Emma Grede
Appearances
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Work-life balance is your problem. It isn't the employer's responsibility. Look, I have four kids and I had to figure out how I would think about my own ambition balanced with my parenting. That's true. And we have to have a level of honesty about what it takes to be really successful.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Like what I do is a lot of action. Like I made like hundreds of calls. Like I always talk about this thing of at some point, because this was like before email, I would send a lot of letters and I thought no one's getting back to me. Maybe they're not getting the letters. So I started like hand delivering things around the West End. I would buzz on little doors of PR agencies and be like...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Hi, you know, my name's Emma and I sent you a letter, but I don't know if you got it. You know what I mean? It's like, yeah, whatever, love. But sometimes they'd let you up and sometimes you've had a conversation with somebody and whatever, right? So I really believe in this kind of idea of action.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And then you've just got to like, just really, when I talk about this idea of disregarding what people think, there's just so much noise. And you have to have like this single-minded focus on what you're doing. And I've been really good at drowning out the noise, not just from what goes on inside me and what, you know, my own kind of fear, but also what's happening around you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And I think that those things are really, really key.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Totally.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I think that it's a great question. And, you know, it's interesting because I am actually a person who takes in a lot of information. If I'm trying to make like a really big decision that I don't feel fully responsible,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
qualified to make which by the way happens to me all the time because I'm still learning so much I will call a lot of people that I think are in the know but at the end of the day I have to call the play right and often if you if you call up seven or eight people that you're going to have different opinions there there'll be different patterns that emerge there will be
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
contrarian type of, you know, something that comes out of that. And so you have to then still like go, where is my gut? What feels good to me? What's right for my customer? I think it's very different when you get customer feedback, because what I've learned is that everything your customer says is true because it's true to them. And so what I do is like, of course, we have a balanced view.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
We try to like speak to as many customers. We're doing giant surveys and you take you know, the sum of those parts. But when it comes down to customer feedback, I think it's ingested in a very, very different way than like that kind of decision-making feedback. When I make a decision on behalf of my business, that has to come from my gut and from the intentions of where I want that business to go.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
When I'm doing things for customers, it's very different because you just want to please customers.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
All the time. I do it constantly, constantly.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Oh, I love that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Well, you know, a first person, I speak to my husband a lot because obviously we work together and Jens has a unique understanding of me, of my weaknesses, of what might be stopping me from making a decision. So I feel like I go to him a lot sometimes. Because he will. Oh, he's going to tell me the truth.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
He's told me that like some of the biggest unlocks in my life and my career have come from Jens. And I will never, ever forget, Stephen, like one of my first board meetings, one of my first companies, it was called ITB. And I would get so nervous ahead of a board meeting. And he'd be like, why are you so nervous?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And I'd be like, I don't know, because I'm a good chatterer, I'm a good presenter, I can sell anything. But, you know, I would get to these board meetings and I would just fall apart. And he said to me, just wrong timing, by the way, if you're going to give, you know, your wife a little bit of feedback.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Literally just before we went in, he said, you know what, I really, I know why you are suffering here, Emma. You have an employee mentality. And I, I mean, I was 26 or 27 years old. I couldn't think about anything else in the whole meeting because I was like, he's completely right. I have an employee mentality. Well, why? Because I'd only ever been an employee up until that point.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
But I was looking, instead of, you know... Being there as the CEO to guide the board into a decision, I was looking for everybody else to tell me what to do. And so I was seeking their approval instead of going in and saying, here's the direction. This is what we're doing. Everybody come with me. And these are the reasons. And so it was such an interesting insight.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And I think that you could only or I could have only heard that from somebody so close to me.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
That was the mentorship.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Listen, you know, from my own experience, I don't think I had any mentors. You know, I started work... Let's talk about real work, right? So it's like I've had a job since I was 12 years old. I've worked a paper round and then I worked in the delis and then I worked in clothes shops. And when I got my first real job in an office in a fashion show production company, I was 18 years old. So...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I've had a salaried job in a place that was working towards something that I felt was interesting and in the kind of direction of where I wanted to go since I was 18. At that point, you make whoever is around you. If you're smart, you make whoever is around you your mentor.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I used to sit in front of my boss, and everybody thought that was so unfortunate because she could see my screen, and that was like the beginnings of online shopping. Net-a-Porter was our client, and we all had a discount, so everyone would sit on Net-a-Porter all day except me because my boss sat behind me, What a nightmare. And I was like, no, not a nightmare at all.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Whatever she says when she's on her sales calls, I would write down and I would use them later on on my sales calls. Now, was she my mentor? No, she was my boss. But I used her as such because I would learn from her. I'd take, you know, I even copied her outfits, you know, I would do the whole thing. And so for me, she was really formative.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
But I don't think that you should walk around looking for a mentor. I think you have to walk around asking questions. Because anyone who's going to be a good mentor probably doesn't have time to mentor you first. Secondly, like depending who you are and what your exposure is, you're not going to have the right people around you to get mentored. So you've just got to be super inquisitive.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And I think it's really important to take where you are and figure out like who is around you and where can you get that type of mentorship from. For me in the beginning, I would just take whatever client I had. Like if I come into contact with the CMO or the CEO, I'd just ask him a question. I'd be in the meeting, I'd be like, I have two other questions for you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I have nothing to do with the work that we're doing or the, you know, whatever brief I was there to deliver. And I'd ask a question.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Yeah, I dropped out there too. I'm a serial dropout.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I mean, listen, we didn't call it that then, but it would come down to grit. Grit. I think that that is what we would say now. You know, Angela Duckworth coined that phrase, I guess, or that term and wrote that fantastic book about grit that everybody read and was like, oh my God, I just want my kids to have grit. Like my kids want for nothing. They're not going to be gritty. Like it's just facts.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
You don't grow up in Bel-Air gritty, you know. But I think that if I think about what it is for me and still is, I'm just gritty. I'm very clear about what I want and what I need. And I will find a way, whatever it is. You know, I am not,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Any of the things that you would have on my resume, you know, an apparel CEO, someone who goes out and raises hundreds of millions of dollars, somebody who starts an agency in multiple countries. I have zero qualifications to do any of that stuff. I will just make it happen because I'm in the moment.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I see the opportunity and I am prepared and I'm prepared because it's like I have done all the work to get to the point. where that thing that is in front of me, I will make it happen. I've done enough work to say, okay, I can take this to that next place.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
No, Emma at 18 years old would have been like, it's so interesting. You know, we don't have yearbooks in England, but if we did, I reckon I would have been like the most likely to succeed. I don't think anyone at school was like, oh, she's a bit of a waste girl. No, it's like I had that mentality that I was away from the pack, that I was going to do something special.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
What a great way to start. I think that that's a great question for me because so much of who I am and how I feel about who I am comes from where I'm from. And, you know, I say all the time I'm from East London. I like to make that distinction because I feel like such a Londoner and I feel like that, you know, being from East London, coming from that place is so much a part of my character.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
But also my mentality was like, whatever it takes. You know, if I think about the most important reason words for career advancement. Like the three most important words would be like, I'll do that. That was me. I had my hand up my whole life. I'll do that. Like every single time. Anytime anyone has asked me, whatever it took, wherever I've been in whichever workplace, I was like, I'll do it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I'll do that. And that is what people started to look at me as someone that would just figure it out, right? It's not like I had any particular skill. I just put myself in a situation and in the space of... Let me have a go every single time.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Yeah, go on.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Floppy. I don't know. I don't know what the opposite of grittiness is, actually.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Yes. Listen, I do. If you want it. Like anything else, right? It's all about... Do you actually want to be that way and to behave that way? And we were talking about this actually, funny enough, on the way over because, you know, I just came from my own office two minutes away. It's Friday. All of the product teams are in. The rest of the office is pretty empty.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And, you know, and I think post-COVID, people have really taken the liberty of... as we allow them, right, they can come in four days a week. And it's interesting because we talk so, so much about the flexibility of working from home and what Zoom life has kind of done for business. But we don't talk about any of the rigidity of it and what it takes away from work.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And I can tell you and I can guarantee you that had I been a work from home person in my 20s, I would not be where I am now. There is no doubt in my mind. And I think about some, you know, I met my husband at work. I made some of my best, strongest relationships in my life that are the most important things to me and the foundation of my happiness and my like being a solid person at work.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
