Girl Gang Craft Podcast Episode #94 “Anne Fletcher On Finding Grounding, Nurturing Your Business, and Starting A Garden”

Phoebe Sherman interview with Anne Fletcher

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.


Phoebe
Hello creatives, happy August! How on earth did that happen? This is actually our last podcast for a little bit. We are taking a summer hiatus. I need a break. A podcast manager needs a break. I'm going on my honeymoon. We're going to take a little moment to reconfigure some things behind the scenes and to just, like, feel. Sometimes we just need to take a pause. So this is our last episode for a little B&B. So I hope you tune in and you can use this little break time to listen to old episodes that you haven't listened to. There are so many good episodes throughout our. This is episode 90 for you all, so there's almost 100 episodes for you to listen to. Anyways, if you are listening this this morning when it comes out, we have our Sacramento event tonight. GGC x Art Mix at the Crocker Art Museum. So if you got this on time and you're like ready to come to Sacramento, I will personally be there. And you can get tickets at Girlgangcraft.com/events or Crockerart.org/events. Hope to see you there. Would love to give you a hug. Meet you. I'm so excited. I'm so freakin excited. And it's a pajama party, so please dress up.

Okay, so apps are open for our Sacramento holiday show, our Providence show, and our Malden show. So if you want to vend with us at any of those events, go ahead and get your application. And, our apps are closed currently for Oakland and Salem holiday events. They're just are really most popular events, but you can join the waitlist in the application form as well. Please give us a five star review. We would love to hear from you. What did you like about an episode? Did it help you with something? What did you learn? We want to hear it and we want you to share with friends. Please, please please please please. And you can also call us up. Call the hotline with your small business questions at (413) 961-0855. Just leave a message and you can ask us specifically things about like brand partnerships or email marketing or craft fair vending, really whatever. And we'll do our best to answer. Okay. We have a conversation with Anne Fletcher Orta Kitchen Garden. Fun story. So she was at has done her GGC events in Oakland back in the day. And then her studio was like right behind my house. So that's always fun. And yeah, I got to teach at UC Berkeley to her class as well. So really exciting to have her on the podcast. Orta Kitchen Garden began as a dream to create tools that promote gardening and connect people to nature. In 2011, founder Anne Fletcher made the first self-watering seed pot as a solution to the problem of sustaining delicate herb seedlings on her kitchen counter. In her design, water is drawn as needed from the pot’s terracotta reservoir. After a year in her garage experimenting and teaching herself ceramics, she refined her dream into the Sixie Seed Pot, a responsibly-made product that is beautiful enough to display. Eager to align her professional life as a product designer with her environmental values, Anne started Orta Kitchen Garden.Anne is offering GGC listeners a free self-watering pot when they sign up for her newsletter. So we're going to drop that link to sign up in the show notes. Get that free Self-watering pot. I'm gonna get it. I'm so excited. Let's get into the episode.

Hey Anne, welcome to the Girl Gang Craft Podcast.

Anne
Hello.

Phoebe
Thanks for being here.

Anne
I am so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Phoebe
Of course. So why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do for work?

Anne
So my name is Anne and I am the founder and owner of Orta Kitchen Garden, where we make self-watering pots that make it really easy to start seeds. And I've been doing that for about ten years. I've also spent a lot of time teaching customer research for entrepreneurship at both Stanford and Berkeley, and I trained as a designer. So my specialty is in product design and research and development of new products. And I still do that freelance from time to time.

Phoebe
How did Orta come about from your love of gardening or you're looking to find a solution? Can you tell us a little bit more about that journey?

Anne
It wasn't love, it was failure. Definitely. Maybe ten, 12 years ago I was working full time as a design consultant, so I was flying all over the place to do research for customers. So I wasn't home enough to take care of seedlings. So literally every time I left, I would kill my plants. And I love to cook, I love food and I love herbs, and I wanted to grow physically some interesting flavors that you couldn't buy in the grocery store and you couldn't buy them. It starts. The only way you can have those flavors was to grow them from seed. So I was like, I am going to figure this out, grow some seeds, and I would get them to sprout, and then I would go away, and then I would come back and they would be dead. I just started building all these little contraptions with like, wicks and little dishes of water and various ways to kind of keep them watered while I was gone. And they were so ugly. And finally, I actually took some time off from work, like I just kind of had a break between projects, and then I sort of enforced the boundaries of that break. And I went took pottery classes for a month to figure out how to make, like, a prettier version of these ugly things. I was making just for fun. And they turned out to be super cute. And as they were coming out of the kiln, the people at the pottery class, they were like, oh my goodness, what is that? It's so cute. I want one! And I was like, oh, this is a desirable object. Even before people know that it's off, water is your seeds. And so that was kind of how it started. But I was totally I had a full time job doing freelance design consulting. So it was many, many years transitioning from a couple prototypes that I made at a pottery studio to making a few more of them in my garage, but still going to the studio to fire them to, eventually getting a kiln and moving into a little bigger space a little by little over many years.

Phoebe
Can I ask what flavors you weren't getting in the Bay area? So I'm very curious about that.

