Girl Gang Craft Podcast Episode #72 “Retail Success”

Phoebe Sherman interview with Tina Wells

INTRO
Phoebe Sherman:

Welcome to the Girl Gang Craft Podcast where we dive in deep to all things business, wellness, creativity, and activism for artists and entrepreneurs. We talk with impactful female driven companies and founders for an inside look at the entrepreneurial experience where you'll come away with tangible steps to elevate your business. Are you ready? I'm your host, Phoebe Sherman, founder of Girl Gang Craft artist and designer, and marketing obsessed. We're here to learn together how to expand our revenue, implement new organizational techniques, and cultivate best business practices as we work towards creating a life doing what we love. Let's get started.

Hello Hello. Hey, creatives. Phoebe here, your host of the Girl Gang Craft podcast, founder of Girl Gang Craft. And we are here to have some conversations about what it is to run a business.
So today we have Tina Wells hopping on the podcast and I will get into her amazingness in just a moment. But first, apps are open. At the time that this podcast goes live, apps are open. So you've also seen that we've announced a new city, Sacramento. So we're really excited. That'll be a night event on a Thursday, and that is in partnership with Crocker Art Museum. So we are really excited about that. So yeah, we have our dates for Salem, Providence, Oakland and Sacramento. So check out those dates. I'm not going to list all the dates for you right now, but they exist. You can go to GirlGangCraft/events to check out all the details and to apply for all the events for the year.
We are also announcing our Mother's Day gift guide and that is a gift guide that lives on our site for Mother's Day. So if you have like a mother oriented product or even service, get on our site, get on the Mother's Day gift guide and you can also apply to that same place.
Before we get into our interview, let me tell you about Tina Wells.
Tina Wells is a business strategist, advisor, author and the founder of RVLNT Media Relevent Media, a multimedia content venture that brings culture, shifting storytelling and beloved products to market through innovative partnerships. In 2023, her acclaimed Elevation Approach, a framework for finding Work-Life Harmony that she developed while confronting her own professional and personal burnout, expanded with a book and a corresponding product line available at Target stores nationwide. In October 2023, her luggage and travel accessories brand Wander Lane debuted at Target stores and became an instant success. Wells is also author of the bestselling tween fiction series Honest June, Mackenzie Blue, and The Z Files, as well as the Marketing Handbook, Chasing Youth Culture and Getting It Right. An entrepreneur who launched a successful market research company at age 16, Wells has been recognized by Fast Company as 100 most creative people in business. Essence’s 40 under 40. The American Advertising Federation's Hall of Achievement and more. For more information, please visit Tinawalls.com. We're so excited to have Tina on the podcast. Really fast. She is hosting a free workshop. This is February 27th and it is all about getting your products into big retailers. So this is huge if you're a product based business. This workshop is for you and it's free. It's Tuesday, February 27th at noon eastern, and you can join that workshop for free at bit.ly/retailtinaggc all lowercase. We're going to put that in our show notes bit.ly/retailtinaggc Okay, let's get into it.

Phoebe
Hello, Hello. Hey creatives, today we have Tina Wells on the podcast. Hey, Tina, welcome to Girl Gang Craft.

Tina Wells
Hi, Phoebe, How are you?

Phoebe
I am good. How are you doing?

Tina Wells
I'm great. I have to tell you, I think you're my first podcast with someone named Phoebe and to be honest it’s my favorite name, because it's my niece's name, so.

Phoebe
Oh my goodness. I love it.

Tina Wells
Very happy to be here with you today.

Phoebe
That’s so fun. It's like a cult following name. I feel like I keep on finding people who have a friend or blah blah or they pick out the TV show that I'm in or I recently have met like a couple dogs named Phoebe. Also at the dog park. That's also confusing when they're like shouting for Phoebe. And I'm like, What?

Tina Wells
My gosh, you're right. It is a cult following name. And it also lends itself to the best nicknames ever. Like me too, as well. We used to call her phoebelicious, the feebster.. Like you get really good nicknames too.