That's where those relationships come from. And so I think it's really interesting now that we have this aversion of wanting to be away from the office all of the time. And I'm like, oh, that's like, it's so interesting to me because I'm like such a, I'm like an in-person person. I want to be with people. I want to collaborate. I want to do things quickly.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And the culture of work right now makes that so hard. So I think, yes, you can teach someone. to have grit. But I can't teach you on a screen, babe. I can't reach you. You won't see how I move. And in that same way that I had this woman that sat behind me and I would take notes of everything she said, that happened in real time, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
She would walk out of the room and I'd be on my next new business call saying her lines. Like it was just that quick and that immediate and I would test it out and I'd make it my own. All of that is lost.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And so I feel a little bit sad for the way that we're working right now because I don't think that we're having that exchange of, you know, what happens when you're in a really dynamic environment and you're able to learn from people around you because we're not as together as we once were.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
It's so much a part of... what is important to me, like that idea of being, you know, someone that is reliable, someone that is honest, not just, you know, sometimes, but all the time. And I'm one of four girls, I was raised by a single mum, and it was so much kind of,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Which I'm always doing, by the way. Which I'm always doing as well. Always, always, always, always.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Well, you know, people ask me this all the time. I think that the sure way to put yourself in a position for more responsibility for promotion is to be excellent at what you're doing, right? Like I find it really difficult when people are like, you know, I'd really like to do this thing over there. I'd really like that opportunity. And I'm like, but you're only 70% good at what you're doing now.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
No, no, no. If it's possible, tell me who she is and I'll show you a liar.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Like I'm looking at the 120% people, the people that are smashing it in the role that they're at now. before they're going to go anywhere else. So that's the first thing to say. But I don't think it's any, I, again, I hire much more for attitude over experience, right? I really want the people that come in with like a winning mentality, a figure it out mentality.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And also what I love is these people that have like an understanding of
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
across the business it's like you are an amazing thoroughbred you know wholesale salesperson but you really want to learn ecom and you really want to learn about stores and you really have a good understanding what's happening planning and merchandising like you know in business leadership language they call them the t-shaped leaders but it's like that's what that's what I care about people that have an interest in the entirety of our business and they can see outside of the lane or the
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
division that they work in. And so that becomes interesting to me. But to me, it's so much more mentality, energy, enthusiasm, attitude. I'm also one of the things that I think is massively overlooked. But a key thing now is flexibility, because I hire a lot of people that are in their 40s and 50s, right, for super senior jobs. executive leadership level roles.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
But if you come to me from a competitor and you believe that the only way to get from here to here is the way you've been doing it for the last 20 years, that's problematic to me. I need you to come both with the experience and a level of flexibility because technology means that the customer and the consumer experience is changing all the time.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
So that ability to say, I've got all of this knowledge, but I'm willing and ready to flex is like really important. So I need all those things. I need a lot, Stephen.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Very demanding.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Oh, I've got a good one. So can you talk to me about work-life balance in this organisation? Sorry, babe. I'm leaving. Get out. Here's the thing. Work-life balance is your problem. Like, that's yours to figure out. Because the way we run organisations now is that no one misses a dentist appointment or a doctor's appointment or a haircut or...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
or their kids' parent-teacher conference at our organisations. That's just not how we work anymore, right? Like, you come in, you have set hours, but, you know, there's flexibility within your working life. It's not like, oh, my goodness, such and such is not at their desk. That's just not how we work anymore.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
So when somebody talks to me about their work-life balance in an interview process, I'm like, something is wrong with you. You haven't been able to figure that out. That's not the way you win this interview.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
hammered into me that this is where you're from this is not where you need to stay the world is your oyster you can do anything you're just going to have to work really really hard and I think all around me I saw a lot of people that were working hard I saw a lot of people that were hustling and doing what they needed to do just to get through the day but I had this feeling very much inside of me that if I wanted more for myself it was all completely within reach and I think that really came from this
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Go on, go on.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
33.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
No, babe, it's not what you would pick because you're ambitious as anything. So maybe you won't fit. You know, it's very interesting, right? Because I wonder if you put on that list of options, earning 10% more year on year, getting a meaningful bonus, right? Because here's the thing, these things correlate and that's what people don't understand.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
In order to run an organisation where there is the ability for your people to have a good work-life balance, You have to be profitable. The company has to be, you know, in line with, if not beating its competition. We have to be able to run an efficient business to give people what they need. The two things go hand in hand.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And so I have this idea that with the people that I work with, like we're in a social, like we're in a contract together, right? It's like, you're going to work really hard. And in return, you should get an amazing place to work. You should get an incredible environment that is feeding you in ways that are not just about your job, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And so when I look around at our office and our organisation, we're doing, you know, I just, I left the office yesterday, there was like a fertility seminar going on where there were like hundreds of people in the kitchen of our office all learning about having their eggs frozen and like various different, I have four kids, I clearly didn't need to be in the seminar. I'm like, I'm done.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
But, you know, that was happening. It's like we do things for our employees that are above and beyond what a professional workplace back in the day may have considered the norm. So I just feel like you've got to, with that, like something has to give. And there are certain things that are the employee's responsibility within that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And you figuring out what works for your life, how you're going to pick up your kids, how you get home, how you get to work, what happens in, like, these are all things that you need to figure out within the construct of your life. That isn't the employer's job. That isn't the employer's responsibility. Right.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I don't think the expectation is that anyone is going to have to work seven days a week in order to have an average job. They're not going to have to do that. If you have ambition, if you want to... do the most, if you want to grow, if you want to be one of those people that's at the top of the organization, the chances are you might have to work a little bit more. That's the truth.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
What are we talking about here? We're going to lie to everyone? Do you work five days a week, Steven? No, babe. You're working on a Saturday and a Sunday. And if I text you wherever you are in the world, you come back to me within about an hour. I'm assuming that that's not just what you do for me, that that's just how you roll. And that's how I roll. And that's how most successful people roll.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And, you know, it's like there is something to speed and agility. And I don't... Listen, I think I have a tremendous work-life balance. I am in Malibu most weekends. I'm on the beach. But I think that we have to have a level of honesty about what it takes to be really successful. And I think that everybody is tired of hustle culture. People are tired of burnout and figuring out how you can...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
do what you need to do and be really successful at the same time is like what I consider personal responsibility. But at the same time, if we tell everybody that to be really successful, you can do that in a way that is, you know, without being 150%, without waking up most days and doing some type of work, without thinking about work a lot. It's just not...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
like East London mentality and all the people that are around me.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
It's not honest and it's not, it wouldn't connect with what I see and what my experience are of most people that are truly successful.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I think because it hits them in a place of like, I just don't want to do that. I want all the benefits, but I don't want to do the bit in the middle. And I get that. It's not for everyone. Then don't do it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
No, no, no. If it's possible, tell me who she is and I'll tell you, I'll show you a liar. You know? I don't think so. And honestly, Stephen, what are we talking about? Because I think that most people want a... you know, they don't want everything, right? It's like most people don't and not sitting here being like, I need to be in all the magazines. I want this. I want that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
It's like most people want to have security of a well-paying job. They want to, you know, be able to afford their rent or their mortgage and have a nice car and live well and go on a few holidays and And that's like a good life. Should you be able to do that? Absolutely. Should you be able to do that without working evenings and weekends and putting all of the hours in?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Yeah, I really think that you should. But if you are leading an extraordinary life, to think that extraordinary effort wouldn't be coupled to that somehow is crazy.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I am indeed.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Yeah, you do. Yeah, you have to. And listen, I don't think that that is as hard as people are making it. You have to understand that, you know, you can't be a leader and a people pleaser at the same time. And if you're walking around trying to make everybody happy, guess what you won't do? You won't have a great business. You have to have a focus on what it is that you're trying to do
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And you have to be relentless in the pursuit of doing those things. And you need the people that are going to, you know, I am, I'm so much about the people that help you. You know, I hate that idea of like being, you know, like a, you know, I get called like a self-made whatever. And I'm like, I'm really not self-made if you understood how many people I am.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I think in a really big way, you know, I have a pretty interesting relationship with my mum. You know, my dad left when we were much younger and our family dynamic is like, she's the dad, I'm the mum and we have three kids together. And I really, you know, I think if you asked any of my sisters, they'd say Emma had this very big hand in raising us, in being pretty formative in our childhood.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