Anne
You have to remember, this is 12 years ago, and it was Thai basil where I could get really good Thai basil at the Vietnamese restaurant with my foot, but I couldn't really just pocket it and take it home like I wanted a lot of that. So that was the main one. And then there were also really interesting tomato varieties that I wanted to just grow for myself and see if I could do it, because you can get a lot. I mean, at the farmer's market, if you're lucky, you get really good ones, right? They're delicious, but they also kind of tend to fall into the same general categories. But there are so many that are available that you can't get at the farmer's market or as seedling starts, there's just these breeders making these really interesting new varieties, but they only have a tiny amount of seed and it's like a whole subspecialty of different flavors.

Phoebe
Are you gardening in your yard also? So you're growing from seeds and then gardening.

Anne
I mean I am now back then I was failing at it like I was getting seedlings to a certain point and then they would die every once in a while I'll get one. But I was a real beginner. I didn't understand about watering very well or sun, which we didn't have very much of. So I started growing in like buckets on the roof, and I had to get to it with a ladder, and it worked to some extent. But now, many years later, I can actually do it and with some confidence know that like the seeds that I sew in March really will turn into tomatoes this year. But it's been a long time.

Phoebe
I mean, that's a beautiful thing because I'm a beginning gardener also, and it has been a struggle for me here. First of all, I'm dealing with seasons over here. Reminds me I'm in the Bay area, right? So that's been really interesting. Like things are quick if you miss a seedling situation, if you miss like putting something in the ground like that window is gone super quickly. Whereas in the Bay area it's a little bit more forgiving. We're dealing with some of that and we're dealing with woodchucks aka also groundhogs, which I don't know if they exist. I mean you have what are the little ones like the multiverse crackers. Yeah. Yeah. Well we have woodchucks and they're like wild.

Anne
They're huge. Oh wow. But they burrow like the burrow like gophers.

Phoebe
And they're so tall also. Oh, wow. You really kind of have like, this wide range of, like them being able to mess up your plants, which has been a journey.

Anne
Anyways the Gophers are definitely a journey and we can talk about that more if you want to.

Phoebe
Which are already hard enough to grow. And then you have to deal with them not being attacked by other beings. It's hard work.

Anne
It is. It really, really is. And little by little, it's like you build up your strategies over time. Like, I'm an extremely good gopher trapper. Now, which I didn't used to be. And it used to make me squeamish. But now I'm like, yeah, I got this. No problem.

Phoebe
So you set up those cages?

Anne
I actually use a trap called the gopher Hawk, which I feel like they should be paying me at this point because it's the only one I use, and they work super, super well.

Phoebe
Okay.

Anne
But I also, you have to just get to know how gophers, you have to track them. I mean, it's literally something I do every day. I like walk around, check the perimeter for like go for activity daily.

Phoebe
I love it. I mean it's a we chopped one woodchuck successfully.

Anne
Yes.

Phoebe
We call it up like a city and we're like, can you come get this? And they're like, the city never responded. And like my guy responded, he's like $125 for me to come pick this up. I like we can go get rid of the woodchuck on our own. So Matt, like, drops the gopher off at the golf course, comes back in the yard, sees another one immediately. He's against stuff anyway. Yeah.

Anne
Yeah. Mammals. Mammals are worst by far. One of the things I've noticed actually, over the years is that the more I leave things alone, like no pesticides ever, no herbicides ever. And in fact, I leave a lot of plants to flower where you normally wouldn't like. For example, right now I have kale flowering in the garden, and a lot of those leaving things alone allows like the base insect populations to grow, which then attracts the predators, which then actually makes it so you have fewer pest problems. It's a really counterintuitive strategy that honestly comes out of it's only semi intentional. I guess. But over the years I've noticed we have way, way more birds in the garden, way more butterflies, way more ladybugs and other predator insects, and way less insect damage. I think at this point I don't worry about that kind of thing at all. But I do worry about mammals. As mammals, it's just a whole other situation.

Phoebe
You've sort of like reached more higher up on the food chain.

Anne
But exactly. Yeah, because every time you spray a pesticide, for example, you kill all the insects, including all the predator insects, right? And those guys are much slower to reproduce. So then like the prey insects, which are like the aphids and the caterpillars like the cabbage worms that are going to come along and eat your crops, those guys reproduce really fast so they come surging back and then the predators aren't there. So you then have to be really patient and allow all of the predators to come back. And little by little you've got a whole team of just super hungry predator insects and birds just hanging around waiting for snacks.

Phoebe
Fascinating. I know we'll get back into entrepreneurship, but since we've sort of gone down the gardening hall, what is your favorite crop to grow?

Anne
Lettuce. Lettuce? I know it's so boring, but it's not a good lettuce. It's like the best thing ever. It's so crisp and juicy and there are so many varieties for like every size and shape and color and season of the year. So I pretty much grow lettuce year round.

Phoebe
Do you have a favorite lettuce varietal?