Phoebe
I love it. That's so funny. Okay. Well, Tina, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do for work.

Tina Wells
Goodness. What a complicated question to answer. Right. Let's see if I boiled it down, I would say I started my career at 16 because I loved product and 28 years later, I'm still loving product. And it's taken different forms at different times in my career. When I first started out, I was a writer for a newspaper for girls called The New Girl Times. That was my first job at 15. That turned into a marketing agency that I ran for 24 years where I got to work with over 350 of the coolest brands in the world, including Dell and Apple and the Oprah Winfrey Network. And then it was through that opportunity, I was able to do something I'm super passionate about, which was write middle grade fiction books. So for those of you who don't know middle grade is 7 to 12. And I always joke, if you have a 7 to 12 year old in your life, they probably know me. They might've read I have like 20 books for that age group right now. So I have my original series for Mackenzie Blue, the spinoff, The Z Files, my follow up series Honest June, and my most recent series, The Stitch Clique. I love writing for young readers. It's the thing I would do even if I didn't get paid to do it. It's the coolest job. And then I guess what we're going to spend some time talking about today is I create brands and was super fortunate last year to have two brands launch in the same year at Target stores nationwide, and one was in the home office space and the other brand that's in stores right now actually is a luggage and travel accessories brand called Wander Lane (WNDR LN). So I said in the opener, I love product and I still love product and I love to create. And hopefully this year I'm going to expand into working with other founders to really help them improve in different aspects of their manufacturing and supply chain and brand building.

Phoebe
So much alignment here with all the stuff you do. I mean, our community is, a lot of them are product based businesses, but we also have a lot of service based businesses. And of course I talk a lot about marketing and lots of synergy here. So let's dive in to a little bit about retail first. How on earth do you get your product in Target? Can you tell us a little bit about that journey?

Tina Wells
Yeah, so I wrote a book that was published last spring called The Elevation Approach and it’s a guide to work life harmony. And in that book, I talk about how you really build your tribe and build the people that are important to you. And I talk about why I don't network and what it really means to me to build community. That's the long answer to say I got connected to Target through a community that I'm part of. And it was actually a friend of mine who pitched me to a Target executive, and she reached out and said, I think we should be in business together.
I'm sure your community can appreciate the power of like, amazing female friends who advocate for you when you're not even in the room. And that's literally what happened. I had a friend advocate for me and I got the call and we started small. We started with books and one series, one series became three, three became product, one product line became two product lines. So it was definitely a relationship that was built over time.

Phoebe
So the books came first in Target.

Tina Wells
The books came first, and I had been a published author since 2009. I had my first series, 2009 through 2013 and then literally took like an eight year break between my last book in Mackenzie Blue to the first book in the spinoff The Z Files.
Phoebe
Let's talk about product scaling, because I imagine that's a little bit different than publishing because you write the book and then the publishing house sort of deals with the volume. How is that transition to scaling your product? I'm sure it felt very different.

Tina Wells
Well, it's funny because when you're doing fiction for those of you who are listening, who have maybe published nonfiction books, you know, you can get that done in less than a year.
It's a fairly quick process. Any of you have written children's books or middle grade, you know, that process is more like 18 months. And funny enough, developing a retail based product line also takes about 18 months from start to finish, from just like initial pitching of ideas. And then from the time you actually get some orders to when you have to deliver the merchandise to be picked up. Let's see, I might say like springtime, early spring, get orders, summer, start shipping. Product in stores in fall. It can all happen within a year. But the process of getting to the order is really what takes time, because shelf space is limited, buyers have tons and tons of opportunity. They are pitched the next big thing all the time. So really what they have is this issue of needing to allocate space to the right product at the right time. That takes a lot of time to convince. And part of your job or really the biggest part of your job as the founder is to really tell the story of your brand and why your brand needs to be in any particular retailer. And every retailer has a unique perspective and a unique, almost like personality. And so it's really telling the story of why your brand is a match for that particular retailer's personality.

Phoebe
So are you doing direct to consumer at all?

