never heard of change of scenery, but the sales girls are educated on it. great introduction to the brand more than it's more than hoping that people find us on Google or on, you know, some big e-commerce website and things like that. So I yeah, coupled with the improved like really beautiful photography and this bigger presence on on Metta. I did have the opportunity to partner with like the most amazing showroom in New York in November. And they've been really like pretty quickly, I'm very impressed with them actually, building the specialty business. And I, you know, especially with that TikTok scare when they were going to shut TikTok down, we're actually not on TikTok, but you saw that a lot of creators, their whole, a lot of creators, a lot of business owners, their whole world was going to crumble if TikTok was shut down. You really can't, that's scary to have all your eggs in one basket like that. So that was, even though I wasn't on TikTok, that really like was a wake-up call for me. Like, okay, now I'm investing all this money in meta ads, but like what if Instagram were to go away? Then no one will find my website. I need to have these other like channels of revenue. So yeah, for discovery and also just for like the The sort of diversification, the specialty stores are really important. Speaker 2: Jamie, I want to double down a little bit more on some of the stuff you touched on going back to, you know, utilizing something like Mercury and obviously taking stages to getting there and it being recommended to you. You know, we do have a lot of founders and operators that are Still at the stage of trying to figure out not just what to use, but how to use certain things. So whether it's Mercury or we'd love to get into some other tools as well, we'd love some more tactical takeaways on maybe how you were able to utilize some of the benefits or some of the offerings that even something like a Mercury account gave you. And so that, you know, if there are Founders or operators listening that maybe aren't utilizing it or maybe are exploring it, what are some of those ways or is there any cool things that you did? Is there anything that you figured out that was like, hey, wow, like I kind of wish I did this earlier. I would love any call-outs there across some of the tools you're using. Speaker 1: So on the most basic level, I just think that the Mercury platform is very modern in the same way that Shopify is modern, right? I started Change the Scenery, what do you do? You go to like all the banks that you know, right? So I went to a very traditional bank. I opened myself a bank account, you know, like it was 1985. This is how I started my company. And it's fine. They give you a bank account, you put money in it, you get a checking account, whatever. The platforms for those very traditional banks are not I just find that they're not modern in the same way that a website that was built in the 90s is not modern. So even some of the big department stores, we're partners with some of them. And then on the back end, the platform almost looks like MS-DOS. It's very, very outdated. But then when you think of something like Shopify, which I'm sure a lot of the listeners are on or familiar with, Shopify is like the most modern it could be. It's the most user-friendly. Anything you dream up, you can have on Shopify. If Shopify doesn't have it, you have a plugin, you have an app. It's easy to navigate. There's tools for everything. The traditional bank platforms, the website, it does like a few things. You can make a wire transfer. You can't even attach your invoice. There's like no way to even write a note. I transfer a very large sum of money and I have no way to even note what that sum of money was for. Then the vendor on the other side is telling me that I didn't pay and I don't remember what that was for. These small things are just hard, especially when you're doing everything yourself. I don't have a sophisticated bookkeeping system. I have solo entrepreneur QuickBooks. So, when I got on the Mercury platform, I was like, wow, not only does it look very fresh and modern, it's very clean, it's very, like, digestible. When you do, like, the most simple basic things, I'm going to be honest, I think the Mercury platform probably does some amazing things that I haven't even got to yet. And every time I talk to Fowles, my Mercury guy, he's like, have you done this? Have you done this? And I'm like, no, I'm going to get there. But just very simple. I transfer large sums of money overseas a lot. And every step of the way when you're making the wire transfer, do you want to attach an invoice? Do you want to make a note that the factory can see? Do you want to make a note that just you can see? Do you want to add other documents to this to help you understand? You can't take that kind of stuff for granted because then like when I'm getting questions from the other side or I need to look back in history, I'm not like spending the entire day. And I don't have a day to spend on this kind of stuff. Like trying to backtrack and see what I paid and all these things. I mean, it was taking me so long just to make a wire transfer. And like now, with Mercury, like the most basic things are just so much easier for me. Just based on it being user friendly and like thinking about like modern transactions, I think the way they do. Speaker 2: Now, I think you made the best comparison there, which is like, you know, so many of us as founders and operators, we move to something like a Shopify from, you know, WordPress or whatever you're using before because Part of it, just everything felt intuitive, right? And I think so much of what we want as entrepreneurs, too, is access to more things that are just intuitive. Not necessarily easy, right? We're not always just looking for easy shortcuts, but if it can be intuitive enough, then at least it takes away the anxiety of saying, wait, did I do that right? Am I doing this correctly or am I missing something? And I think the more decisions in a day that you don't have to feel that way, the better. And I think when it comes to having an account and whether you're using a debt facility or you're using a FinTech partner or whatnot, All of it at the end of the day, it revolves around money, right? Even us starting a business, all of us, we want to make money. We want to be profitable. We want to be able to understand where our money is going. None of us are really running charities. And so at the end of the day, if money is such a core component of what we do, it sometimes feels like a lot of the other Things revolving around management of it feel so antiquated, feel so dated, that it's like, wait, why am I still doing it this way? So I think that's a really good call out. And I think it goes to say, just in a lot of different things that we do, whether it's even the tooling we want to use for our website, or even, you know, we moved from, we were using a consolidator for our Walmart inventory when we were sending it in. We were using a consolidator that was a dated one that's been working with Walmart for like, you know, 50 plus years, etc. And we actually ended up moving to one that costs a little bit more per month in terms of their monthly fee and their access fee. But they're so much more intuitive, easy to use, faster, quicker, etc. And so sometimes it's like, you know, one, if you don't have to spend more and you're getting better, that's a no brainer. But if even if you did, I think the fact that it can help you in so many ways and more than one is huge. Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's so many things in especially small business, especially in I mean, I'm proud to say no longer solo entrepreneurship, but for a long time that you don't have any time to address it. So, you know, it's probably not the best way. I actually didn't know that there were other options for like a more modern financial partner, but like I'm just trying to get through the day, right? Like I'm just like there's way too many things for a small business owner to get through and I was like, okay, I have a bank. Speaker 2: It works. Speaker 1: They transfer money. Like that's not going to be my priority. So I'm glad that everything came about the way that it did because sometimes you're just like, wait, why didn't I try harder to find a better solution? And it's just because you're starved for time. Speaker 2: Well said. I know we're going to come to wrap up. I had one more thing I wanted to at least dive into, though, which is kind of wrap up on the idea of brand and performance a little bit. You've been building an incredible brand. And obviously with that comes a pioneering design heavily. And then you have the world of obviously having to perform and having to sell it and having to get it out there and whatnot. How do you split your time, right? When you look at it and you say, you know what, I need to go and obviously focus on selling this, but I also need to make sure that I'm preserving and creating an incredible brand. You know, designing beautiful products and making sure that I know what my community is feeling, how my customers are reacting. As an entrepreneur, how are you balancing your time between those, at least those two core pillars? Speaker 1: Not balanced yet, but I'm working towards it. I, you know, I didn't expect to be with customers so much. It was like a really nice side effect of just being needing to get the product out there in the beginning and realizing pretty quickly what I said before that people don't just stumble on your website. I really had to like generate word of mouth. So I started joining any event people would have me at or having these private shopping parties and I got to meet a lot of customers. I spent 20 years in like an ivory tower. I never met a customer. I never, you know, I would go to the Kate Spade stores and try to meet people, but it really, we designed in like a vacuum. We never met the customer. We didn't know who she was, how old she was, where she was going. Now, all of a sudden I get thrown into these shopping events or these private parties, these situations where I'm getting to see hundreds of real women try on my product and I have to protect time for that to never go away because that's been the most valuable thing. It doesn't matter how it fits me. I mean, I know I am the customer, so that helps, right? And I know that I need it to be this way because my son is going to pull my bathing suit down in the pool or I need to be able to have things that I can pull on and off as cover-ups because they want snacks and then I'm in the water with them and, you know, whatever. So, I know those things. Women have such different body types. And so, hearing it, I don't just hear it from like two people. I hear it from hundreds of people. And I try to say, okay, well, that was very specific and I can't do this because that's for one woman. But I'm hearing this all the time. All these women need X, Y, Z. So, I'm going to find a way to make that happen. So, I think like that has become one of the most important things that I need to protect. Because once I have, I mean, every idea now comes from my customers. And then I, you know, I find the solution in like a modern fashiony way. But that's fast now because the ideas are like all there. The other stuff is harder to protect time for. I mean, partly because like, anytime I'm doing something I've never done before, which is like all the time. I never know how long it's going to take because It's just not my expertise, but I have learned the hard way that I am definitely not good at everything. And I don't love everything, you know, like I really love email marketing. This is like my new favorite thing. If it all goes up in flames, I'm going to be an email marketer. And that was brand new to me. I never used Klaviyo. I never used Figma. I love making the emails. I love the copy, like all of it. But then I tried, like, for a second to run my own meta ads. Like, you can't run your own meta ads. It's like, I got the book, Instagram Ads for Dummies. Then I realized, like, if it's older than, like, three weeks ago, the book doesn't help. So then, like, I, you know, you have to be a little humble. I went and got myself a brilliant meta expert consultant. So I think partly it's a little bit time management. I mean, there's only 24 hours in the day, and I have three little kids. And partly, you know, the capital from Mercury helped free up other capital to get myself some more human resources for good at things that I'm not good at. And that has been like the only way that I'm like working towards any sort of balance for the brand and for my personal life as well. Speaker 3: I love that. I think your story is super inspirational for those who are, you know, maybe on the fence of, you know, even just starting a business or making that move to doing something for themselves. So kudos to you. Would love to get one last, you know, final takeaway for our listeners and the audience. What is that one thing you want them to take back and implement in their business starting today? Speaker 1: I would say unlearn everything that you knew in your life before. You know, really like learn what you need for your business. It doesn't matter what you needed at your businesses that you were at before or it doesn't matter what other people need for their business. For so long, I was just trying to figure out what everyone else was doing. And it's taken a long time to like find my voice, find my path, find what works like uniquely for change of scenery. And if you don't do that, then your business won't be unique. So I think that's the most important thing. Speaker 3: Love that. Speaker 2: Chew on that. Speaker 3: If you want more from us, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Instagram, follow us on TikTok, and check out the website ChewOnThis.io.