Anne
Oh, Makola is one of my favorites. It's like a small heading. Lettuce. It's really, really juicy. I love one called Brown Goldring, which is a romaine type but just super, super easy to grow like it grows all the way through the summer and almost never bolts. I'd say those are my two go tos that are just really easy and flavorful. I mean, I love little gem, but it's a little bit of a hassle to grow because it's so small. You have to make a lot of them, and a lot of the other fresh lettuces are just as tasty, but they're kind of more unusual and they're bigger. So you get more food for the effort.

Phoebe
And you're starting everything from seeing that, especially lettuce.

Anne
Yeah, because it's super, super easy and it's very expensive to buy. Lettuce starts buying a let us start is almost the same price as buying like a whole head of lettuce.

Phoebe
Interesting. Do you have a least favorite craft that you go.

Anne
Oh, if it's something I don't like to grow, I just stop growing it. For me, it's anything that's really high maintenance or that tends to boil really fast. Most of the like bok choy family toy varieties, those ones are tough for whatever reason. I'm not sure if it's our weather or the watering or anything, but they tend to bolt before they make those nice little heads that you find in the store. So I tend to buy those rather than grow them. A lot of things that require heat. So in fact, tomatoes are tricky for me because we're here in the bay where it's cool in the summer, it's like dry, but it's cool. We don't get that lovely heat, the tomatoes like. So I've started growing varieties now from some breeders who have bred specifically for California's cool nights, and those are working super, super well. So for the first time as of last year, I can get like full size, delicious, juicy tomatoes, which I wasn't able to do before. So before that I was only growing really like cherry tomatoes, the smaller ones, or like the Stupids, which is an heirloom that can be in colder areas because every time I tried like a beefsteak or the Cherokee purples, those are all kind of bigger, delicious ones. I would get like one tomato if I was lucky.

Phoebe
That's so interesting. And then here, like, that's my easiest crop because you just get blasted with that heat and so intense like the last frost.

Anne
Yeah, exactly. And now that I've got these varieties that are bred to grow here, it's amazing. I'm suddenly getting not quite what you would get on the East Coast or like in L.A., but I'm actually having some success, which is great.

Phoebe
I love it. Okay, back to entrepreneurship stuff. So tell us about how sort of the beginning moment of you creating your product, what.

Anne
Caveat here, which is that for me that's the easiest part because I trained as a designer. Making stuff for me was just kind of like almost a hobby. And so the business side of it has been what was has been really hard for me. So making the product originally. So we make our products from molds. I had to carve the positive form, like what it looked like, but it was made of plaster so hard and then making a mold from that, which then you can pour clay into the mold to get the form. But it's just a really technical kind of molding project, which is one of my favorite things in the whole world to do. I just was like tinkering away at that happy, happy, happy for a while. And I was making them in my garage at that point, the pottery studio where I was going for classes, they didn't have the kind of equipment and space because you use liquid clay for the process. We do, and it's super messy. And they were like, no, no, no, we don't do that here. But I was using their kiln, so I was kind of going back and forth. So I kind of set up a table in the garage to have the molds lined up. I mean, it was a total mess, like it was spilled out onto the driveway and I had like buckets of clay everywhere. And that was a good time. It was just classic. We were living in Palo Alto at the time because my husband was in school, so it was like the classic start up in a garage, except it had nothing to do with tech. It was just clay. So that was the beginning. And then I went to a trade show for vegetables called the Heirloom Expo, which used to be up in Santa Rosa and has since kind of reinvented itself down in Ventura. And I haven't been since. In those years. It was like a really interesting festival of people interested in heirloom vegetables. So I took them there, kind of like I wonder what happens. And the booths were like super cheap. I got the outside booth because it was the cheapest and it was like 100 degrees every day. But I sold out on the second day and it was like, oh, okay, this might be a thing. But like at the time, I still had a full time job. I was like, Maybe I'll go somewhere with this. I made a website, I got a few wholesale accounts from that show, and little by little added products to the product line. I did a Kickstarter at one point because I needed to make a much more specialized mold for our next size up, just because at that scale, I wasn't really sure how to make kind of the master molds, which is what you use to make more molds of the same thing. So that's a pretty technical discipline, which I've since learned, because paying someone else to do it, it's very expensive and very time consuming. So now I do that in-house. But at the time I did a Kickstarter to be able to pay for those molds, and that kind of got me started with my initial client list, and I've just kind of been slowly building from there.

Phoebe
Yeah. What does that slow build look like? How are you getting the word out beyond that initial customer base? What are some sort of techniques that you are using?