Tina Wells
I am this year. Like I said, my current line in Target right now is called Wander Lane and it's a travel like a luggage and travel accessories brand. And we are starting to ship our compression socks as a direct to consumer. And then we have a really cool makeup bag that's coming in the spring. And then Elevation, which was my line, my home office line that was in stores last year, is relaunching this year as a D2C brand. And that will come in spring before Mother's Day.
So super excited about that new collection.

Phoebe
Like, what is the strategy? What is the difference between strategy between creating a retail brand, which it seems that you started with that which is kind of opposite from a lot of folks, right? Yes. So how did you sort of make that transition or pair them together?

Tina Wells
I wasn't sure the brands were going to go D2C. I wasn't sure like did I want to really become the distributor? And then when I realized, well I have all this data now I know what items sold in store, I know what items did really well. I know what people gravitated towards. And I have a huge opportunity to just produce those items. That’s super exciting to take that data back and say, okay, well I had my first collection, maybe 18 pieces and well all of them sold, there were some SKUs or product types that sold really well. And what we were able to do is take that data and say, we're going to put into production the things that sold really well and let's try in some different colors and fabrics and change some things. And I will say like the biggest change from moving into DTC is retail, and being in-store is really about stopping a customer in their tracks.
So how you build a product from color to fonts for retail is different than the approach I'm taking in direct to consumer. So direct to consumer for me is a little bit more about like soft touches of items, like really thinking through artistically of how any media like we create our reels, our website, all of those things become the store, right? It becomes part of the brand experience versus actually shopping at Target. It's my endcap unit, so it's like my banner that introduces you to me. It's how we arrange the product on the shelves. It's a color story we're using. There are different things that guide you based on your particular retail channel.

Phoebe
So cool. Just a weird question. Does Target share that data with you or?

Tina Wells
It's really fortunate and I think I was so lucky and fortunate to get that because it really helped me see like what's performing, what is really resonating with guest. And if you're going to be in a retailer like Target, Target is so obsessed with their guest and creating a great environment and making things accessible and beautiful, it's being a great partner. They want to make sure that I am informed and understand what's resonating with the guest so I can continue to create content on my end that's also driving sales to that guest.

Phoebe
That's really cool. Are you working with any other major retailers?

Tina Wells
Not yet. I have a couple offers, so I'm looking at what makes sense. And you know, I started my career in research, right, in product research. And so I think that there are so many interesting trends happening right now at retail. What I'm really doing is my own version of like assessing the landscape, really to see what's working, what's not, what needs innovation, what doesn't. I like to go into spaces that are ripe for some innovation. But I just got back from a trip to Asia.
I got to meet some of my factories, look at some new lines I have in production and gave me a lot of ideas. Didn't really think I would play in fashion, but I have one concept that I'm interested in trying. And so for me it's always about like, what's the brand moment? And then is there a retailer that's looking for that particular brand?

Phoebe
You've touched upon brand story a little bit or maybe kind of a lot. So can you talk a little bit about how you create both an in-person brand story, like you're saying, with an endcap versus sort of facilitating that online on your website, on social media. What does that look like?


Tina Wells
Yeah, those are really different experiences because I had a really unique happening where I created a new brand that launched within a very well-established retailer that's beloved and has such a big personality. Like Target in itself is a big, big personality. We all know our target or target personality, and when you're launching a DTC brand, you have to create that personality like people are invited into your space, your store. I was given space within a bigger retailer, within a bigger story. So when you're in retail, it's like, how does your brand story play into the overall story they're telling? So if I think about the overall story at Target, it's always going to be about great design meeting accessibility. You can get the best designer item at the best price. That's why we love Target. But on my own site, the experience is much more about elevation, how I want the products to feel and how I want you to feel using these products. I'm telling the story a little bit different because I don't have to also live within this larger container that is the retail story.

Phoebe
So fascinating. So what sort of advice would you have for new brands who are maybe already doing direct to consumer or maybe they're established brands and they're just focusing on direct to consumer, or maybe they're even in some smaller, boutique, smaller retailers? How do you shoot for getting in a major retailer like Target? What advice would you have for them?

