DORÉ

I’m so happy to introduce you to Grace Bonney and Anna Bond, though I’m pretty sure you already know them. Grace is the founder of Design Sponge, and she just came out with a beautiful and inspiring book called In the Company of Women, where she talks about women entrepreneurs around the world. Anna is the fantastic Creative Director and Founder of Rifle Paper Co., our favorite stationery providers. Anna is, of course, part of Grace’s book, so I thought this would be the perfect occasion to talk to two very successful business women on how to build a brand your own way. There are so many treasures, so much honesty, so many lessons and so many fun moments in this conversation, I can’t wait for you to listen to this episode of Pardon my French!

[podcast_episode episode=”241607″ ]

On realizing the need to build your own thing…
GRACE: I’d written for House & Garden, then that closed, then I went to Domino, then that closed. I felt like it was my fault. I went to interview for Blueprint Magazine, which was Martha Stewart’s magazine, had an interview, never heard back. I thought I just wasn’t the right fit and then I found out the magazine had folded over the weekend! I had this moment where I was so sad, but also print was not this stable place I thought it was. It used to seem so safe! Like all the “Conde-Nistas” and their high heels, regular paychecks and health insurance and all these things that seemed so appealing to me. Then I realized I was going to have to build that on my own.

On finding your own way as an entrepreneur…
ANNA: I was always really quiet in school and I always joke that I would have been the last person in my high school to be voted most likely to succeed. It wouldn’t have crossed anyone’s mind! And that makes me laugh a little bit because I don’t think I saw that in myself but it was there and I feel I’ve been doing it in my own way. When you think of leaders, sometimes it’s the bold, outgoing person, but I feel like there is a way for my type of personality to do it too and that was really fun to discover.

On who the woman in her book is about…
GRACE: There was a moment of like, women are props, we’re just these beautiful props, styled on things. Even in business magazines, it’s this “power bitch” vibe with big shoulders and ladies on desks being really sexy and if that’s who you are, great, own it, but that’s not the majority of women I know running businesses and I wanted to see confident, strong women, but in whatever way that was for them.

On selecting women to profile in her new book….
GRACE: It started out as a sticky note on my laptop that said, “bold women,” and I had a list of maybe six people, and people I sort of tangentially knew through other people who I just admired for just firmly being themselves and not being afraid to have an opinion and to have a strong point of view, whether that was aesthetic or spoken and I wanted to see more of that. I felt so much of the lifestyle community was about celebrating this sort of softness and meekness in women that is totally fine and valid, but it’s not really what gets me going in the morning. So I expanded the list to more and more women I admired but had no connections to at all, and literally on Facebook I started reaching out saying, “Does anybody know Carrie Brownstein? Does anybody know Thelma Golden?” And then through friends and friends of friends, I slowly started getting connected. It was truly a village effort to put this together.

On finding your voice as a boss…
ANNA: I think that’s one of the biggest challenges. The business started with me wanting to create stuff for myself. Now it’s much more complicated. Rifle was very much me when I started, I was the only person who had to agree or disagree and now I’m working for the brand almost in the same way everyone else is. I’m there to guide it, but I now have to remove myself and ask myself is that Rifle or is that just something I want to do. And that was a really interesting process.

On accepting the challenges of running a business…
GRACE: I think it’s ok to wax and wain. I interviewed over 100 women for this book and the one thread everyone had in common that I didn’t expect was that people had all embraced that their businesses had moments where things were running really well and then for a few years they weren’t and they had to hustle, and then they got it under control and then it went off the wheels again, but they didn’t feel bad about it because that’s part of it. You grow, there’s a whole new set of problems and challenges and then you tackle those and grow again and discover new hurdles and it just keeps going.

On building a business outside of New York…
ANNA: So often at trade shows people would assume we were from New York and be shocked that we were in Florida. Shocked to a hilarious point of how can there be a successful business that’s not in New York? It just didn’t compute in their minds that someone could build something they thought was cool and it’s not in New York or L.A. That to me has been really fun and exciting. The cost of business in Florida is so much cheaper and it’s easier for us to hire people quickly.

On dealing with negative comments from readers…
GRACE: The thing that gets under my skin is whenever I jump in and defend a homeowner or my point of view, which isn’t actually all that often, people jump in and go, “SHHHHH!! This isn’t your place! This is our comment section, you shouldn’t be talking here! First Amendment rights.” And I’m like, I pay the bills here, yes, I can talk and me talking isn’t violating your First Amendment right!”

On coming out on the site…
GRACE: I’ve come to this place where talking about my personal life, within limits, feels normal and weird not to talk about those things. So holding that back for a while was a weird process and I eventually felt moved to say it because it felt like I was keeping something from people and a part of myself back. My site doesn’t make a ton of money and it’s not this super famous thing. It’s about passion and being able to be honest and real and when that wasn’t happening, I didn’t want to go to work anymore. I needed to make a change that made me happy to be there again and that was simply coming out and then moving on and that was it. It was like a one week thing and next week you’re back to talking about houses and that’s the way it should be.

On the idea of “You can’t be what you can’t see”…
GRACE: At a certain point, I thought about what about all of the little girls of color and are they seeing examples of interior, graphic or fashion designers or whoever else in our community they can look up to and see themselves in. So I started making this list of people I wanted to be able to look to this book and see themselves reflected and that extended to race, age, religion, stage of career and even as far as people who are still working part-time jobs while also still having their companies. All of those entries points are what made the book so important for me because I really wanted anyone to be able to pick this book up and see at least some part of who they are reflected back on a page.”

On accepting imperfection and not having it all figured out…
GRACE: No one in this book is perfect. Everyone is imperfect and talks about that and embraces it and so often when we think about role models, we put them on this pedestal of, they’re done, they’re finished, their life is figured out! I love Eileen Fisher and she is constantly talking about things she’s still course correcting and changing and figuring out and I’m, like, man, you can be that far into your career and still have stuff to figure out? Then I don’t feel so bad about still having a lot of questions I don’t have answered yet.