Anne
Oh gosh. Okay. So there have been so many because it's been a lot of years. I also need to give you a shout out because I don't know if you remember this, but I took one of your marketing classes a long time ago. It was post Kickstarter for me, but pre doing really any kind of marketing and I was really intimidated. Like I said, the technical side of this is really easy for me. I'm a kid who like played with Legos and mud. I like building stuff, but so like how to tell the story and how to put myself out there. It was really, really uncomfortable and I remember taking your class and there was a lot of good information in it, like technical stuff about how to do the things. But the real takeaway for me now, looking back on it, is that I felt like empowered to do it. It was something I could figure out that maybe somebody like me actually could be a marketer, because at the time, marketing was like this big flashing neon scary thing. But you helped to like, break it down into manageable chunks. But I was like, oh, okay. I can think about email and I can think about Instagram and what they're for. And I mean I'm still that same person who's nervous about marketing. I still feel a little uncomfortable kind of putting myself out there. But what I've found over the years, the thing that works best for me is actually email marketing, partly because it's written and I like writing, and it's a calmer channel. Before the pandemic, I was doing, I think the newsletter at that point was still monthly. It might have been weekly, I kind of forget, but I was doing Instagram daily, and when the pandemic hit, my daughter was five and suddenly my husband and I, both of our work hours were just cut in half like, boom, a lot of things had to fall by the wayside. Almost overnight, I stopped doing Instagram. I was just I just don't have the hours. I doubled down on email, which has been my main channel ever since, and there are a lot of different ways that I grow the list. The slow and steady is just like the pop up on the website that you see everywhere, like 10% off your first order. When you sign up. And that's kind of a slow and steady. Then I do various collaborations with other creators, with giveaways where we support one another, and I've also worked with various other companies where I'm like, the bonus that comes with something else, where then I give away a free product, but they're helping cover the cost of it so that it's like the person gets a freebie as a gift. I get their email address, and then that can kind of grow it. So there's lots of different ways to go about it. And in fact, I mean, I'm always looking for something new. Of course, lots of people do the same thing, and once too many people have done the same thing, it doesn't work anymore. So I find that it's kind of always changing, like the whole put an interesting lead magnet of like. Download this PDF printable for your email address. Most people at this point are like, yeah, know or whatever, I don't really care. That isn't really working. So I'm kind of always strategizing for what's the next thing. And so far, what I'm finding is just being genuine about what I offer as far as product and about story and the sustainability of our brand and what the product will do for you and the fact that the newsletter is it's really informational and is going to help you along those goals towards really growing your own from seed, succeeding with your seeds, and succeeding in your garden from a perspective of like somebody who's not a natural green thumb, like I work really hard at it. If I can kind of tell that story, then like minded people show up and then they stick around. So that's kind of the strategy that's been working.

Phoebe
Are you doing wholesale?

Anne
I do wholesale, yeah. And again, with the pandemic, I stopped focusing quite so much on wholesale because I have a few bigger wholesale customers who still do wholesale, but the ratio of like work to invoice, depending on the size of the store, can really not really work out that well. A bigger invoice or a bigger plan totally makes sense.

Phoebe
Are those big orders garden stores then?

Anne
Generally, let's see. Hudson Valley seed is a big one for us. They're a big seed company. And then also terrain, which is more in your part of the world. It's a chain of high end garden stores. We tend not to be a great fit for nurseries. I mean, in some ways we're competing with them directly because we so the equipment to start your own starts and also our price point doesn't make that much sense for them. Think about going into a nursery. Everything there costs like $8.99. It's like plastic trays and bottles of fertilizer, plastic bags of stuff. It's very plasticky and cheap, which in some ways I'm not even like saying it is wrong with that. It's just that's that world and our pots and the price point is a lot higher. They pay for themselves really quickly. When you think about like a tomato plant costs, what does it cost where you are, it's like 4 or $5 here. If you have a pot that gives you 12, it pays for itself after you use it a few times, and they last for years and years and years. So the economics works out, but it doesn't really work out in the context of a store where something cost $150 and it's next to something that cost $6.99.

Phoebe
Is that your price point? $150

Anne
$!50 is our highest, and the lowest end is $43. And I'll also say this here for your listeners. We have, factory seconds, like a secret factory seconds page where everything is deeply discounted. So you could start at $25.


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Phoebe
So yeah, how do you differentiate yourself as a higher price item? What do you do to attract those people who can afford your item?

Anne
It's so hard. I'll tell you when I figure it out, maybe. I think a lot of what we do is we just have to tell the story in more ways than you otherwise would right. Like if you're selling a mug for $5 and it's got a cute pattern, people are like, oh, great mug. Like, I know what a mug is. I know what it does. And the patterns. Cute. Done. We just have a lot more storytelling to do. Like how does it work? How well does it work? So we need a lot of testimonials, video and then also telling the story about our sustainability angle. Because we use no toxins in our clay, which is unusual. Most terracotta anyway has barium carbonate in it for example, which helps keep the surface tidier. It like takes some of the salts out so you don't get like a white sort of almost powdery look on the surface. Sometimes when I was first making clay, it was just on the ingredient list. So I was just being a good student and following the ingredient list until I learned what it is, which is rat poison, and that its function in the clay was purely that cosmetic surface. I was like, oh, I totally don't need that, and I do not want this just hanging around, right?

Phoebe
To go in your food and to go and the thing that you're using to make food.