Tina Wells
The first thing I would say is buyers are incredibly busy people. You're not going to get a meeting with a buyer to say, Hey, so what are you seeing in the market? A buyer's going to come in and meet with you because they're like, Well, what are you seeing? What trends are you seeing? What information do you have to share with me? Let's just say before you even get to the meeting, like how do you connect with the buying community? And I would say you have to understand the area of the store that you want to be in or be featured in, and then understand are there key conferences, events or places that you need to be where those buyers tend to come looking for new brands. And the spoiler alert is that there are, you just need to get to know them. It's going to be doing a lot of research. Like I would say founder made is great, but that really works if you're like a consumer packaged good or a CPG, we'd say CPG product, but there are tons of amazing trade shows and gift shows. And I know in our very modern world, we sometimes feel like, that was how they used to do it. Like that's still how they do do it. I think there are some industries that even as they evolve, they hold onto traditions that are incredibly important. And if you think about like kids book fairs or other things that are really important in publishing, traditional retail has really key moments, whether it's like NRF, the National Retail Federation meeting. Go to those events, listen to buyers talk about what's important in their stores, get the annual reports. Like I know it seems really boring and basic, but I'm telling you, you're going to see the aha moment of someone saying, this is what we're craving, this is what we need, and that creates an opportunity to connect. And then the other piece of advice I would give you is to research what's called a vendor rep. Some people might call them brokers.
These are people who are set up as consultancies to work directly with retailers and they are based on different areas of expertise. They could be focused on beauty. They understand the category, they understand all the competition that you have in a retailer and they are the ones that could tell your story to a retailer on your behalf, and they're paid a commission for that work.
And it's a commission that actually is really right sized. It doesn't make you feel like you're paying way too much. It's like a great relationship if you find the right fit. And that's the most important piece is finding the right vendor rep that really gets your brand, that's excited to share that story and that it's distinctly positioned to do so.

BREAK

Phoebe
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Phoebe
So you do a lot. How do you balance it all? Coming back to your book, what does your day to day look like?

Tina Wells
Yeah, I am in the middle of a crazy two months of travel, which hasn't happened to me in a long time, not even when I was launching my brands funny enough. And it's funny, I got back. I had a long trip to Asia and I have a trip to Europe that's starting in four days, right? So I'm like literally home for five days. And the other day I just went on a crazy organizing spree and I laughed. I said, I'm like living the elevation approach, right? The very first principle is to declutter your space. And I did a digital like clean up and then I did an in-person cleanup and I thought, that's really funny. Like, I'm innately returning to the first instant elevation principle I need because I'm feeling really out of balance. You know, the first thing I would say is that living in work life harmony means that you will very quickly understand when you're not. And that doesn't mean that you always can quickly change the entire situation. But if you use one of my principles of in-person elevation, you're going to get back to the feeling. There are times in life, whether you're like on deadline for an article or manuscript or let's say you're a student working on your PhD. Like there are just some seasons in life that are busier than others. What the elevation approach really helps you do is figure out how to have harmony even in a really difficult situation. You know, one of the other principles teaches you to create your own rituals. I find that really important, like making a hot beverage in the morning. It's one of my rituals, whether it's coffee or tea, and it can change depending on where I am in the world. But taking that moment first thing in the morning to just say, I'm going to do this one thing for myself, it's a really important way for me to start the day. I love like baths whenever I can get them, depending on where I am in the world. I love different beauty treatments, but it's a way of like helping you get in tune with the things that make you feel grounded and harmonious wherever you are.
Because we can't always predict the circumstances we're going to be in. But if we can have a few, I like to call them like tools in our tool kit that helps us really recalibrate rather quickly.
Phoebe
You mentioned that you don't network. Tell me a little bit about that.