there were around me that just like getting me here today. Do you know what I mean? There's like a village sitting outside. But nothing happens on your own and it takes so many people and so much skill and so much that I don't have.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And so when you start a company, this idea that you should make all of the – if you're thinking about making all of these concessions before you're thinking about what the goal is, what the – I call it, and everybody, it's like enterprise mentality. It's like you have to put the business first, the needs of the business.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And sometimes that is about thinking about your people and being a certain type of leader. Sometimes it's not. So you've got to balance those things, right? We're trying... the point of a business is to make profit. It's to create like a company to serve, you know, your customers, all of those things. It really isn't about what I think so many people are trying to make it about.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Now, your leadership style is, you know, it's going to be such a huge part of what makes that business successful, but it isn't everything. And so I think that we've just got to try and separate these things like a little bit. That can't be the first thing that you're thinking of, like how, you know, like how you're doing all of that stuff.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
The first thing that you think about is like, how is the business going to grow? How are we going to thrive? What are we actually here to do?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Yeah, totally.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Yeah, that's just part of being in business though, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I don't think you do.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
well, don't do anything to be cancelled. I mean, look, I think it's a fine line, right? If you're a leader, you're never going to please everybody. And I think that this is where leadership style and who you are as a person really comes out. I don't think anybody, I'm somebody that leads with no ambiguity. Nobody's like, I wonder what Emma's thinking.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
It's like, I'm very clear in what I'm thinking. I'm very clear in in what the goals are. And the reason that we've been able to do what we've been able to do is because of those things. I have a very straightforward management style and I bring everybody along with me. Now, listen, there's always going to be someone or a fraction of people that will feel disgruntled.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I've gone through various things in different companies where you've had to you know, downsize or let people go and things that are really unfortunate. And that's just part of the course of business. Now, are you doing those things in a way that is congruent with who you are as a leader? And, you know, really thinking about, Again, it's like I never have an individualistic idea about that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
It's like if I have to look at a company and downsize, I'm not thinking about the 50 people that I have to let go. I'm thinking about the 400 jobs that need to be saved. And sadly, sometimes there is a little collateral damage. That's just part of being in business.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
You know, I would... get up as a kid, I'd iron three school shirts, I'd make three-pack lunches, my mum would, you know, go off to work. I'd get all the kids in school and half the time turn back around and come home to watch This Morning. That was my life. You know, there was the odd day I decided to stay there.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I certainly am not sitting here sweating what somebody might do on TikTok because I know who I am and I feel good about the decisions that I make because of where they come from. They come from me, they come from my heart and I know that I'm a good person. So I would never sit here and be like, oh no, someone's going to like shame me.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I don't think it's any different than, if I'm really honest, I don't think it's any different from any other woman, but I do think it's different for women more generally. I think that probably the most important lesson was, how distinctive and important my point of view is and why that gives me an edge, right? But I also understand that this kind of like empathy coin has two sides to it, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
What makes women phenomenally good leaders and makes them fantastic at mentoring staff and looking after the needs of the team is sure as the underbelly when it comes from perhaps, you know, downsizing their team or, you know, firing the wrong person or if people are not getting pay rises, like how they might feel about that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
So I definitely had to learn that there's two sides to what makes me great and to keep both of those sides in check.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Yeah.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
It's like, because... No, it goes against the grain of caring for... It goes against the grain of being like a maternal individual who is looking after people, right? Because that's the opposite of that. You're leaving someone to their own devices. And so that's been difficult for me, for sure.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Yeah, yeah, I do. I think it would have been like way back when in London in ITV, the first time I had to do like a meaningful downsizing of the agency. And I had to fire like, you know, it's a small agency. I had like 60 people and I fired 15 people in one day. So we're in a tiny office, Gressie Street in, you know, just off of Tottenham Court Road everywhere. Everyone sits together.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
So there was no like giant boardroom that you could go into and then go, go out the back door. It was like, I went back upstairs and told everyone, you know, it was like awful. It was absolutely awful. I laugh about it out of just like... horror of how it felt at the time, because it really, to me, it felt like the end of the world, the end of my life.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
But more often than not, I was just, you know, about trying to help my mum keep our family afloat. And I think that that made me super responsible at an early age. But it also gave me a very early indication of like how I didn't want to live my life. I knew that the milkman hadn't been paid. I knew that there were bills dropping on the, you know, on the doormat kind of every day. And I felt that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And I felt so responsible because oftentimes, you know, like so much of being in a competitive dynamic environment, you know, you're pulling people out of other agencies and other jobs and you're bringing them in and, you know, you're like, that's the best person for this. And then all of a sudden you're like, I'm so sorry, but like, It's over.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And that for me was soul destroying the first time I had to do it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Well, look, again, I go back and say I created a better company because of it. I created more discipline in the business because I was able to see the mistakes that I'd done that weren't just about overstaffing, but it was just about running a less... healthy engine.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I do think it made me a better leader in the sense of I had held so much of the anxiety of what was happening in that company, it not going well to myself. I hadn't really shared with the full senior management team quite how bad things were. Because I thought, I'm the CEO. That's all my problem. They should be able to just come in and out.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And with that, there was a lack of accountability from everybody else. And so I think I've really understood now that, you know, it's like I'm here at the top of the organization. And, you know, it's almost like I'm the manager, right? I sit on the sidelines and I have a bunch of people. I shouldn't be running on the pitch to score the goal. It's like,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I need to stay on those sidelines and I need to direct everybody to do the best job possible. And now I think so much more about bringing everybody on the journey. And when you're having difficult times, which we do all the time in all of our businesses, despite whatever it might look like to people, You know, you need to bring people on the journey and get them involved in what those solves are.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Because if you get to that place where you have to downsize or you have to change the way that you're doing business and you have to make meaningful changes, they're there with you. They've been part of the solution. They've been part of those solutions not working out and they're going to be part of making them right for the rest of the business.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Well, the truth is it feels like the end of the world, right? Like that's how it feels. When you start something from the ground up and it's yours, there's such a sense of responsibility. And, you know, I think that what happens in business, it's always like a confluence of factors, right? Like you try to work out like what has made this thing happen.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And it's like, you know, sometimes like death by a thousand cuts. There's no like one thing that you can point to and say, that was it. That's what made this like downtrending moment happen. It's like... It's a bit of this and a bit of that and a bit of this and a bit of that. But often what it comes from is, you know, you get so into what you're doing that it's very, very hard to rise back up.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And I think what I've taught myself, like this muscle that I've taught myself, is every kind of quarter, at least every six months, I try to float up.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
and see like what is happening not what I'm telling myself not what are we doing like what's happening what's happening with the competition what's happening in the market and back then I just didn't have the ability to do that I was so heads down so in the work so you know like just
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
deep in like my clients and doing the best job that I could that I had no ability to zoom out and I do again I'm not just blaming myself but it really was about that inability to see clearly and so I think they're
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Anybody that's kind of been through a moment like that, it's either surrounding yourself with people that are able to help you have a little bit more perspective or trying to make that a habit that you do that in your business. You know, Bill Gates talks about having reading week or like, you know, an away week.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
at a very young age and I felt the heaviness of that. And I knew it was all down to my mum to make ends meet and to figure that out so that we could all be OK. And I kind of decided at a very, very young age that I didn't want any of that anxiety and I didn't want that heaviness to stay around and to weigh on me as I grew up.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
He takes himself off and he does it twice a year and he goes and he just like sits somewhere beautiful. It looked like it was like by the water or something. He goes into a little cabin and he just reads, but he thinks about like what is happening in his business, what is happening in the world. And I certainly would never want the comparison to Bill Gates.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
But I think just having the ability to zoom out a little bit is something that all founders should really, really think about. And it's given me unbelievable perspective that I've made that a practice now.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I love the solo episodes.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Yeah, I love them. I think they're so good.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
You do nothing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Oh, babe, we all had an idea of like a yacht. No, no, no, no, no.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Tremendous guilt.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
