We were lucky to catch up with Laura McCann recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Laura, thanks for joining us today. Parents can play a significant role in affecting how our lives and careers turn out – and so we think it’s important to look back and have conversations about what our parents did that affected us positive (or negatively) so that we can learn from the billions of experiences in each generation. What’s something you feel your parents did right that impacted you positively.
My parents are polar opposites, which is why they probably divorced. Dad is analytical, pragmatic and highly intelligent. Mom is creative, feeling and adventurous. Guess who gets to be both? Me.
My parents divorced when I was seven years old. At the time I was living in Miami. My mother decided after pondering her potential fate raising three children in the U.S on her own, it might be better to try something different. She always wanted to be an artist, so she packed us up and moved us to Paris in 1972.
We were thrown into French public school, learned to adapt, lived in a big city and went from a suburban to bohemian lifestyle. I can only say my childhood was unique. I am lucky to have shared it with my younger sister and older brother as no one could really comprehend the impact this has had on me and my entrepreneurial journey.
Being bi-lingual has it’s advantages as does learning to read a subway map by the age of ten to get around by yourself. Paris in those days still had a post war vibe, and we soaked in the vast impact that a new language provided- we doubled down on curiosity and culture. Ordering pastries being a big goal, and having no idea what people were saying were all great incentives to learn the language: mom was right to do a total immersion strategy.
Being American in Paris felt rare and special. We were the first to have skateboards, and we’d congregate at the Trocadero fountains with other kids and feel like rockstars. We’d impress flight attendants when we’d be sent home to our dad. Kids traveling alone in those days was a pretty new phenomena, and we were encouraged to be brave, think for ourselves and delight everyone with our French- English ‘reparte.- we called it ‘ Franglais’.
Dad would get us a few months of the year, and we’d savor time in Miami enjoying the pool, sunshine and our favorite long lost foods like Peanut butter and pancakes and syrup. We’d watch hours of TV and see our grandparents who spoiled us and taught us many skills from sewing and knitting, to typing and cooking.
Both of my parents and their parents are entrepreneurs. Little did I know I was being given a foundation that would allow me to join the club with ease. Today my third culture background makes me adaptable, courageous and curious.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I am a serial entrepreneur. My professional journey started early, at age six, when I landed a small role in a movie called Limbo. I continued to act until my late teens, and my career culminated in a starring role in a French Movie, ‘La Petite Sirene’ by Roger Andrieux. I wanted to be an Oscar winning actress and was on my way but my family wanted me to go to college so instead of pursuing an acting career I moved to New York City. I always loved clothes and my grandmother taught me how to sew. I decided I’d study Fashion Design and moved to New York City in 1982 to go to Parsons School of Design.
Moving from Paris to New York was complete culture shock. Where Paris was beautiful and creative, New York was gritty and fast paced. I was tempted to quit and had a few moments where I could have but fate intervened and I graduated with honors and started my career in the Fashion Industry. Most of my classmates went to Seventh Avenue to work with the big designers. I went to Broadway and designed for the mass markets. I quickly advanced to senior designer and worked for some very small companies that did big projects, which gave me a front row seat to the executive office. Little did I know I’d be there soon enough.
At the age of twenty six with a one year old baby, I had a chance to start a private label design and manufacturing company with some co-workers and became a full fledged entrepreneur. I excelled at designing products, working with big retail buyers and my work allowed me to travel to the Far East on sourcing trips and Europe for shopping trips. At the time I was supporting my family and I was driven to create a secure foundation financially and I became quite successful at a young age. With over fifty employees, and international offices and an A list of retail customers I was very lucky that my first effort at a business was successful. Of course there were many challenges.
I was very lucky to have been introduced to YEO (now called EO) at the time and joined this exclusive group of entrepreneurs which provided me with many friendships but also the foundation for growth I badly needed. I was accepted into a program called the Birthing of Giants, an Executive Masters Program at MIT, back in 1997 when the world was changing from analog to digital and was exposed to new ideas, business models and tasted “tech” for the first time.
In 2000, I started Zweave, my first tech business, to solve the problems I had in my fashion business. I was very early to market building Saas PLM software for the Fashion Industry. At Zweave, I learned everything I hadn’t learned before: how to build a software product, marketing, enterprise sales and fundraising. I brought on a co-founder and for seven years we did some amazing things like winning eight consecutive SBIR grants to research and develop our software.