Tina Wells
Yeah, I don't like the idea of like collecting people. I think that I so often will just befriend someone and have no clue what they do. And I just like really like this person. And then someone will write me and say, Can you connect me to so-and-so? I'm like, Why? Thinking like in my head, they're like, because I need to do A, B, and C, And I look at their LinkedIn and I'm like, my goodness, my friend has a really big job, you know, like, oh that's what she does.
I remember years ago I went to a summer camp put on by this organization called The Wing, and it was so much fun. We went upstate New York. I was with a bunch of women. We didn't talk about work. I mean, we even had like a prom. It was so much fun. Like we were just laughing and having, and it turns out like one of the women I had befriended was like a VP at Goldman Sachs, like I never would have known. just ended up having a good time. And I don't like the idea of saying like, I need you in my life because you have a specific job. I think so many of us are in a phase where the jobs we had a year ago, like maybe we're transitioning, maybe we're moving into something new. So acquiring people just because they have a certain skill set or job feels like that's going to backfire on you at some point. We're not staying in our roles the way we have traditionally stayed at jobs for long periods of time. So I think it's really important to have peers, type peers who are going in a similar life stage where you can really be held accountable. I think sometimes we spend time searching for mentors, and I think sponsors are really important where it's less of a commitment. But hey, I would really appreciate if you could help me do this. They get to have that win up helping, but there's not this ongoing like we need to connect every two weeks. I talk a lot about friend tours over mentors.
Like I found that my peers, one, they really hold me accountable and two, they understand where I am at the moment so they can really give me that advice that I need. And I think those relationships show up in different forms. I think asking for a mentor seems like a more antiquated way of doing things.

Phoebe
I like the idea of a sponsor, like asking a mentor for a specific project act or a time period.
I think that's really interesting

Tina Wells
and it works because the people you're asking or you would be asking to mentor you are like the busiest people on earth. So if you're like, Hey, I need help with this one particular thing, and this is why I think you're the best person to help me. There's something that’s like, I'm flattered.
You think I can help you do this thing and check the box. Everybody is happy.

Phoebe
I love that so much. You've had such an extensive career and things are related, but also different. How do you decide what's next for you?

Tina Wells
If you read the book, you're going to find that I'm asking you a lot of questions, and that's really the conversation I have with myself quite often, is do I like where do I feel like I'm contributing?
Is this meeting my goals? Well, if you want to know if you're meeting your goals, you actually have to have goals. What’s sitting right next to me. Every day I use this, I'm going to show you my full focused planning system. To me, like goals and planning and achieving is really important. But if I don't have a framework for saying what success looks like, then I don't have a way of knowing if I'm in alignment or not.
So I think that when I made shifts, like I was running my agency for 24 years, I spent a long time doing one thing, but every client is a different experience. Writing brings a different thing out of me, whether I'm representing a technology company or a beauty company. And so I think I learned how to pivot and how to get curious through the agency because I couldn't do the same thing all the time. I was called into so many different literal, different types of businesses. I think I also loved that, like that's the part of the agency world that I love is that every client you can learn new things. It's a new adventure. I've always loved to write, so I found a way to incorporate that. Like I said, for me, the through line has always been consumer products and I really like that innovation. And so I think if I feel like I'm not learning anymore, that's probably when it's time for me to make a move. Or if I think this isn't my zone of genius and I could do a thing, I'm good at a thing, but it's not the thing that lights me up. And I think we all have the right to look for that when we can. My mom used to always say, sometimes you have to do what you have to do so you can do what you want to do. So I certainly don't want your listeners to think we're always in a position to do the thing we want to do. Very often we have to do the thing we have to do, but we're always working towards doing the thing that we want to do.

Phoebe
Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? I love that.