creating a little bit of space yeah so is it a practice for you it is honestly I've really made it a practice and I say that it's about like first of all I have to get out of the office that's the most important thing um and it's really about me creating the conditions for me to be really thoughtful so it's like I prepare to like be with myself like so I'm really taking a snapshot of like what's happening with my competition what are people doing I'm on the sites of my competition like I
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I'm like, what is the customer seeing? I go like in store. I really try to understand that what is everybody else, like what are customers truly experiencing from this brand? And then it's really about looking objectively at what we're putting out there. And I really do that. And I've got a – I think I have a really, really good sense of not – I don't know how to say it without swearing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
You can swear. I just don't believe my own bullshit. I've still got the ability. And it's so interesting because I think that when you join a new company, you know, I always say to people that come, you know, you've got fresh eyes for, I don't know, a couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months at best until you start telling yourself the same stories that we tell ourselves internally. And
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I am very good at having those fresh eyes. And so when I have new people in the business, I will go to those people and be like, what are you seeing? Where were you before? Versus what we're telling you, what are you seeing in this company? And so I make a point to get around to any new starters. And that's just part of the process. Competition, new starters, having the Zoom out.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
What am I actually serving and delivering to customers? And I kind of take all of that. And come up with like just a one pager. Like for me, it's always very simplistic. You know, it's like three things. I'm like this, this, this. Go and work on those things. And it will often be in line with the priorities that I have, like the broader priorities of the business.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
But sometimes it's just like a random thing that I'm like, I didn't see that happening. I didn't see how shit would become of that, you know. And so it's like I try to have that level of objectiveness all the time.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
100%. Yes. Well, also, I'm rightly paranoid. Like, I've worked with some of the most copied, duped brands in the whole world. Do you know what I mean? It's like, I'm not actually paranoid. I'm just like, everybody's copying me.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Whether they are or they aren't, I actually, I thank God every day for the type of upbringing that I had because it's made me who I am. And I guess there were parts of my childhood that essentially just didn't exist because I didn't have the ability to like.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I'm totally unbothered. We've moved already, babe. I'm like, by the time they've copied me, I'm, you know, I'm a year and a half in the future. I'm like, go for it. Done. It's over. You can't, there's no other way to behave. You know, it's like if you sit around and you're so concerned at that, you know, don't get me wrong. If it's like copy, right, that's different. You're here for my people.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
But it's like this, that is just part of being like I work in fashion. It's very cyclical. Where are ideas owned anyway? Who knows?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Yes, absolutely. I've been known to walk up to a founder in the gym and disturb him during his workout. In the early days of Good American, I was like, excuse me, sir, I won't say who, but I was like, you are, we used to have this one company that would buy whatever we dropped at Good American and they would photograph it and put it on their website.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
The next like three days after and take pre-orders on it. And I was like, I know you're, I can see the rip pattern. Like I know that's my gene. That's literally my gene. You haven't like tried to make it. You've just taken our thing and you're taking orders on it. It would drive me crazy. So when I saw him, I went and told him about himself. He didn't care. He still carried on doing it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And there were 12 times the size of our business. So, you know, it worked for him. They're big. They're a big one. Don't say anything more, Stephen. People will work it out.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I'm not joking. There's a lot of companies out there that do a good job copying everybody else.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I'm sure people have. You know, I don't know how fun it is to run a company like that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Yes, indeed.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Yes. Now I'm, you know, I'm in business with Jens. So we started our relationship as I was an employee and then he was my investor. So he and his business partner invested alongside somebody else that I bought in, in my first company. Then I married him. Then we had four kids together and it has been an unbelievable relationship. And one of the kind of
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
you know and still to this day it's so interesting actually like the idea of like just playing isn't part of like who I am but it gave me a lot of other things it gave me a sense of you know I'm an extremely maternal person and it gave me this kind of like empathetic route that is like I'm here to look after a lot of other people and I know I do that very very well
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
most important things in my life and still remains one of the most important things in my life. But it hasn't always been easy because he is obviously, you know, doing his thing and he's very ambitious and he has his own things going on. And when you bring kids into the equation, everything changes again, right? It shifts a little bit. I think what is important is to have somebody who just sees
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Where did you get these photos?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
all of your talent and sometimes seize it before you do yourself. And I think that Jens has been like unbelievably encouraging of me at every turn. Every time I've had any doubt, every time I've been like, God, that feels like a little bit outside of my comfort zone. And he's been like, but you did this. but you did that, you know, and I'm like, oh, yeah, I did, didn't I?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And he's like, go for it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I say this all the time. Everything starts with yourself and you have to be willing to put what it is that you care about, what it is that you want more than anything first. You have to be able to do that first.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And if you have somebody who isn't necessarily like a big cheerleader, which not everybody can be for everyone else, that's one thing, but if you've got someone that sucks your energy and your ability to believe in yourself, that's a problem.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
So I don't think that everybody needs the cheerleader husband, but you need somebody that at least supports your belief in yourself so that you can go off and do what you need to do.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Yeah, for sure. I mean, look, I think that I'm very, very lucky with Jens. We are really into each other. We're really interested in each other. And that's the starting point for any great relationship, right? Like I am interested in his point of view about something.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
When I see something, read something, you know, get something on social, like the first person I think about is, oh my God, I need to see what Jens thinks about this. And so that is just the default nature of our relationship. Yes, we schedule date nights. And, you know, 16 years in, that takes a lot of different, you know, shapes and forms. We'll go to a Lakers game together.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Like Jens loves the basketball. And I was like, you know what? Like he loves the basketball. all the good restaurants are downtown. I'll make sure that we go to like some new crazy restaurant that I want to go to ahead of the game. And then we go to the game and it's like the perfect date night. We both get what we want.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
My energy had to be about, you know, making sure my sisters were fed and making sure that the house was clean and making sure we were safe. Because as wonderful as East London was, it was also a place where you needed to have your wits about you. You needed to make sure that you'd brought your bike in. You needed to make sure that you were safe.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Oh, well, we do a date night every single week without fail. Yeah. And it's really funny because our teams, we have like team greed meetings. We all get together like once a month and it's everyone. And the first thing everyone puts down is date night.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
They program it in like wherever we are and it just become, and it's so interesting that I always think it's so funny that they safeguard it in such a way because I feel like they all feel like that this has become like a really important thing. But I don't know that there's any big secret. The secret is just being interested in each other. The secret is just... growing together.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And I think that we are so fortunate that we've been able to work with one another, but it comes from like this place of like interest and respect. And I'm interested in the person that he was, is it 16 or 17 years ago? I wish I knew, but I'm interested in the person that he's becoming. And I think he's interested in the person I'm becoming.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Yeah, 25 or 24 maybe. Yeah, something like that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Yeah, a decade.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I met her for the first time on a job that I'd done for one of the girls. I was actually, and I'm sure they're I must be pretty furious now, actually. I was actually introduced through an agent at WMA. They just gave me her number directly, so I just called her.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And so my primary instinct wasn't like, let me have a laugh right now and let me see what my friends are doing. My primary instinct was, how do I ensure everybody's safe and the door's locked and we're going to be good?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Well, you know, probably. You know, maybe they should have ushered that introduction slightly more, but hey-ho. Yeah, I just called her. At that time, you know... At that time, Chris wasn't the Chris of now. She was still extremely famous. I remember when we went for lunch, there was like a little crowd forming outside. But it was very different from how it is today.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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I feel like this person was like dying to escape her circumstances. I was raised by a single mom, one of four girls, and I had a very big hand in raising them to help my mom keep our family afloat. But I thank God every day for the type of upbringing that I had because it was hammered into me that nothing is going to come easy. And that made me who I am. Gritty.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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Amazing. You know, but also like not in that way that when you go and meet someone, for me, it was just like meeting any other manager, agent, publicist. And of course, it was Chris and she was, you know, on the show. And so I had an understanding of who she was. But also I was trying to get something done. You know, I would have been doing some type of endorsement and trying to, you know,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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get some information about whatever it was that, you know, I was working on at the time. So it was just like a means to an end. Wherever I would go at that point in my life, you know, I was meeting with managers, agents, publicists all the time. And that was part of my job and part of what I did on behalf of brands.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