When I left Zweave, I consulted and mentored and looked for my next opportunity. Working for other people was a new experience but one I needed to really understand who I was and what I was bringing to the table. I got to be a COO of a tech start up that got into Techstars, went to work at a venture backed digital trend service as an interim CIO and built out my own digital agency. My last gig was running a PLM practice for a boutique retail consulting firm. I had come full circle.
During those years I mentored woman and one serendipitous moment led me to discover Aromatherapy. I had always wanted to build a CPG brand, fashion was out of the question, beauty wasn’t my thing so when I did the research on the aromatherapy industry I saw an opportunity. For the first few years I provided consulting to the company and its founder, eventually I began to invest, and when I saw an opportunity to build something I set up Adoratherapy and we acquired the formulations and began to build out a new vision for how to bring beauty and wellness together by creating a new kind of fragrance house.
We create healing scents that are breathable. We focus on the Chakras and the Aura and providing perfume with a purpose: reminding you to adore yourself. We are a retailer, manufacturer and also sell online. We have received awards for our scents and formulations, and my leadership. It has been a massive undertaking, and every skill I have had and all of my resilience has been needed to make this company rise up.
When we opened our store we introduced an aura reading studio and my life partner Jim joined the business. Combining our skills has allowed us to tap into a magical opportunity. We love the work we do, the people we meet and this time around, the goal of the business is to stay aligned, tap into our true voices and build a brand that makes a difference one breath at a time. We are experiencing the success I had wanted by pivoting, being creative and innovative and never giving up.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
When we started Adoratherapy in 2015 social media was just starting to be important. Because we initially started out as a manufacturer we were building relationships with buyers not the consumer directly. Our B2B focus made us miss the early, easy years where anyone could do Facebook ads and grow,
Our first pivot was in 2019. I decided we needed to focus on a DTC strategy because we had grown to over five hundred retail doors but the margins weren’t there and I felt that the customer didn’t understand the brand. The retailers we wanted to be in didn’t understand aromatherapy and organic essential oil products were mostly sold in health food stores. Whole Foods was a client but I did not want to build a grocery brand. I saw us in prestige beauty and spa.
We moved from a Magento website to Shopify and I started to take an interest in instagram. The indie beauty industry was buzzing and I could see what other brands were doing. I took a course on how to grow our instagram account given by Foundr and decided I would do all the content and posting. We went from 300 followers to 10,000 in about a year. I was hooked. Since then we have grown to over 30,000 followers and many other social channels.
I like content, copy and graphics so it was a fit. I really had to treat the first few thousand followers and posts as a journal. The more I expressed myself, the more things happened. Eventually I got a feel for what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. Today I get so many compliments on our social media and I have an amazing colleague who manages this for me.
My advice is to start by doing it yourself. It’s the best way to learn and try things. If I had hired it out at the beginning I would have lost the opportunity to really immerse myself in all things related to content creation including Ai. I am almost sixty and pride myself on being very savvy about tech, ecommerce, media and marketing. This stuff keeps me young and in tune with what’s happening.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
Being an entrepreneur is all about excavating your trauma to be big enough to contain success. Growing is easy, keeping things at a high vibration is another thing.
Many successful people tank the businesses, marriages, family and finances. I really wanted to figure out how to stay above the fray, balanced, wholehearted and healthy and expand. We hear these stories all the time. The media loves these winner- loser stories.
I had experienced many losses myself. Mostly the stress I held eventually showed up as a major health problem, Faced with the prospect of not recovering from myself I had to take a deep look. Initially therapy was my focus. But it wasn’t getting to the core of my issue: I felt unworthy to my core. This was not a mental construct it was a deep wounding in my body and psyche. This led me to explore all kinds of modalities around energy work and spirituality.
My favorite work has been aromatherapy and breathwork, chakra balancing and healing and hypnotherapy. Throughout my journey I became aware of my core mission: reminding people to adore themselves.
The heart chakra is about giving love, receiving love and loving yourself. My critical voice was my father’s voice and until I was able to lower it and replace it with the divine voice of self acceptance I would continue to suffer.
When I realized the brand, its mission and my story aligned it all came together.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://adoratherapy.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adoratherapy/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ADORAtherapy/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/adoratherapy/?viewAsMember=true
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/adoratherapy
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOrGg2A9-X2UfEL1yK0cUFA
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@adoratherapy
Image Credits
Keyan Riddick