Welcome Back. Here are the six quick questions. So question number one is what's your why? Why do you wake up every day now and build their endearing dot com because I feel incredible every single day and I want people to feel that way too. And everyone can, if they start to be really honest with themselves, my wives sharing how I feel and make sure everyone else It's a damn good one. Question. Number two is what was your favorite marketing moment in building triangle? No, I would say the the, the initial interactions and when I would nurture a relationship with the customer and they would write me an email to say how blown away they were with the effort and the care that went into every process and and how proud that made me. Those marketing moments were really what set triangle up to be the brand that it was.

So that encouragement is what fed me. So that that was like those really early moments with my proudest moments. Amazing question # three is what's your go to business resource if you have to name a book or a newsletter or a podcast that you're reading, listening, subscribing to at the moment. Um, at the moment, I'm not really doing anything businesses like that. I'm more in the other space, but popular in my head then was the lean startup, which is the book that we read before we started trying. It's old, it's pretty old, but I it's still a classic and I would say very important for people that want to start a business because you can spend a lot of money really quickly if you don't take care of your money goes real fast. So yeah, that's my, that's my tried and tested book. But at the moment obviously I'm more of a podcast girl. So diary the ceo, the mentor marc Boris, they're just kind of easy ones too.

Like tapping it out. I actually have one of my girlfriend listens to podcast a lot more than me and she'll just send me like bits and say listen to this five minutes. Listen to that 10 minutes there that I like that a little, a little bank of the good bits. Question number four is how do you win the day right now? What are your am or PM rituals and habits that keep you feeling energized and happy and successful. Yeah, I am is my, I'm a morning person early riser and I have kids. So, and God I am that way anyway. But I work out every morning. Pretty much. I don't push myself. I do sustainable exercise and strength training or walking or a bit of Pilates. Um, and it's really just taking that time for me. That's how I win the day. I value myself every single morning. I get out of bed. I go and do something that clears my head. It's like meditative for me. I actually go for walks now and don't listen to anything. I just, you know, just take the day end and that's really how I win the day because if I've taken that time for myself to do something that's not so easy for me to wake up and jump onto emails or jump something or talk about something because I get things from the US overnight while I'm sleeping.

So it's like I could even make up at three a.m. And I did this morning and read an email but that's my that's my thing. Night times is definitely I just go to bed early but in the morning is how I win the day for sure and valuing myself enough to do something good for me. Mm I love that Question. Number five is what has been your worst money mistake in the business? And how much did it cost you? Oh there's so many, there's so many, two huge ones that probably should have killed our business. Tell us both. Yeah. Okay. Well the first one is that we used to do all our fulfillment out of Hong kong ourselves or ourselves. So it was in our tiny little warehouse studio apartment place and we decided we had to get rid of it was taking up like 56 hours of every single day and we just, it was just not the best use of time. So we outsourced to a third party facility decided that we would carry it over the chinese border without doing it properly because I don't want to pay tax because we didn't have, we didn't want to spend that money.

So we put in suitcases and tried to illegally drive it over the border and got caught and had all our stock confiscated. So literally everything we had and we thought that was going to kill our business and I don't even know how much money that we didn't actually ever, but it was everything we had and luckily we had enough repeat orders sort of moving for our best sellers and to delivery timelines were very like there were 2 to 10 days or something but it always got there at like two days. So we were able to be like you know it's it's still in time, it's just like seven days like so that was the first one. And then the second one we found out that our chinese factory were completely ripping us off and rebranding our bikinis, manufacturing our fabric in with a different label and selling them in china. And when we went to take our stock back because we owned all our fabrics and we did all our negotiations in china ourselves. We didn't use an agent or anyone. And great until a situation like that happens and craig went to try and take the stock back and they refused and locked him in a truck in the garage was a very scary situation but he got out our stock didn't and again we lost everything we had.