So it was a really interesting time for me, actually, because there was this big shift. And what I'd done in the agency was built this, you know, entertainment marketing agency. And we really kind of sat at the intersection of where, like, brands and entertainment get together. So film product placement, endorsement deals, influencer packages.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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And that was, like, the very early days of influencers. We were calling them bloggers at that time, right? Yeah. So the agency was growing and I'd opened an office in New York that was really doing like the majority of the business and it was fantastic. So the business become very kind of US facing from a client base point of view. And then this idea of like.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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talent-based equity deals kind of like raised its head. And I've read something about Ashton Kutcher taking, I don't know, equity in some Silicon Valley startup. And I started to get calls. And people would always phone me when they wanted to put an A-list talent in a fragrance ad, for example. But people started calling me and saying, hey, we've got this startup.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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We'd be willing to give X, Y, and Z 10% of this thing for an endorsement. And I was like, well, that's interesting. how do I commission that, right? Because usually I would be getting paid a percentage of whatever cash was taking, was crossing hands. So for me, it was this new, interesting part of the business that I had to figure out how to monetize. So fast forward, I did a couple of deals.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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And instead of, you know, taking a piece of equity, like, you know, because at the end of the day, my agency wasn't in that way, shape or form. It wasn't figured out that we could like bring equity into the business. Like, where does that go? That wouldn't go to me. That would go to the shareholder base. It would then mean nothing to anybody. So I was like, do you know what? flat fee.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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And so I did a bunch of deals with a bunch of talents and I'd say, you're going to pay me a couple of hundred thousand dollars. I'm going to work out for X to take 10% of your company. And I did three that were very, very successful. Then what happened is I kind of sat back and I was like, wow, it's so interesting. And I remember this company reporting some Just reporting some numbers.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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You know, I've had a lot of therapy. So starting from when I was 18 or 19, I started anger management because I felt, you know, like I was constantly in a rage, like I've never had any issue with being able to express myself and express rage, which I know is something a lot of women struggle with, not me.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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And I was like, I cannot believe that they've gone from there to there. And in my head, I made a direct correlation between the talent that had been brought into that company. It was Pharrell Williams at the time. And I was like, wow, because Pharrell did this thing, the value of the company jumped like this. I got my little couple of hundred grand and wasn't incentivized.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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And, you know, by any of the value that was created. And therefore, you know, I was like, God, I'm really losing here. Maybe I should do one of these for myself. Maybe I should create a company and bring a talent into that company and give them a piece of equity in order to accelerate the business. That was the start of Good American.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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That was the initial thought because I wasn't getting paid what I needed to from my clients. So I was like, well, who's going to pay me correctly? No one. So I'll create it myself. At that time, Jens and Eric had started Frame, which is an incredibly successful denim company.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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And so I had kind of thought in my head that between, you know, I had clients like G-Star and Calvin Klein, and I'd worked with Topshop for a long time, very denim heavy. Jens had Frame. And so I was like, I know something about denim. Like, that's a category I can do. No, what I knew was denim marketing. I had no idea about how to make a product.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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And then fast forward, I sit down, I sit at a dinner next to some guy who had invested heavily in a big plus-size retailer in America. And he said to me, Emma, this space is exploding. And he was telling me all about it and I... I looked on my phone, I looked at the retailer and I was like, that's gross. Nobody wants to dress in those clothes. That product is horrible.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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And then everything just came together. I was like, oh my goodness, I'm going to create a denim company. I'm going to make all of the sizes all the time and I'm going to make everyone look hot. Basta, end of. That was it. I was like, ding, ding, ding. And it just came together. And I was like, oh, and you know what I know how to do?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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I know how to book talent and bring them into the brand and converge all of those things and it's going to be explosive. And so the idea was kind of set in my head. And at that point, I'd had the conversation with Chris who had said, you know, we're looking for these type of partnerships now.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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And so I just went back to her and I was like, I have an idea and I'd really love it if I could pitch your daughter. The rest is history.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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I pitched her.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Mm-hmm.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
I don't remember the exact words. And, you know, I never like to... It's so interesting. We have a great working relationship, the family and I, because... I don't speak on their behalf, you know, and I'm very careful not to speak on their behalf. And it feels really unfair because they are so unbelievably famous that anything that you say becomes news.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
So I prefer never to talk about what she said. What I remember is the end result is that she said yes and, you know, we're in business together eight years later.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Yeah.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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No, it's so interesting, actually. That's the thing that we got right. I think that what we understood intrinsically is that there was this huge subset of customers that were left out of the fashion conversation. If you're above a size 12... that there was almost nothing cute in the market for you. And what we didn't do was create any separation.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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And it's interesting, you know, and I'm going to sound like so unbelievably arrogant when I say this, I don't really have those daddy issues. Like I've been so fortunate with the men that have been in my life. I've never had a bad boyfriend. I've never had experiences with men that have been like really unfortunate in that way.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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We were just like, we're going to make 19 sizes of clothes. And what happens traditionally in most retailers is that you've got one set of sizes and then you go up to floor five and there's this horrible little subsection and you've got... bit of, you know, the assortment for petite and a bit of the assortment for plus size women.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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And it's completely not reflective of what's downstairs for everybody else. And so we were like, do you know what? We're just going to connect all of those things. We're just going to make one product. We'll make it in 19 sizes and whatever we do. we'll let the customers choose.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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So if we're making a dress with a giant slit up the side of it, we're not going to moderate it because we think that a girl at a certain size doesn't want the slit as high because you know what? We bet she does. If we make a teeny tiny fluorescent pink bikini, we're going to make it in every size and we'll let the decision be down to the woman.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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And it turns out we were 100% right with our instinct because these girls weren't buying or Because they didn't want to buy it. They weren't buying because it wasn't available anywhere. And so our instinct to just like make the stuff and put it out there and see who comes was the right thing to do.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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So many, the game has so changed. You know, the arbitrage that existed in social media then, like how you could pay to acquire a customer is almost entirely gone. And so when I think about how we could work with Facebook and how we could work with Instagram, how powerful those followings were, back then, you can't compare it to now. And so you could acquire a customer very cheaply.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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You could, you know, I think that the algorithms worked completely differently. Therefore, the cohorts in your business behave completely differently. And if I think about it, we had a three-year golden period of runway. The good thing is, I think we knew.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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And I always talk about the beauty of my board members at that time, going back to people like Andrew Rosen and John Howard, who were the total opposite to everybody else on my board that was like, Emma, you need to just double down, acquire as many customers as possible. Don't worry about profitability. Just spend, spend, spend. And they were like...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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absolutely do not do that you need a profitable business that works when this is over and so I just was like I'm gonna do what these guys are telling me they have a lot of experience they have a lot of successful businesses they've been doing it for a lot longer and so I think that
