We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kallen Gavin a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Kallen, thanks for joining us today. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?
A wakeup call:
I received a big jolt call late last summer. Roles had suddenly been rescoped and I found myself in a newly thin and stagnant position. I was dismayed by leaders that I respected and felt betrayed by this socially deemed path to success that is corporate America.
A change was needed. But what? Problem was: my management / marketing role was the type where you get to have an opinion on everything but you really don’t execute anything yourself. So, I wasn’t a graphic designer, photographer, or producer. I didn’t buy or traffic media. While I was great at analytics, that wasn’t my designated “role”. I concluded that I spoke some really great English for a living (sigh of dismay). This moment of – “what work experience and hard skills do I really have?” – was a very scary moment for me.
I had indeed painted my way through covid – my evening escape from work, kids, chores. SO – I could paint. I had that.
Learning:
I went on a path of learning the functional parts of marketing. First up – I turned my paintings into textile pattern repeats with some new design skills I learned. Thanks to a Freya Kotchakorn online course and Procreate, I was starting to feel like I was onto something.
It mesmerized me how much “bigger” my paintings could become in various pattern types.
Building:
For the most part, my patterns are all brightly colored and happy. My two girls ages 4 and 5 are always on my mind. With my textile patterns and their interests guiding me – I started dreaming of making little girls’ clothing. I drew out these first few outfit and self educated on the steps in garment making- from patternmaking, to fabric grading and tech packs.
It’s easy to dream and much harder to execute. After a few months of vetting manufacturers (and wow this step is incredibly necessary) – I finally found my match and started running sample rounds early this year. With each sample, I gathered feedback from my two girls. Thankfully, my manufacturing partner was willing to work with me until we got the pieces to perfection.
On to selling and distribution:
I received my first production run of just over 1,000 pieces just two weeks ago and have spent countless hours double checking quality (size, fit, brilliance), tagging, packaging, and loading each and every piece. I am using Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) as my distribution partner – through direct sales from my Shopify website as well as sales through Amazon.com. I am working on Instagram shop and Facebook shop plugins with this FBA merchandise today! More to come.
I can’t wait for the really fun stuff! The stuff I was trained in professionally and in school – I have so many marketing plans. Stay tuned.
This entire time, I have continued create new pieces of art. I feel myself gradually moving away from flowers and acrylics – and more towards faces, figures, and oil paint. Let’s see!
Come say Hi to me at 100 Taylor in the Germantown neighborhood in Nashville, TN.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I wasn’t a kid who knew exactly what she wanted to be as an adult. I really loved…a lot of things! Dance, viola, maybe history, maybe not history. I went to college at American University in DC, where I majored in International Studies and interned on the Hill. And boy did I drink that Koolaid at first. After a few years at a lobbying firm on K street though, I grew disillusioned by politics and pivoted to business. I gained my MBA at University of Maryland and landed in marketing at Verizon. Thankfully, my roles there were a great blend of analytics and creativity. I started getting back into painting with the advent of my daughter. Just after moving to Nashville for a role at Asurion, Covid struck. This isolation and a highly political workplace environment drove me even more towards painting as an escape.
Over the course of the last year, I found a way to transform my artwork into fun, comfortable and high quality garments. I am most proud of the fact that – while I might not wear so many functional “hats” forever – I got a taste for many functional roles over the past year. From ideation and design to manufacturing, logistics, and accounting – I now know enough to appreciate these functions and better guide the broader process
Art has led me to acceptance, a community, and a new path. What do I want to be when I grow up? Hopefully it doesn’t have to be one thing. I am an artist, textile designer, and small business owner. I design and produce girls’ clothing, accessories, and home products. Everything that I sell always starts as original, handcrafted artwork.
Check out my new line of girls clothing and see my latest artwork featured in Gallery 100 at 100 Taylor and on my website. I am also available for custom textile design.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
I had to unlearn that working hard is the fastest path to success. Instead, I have learned that a balance of hard work / execution creativity in problem solving and product design breed success.