Anne
Exactly. Yeah. No, I should say so that people don't get worried about their terracotta pot if it's fired properly, it does not leach out into your food. It's part of the clay body and stays in and it's chemically inert once it's fired. I wouldn't say like you have to buy my stuff like, oh, or else everything else is toxic. It's not. But sometimes firing isn't perfect. And also mostly it was on our end. Like, I don't want that liquid. There's lots of clay for example, like it gets on the floor and then you have to like, clean it up. And so it's in the mop water. Whatever was in the clay is in your mop water, which then goes in the sewer or it goes, we actually mostly use our mop water to water plants outside. So then that's how it would get in our plants. And we do that at kind of every level. So we only fire once at low fire temperatures, which most terracotta again is fired twice because it's just an easier way to handle the materials. We fire once to save the energy, which means we had to go back and reformulate the glazes so that they would work in a single fire. But just like it's turtles all the way down, we do it with the packaging too, like we package with zero plastic, which is a whole thing when you're shipping pottery to not use bubble wrap. It's bubble wrap is very easy and very cheap, and it's absolutely the standard. But we don't do that. So we have like a whole knowledge base of how to ship pottery without breaking and also without using plastic. That's a big part of the story is all the way through is the sustainability, the safety. And our pots are guaranteed for life too. You can return it for any reason, at any time, forever. And strangely, the reason I can have a guarantee like that too, is nobody ever does.

Phoebe
So what is your team look like today?

Anne
So we're two full timers, one in production and me on basically everything else. I've got a new person. We're going to be three full timers starting on Thursday. I'm about to hand off all of the shipping, packaging, logistics side of things, which is going to be amazing. And I have a remote part time administrative assistant who helps me stay organized, and a part time assistant doing Instagram. Because I don't know if you've noticed, Instagram for us is alive again recently and it has very little to do with me. Like I give her the content, but she posts it. She tells me what she wants me to do because still, just the hours on Instagram is too much for the rest of the stuff I've got to do.

Phoebe
But you find that being on Instagram is helpful.

Anne
It's an experiment right now. We will see. So we have a landing page that comes straight from Instagram so we can follow. If anybody's signing up to the newsletter and the numbers aren't that big, it seems like the other sorts of more targeted newsletter collaborations work better.

Phoebe
Are you running ads right now?

Anne
I think I've run ads maybe twice, and they haven't worked for me at all, and it might be because I'm not sophisticated enough in how to do it. But the ROI on ads for me has literally never worked. Not even close. I don't know what you teach about doing ads, but it's a whole black art that I just like, have no idea.

Phoebe
Ads are out. I don't know what I teach about ads. I generally say that it's easier to pay for leads, like if you were to do an ad for your lead magnet or something. That's what we do. We do ads for our lead magnets and then ads for our events. But I am about to hire someone to be a professional because our ads keep on getting flagged like it's constant and I don't have time for that. Like we get because girl is in our name. It's discriminatory. So it's like every single ad gets flagged and then I have to like readjust, readjust, readjust. And it's sort of like a numbers game. And it's like I monitoring it and you can't get a real person. So I mean that's quite a rabbit hole to get down. Oh, we won't waste our time. But yeah it's a lot. Yeah.

Anne
And I haven't had that exact experience. But that's basically what happens to me every time. Like I try and run an ad and then something goes wrong and there's no one to talk to. There's no support at all. And in fact, I even had from when I ran an ad on Facebook, I was doing some kind of promotion. I forget what, but I ran an ad for like a month just to see what would happen. And then I turned it off and it was connected to an account like an income account that I don't monitor a whole lot because it's an automatic account that then just transfers into my bank account. Facebook did not turn the ads off. Facebook continues taking out the money, but it was like little by little they were just like siphoning it off. And I had checked to like it was like I logged in campaign off Facebook, taking money from my account, but because it wasn't my main account, I wasn't monitoring it quite as closely. So by the time I noticed it, it was $1,000 that Facebook had been taking. But like in five and $10 amounts and like I raised hell about it and sent in all these complaints and it took forever because like you said, it's like AI, you get bots, but finally I made enough of a stink that they did eventually refund it all because I was like taking all the screenshots. I'm like, this is an ad that's turned off and it's like very obviously turned off. So yeah. And then of course, because once they've got your information, then they can just sort of say, like, I'm sure we'll just start raising the rates on you, all these other things.

Phoebe
So that's a wild I tried to while we're talking chat about meta, I tried to boost a video for our Providence event, and now Apple is getting a piece of the puzzle. If you do it on your phone. So you like, let's say you want to do a $200 ad. Now Apple's charging a fee. They're like, Apple is going to charge a fee okay. So you think it's going to be what, $3 whatever. And it was $50. Apple's adding on like a $50 fee. I'm sure that raises depending on how much of the ad is from. Apple wants a $50 fee for my Facebook ad, which is wild. And then, like I even said to like, balance it, they're taking a part of the Apple fee also. So there's it's like double dipping. Wow. And so my ad, I had started it two weeks ago and it didn't even go through the whole time because it kept on, you know, and so and we're trying to give the money to and we're trying to being an entrepreneur, it's so fun. I know I would love to talk a little bit about your class. So used to teach at Stanford and Berkeley, and I was a guest at your Berkeley class, which was so fun. Tell us, I don't know, some of the key takeaways that you saw working with maybe people who are excited to be an entrepreneur. I don't know. What were some of those themes that you all discussed in class?