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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While we created a foundation for the business that was really important, that was rooted in being digitally native, we never rested on that being the only way that we could meet customers. We were immediately saying, we've got to open our own stores. We've got to create a wholesale footprint.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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And when the tide turned, which inevitably did, and that really happened, COVID kind of gave you an acceleration, but then the fall off was pretty quick. We had this buffer of an incredible business that allowed us to stay the course.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And so I think the absence of my father in my life is one thing, but I had a lot of really important male influences around me. You know, I had my granddad that was a Big part of my life, my granddad Reg, it's actually his birthday today, which is so crazy that he's coming up in conversation because he does it every day. And then I had like two uncles, Uncle Robbie, Uncle Joe.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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Yeah, I really am blown away by what happens when you meet customers in real life, you know, and I think that some of the more experiential things that we've done that stay with people, you know, post-COVID, people want to be together and they want to be in person and they want experience and they want memories and they want things that last and they want physicality and what's tangible.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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And so whatever you can do that brings those type of experiences like in real life experience is always going to be out anything that is like more digitally native. And so a good example of that is we just opened a store on Sunset for Skims and we connected the store opening. with this incredible diner next door that's like a 24-hour kind of like Hollywood staple diner.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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There were queues around the block. Every single slot for the entirety of the six days, and it's 24 hours, was booked within five minutes. And this is to get pancakes and... chicken tenders and like a root beer float. And what was so interesting to me is I took my kids and it was so cute. It's like a 50s diner with a jukebox and we skimsified the whole thing. It looked amazing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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My three-year-old two days later said, I want to go back to the cafe. And I was like, You're English. That's so cool. You want to go to the diner? She's like, yeah, I want to get the thing with the cherry on the top. And I was like, wow, like in a three-year-old's head that even like she had an impression of like that being like a special moment and something that stuck in her mind.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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And I was like, those type of things for me are just way more valuable. Now, look. If you're starting a business, it's really hard to do experiential in real life, things like that. But I think the point is that getting in front of customers, like getting to them and that physicality of being in front of them.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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And whether that is if you're starting a new drink, like being in the supermarket, being in front of like the point of purchase, like that is really important to tell your story and have some physicality around what you're doing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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Yeah, I think it's, I definitely think it's community. And I, you know, when I think about what that means for our businesses, you know, oftentimes it's really about like, like owning that customer experience. You know, it's like if you, if you know, for example, Skims has an app, which is like an incredible place for customers to experience the brand.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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And I think there's like a lot of, again, it's like there's high, low ways. There's very, very few brands that can be successful in in an app, right? You've got to really have so much brand affinity and so much love to that brand that people will come, get off of whatever they're doing and like click and be in your app. So I think that's certainly not for everybody.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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I don't think that would work for a lot of the brands that I'm involved in. But the sense of like standing for something, having some kind of purpose, galvanizing people around something that isn't just about your product is...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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is probably the way to go i think and you know good american has been so successful because it always stood for something at the end of the day we were selling blue jeans and white t-shirts but people understand why they come to that brand they understand that there's a purpose but you also have to evolve that purpose continuously and when i think about where we started eight years ago and where we are in the middle somewhere we became b corp certified and that was another like
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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One uncle by marriage, one uncle, my blood uncle. And they were just such... like huge figures in my life and I had such a amazing male role models that I knew exactly what I needed in my life like I never I just I don't feel like I had that emptiness of not having my father around I really it just wasn't my experience anger management where do those roots stem from
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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real push for the company. It was very, very, very heavy lifting. But that was something that for our staff became so important to them. You know, denim is a tough business to be in. It's a very pollutive business. I have a lot of really young people, a lot of young mothers that work at the company, and they wanted to know that they worked in a place that cared about the world. that they live in.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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And so it really was something that was an undertaking by that company to say, we all feel that we could do so much better. And I think that the underlying values of that company are about it being about our customers and the people that work there and whatever is true to them being the most important thing. And so that has really evolved over time.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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Oh, bless her. Well, I'd say I love your curly hair, first of all. It's not a bad place to start actually because I would say that it's so important to be true to yourself in whatever you do. And, you know, I think that I have an incredible gut instinct and I have very strong feelings that guide the decisions that I make. And that has really led me so well.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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So I'd be like, have conviction about what it is that you feel deeply and go with that. But by the same token, I'd say know what you don't know, because there's a lot of places where I'm weak. And one of my greatest strengths and a superpower of mine has been know what you don't know and hire people into the kind of gaps and the holes that you have in your own knowledge.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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That's been really important for me and I feel like I'm so privileged that I've worked with people in one company and being able to bring them into another company and another and I start almost a lot of things with like a similar group of people and I love that because they fill in for where I'm not so good and that's been really key. And then despite everything you've been told...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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you're gonna have to take some risks. And I think that everything that this kid knew was like, don't be risky, don't take any risks, like figure everything out and be really safe. And what I've learned is that nothing is going to come easy. And I think that when I moved here, I moved to America with a two-year-old and a newborn baby. And I had no friends here, not like real friends.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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And it was a really scary move because you move away from, you know, you forget when you move country, you move from all senses of what is familiar to you. And that's very It's very difficult in any stage of your life, but there's a special vulnerability that comes along with having a new baby and having a new venture that you don't really understand how to run at the time.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
And so I would say, like, learning to take risks as probably being the best thing that I've done.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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Oh, you know, I think she's so cute and so lovely. You know, I don't, like, I feel like that's... You know, I still look exactly the same, don't I?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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You know? Like, I feel like this person was, like, dying to... Dying to just do something differently and dying to escape her circumstances. But also, you know, this person loved these three people so much. Charlotte, Rachel and Katie. They are like my world, my sisters. We're on a group chat and we chat all the time. And like my reason for being successful was... was so much about them.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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It's so much about this idea of being able to share and look after them and take all the things that we had in our childhood and move it into a new space. And I'm really proud of myself that I've been able to do that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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Yeah, because I feel like for me, you know, I... I didn't feel that safe when I was younger. You know, I really didn't. I really, really didn't. And I felt like I should probably have a future where my kids feel I want to be thoughtful about the words because, you know, my mum is still alive and she did the very best she could with what she had, which is all any parent can do.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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You know, it's really interesting because I really felt like I was raised in quite a blamey culture. Like everything was somebody else's fault. If you weren't making enough money, if you couldn't make ends meet, like whatever was happening, it was the government's fault, it was that person's fault.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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But I feel that for me and my sisters, there was just so much uncertainty in so many things that I wanted to make sure that for my kids there was just this solid foundation. And I'm so happy I've been able to do that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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Oh, I think it's one of the most important things. You know, when I think about who I am investing in, when I think about what businesses to support, I don't care if a founder has a lot of missing pieces, but if you can't sell... You ain't getting my money. Like, no way. Like, it's just no way. You can't outsource that stuff.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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You either have an ability to convince somebody of what you're doing and sell your idea uniquely or you don't. And I've never invested in any founders that didn't have that as a skill. They couldn't bring me on a journey and tell me their story and convince me that this was something that the world needed.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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Oh, you'll see you're just so much more thoughtful than I am. I would just... I would be so... You know, like, my whole thing is, like, I have to be passionate about the thing that I'm doing. I have to, like, see the need. I have to figure out the... Like, what am I solving for? And then I go in on that. I'm, like...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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You know, I'm painting the picture of like where the problem sits and then I'm showing you how I've uniquely come up with the solution. And then I'm, you know, I'm like old school, right? It's like I create a value proposition. I'm all about like the perfect place for pricing. And then it's like I'm going to get it to you in a unique way. I don't think it's like so complicated.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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I'm like a born salesperson. That's just who I am.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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It was never about this idea that I've accepted as a kind of a radical part of my life, which is like self-responsibility. Like I truly believe that everything I want, who I am, Anything is within my reach if I choose it to be. But growing up, that really wasn't a... That just wasn't a part of my life. It was very much about what was happening over there and how that affected you.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Oh, do I?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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That's what I'm saying.