So that was really the bigger one because that was a few months after the first one. And that was a bigger moment for us. Really scary and really vulnerable when you trust people implicitly and they completely let you down. That was probably out our the worst one. And that was, that was a huge, huge loss. I mean again because we did everything ourselves, we were able to buy a new fabric pretty quickly from the Guangzhou fabric markets and we had a few other factories that we were sampling with magically by some miracle because we were just wondering because they couldn't do the volume our current factory but not really didn't think they could get the volume we wanted. So we were looking at some point to go elsewhere and we had to really accelerate that. We didn't have a factory for about three weeks. So luckily our third party facility that we ended up using, they had some stock so we were able to not have too much of a lag some by some miracle. Again, I'm pretty sure I was Emailing everyone 24 hours a day, not sleeping for weeks to make sure that every customer was spoken to that had an order coming and it was delayed and this and yeah, so those were huge, huge lessons and I would just say if you deal directly with manufacturers and suppliers to be really careful and maybe not as bullish as we were in doing that process.

But it saved us money initially and then lost a lot. That is so I feel like your story is truly the definition of the playbook of like roller coaster, you know, the highest of highs but also like the lowest of lows that really could have stopped the business. Yeah. The ones where you're like now when people are like, oh, I'm worried about maybe I'm like, no, trust me, I use if you've got the grit and the resilience, you're gonna be fine. The only thing that would have killed us is if we stopped literally like there is always a solution. If you keep going, it's when you as a founder actually goes, then you're done nothing else will destroy you. You know, and, and that's, you know, money and stock and everything, you know, like you can really find a way to get through things if you just don't give up. Like we proved that many times over two years. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I feel like, so this last question you've already shared so many, but I'm gonna ask it anyway, just in case there's another one in the bank.

What is just a crazy story, good or bad that you can share from your journey building triangle One that popped into my head, which is different and probably I'm going to bring it up because I feel like I believe in manufacturing. That stresses me out, even thinking about it. It was so many years ago. I'm like is when we were signed to really succeed and in our big 2015 year and Bloomberg which was at the time because we traveled so much um we, that was always on in every hotel Bloomberg like business business week, it was like everything, it was like the asian one, the american one, it was like when I hear it now, it's like soothing to my soul because it was the only constant in our lives for a couple of years and because we were just on the go and they asked us to be on one of their episodes like and so we went to new york and we went into, it was just the most surreal experience. I refused to go on here. Actually I make like I'm not going on Bloomberg and it was just so surreal because it was something that we've been watching every single day and watching, you know, huge business owners and like leaders of the world in business talking and then craig got to go on and talk and so that was pretty crazy.

That was like that was the biggest acknowledgment of the american market actually knowing who we were because we were able to be on that show and talk about the business to people that knew who we were. So that was that was crazy. It was really crazy and I had the most amazing food and snacks in the kitchen, I waited outside and it was just, it was like the simple pleasures Yeah, that was my highlight of Bloomberg, not anything, it was that the food, Oh my God, I love that, it was cool. That was crazy. Crazy time that whole year. It will be in the book, the whole crazy story, like everything is crazy every week. It was like, we didn't even have anyone to tell because we were like that, like, you know, like so many stories like Kardashians and Beyonce and like just really wild stuff was happening to us and we were just there going okay, it's like, are we making up soon for this?

I don't know, it was crazy. That is crazy, Aaron, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of your bits and pieces and learnings from along the way, I'm so grateful for your time and we've got a little bit over so thank you so much for coming on the show for anyone who wants to reach out and learn more about your consultancy, where should they go? Yeah, so instagram, obviously I'm on there, so check out my instagram and then my website is there, I am at capacity this year for most of my work, mainly because I'm working on my podcast, writing my book, so there will be things are evolving so much this year for me, I will be available so much more as time goes on. So if you can't get in with me now and if you want to talk to me or sit with me or whatever it is, there will be ways they are coming. Great, amazing. We'll keep our eyes out for the book and for the podcast. Amazing. Thanks. Thank you. Hey, it's Dune here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female startup club podcast.

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