Anne
Okay, so I'm going to cut right to the chase because I've been doing this for a long time. There's a party line. It's like anybody can be an entrepreneur. You just have a good idea. You get in front of the venture capitalists, you'll get funding and like, yay, you're the next Mark Zuckerberg. And it's so not the truth. Especially now with interest rates where they are. Venture capital is a real long shot. And everybody I know who is eventually gotten it has pretty much always regretted it. You basically lose control of whatever it was you were doing.

Phoebe
It's no longer your business, it's someone else's business.

Anne
Exactly. And I think for some businesses it really makes sense because there are certain business models where you have to grow super, super fast and get market share and then reap the rewards of it. And so it's a different kind of transaction. It's a whole different thing. But it's not the only way. I guess it's kind of the upside of the classes that I've been teaching for years and years, even though most entrepreneurship classes and seminars, etc. it's all about like, how are you going to pitch to the venture capitalists to get your funding? That seems to be like the way marriage is the happy ending of the rom com, but then it like completely doesn't talk about anything that happens after the wedding, which is actually the rest of your life. I think a lot of entrepreneurship education is all about like getting to that pitch and getting the first bit of funding. But it's a whole lot that comes after that. And there's also a lot of different ways to do it. There's lots and lots of other funding options out there. The first, which is just like, you can bootstrap, you can do it little by little. You can do it with loans from a bank like banks actually do. Just give traditional loans. If you have a good business plan and good credit. There are lots and lots of government programs actually that are fascinating. And we had a whole speaker last year come talk about that. And it was fascinating because she's been working in that world for years. And she's like, look, the government funding, it's a pain because you have to do so much more paperwork to get the funding, but it's a lot more secure and there's a lot more of it. And they don't own your business. When you're done right. Like there's a huge upfront work to get the money, but you don't have the back end work of then having your business owned by someone else. One of the biggest takeaways over the years is how many students come in thinking, I'm gunning for venture capital, but most businesses are not venture funded. Most businesses have come into being in lots and lots and lots of other ways. Yeah, I think that's the big one. And the other one is that your first business idea is usually really bad, and it's going to take a lot of work, and that's okay. I remember one of my other marketing mentors from back in the day, when I was talking to her about branding and positioning. She was like, well, you don't have to have a brand right off the bat. A brand story develops, you try a little something and you talk about what it is now, but over time, your brand of choice will emerge, your brand look will emerge, and you can kind of refine it as you go. You don't have to start with a fully baked brand and a fully baked origin story. You can build it. And I think that was really helpful. It's not set in stone from the day you open your doors, and that's certainly been true for me over the years.

Phoebe
Yeah, I like that. I mean, you're branding stuff, logo design stuff too. I mean, we're on our third logo and about maybe had our fourth. Maybe the colors seem to be similar or the same. But I think that transition is I mean, if you see McDonald's or Apple, all of those logos have definitely changed. And I think the storytelling thing is interesting also because it's all about like where you start with the story too. I think that can be interesting. And like, I don't know, even your business can develop so much to like give yourself the opportunity to not stay so stock in. Why your business is because your business could be something totally different and five years from now.

