When I started my business, I didn’t really know I was starting a business. I was making things I loved and thought it’d be great to get paid for that. Falling into business this way creates a very different experience compared to setting out to make money and crafting your business model around that goal.
The past three years for me have been a series of trials and errors. For a scientist like me, that’s exciting. In my past career embarking on a project with no certainty of where it will actually prepared me well for entrepreneurship. In the lab you run into issues constantly, there are always setbacks and unexpected hurdles. It’s the same with running and growing a business. As soon as you figure out one thing and slew of new issues to solve arise.
When I used to step back and look at my life’s path I would sometime wonder how this rock collecting tomboy ended up with a clothing company. These days it’s a little less mystifying. I saw a problem in my personal, an over abundance of fast fashion options and so few sustainable ones, went to solve it for myself, and then attempted to replicate the results of my experiment on a larger scale.
I’m still a scientist, just in a new context.