We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lily Grillo. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lily below.

Hi Lily, thanks for joining us today. How has Covid changed your business model?

Thread & Leather was conceived based off of my brother’s one idea, the Wrap Wallet. I bought half of the company in 2018 and we were doing well. Then 2019 the global pandemic hit and like many businesses, we barely hung on. At the time, I also knew very little about business, having made a full career change, and a family to focus on during lockdown. During that time Business was not my priority and we failed.

Now that the economy is back on track, in spite of inflation, I have been learning and fast tracking my business knowledge to bring Thread & Leather back from the brink of death. We are basically starting from scratch.

In a way, Covid forced me to really face my fears about business and learn quickly. I have also come to the realization that the whole brand can be shifted and made into something more. On a creative side, pandemic has given the company new life. On a financial side, it’s like having a start-up and the growing pains are terrible.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

For 15 years I was in education and loved it! My husband is in the military and as our family grew we decided I needed to find a way to work, but also be at home. My brother, Dave, had this company (Wrap Wallet) that he was struggling to run, so I stepped in, made a career change and bought half of the business.

Why make a career change? I had a stable job as a Nursery School Director and we were doing fine. Owning a business can be risky and challenging. But the amount of potential I saw in the business was staggering; and Thread & Leather was born.

Our niche is to make hand-sewn luxury leather accessories for a minimalist lifestyle. It sounds fancy and long-winded, but what I am striving for as part of this company’s mission is to create equal opportunity jobs for people who can not work a traditional 9-5 job. I want this company to succeed to the point, where we can hire individuals to sew luxury goods in the comfort of their home to accommodate their lifestyle. This isn’t a “stay at home-mom/parent” gimmick; this is for those who need to be work but can not always find a way. This is about hiring people and not machines. The future of this company is about making community connections and social impact.

Thread & Leather is a company that I want to grow to, not just be about products, but about the people.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I spent 15 years being relatively successful and good at my previous job in education. Moving to a new field I had unlearn my pride and my fear of failure. Not just minor failure, but catastrophic-business-ending failure.

In education, even as a Teacher or Director, I was never the “Top Dog”. My decisions were made at a management level and ultimately the hard choices were made by others. 15 years of working like that, I had confidence in my abilities, pride in my work and a safety net of knowing where all the boundaries are. Owning my own business, there are NO boundaries, ALL of the decisions are mine and ultimately the success and failure of the business falls on my shoulders. It is overwhelming.

Due to failing during pandemic, I realized that it couldn’t get any worse for the business. I let it get to the point of barely existing and felt sick to my stomach when I realized that I wasn’t ready to give up yet. It happened when we got the letter in the mail saying that school would be reopening and it struck me that I had thrown all of my energies at keeping our family of 5 moving forward, so what was I going to do when everyone was back out the house? I am not overly domesticated where I could be a stay at home parent. In one of my many late night FB scrolls I saw someone had posted about a 5 month program for women in business. It was completely free program run through the non-profit The Center for Global Enterprise, but they were only accepting 130 women. I got a spot! It was 5 months of crash course in business, meeting other women entrepreneurs and learning from men and women in business.

One of the most important lessons I learned, over and over again from each speaker, “If you’re not doing anything for your business, you’re already failing.” “You won’t know if you don’t try and if you don’t try, you’ve already failed.” It’s true. If nothing is happening and I do nothing, then nothing will change. I was so afraid of not being successful and of rejection that I wasn’t even trying.

Now I put the effort in. “No” (or being ghosted) isn’t so scary anymore. It can’t get any worse than what it was at the brink of business death. Perspective is powerful and it is important to put pride aside and remember that it’s okay to not do well and it’s okay to take baby steps. I am not fearful of failure anymore. I have put my past pride of career aside and willing to learn to be better in my current choices.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

When Dave, my brother, invented the first Wrap Wallet, he wanted to create something that was hand-sewn and could easily be used for traveling and a minimalist lifestyle. He wanted to take the bulk out of the tradition bi-fold wallet to create something sleek. In doing so, he made Wrap Wallet by hand. Cutting the leather, creating the stitch holes and sewing it himself. Dave is an engineer and figured out the best way to have each wallet cut was on a laser cutter. At first all wallets were cut by a laser cutting company in Manhattan and then sent to a fulfillment center to be shipped. After a couple years of success Dave was able to buy a small laser cutter.

At this point, I stepped into the picture and we set up the laser cutter in my house and moved our manufacturing and shipping to in house production. By nature, fulfillment centers are wonderful if you have a lot of product. We store a lot of product, but our physical foot print is relatively small. This, again, forced me to learn more about manufacturing (aka running and programming the laser cutter to create products) as well learning about streamlining our shipping processes.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://threadandleather.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thread_leather_nj/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/threadandleatherNJ
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/wrapwallet