We recently connected with Suze Dowling and have shared our conversation below.

Suze, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about your team building process? How did you recruit and train your team and knowing what you know now would you have done anything differently?

Your team is everything – they can make or break your business. One of the things that surprised me when we were first building our team was that it ended up being less about the specific roles and more about the specific person in the role. Hire the person who can aid you and your goals; skills can be taught, but character and team dynamics cannot. Having people aligned with your goals can move the team through projects much quicker and more smoothly, not to mention impact the culture you are creating.

From Pattern’s inception to today, I’ve made being personally involved in every step of our hiring and recruiting process a key priority.

I remember when I first began recruiting team members, I was so nervous as I had no idea how to best approach. I recommend taking a very proactive approach in sourcing – don’t wait for folks to come to us; we go and find them. With that said, I absolutely underestimated the time and energy that it took to recruit, nor did I have a LinkedIn “Recruiter” account (tip: get one ASAP!). I realized early in recruiting that I needed to be bold and direct in my ask – I reached out far and wide in the recruiting process with many cold LinkedIn messages to folks that I thought had a great background and seemed like they could be a fantastic fit. In the message, I always said, if it’s not for you, let me know anyone that’s in your network who I should be talking to and offered to connect and network. It’s meant that I’ve built a really large network of folks who I can now turn to for advice, guidance, referrals, and general industry knowledge sharing.

There are three key things I really look for when hiring:

1. Curiosity — we’ve found that those who are curious are lifelong learners, aren’t afraid to ask questions, and are inherently more collaborative.
2. Problem solvers — it’s vital that team members are able to show grit and perseverance towards challenges. Remember, there’s never not a solution. Yes, there are roadblocks, but if you ask “why” or “how” enough times, you will find a solution.
3. Player/coaches — you need people who aren’t afraid to roll up their sleeves and get into the weeds of operating and building. But, ideally, they are also in a position to grow within the organization as you scale.

My goal is that every team member believes in the power of a team and is excited to help build our culture – creating a culture of agility, entrepreneurship, and a ‘can do’ attitude.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I don’t have the most traditional path to where I am today, but honestly, I think that’s part of what gives me an edge in my role.

I began a career in PR, representing a number of print magazines. This experience propelled me into exploring the world of eCommerce and digital, as I could see first-hand the dramatic decline of print media. Having seen this, it became increasingly clear that I wanted to work in an emerging industry that I felt was just in its infancy and had a world of potential ahead of it: digital media.

I actively pursued a career in the digital space with a focus on direct-to-consumer. My co-founders and I ran a brand and marketing agency called Gin Lane for nearly a decade – our work there was focused on partnering with entrepreneurs to launch them into market, covering their full brand development and digital eco-system.

We helped to launch brands like Harry’s, Hims, Smile Direct Club, Quip, and more. We helped launch and grow over fifty startups and had an incredible experience doing so. After many years of working with entrepreneurs to launch them to market, Nick, Emmett and I each felt it was naturally time for us to take the next step: becoming entrepreneurs ourselves.

We launched Pattern to help our generation, and ourselves, better enjoy daily life by focusing on the home; and to innovate on the operations of a business. We saw an opportunity to create a new model of operating a portfolio of brands that were focused on sustainable scaling. Today we have a portfolio of seven brands, all operated by one unified team working across the entirety of the portfolio!

These days DTC brands need to be experts at everything from email marketing to paid digital to supply chain logistics and everything in between. It’s why we’re so excited about Pattern and our model: We believe there needs to be a new business model for the country’s growing community of eCommerce brands…we fill the gap between massive scale IPO exits…and, well, no exit. We’re focused on completing thoughtful acquisitions of sustainable DTC businesses. When brands join the Pattern family, they benefit from our unique ability to provide world-class marketing and brand-building, coupled with in-house operational excellence and a mature brand platform. Not to mention, we’re also giving entrepreneurs the exits they deserve, which has been one of the most rewarding elements for me.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I’ve always been a bit of a type A, somewhat rigidly organized person who loved process, predictability and importantly a plan. I never thought the world pivot would be a part of my lexicon, but in the past four years of running Pattern, pivoting has absolutely changed our path and has made me realize what an integral part of the entrepreneurial process and journey it is.

