Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Brittany Garman. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Brittany, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?
Finding the perfect company name for our brand was quite a challenge. My co-founder, Anita Rajendra and I knew we wanted something simple yet meaningful and that could grow with us. Also, we needed a name with an available url…ha! We first started looking at some of our favorite words in other languages, key words that related to our product and our basic mission as a brand. After weeks of scribbling on post-its and white boards we had it. “Mina” meaning love in German and “Vine”, a slang term for clothes.
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 background and context?
I am a creative entrepreneur whose sewing hobby turned into co-founding a clothing line. Growing up, I always dreamed of owning a business and had a natural attraction towards design. I began my career in interior design but knew I wanted to go further and create a line of products. Though having a keen interest in all things DIY and even making my own clothes, I was still in need of a bit of inspiration.
As luck would have it, the stars aligned and I met my future co-founder, Anita Rajendra, in a women’s entrepreneurial incubator where we struck up a friendship. One night over casual conversation she shared a story about her struggles with clothing as a new mom. In particular, she expressed her frustration with nursing covers and how they lacked in design and functionality. She showed me a couple products online and I thought to myself, “Seriously? Is that the best the world can do for moms? Why has nobody figured this out?!?” From there, we began our mission to do better for moms and set out to create the ‘Mother of all Nursing Covers’, the Mina & Vine Smart Scarf.
It is the first and only of its kind, that successfully solves the top three concerns of breastfeeding women: an increased body temperature for both mom and baby, the visibility of a baby and style/function limitations. But, designing the perfect nursing scarf was no easy task. We interviewed hundreds of women across the nation, tested dozens of prototypes, then launched our idea with a Kickstarter campaign. After a successfully funded campaign we were thrilled to begin the first round of production of our scarf. Full disclosure, this was not an easy process but we learned, adapted and became stronger as founders. With this, we developed a tremendous amount of pride for our product and have nothing but excitement for its future. What’s even better is the response and selling of our scarf to consumers and businesses around the world! Who knew something so small could have such a big impact.
Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?
Every entrepreneur should read “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries. My co-founder and I followed this method which was hugely helpful in laying the foundation of Mina & Vine. In a nutshell, the book guides you on how to objectively evaluate your business, stress test your idea and most importantly, test if your idea is actually viable. You certainly don’t want to find yourself in a position where you’ve dumped a huge amount of capital into a product or service that few people want or need.
Another favorite educational resource and overall good listen is the “How I Built This” podcast from NPR. It’s truly refreshing to hear a candid conversation from real entrepreneurs where they share the good, the bad and the ever so ugly in building their companies. Every episode has a little nugget of knowledge that has no doubt influenced Mina & Vine and our decision making.
Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.
Yikes, getting started with manufacturing a product is no easy task regardless of the size of your first run and/or funding. To be blunt, it’s very hard! As a startup, you need a manufacturer who is first, willing to take on a new project from an unknown company and second, provides support and extra guidance in making your product the best it can be. Few will do this. For us, we started our search locally in hopes of being more hands on with our first run and to have the opportunity to see the production of our scarf in person. Sadly, this option proved to be hugely expensive as we are in a big city but, all was not lost. Our pattern maker was hugely helpful in sharing resources and directed us to the manufacturing directory, Maker’s Row. Game changer! We were and are still committed to a USA-Made product so this was our go-to for finding at the very least, names! From here, we spoke with dozens of companies and quickly learned about minimums, set up fees and lead times. It was a time consuming exercise but necessary to learn the ins and outs of manufacturing.
With our first run we landed on a manufacturer in California that specialized in digital printing on textiles and had recently added cut and sew to their services. It sounded like the perfect fit to do everything in one location to reduce time and shipping costs but this came with a capital B-U-T! It took months of sampling to get the cut and sew correct and we wasted quite a bit of yardage of our expensive, super specialized fabric. Also, we kept getting reassigned to a new project manager which meant getting a new team up to speed every few weeks. Lesson learned here…don’t waste the good fabric on sampling and pay the extra cash to get samples made early. Find a similar fabric or ask your textile resource for a remnant and/or deep discount of sample yardage. All in all, between sampling and manufacturing hiccups, it ended up taking three times as long to get our order completed. We should have started sampling much earlier but the old saying “you don’t know what you don’t know” certainly applied. This did give us the knowledge needed in working with our next manufacturer who we still use today…and they are in the same time zone.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://minaandvine.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/minaandvine/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/minaandvine
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mina-vine/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/minaandvine
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLrJLHu85cgk3Rf_9p2gYfw