In advance of this interview and as I reflected on the past year, I pulled my last 9-5 goodbye email. It included a quick thanks and goodbye to the people who mattered most. And, it outlined my plans for the immediate future. They read something like:
Hang out with my two smart and sassy girls
Paint my white picket fence pink and launch The Pink Picket Fence (site overhaul and MORE coming!)
Start my girls’ clothing line
Invest in my community and actually get to know my neighbors
Write a couple hard rock songs about dinosaurs
Start an RV park (yes I really did write this)
You can see that I am a girl with a lot of ideas. I also have an outsized work ethic. After getting my MBA, I worked really hard. I wanted to do – get things done – and do some more. I rarely made time to pause, think, and maybe pivot. When we moved to Nashville and with the onset of covid, my husband fell out of the workforce and picked up on the home front with our girls. We were fortunate enough to be comfortable and secure with our kids’ expenses, but even with that I felt a ton of pressure to not just provide but also advance so as to provide even more. I also wanted more. So I worked like I had no other choice. I stopped questioning. I turned my head and ignored – and worked harder. And I found my way to a promotion pretty quickly.
Then – my husband returned to work and suddenly I felt like I could breath. I also turned 35 and there is something magical that happens in the mid thirties. My voice came back. I became more of a leader and less of a follower – and that can go either way in the office!
The best thing that ever happened to me was being forced to pause and think about what I wanted to do. Where do I want to spend my time? What matters matters most to me? *But*- we were back to one income and it would have been easy for me to run right into the fight and go-go-go-go mode without thinking.
It took me months to stop feeling the sting of such an abrupt change – moving from structured office environment to ….well a “just figure it out” type of situation. Can I paint by day? Can I go out to eat with a friend for lunch? What am I doing with my life? Some serious unwiring is still … an ongoing thing for me.
What I am seeing unfold is, the biggest and best solutions / new ideas take some time to grow. Making time to pause for thought and reflect without expectation or time pressure seems to carry with it the calm needed to identify the right path forward. For example, It took me quite a while to find a path through production. I had my ideas – beautiful artwork and designs. Print on demand was not going to cut it. I had received multiple bad custom samples, and I was not willing to fund a large production batch internationally without knowing the partner’s creditability. On top of that, many manufacturing partners will only pick up a line if they have produced elsewhere previously and have continuous large batch needs. What to do? I struggled with this for weeks. Then I started researching US intermediaries that would back the exchange smaller funds to manufacturers in other countries. From there, I felt more secure in funding an initial line because I knew that I was guaranteed the product I had paid for.
PS – why did I not go with a US-based company for manufacturing? I would love to but – their pricing is over 2x what I have seen in European countries and almost 3X what I see in China. I am working with a fabulous manufacturing company out of Turkey. While I do get hit with high shipping fees and import duties – the financials currently point elsewhere. This could change – let’s see!
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
I have done a ton of research on business funding over the last few months. I was lucky (maybe a tiny bit smart) enough to have invested a few thousand right out of undergrad in a DIY trading platform. I invested in Netflix when it was way less than $100 a share (too bad I didn’t have more money then). Anyway – this tiny fund grew a lot and still remained not at all enough…but it got me started. My husband picked up the family bills. And a couple months ago I hit a point where I began scoping business loan opportunities. What I found was – this is an abysmal environment for startups to gain access to funding.
Getting a loan through SBA puts you into one of a few categories based on the amount of money you need. I have only been open to micro loans (less than $50K) – but gaining a micro loan requires me to have been in business for at least two years. Well I haven’t been in business for 2 years so – that is out. For anything above $50K – The prime rate for loans is just above 8% as of Aug/Sept – so this means the very best I could do if I elect to get a $51K+ small business loan is pay 8% interest rate (and that doesn’t even include the 2.5% plus interest owed to lender). Everything seems to be designed for multi-partner, multi-investor startups. So what if you are a one person shop? I have pivoted to a 0% interest for 1 year line of credit and other means of self funding to avoid these high interest rates. I do think this small business funding environment needs to be reviewed – deferred interest accrual should be top on the list as far as giving businesses liquidity to get started.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.thepinkpicketfence.net
- Instagram: @the_pinkpicketfence
Image Credits
Katie Telepak – Fields and Freckles Photography