Anne
Oh yeah. Absolutely. Because certainly that's happened with me that some categories like grow and some shrink over time. And you have to kind of be watching that to see where the interest is. That's like from the perspective of being more than ten years in. And I think one of the things that happens a lot with students is kind of this sense of like, I got to get it right. Right now, it's got to be perfect, and this is what I'm going to do. And what always strikes me is how like the numbers are insane. They're insanely wrong. They always have the wrong number of zeros in one way or the other. As far as like what our original business plan is and our projections and like how much things cost, it's super important to do those exercises, but also super important to get a lot of feedback because it's not intuitive.The first round numbers are always horrible, and you have to really, like dial it back and be like, really? You're going to have 250,000 customers in the first six months, maybe from zero. Like that's a big number and it can happen and maybe like two years, if you've got a really aggressive marketing program and you're selling something pretty inexpensive. But how do you get 250,000 customers? If you kind of drill down, you think it through. It's like each one of those is a person. How do you get each one or it can often go the other way where it's like, well, I'm going to have 400 customers and I am going to have a payroll of like $700,000 a year. You realize you're getting a lot of money from each of those customers. How are you going to do that anyway? That's one of the things also that comes on. And then I guess I haven't even gotten really to the expertise. What I really teach is research and how to understand your customers on an individual level, rather than a business plan level. Obviously, it's an entire semester class, so I can't really do it here, but I would say the main thing to think about, if you're interested in it, is to look up ethnographic research. That's generally what it's called, and it's about doing deep dive interviews with people to figure out where the needs are for products and services that they're not really even aware of themselves. Because if you start a new business in a spot where it's already pretty saturated, like we can go back to the mug example, like there's a ton of mugs out there to compete with all the other mugs. You have to work so hard at that. But if you make something that no one's ever seen before, you have a huge amount of space. Like we make a thing that nobody ever had in the world before and is really hard to make. It's given us a lot more runway to get started and a lot more space, because nobody's competing with us directly. I mean, people are competing with nursery starts and all sorts of other kind of seed starting tools have been out there. But specifically what we do, we're the only ones that do it and have been for ten years, like we've had ten whole years of nobody really doing the same thing. There have been some knock offs. There was one on Amazon where they literally lifted all of our photography. Basically, it's defunct now and it got like horrible reviews. People like, this thing doesn't even work. Well, yeah, because it's hard to do it right. The way that you get into that territory is to really listen to what people are saying and listen for the gaps, and that usually comes from places of people telling you stories about things that didn't fit this one time this thing happened, and people only really tell a story when something is out of place, right? So you listen to the stories people tell. If people keep telling the same story over and over again, you get to a place where you can kind of hear that there's a cognitive dissonance. One of the ones that I heard over and over again, and many years ago, but gardeners would be showing me around their garden, and we would get to a point where they would be like, I'm not really sure I want to show you back here. Be like, oh, look, it'll be it'll be fine. Let's go see. I'm not going to judge. Right, and I don't that's part of the job of another graphic interview is not to judge. And they would show me the corner where they had stashed all of the empty six pack containers from the pots, the plants that they had bought, and there'd be piles and piles of them. Some of them were tidy, some of them were just like tossed in a corner, but they were all dirty and they were all covered in cobwebs, never to be used again. Literally every single one of them told me some version of exactly the same story of like, well, I'm saving them to use them again, but I haven't really figured out how or it just hasn't come up yet or whatever, but they couldn't bring themselves to throw this away because it seemed useful. And yet it's totally not useful because it's really high maintenance to use those as far as the watering goes, and they break and they're basically garbage once you've used them. But it's very hard to come to terms with that. And so when you have multiple people in a row tell you the same story, that's kind of your clue as an entrepreneur or as a designer, that there's a gap, that there's something if you can develop a service, product or business that fits in that gap, you're going to have carved out a territory that isn't occupied right now. That's kind of what I've been teaching for all these years and all the techniques to do that.

Phoebe
What is something that you saw your students get stuck on?

Anne
So there's a lot of ways to get stuck. A big one is simply in getting over the fear of going out and talking to strangers about their lives, because that is super uncomfortable, I think, especially now that we're more accustomed to communicating by text. We don't do as much just face to face conversations anymore with strangers, so just getting over that discomfort is a big one.I mean, there's really only one way to do it, which is to rip the Band-Aid off and just start go talking to people and over time, it gets easier. I'm totally an introvert, so for me, it's like I do it as a performance. I put on my interview person. I mean, you've seen me do it in class, right? Like that's me doing and the interviewer as a character. So I do it as a character and it makes it much, much easier. And over time you can kind of get into it and be like, oh, okay. Once I set it up in a certain way, it works. Is that another roadblock? I see a lot? Is being afraid of ideas that seem too weird of like censoring your ideas before they even get to the surface. And that's super, super hard. Because if you're going for a territory that no one's ever been in before, it's by definition going to be weird and not normal. But it feels really wrong to like, do something that isn't kind of a variation on something you've already seen before. I do a lot of activities with students to help them overcome that inner critic, and anybody can look it up on the internet. There's like a million sort of brainstorming, overcoming, like your inner censoring sorts of activities you can do, like kind of coming up with bad ideas instead of good ideas and various kind of games you can play to help yourself flip back and forth between the critical mind that says like, no, seriously, this is a bad idea, let's not do that. And the creative mind that's like, how about we try all these things? It's a fine balance, but most people fall much more into the category of like that. I'll never work. Let's not even try. And even when they're kind of feeling like they're pushing outside the boundary, it's still not very far outside the boundary. You can push a lot further and still not be totally into the territory of like, this really is an idea, like letting your hair on fire. Like, yeah, that truly, let's not do that. But short of that, what can we try?

Phoebe
Yeah, I think that's fascinating. And I see that a lot with our community, also. I think a lot of people are scared to think outside the box or they sort of stick to this safe, I mean, we've work with so many makers, right? This sort of same business model that they've seen everyone else do. It's really hard, I think, for a lot of people to sort of think about all like what other spaces can you take this to? There's so many cool options and expansive options that you might be interested in that might make you more revenue, might make you reach more folks like, etc.. I mean, I think that's a problem just with living in our capitalistic society, right? Things are very already built for us. And I think it's a really cool, interesting opportunity right now to figure out, especially in sort of niches that you're in too, like, how can we overcome the stuff that already exists, like, how can we use our imagination to think beyond what is to create better stuff?