Tina Wells
Yeah. I'm the oldest of six, so my mom definitely had two. My parents both like children with very different personalities. The six of us are totally different, but consistently in all of our personalities are big personalities. My parents always say that was my mom. Like, you just have to do what you have to do so you can do what you want to do. And when you're younger, it's like, Yeah, you have to do your schoolwork so you can go play, right? And there are those different elements of it. But I think sometimes we see people online and we think, my goodness, they must love every aspect of their job. Let me tell you what's not fun about retail. It's not fun.
It's like two years ago when COVID was raging in Asia and people didn't really know about it in the U.S., it's also Christmas Eve and you're shipping your first product to Target and you don't know if it's getting out of the port and you're freaking out. Those are the things when I literally would go into shipping mode, anything could happen. Containers could get stalled. Like these are all things I needed to be aware of. Is the paperwork correct? When they're asking for paperwork, you absolutely have to present it, right. You're talking about product being shipped between countries. There's customs, immigrant like tons of stuff. Not the most fun part of product creation. But I would always say to myself, I just have to do what I have to do so I can do what I want to do. What I love to do is design products, but what I have to do is make sure my paperwork is tight, make sure my products are submitted correctly, and all these different systems, these are all critical things that decide if the product gets on shelves or if it doesn't get on shelves. And so it always for me, we kind of go back to like, but just do what you have to do so you can do what you want to do.

Phoebe
Okay. Backing up a little bit, the agency life. Why did you end up leaving the agency

Tina Wells
So funny, I was having this conversation with a friend yesterday who's also in the agency business and I was saying, Look, it's been five years since I decided to close. And what I realized five years ago was that agencies were going to go through like a really significant shift in what clients needed, like what consumers were doing, like all the things we're seeing now play out with algorithms and like the whole game was just changing. And I think you always have to know when your industry is changing and in that moment you have a decision either you're going to agree to change with it or you're going to pivot. And I knew exactly the changes that needed to happen. I just did not want to make them. I'd realized I'd gotten good at the thing, but I was not passionate about marketing the way I probably was in my early thirties or definitely in my twenties. Like I would eat, sleep, breathe, marketing and that's not how I felt. I started to really feel a passion around content creation. That's when I realized, okay, this is the thing I'm good at. I would be in my 80%. I need to get to the thing that would put me into my zone of genius. That's a hard conversation to have because so many of us do things we're good at, but we don't get to exist in our zone of genius because we don't allow ourselves to get beyond the 80%.

Phoebe
Can you talk more about the Zone of genius?

Tina Wells
Yeah, it's just like when I don't know how to say it. For me, it's like the birds are humming. Or you could just do something all day and you wake up and it's like, I need to have dinner. Like it's when the whole idea of

Phoebe
Like a flow state

Tina Wells
Yeah, when you're really in flow and, like, time goes away and you feel like I could do this, I would do this thing. Even if no one paid me to do this thing. I was just watching the Grammys, so I think it was so funny listening to Taylor Swift talk about the entire process of making music for her. She could just do it all day long, and it's the thing she loves to do the most. And I think when people are in their zone of genius that really comes across, you really can tell when someone is in flow.
And there are times when you can tell when someone's like, really good at something. Maybe they're faking that. That's their thing, but they're really good at it. And then you're like, Yeah, that person's really good at it. But when someone is really in flow, let's say you're watching an athlete and they're performing in a way that's like they're existing in their own space, we can identify when we see people in flow.

Phoebe
Yeah, 100%. The Grammys. And Taylor is– I'm a big Taylor fan, so I've been thinking about that a lot, too. I mean, she hit this record, the first person to win four Albums of the year, and she was like, But I actually just care about the work. Like I actually just enjoy doing this thing. And I was actually thinking about that myself, this morning. And I'm like, Why am I so stressed right now? I'm doing something I love like there is no rush. Like, how can I settle into that moment without thinking about the other stuff? Because sometimes even when I'm in my flow state, I haven't given myself enough space to be in that flow state. And I'm thinking about the rest of my to do list and that's the stuff that we have to do and I don't want to do that sort of creeps in.

