Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jennifer Beman. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Jennifer , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s jump to the end – what do you want to be remembered for?
What I’ve created is a totally unique way of organizing a conversation between two people. My biggest struggle is how to communicate that to my potential customers… which is ironic because my product is about communication!
My vision for this method is huge: that it will be on every therapist’s or coach’s shelf as a tool to use with their clients, that millions of couples will use it to talk deeply and compassionately about their issues, that it will teach people active listening without really appearing to teach anything and thus contribute to peace and understanding in the world. I hope that millions of people will have insights and revelations working with my product, and feel more understood by the people they love.
I feel like I have something precious and truly helpful to share with the world, and my only doubts are in my own ability to bring this to a place where people can see it for what it is.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I edit documentaries — a few you might have even heard of. Here’s one reason I was attracted to film-editing: I’ve always felt that life goes by too fast for me to see what’s really going on. On film, I could watch a scene over and over, slow everything down and piece out how things fit together. In the editing of a scene, I understand it.
Over my thirty year career, I’ve learned a great deal about the structure of a story. I’ve also had the opportunity to understand how people create stories about themselves: who they are, their place in the world, their place in relation to other people. I began to see editing as a metaphor for the mental process of the internal storytelling we do to make sense of our experiences. I created BioGraffs as a tool to help people better understand their internal stories and share them with others for enhanced self-awareness, greater interpersonal understanding, and deeper connections.
Our minds can be confusing places. They are full of stories about our interpretations of our reality, and what our experiences mean to us. The more emotionally charged the story, the harder it is to think about it clearly, and harder still to talk about it. BioGraffs is a creative way to move a complicated story out of the mind, and into a form that can be more readily seen, contemplated, and shared.
When I first created BioGraffs, I made it as a way for people to think about their sexual preferences, and share their preferences with a partner. Many people, when asked “what do you want?” have a hard time expressing that – or even knowing what it is. I turned a ice-breaker activity I made up for a women’s discussion group, into an interactive art installation called the “Graphic Sex Project”™ where people were invited to create a “graph” of a good sexual experience, or anything else they chose to express about their sexuality, using colored cubes. Nearly a 1000 people contributed their art to the project. I soon realized that this method of visual storytelling using cubes could be helpful for so many other things, not just sex. Things like the state of your relationship, what you want out of life, what it’s like inside your head, how you feel love, what you are anxious about.
Communication is hard. BioGraffs helps people slow down their thinking about a complicated topic and organize their thoughts into a visual story. The visual story becomes a guide for sharing their perspective, that invites curiosity and creates a bridge to understanding
My vision is to put this powerful tool into the hands of people trying to better understand themselves and their relationship with others. Making BioGraffs together with a partner is a way to create a structure for conversations about deep topics so both people feel safe and fully heard. Using this tool with the help of a therapist, life coach, facilitator, or counselor can help people get a new perspective and get unstuck in their internal stories.
It was a long process from art installation to manufactured product, and I’m just now starting to market BioGraffs – it’s kind of like a game for having deep conversations.
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
I made a big pivot from art installation for talking about sex to a manufactured kit for talking about anything. I needed help to do that and I found it in Joey Salvatore, a therapist I met through a presentation I did for ACT therapists (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). He is a great illustration of the advice to get out there and talk about what you are working on as much as possible because you never know who you are going to meet!
He immediately loved my idea and saw so much potential in it. He’s been advising and helping me ever since to make BioGraffs into something that can be used in session by therapists, counselors, coaches, and other helpers. We have a weekly zoom call that has become such a support system for me. I’ll never forget when he invited me to his birthday party and I discovered that he is exactly half my age.
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.
For a couple years I was making my product by hand! That meant getting cubes through an school supplies outlet and gluing magnets onto them one by one, printing the materials, the box all separately – it was expensive! It was a hard to make the decision to put up the money to manufacture a minimum order. I was happy to find a supplier that was willing to do “only” 500, but that was still quite a chunk of change, when I didn’t really know if I could sell them! I had a few customers who were very enthusiastic about the product. For some reason a bunch of therapists around Seattle really liked it!
But could I take the risk? When my mother passed away, I used much of my inheritance to finally make my first order of 500, and I’m grateful for that gift from her. I was very surprised how long it took from the decision to go ahead with manufacturing, and finally having the product in hand. I had all the artwork ready to go, but there were problem to work out with the manufacturer. The biggest one was figuring out how to make sure the magnets would stay stuck. The first prototype i got from them had a 10% failure rate on the magnets. I finally figured out that I had to have them drill a hole in each cube to inset the magnets, and that solved the problem. And then the shipping took so long! It was about 9 months from deciding to go ahead to when I finally had 500 units arrive at my door. I did not expect that.
I’ve only had them a month and sales are slowly starting to build. I’m so proud of them – they look great!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.biograffs.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bio.graffs/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bio.graffsproject
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bemanwhite/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB8c02r8qAWJj9t4GKGliXQ
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@biograffs
Image Credits
Geneva Jimreivat, Julianna Jimreivat, Noah Peterson