I now see pivots as opportunities. After all, if your goal is long-term success, then the important part is getting there — not how many winding bends there were in the path to do so. Startups, like all businesses, work because of a cycle of invention and reinvention, and a pivot is just that. It’s a chance to evolve into something better. Pivots are often times about opportunity cost. There are times when an original idea has traction, but a new, better opportunity presents itself. The trick is to spot it early and commit.

In our case – we launched Pattern in late 2019 with the vision to create a multi-brand company that was owned and operated by one team. We thought our strategy would be a DTC-only business that focused on brands we incubated.

Fast track to today…we ARE a multi-brand company owned and operated by one team, but have had to be flexible in some of the mechanics of how we get there – an example being moving from incubating to acquiring brands.

In 2020, during the deepest and darkest days of the pandemic, we were talking about how to expand our brand family. We had a business model, began industrial design sketches, and were moving forward with incubation…but then we paused, and realized that instead of spending countless hours and dollars incubating, we could find incredible businesses, with strong product market fit and consumer loyalty, and welcome them into the Pattern family.

Before taking the leap of faith, we asked ourselves these three questions:

What’s the worst that can happen?
What’s the opportunity cost if we don’t do this?
What would we do if we were starting from scratch today?

This last one was particularly liberating. It was freedom to take a blank slate, and acknowledge we’re humans who evolve and learn every single day and that we get to act on these learnings. Breakthrough moves happen when you cultivate enough courage to take them.

Our conviction in this being a SMARTER strategy led to us putting our brand incubation on pause and moving full steam ahead with M&A. By May 2021, we’d completed our first acquisition, GIR.

It certainly wasn’t easy, but I’m proud to say, to date, we’ve made 6 acquisitions and are continuing to grow the family. I now can speak fluently about asset purchase agreements and integrating acquisitions, and most importantly, I know that we’re taking the smartest path to building our vision for our multi-brand portfolio.

The biggest piece of advice I could give is: don’t freak out when part of your original hypothesis changes or evolves. Celebrate it. Building a business is equal parts art and science — no one has all the answers, and there certainly is no such thing as perfect.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

Overseeing supply chain and physical product has been one of the biggest learning curves, but it also brings me incredible joy. There’s something so special about taking an idea and turning it into reality. Underpinning everything in our product creation process is our core belief of direct with consumer and truly creating with our customers. Too often people create something for the consumer without getting input and validating the need.

For any hero product, we look to smoke test early in the process – this is a strategy borrowed from software development where you validate the idea before fully committing to it. Typically we create a separate brand and landing page for the product before it’s fully produced, complete with product descriptions, photos, and a pre-order or waitlist option. Based on interest level and engagement we can test what most resonates.

Likewise, we’re big fans of focus groups with our consumers.

The key is to test the market’s reaction to the promise of the product without actually creating the full product. Additionally, we’ve learned how critical it is to go into product development with a firm understanding of your target MSRP and margin goals across all sales channels.

In terms of finding the right manufacturing partners, I think the word partner is vital – your suppliers are a critical part of creating a great product, and you need to build a close and collaborative relationship. We find our suppliers through trade shows, asking folks in our network, tools like Panjiva, and more.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is physical product is much less agile than digital – you are committing to inventory and the lead times mean that you are designing and ordering months in advance of selling. It’s a huge commitment! You need to be 110% confident in the product and quality before hitting “go” on production. Early in Pattern we were quite naive and had believed that small quirks in product sampling / DVT would “resolve themselves” in production. They don’t! Never pull the trigger on placing an item into production unless you feel confident in the quality and execution of the sample you have received. Sometimes that will involve lost time, and a more fundamental rework of the product itself. In our instance — we had a storage item with a lid that felt a little “tricky” and stiff when testing putting it on and off during sampling, but we believed would be resolved in the production run. It wasn’t, leading to us spending substantive time and money on a full redesign and relaunch of the product. All in all, if we had listened to our gut during sampling it would have saved many hours and many dollars, and ultimately had a better product in market more swiftly. A vital – albeit expensive – lesson learned.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.patternbrands.com
• Instagram: @patternbrands
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzedowling/
• Other: To consult with Suze: https://intro.co/suzedowling

Image Credits
Pattern Brands