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Yeah.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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How have I learned to act upon feeling? Well, I guess there's an element of doing it and turning out to be right. But I think that you've got to know the difference between... Having intuition and a gut feeling and then just sort of general excitement and being able to separate those things because I get really excited about things, right? And I'll be like, oh, my God, that's amazing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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And it's so interesting because when you sit on a show like, you know, Dragon's Den or Shark Tank, like you really need to learn that very quickly to separate those feelings. So that that helped me a little bit. But I think that that is the like, is it coming from a place that kind of hits you in your heart spot? Are you just feeling like some sense of excitement?
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And that that is two very different things for me. Like, are you moving me emotionally or am I just like, oh, that feels like money over there? It's like that looks like it's going to chop up into some, you know, nice dividends at some point. That's not how I make decisions.
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Like I never go that way with that sort of general excitement of something that's going to be like more financially exciting for me. They never work out.
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You know what happened in the end of that story, right, Stephen? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Listen, he did all right. He did all right. But, you know, I'm not investing in his next thing a year.
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I saw it. I can't believe people are just walking back into that. But there you go.
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Yeah, I think there is some truth to it. I mean, look, I don't know that I even had an idea of how high high was. And I think that it's perspective and your environment that gives you an idea of what is high. I often talk about this idea, you can't be what you don't see. And for me, I don't think that I had a lot of role models and being in England at that time, it just wasn't like, who was there?
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Do you know what I mean? I don't remember anybody being particularly like, you know, I kind of honed in on Oprah because she was on the TV when I would come home from school and I was like, that is aspirational. There's a black woman who reads all these books that has these crazy ideas around gratitude.
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And so it was interesting, actually. I think I just got enraged thinking that... all the possibilities that weren't so obvious to me were the fault of somebody else. And I was, I think, just a bit of a hothead, you know. And what I saw in my family and what I saw around me over and over again was this ability to just kind of like lash out and not deal with things.
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And at the time, you know, she was talking a lot about manifesting and it wasn't mindfulness, meditation, right? But that then kind of moved in to mindfulness. But the exposure to those ideas, to me at that time, it felt fresh and new. And I was like, I am going to watch Oprah and I'm going to be like Oprah in my way of thinking.
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Not that I wanted to be on TV, but it's like that's the type of level of thought I wanted. I wanted to be thoughtful and articulate and move like Oprah because I thought she moved good. So when it comes to like your dreams and your ambitions, for me, I think that there may be...
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Aside from the visualization side of things where I drew this beautiful home, for me, they've always been a little bit more bite-sized. It's been like, let's get out of this place, get out of Plasto. Then let's get a job and surround yourself with the right people. And then it's all been very kind of like much more... incremental.
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And I always think about this idea of how I've leveraged everything that I've had into the next thing. And I'm pretty good at doing that. I have grand plans that I started writing when I was 30, but they're much more theoretical about how I want to feel and how I want to be spending my time as opposed to like, what will I be doing at that moment?
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The hiring advice was learn to fire. Well, that's what, you know, because I think that what happens in businesses is the people that get you to 10 million are not the people that get you to 100 million. People get you to 100 million are not people get you to 500 and then to a billion.
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And so what happens is as a founder, you get so, you know, you know what it's like, like that startup vibe, those early people, the work that they do and the times you have together, that all becomes like... so much part of your success story, right? And if you hold on to that for too long, you kind of miss what is next and you miss that ability to be able to pivot and to level up.
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And so I think that the mistakes that I made early on were not moving people out of the business quickly enough.
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Because I just didn't want to fire them. Because? Because I have loyalty and I'm like such a nice girl and I was like, you just needed to go and I didn't want to say that.
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It restricted my growth. It restricted my ability to be able to move up and level up and have better clients. And, you know, you don't know what you don't know until it's, like, right in front of you. And so I needed to keep... As the business grew, you need to keep constantly up-leveling your people. And so that's what I missed.
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Oh, no doubt.
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No, we're not a family. We're not a family. And that's the first thing. It's like, I think everybody really needs to understand, like, why they are there. And this is about leadership style, right? Like, are you clear? in what you're all there to do. Because it's like, I am not building a family. I am here to run an organization. That organization is here to create a profit.
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And I absorbed that as though it was just the default reaction to anything. But I knew pretty early on, I had a really fantastic boyfriend when I was 18, 19, and he was like, your reactions are just not normal. I was like, really? He said, yeah, I think you should try and deal with that. And I did.
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And we all have to be very, very clear about our goals and how we're getting there. And I think that in the past, what happens, and especially when you have successful companies, success masks a lot of
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problems in a business right like and when you get successful you've got to allow yourself and your team to be equally critical even when everything's going well and even if the bottom line's well there'll still be dysfunction within that organization and you can't let the success marks what that dysfunction is you've got to get into it and actually it's even more important when you are successful that you deal with those things because otherwise
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The problems get bigger and bigger as the company gets bigger and bigger and you end up with a problem that you could have stamped out much earlier on that you then didn't. So it's just a really key thing. And it's a muscle. It's like anything. You get better at this, like, all the time. I've become better and better at spotting who are the right people.
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And inevitably, actually, I spend more and more of my time bringing the right people into the company. I reckon we were talking about this the other day. I think it's like 20%, maybe even 25% of my time is spent on talent, and cultivating, like, the right people to come into the company. It's a lot of time.
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It's a lot of time.
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But that's the difference between good and great. 100% agree. Who you bring in. You know, when we talk about culture in a company, culture is like who you hire, who you fire, and who gets promoted. Now, that is my job. That's my decisions to make within the organisation. So I really think about how much more thoughtful can I be about those decisions and making
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The majority of that is put in like who I hire.
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Oh, no way.
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Yeah. Well, Steven, that's the reason that you've got to be a great salesperson. Otherwise, I'm not going to invest in you. But it comes back down to that, right? Because in the beginning, you've got to sell a dream, a vision. You might be willing to give someone some equity, but chances are that equity is worth zilch in the beginning.
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I went like into a community like anger management course and I was like, oh, like there's other ways to deal with this. Like I can breathe through it. I can like find these like tools and techniques and figure out how I can. react differently. And with that, it's going to come a different result. And with that, people will treat me in a different way.
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So you've got to be that person that can say, here's where we're going. We're going to paint a vision. But you've got to have the strategic chops to say, you know, anybody good is going to understand that a founder alone goes nowhere, right? So it's like, what am I coming into?
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Like if it's the founder and it's like very little, then what's the vision that I'm buying into and what's the strategy to get there? So it comes back down to this like idea of like can you sell a vision? Can you sell the strategy these people are going to come into and actually work towards? And I think that that is probably like the thing that I'm good at after.
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I've had a pretty clear idea about what I'm doing and I can do that because I don't do very much. Everybody always says to me, how do you do so much? It's like I don't do very much. What I do is obsessed with it. over the customer. I obsess over a set of products and then I get into them really quickly. That's it. Like that's all I do. And so it's not really that much that I do.
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And I think that it's like so, so, so important for you to be able to do very, very, very few things really, really well.
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No. No, I honestly think it's the opposite. And I think that if you start to tell yourself that it's a slippery slope, because no one is good at everything, right? You've got to find people that have expertise, that can do things that you can't do. And that can be really difficult in the beginning. But again, it's like...
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So much of it is about curiosity, asking as many questions as you can so you can start to figure out who is going to be the best person to solve that problem. In the beginning, I just feel like I had no idea how so many parts of my business worked.
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But it's like I would make sure that I would be the person to ask enough questions to get to the point where I could hire somebody that would be competent to do that role, right? So it's like you train yourself and you train these muscles that get you better at hiring. And you're going to make some mistakes. Like I never feel like we spend enough time talking about failure, about the mistakes.
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I've made so many mistakes. I moved... a whole bunch of people here to L.A. and shut the office down 18 months later because I thought I had something that I just didn't have. I thought that the reputation I'd built in London would translate to L.A. What I didn't understand is L.A. is a community and I wasn't part of it. It was like a closed door. I got here and I was like, what?
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Like just frozen, frozen out, completely like that.