Tina Wells
Yeah. And in my book I talk about these four phases of the elevation approach, and the first is preparation, which is really how I live my day this way. So I set my day in the preparation phase in the morning. Afternoon as inspiration or late morning to afternoon. So that's when I'm like doing conversations like these meetings. Meetings, like where I'm most visible and then I have to pause for recreation and that can be 15 minutes, it can be an hour. But it's the time when, like you said, you let all those thoughts kind of go away. It's just like, I'm not going to focus on my work for a little bit of time to literally give my brain the opportunity to almost, like, clean out all the stuff. And then I go into transformation just the last phase, and that's what lets me get things done. I think if anyone feels like I can't get out of my head or I'm feeling a little stuck, sometimes just taking 15 minutes, I don't care if you go play a game, I don't care if you go watch, like Grammy’s, gossip videos, like whatever will just get you out of your head for a little bit. You'll come back and you'll be way more collected and connected.

Phoebe
Yes, absolutely. We're not machines. We need to, like, make space for all the stuff. We need to make space for our brain to, like, pause, space for joy, space for movement, all of that good stuff.

Tina Wells
Yeah, So true.


Phoebe
Why don't you tell us a little bit about your retail course that's coming up?


Tina Wells
Yeah. I'm so excited about this. So I just started with my team. It's funny, when I started in retail at first I got some onboarding docs and I was looking at that and I'm like, okay, I've built a lot of business and seen the back end of a lot of businesses. But retail is a behemoth. It's own language. It's rare you go into an industry like medicine, there are few, but they literally have their own language for how things work. And I went through the process and I remember thinking this was like three years ago. One day I hope I can write something that will make it as easy as possible for people to succeed at business. Right? And so many big retailers have these enormous goals and desires to work and partner with smaller businesses. I think sometimes people don't realize that there are businesses in these retailers like Target that are run by one or two people. So really small teams trying to make a big impact. You've got really big retailers who want to work with smaller brands. And what's kind of missing in between is the real knowledge from an entrepreneur, from a founder who has done it as to what those steps really feel like, because it's one thing for a retailer to give you a document and say, here's all of that you're going to do. It's another thing for you to understand how to make a bill of exchange, how to pick a banking partner, how to understand how picking a banking partner in a retail business is even different than a bank you do business with every day. I felt like my path into retail was really mysterious and hidden and people don't love to share information. And obviously the retailers are so busy they'll help you as much as they can. But they're like, Our job is to get the product on the shelves and get it sold. We're giving you an opportunity. Here's how we work. But you really need to do your research to understand how the whole retail machine works. I really was sitting with my team and saying, if I could have had a guide, if I could have had a program that would have showed me everything I needed to know about retail, what would that look like? And then that's what we went and created. It's an accelerator. We want it to move quickly. But the goal is to really help small businesses do better business with big retailers. As we talked earlier, it is such a huge moment to get your product on the shelves. My goal is to help it stay there.

Phoebe
I love it, so exciting. Well, we will have all that information in the show notes about how you can sign up and how you can find Tina. Do you want to give us a couple more details about the book as well that we can give that a read?

Tina Wells
Yeah. And you know what? The book is also a workbook. And so if you're like me and you like to really write and things, I suggest the workbook for the elevation approach. It was really important for me that we didn't just do a book, that we also did a workbook and there are many more exercises in the workbook that are really focused on keeping you in this work life harmony flow. And just as a quick explanation, I choose the terminology work life harmony over work life balance. The idea of balance is that if you have more work, you need more play and you're just adding a lot more things and it doesn't give you the feeling you want. Harmony in my opinion, it's like a plate that's full of your favorite foods that like, you know, that meal that works together.
You know, when a flavor comes in, that's not quite right. That's what we're trying to really achieve, is that harmony of like not piling things up, having just the right amount of thing on our plate and knowing when something is working. The book is a great overview for that, and the workbook will help you really work all principles.

Phoebe
I love your plate analogy. That's super fun. Okay, Tina. Well, this has been absolutely incredible. Thank you so much for joining us.

Tina Wells
Phoebe, this has been so, so fun. And I've loved every question, and I'm just grateful to you for having me.

Phoebe
Thank you so much, Tina.

OUTRO

Phoebe Sherman: Thank you so much for listening to the Girl Gang Craft Podcast. Head to Girlgangcraft.com/podcast for shownotes and more. See you next time.