Anne
Absolutely. And you bring up the real elephant in the room, which is that we're in a capitalistic society, and that's one that coming back to my business now for a minute is that I come up against a lot, and I also come up against it with students all the time who are like, I want to be an entrepreneur. I'm a maker by nature. I want to like, contribute something new, but I don't want to be a capitalist. I understand at the same time, like from students talking, like I understand at the same time that like climate change is a product of a capitalist society and the structures of constant growth and extraction. And yet I need to make a living in it, and I want to make physical things. WTF? It's something I struggle with all the time. I go round and round in circles, like how do I bring in revenue to pay expenses? And also honor my values, which are that I'm trying to build a company that is doing no harm. I'm trying to help. I'm trying to help people grow their own food and connect with nature in a way that feels healing and connects them to other non-human beings. I'm also doing it in the framework of capitalism and that's super hard.

Phoebe
Well, and I think there's so many ways to go about it too. I've talked about this before too. Right. There's anti capitalistic practices like profit sharing, making sure your team supported using sustainable materials. I personally am struggling with like stuff overconsumption and like while I use a lot of more sustainable local practices, I don't know, I'm just sort of toying with the stuff factor. There's so much there's so much to do and there are so many cool ways to sort of like push back against capitalism. But I know, like for a lot of our community too, they get sort of stuck and not even wanting to bring in money. So how do we sort of push back against the systems while also we gotta support ourself? Like, I would rather do that working for myself and trying to build the best company I can, then work for someone else personally.

Anne
And I would too. Absolutely. That's why I'm here. It's also like a real conundrum, because how am I supposed to tell my employees, like, I'm going to do this work for no money, so you have to work for free and not pay your rent until there's a system that allows people to not pay rent on the building and pay for your food. It's the system we're in currently, but I think it's really important you bring up the anti capitalistic practices you can be doing within it. And definitely profit sharing, something I've always done just super casually, because I'm not a profitable enough business to be big and have a formal process about that. But certainly every time I have a windfall, I just divide it up and that's that. Everybody get some. I wish there was something more than that. And of course, the other part of it is being a business, thinking about this sort of thing. When Amazon is out there shipping things overnight for free for me to ship. I was just looking at this because I had a customer who needed something rushed. Our basic shipping costs $10 usually, and they needed something overnight. The object that cost $10 to ship at regular pace was going to cost like $98 to ship overnight. Amazon does for free what costs me a $100 to do each time? What are you supposed to do? There's nothing to do really about that. Or maybe there is. And I hope some brilliant business minds are out there listening right now and can chime in because, like I said, I struggle on the business side more than on the technical side. I love glaze chemistry and creating products that don't have any toxins in them and getting into like the biology of seeds and plants and how to grow things and how to make that work super, super, super well. And I love writing a newsletter about all those details. But like the overarching umbrella of being a business in a capitalist world is tricky and I have no expertise and no great advice, only questions.

Phoebe
Only questions. I love it and hate it. I love it and hate it. I mean, we could talk for hours, but I think, do you have any sort of last minute or last pieces of wisdom that you want to bestow upon our community as they build their businesses? No pressure

Anne
Yeah. No, I would say a few things. One is that it's so hard just it is. And if it feels hard, that doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. Also, from my other life, the gardening side is that I would say that growing some plants and nurturing some plants is really healing and grounding. I find that it's one of the practices that helps me when I'm struggling with just the world, whatever it happens to be that day. But fingers in the dirt, watching things grow, it like takes you outside of time in a way and gives you that connection to the earth and to the other beings around you. That for me anyway, kind of calms my nervous system and allows me to reset and kind of live to fight another day. Obviously. Like getting out into like real nature on a real hike somewhere is extremely healing. But it's when I started a gardening company, I didn't know how much having a garden and having plants to touch every day was going to be such a healing practice. I would say even if it's just a houseplant or just like microgreens on the counter or like some balcony plants, I think it's actually a powerful entrepreneurship practice to have these self-care routines. And that that's been a really, really important one for me. It's hard coming back to that, right?

Phoebe
Like it's hard.

Anne
You need to self care.

Phoebe
Yeah. I love just saying hi to my plants. And I get my little flowers too. And they're so beautiful. And it's just get a little dose of serotonin. And before I walk into my house every day, I.

Anne
Know I actually have a curry leaf plant growing in my kitchen right now because, again, the cooking and the herbs and it's semi deciduous, which I didn't know before I got it and it lost all its leaves over the winter, which as you know, California doesn't really have winter, but it's winter enough and I thought it was maybe a goner. But it has grown back just over the last month. It's grown maybe eight inches worth of leaves. It just makes me so happy that it's just sitting there in the kitchen being green and beautiful, and it looks like it resurrected. It's amazing.

Phoebe
Okay. And well, this has been amazing. Where can listeners find you?
Anne
The best place to Find me is on my newsletter, because that's where you actually hear from me directly 2 to 3 times a week on my website, there's a pop up, and if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you can just put your email in and you will hear from me right away. And yeah, I will write to you all the time.I'm still a small enough business that if you just respond to those emails, I get every single one and do my best to reply to every single one.

Phoebe
And your website is

Anne
Right, Ortakitchengarden.com

Phoebe
We’ll put all those links in the show notes as well.

Anne
Perfect. Thank you so much.

OUTRO

Phoebe
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.