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They're not like us. This is it. And it really was. And so I think that, you know, learning, like not just understanding, okay, I had this thing, it went wrong, but it's like really going deep and being like where and how did I fail and how do I consistently get better at that? And staffing is one of those things that you just get better and better and better at it the more you do it.
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Truly exceptional people?
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And it was like this insane moment of connection for me. I hadn't connected how my behavior might be impacting a lot of my relationships and what was happening around me. But you don't need to tell me things more than once. I was like, got it. I stayed in the program for like, I don't know, a couple of months.
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Mm-hmm. You know what? At the risk of disagreeing with anybody so prolific and amazing, I think as someone who has been able to move people between organizations or between companies, sometimes it can be the company that can make people great. You can have a truly exceptional person in a kind of dysfunctional company and then they don't do as well, right?
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Like you can bring in somebody not quite exceptional into an exceptional culture and company and the organisation makes them great.
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No, makes them great. Because what people tend to do is level up, right, where they're, you end up the average of the people that you surround yourself most. And I have, in some cases, brought people in, you know, that I'd be like a B-, and they've turned into an A+. And the more I think about this, Stephen, the more I think that's happened on a number of occasions.
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And when the organisation is exceptional and when the people there are doing exceptional work, they can actually level up the people. Now, they have to be somebody that wants to level up, for sure, but I've definitely seen it work that way.
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I love this idea that you've hired friends. Who are these friends that you're hiring? Did you hire a bunch of friends? It's a terrible bloody idea. I was 18. So it's me who works with my husband. Yeah.
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This is great. Between Prada and the rap battle, I get it. I can see that these things weren't happening.
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No, but that's what it comes down to, like rigor, right? It's like you, again, you've developed systems and processes that have helped you get to where you are. And it's like, now I have a giant organization and a, you know, a, head of people that spend their life, like, not just, again, bringing people into the organisation, but then, like, making them great once they get there.
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Like, I had no such thing. I don't think I knew where the HR office was when I was in employment. I'd be like, who are they? Where are they? I don't know, a girl called Jo that sits in accounts. I don't know where she was. But I say that because we're in a different time now where there is such an ability for us to be more thoughtful about who we're bringing in.
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Fast forward, and I'm an apparel CEO, someone who goes out and raises hundreds of millions of dollars, somebody who starts an agency in multiple countries. I have zero qualifications to do any of that. Like, I didn't have talent as a designer, but I will just make it happen.
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And it's something that throughout my life, like therapy in different ways, thankfully not group therapy anymore, but I've remained using therapists in different ways to unlock different things that for me become difficult. And I think about that as like a tool and the way that I grow. And when I had kids, I saw a therapist to really understand like,
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And so I think anyone who's really smart and any founder... that's really smart is going to use all the tools. All you need to do is know that it's a really important thing that you will do. Who those first three, five, ten people that you bring into your organisation will be the difference between good and great.
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And so being slow and thoughtful and purposeful and using everything at your disposal to make those decisions is probably the best time that a founder can spend outside of developing products or whatever the end product is.
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Yeah, go on.
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I mean, look, it's undoubtable that that is real for so many people in their lives and the way they think about themselves. I think that any thoughtful organisation has and certainly is
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In more recent times, if we think about what's happened in the last five years, anybody that didn't look at their company hiring process and beyond the hiring process, look around their business and see, is it a true reflection of our customer base, of society, of... what we're trying to achieve and who we want to be making decisions. We're talking about foolish companies here.
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I feel like anybody and everybody did that. Look, the great thing about prejudice is you very rarely know if it actually happened to you. Nobody likes to point it out. They're like, listen, you didn't get this thing because actually I'm prejudiced against you. I'm sure it has happened. It's never something that, for me, knowing how I'm hardwired,
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I would have let get to me in any way, shape or form. You know, I'd get in a room and would never feel any such, like held back by my education, held back by my accent or anything like that, or being a black woman. In fact, to the contrary, to me, I always felt like it was a bit of an advantage. There was only one of me.
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how I could be a great parent, how I would think about my own ambition balanced with my parenting. And so it's just something for me that I feel pretty good about using someone else to come and help me figure something out that I'm struggling with.
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I used to walk into these offices and work experience and everybody would always single me out because I was the only one that kind of looks like she might have a different opinion. Everyone came from the same kind of, you know, like private school stock. And there I was with the accent, with the big curly hair, black girl sitting in the corner. And inevitably they'd be like, what do you think?
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So, you know, it just played out differently for me. And therefore my experience is kind of a reflection of that.
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Yeah, and I think this is a very different... Listen, you and I speak as two British people, right? I've lived here now for eight years. It ain't the same here in America.
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Well, the way people relate to race is extremely different here. And if I'd have been born in America, maybe I'd have had a different feeling about how the colour of my skin impacted my life on a daily basis because it's very, very, very different here and very much more prolific and a point of everyday life.
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not just conversation, but everyday prejudice comes up and manifests itself in a very, very different way here with negative connotations. And so I thank God that I was raised in London and I had a very, very different way of associate, like how I felt about myself. I had a very, very different way of the way in which I was raised and how I experienced, like, race as a kid.
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Yeah. I feel like this is, like, my speciality, you know? It's really interesting because so much of that is just, like... in us right it's like hardwired who we are and how many fucks we give and I just so happen to be the type of person that has such sort of self assurance and such conviction that I don't care or I just have, I have such high, it's not that I don't care.
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I just have such a high value on how much I care about what I think that maybe what other people think just kind of like pales into insignificance for me. That's the honest truth. And so I just have very, very high self-worth.
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I think about that all the time because it's just one of those things that we just imagine that people spend a lot of time crafting texts to us that you would like sit and be like, what did they mean by that? You know, like, it's a scent. Do you know what I mean? I didn't even think about the words and the now, you know, whether I was using caps or the wrong emojis or like whatever it is.
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And I do think that there is this thing that we imagine because we're at the centre of our universe that we're at the centre of everybody else's. And it's just not the truth. Nobody's watching you. I think about it all the time. Nobody wakes up and thinks about me as much as I do.
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Fashion designer. Fashion designer. Straight away, yeah. Fashion designer. And why would you have said that? I was obsessed. Well, you've got to remember, you know, I was born in 82. And in the early 90s in England, it was like the glory days of fashion. You know, you had all of those...
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So we've just got to relax. Well, maybe it feels like it for you, but I just don't think that anybody's that interested.
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Yeah. Yeah, totally. Listen, and David Swindon is like allowed to have his egg emoji. I just don't think his egg emoji needs to like ruin my day. I'm like, poor fucker. Like, what's he doing? How embarrassing.
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I love that you ask this and I'm very surprised that you are. I had the most easy, unbelievable experience. brilliant fertility journey with my first two and then probably the saddest, most disappointing, hardest time in my life with the second two.
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And so it really was a tale of two halves because I have an 11 and an 8-year-old and, you know, without too much information, I, like, literally, you know, came off the pill and poof, I was pregnant. Oh, wow. At what age? Which was amazing. 31 I had grey one. Yeah, so 30. 30 years old, you know, was... had got married, actually had zero ambition to ever have kids ever.
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And then it was like one of those fairy tale things where I literally walked down the aisle and was like, oh my God, I just can't wait to have a baby. What is going on here? No, I don't know who that girl was. So I got pregnant very easy with my first child. A couple of years later, I had my second child. You know, life happens. Moved to the US. Everything's like, you know, going fantastic.
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supermodels, the Kates and the Naomi's and, you know, amazing designers, McQueen and Galliano and the British kind of art scene and the, you know, British music scene. It was just an amazing time in England. But to me, fashion was this means of escape. It was this fantasy industry. I didn't know anyone that worked in fashion, which is so crazy.
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I decide baby number three, come off the pill again. And I'm like. waiting, waiting again, and it doesn't happen. And so I'm like, honey, you need to go and get yourself checked. He's like, okay. You know, so we do the things that you do when you don't get pregnant so easily. And there was just no explanation for my infertility. And so I went through a few rounds of IVF. And for me, you know,
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So I am at this point, how old am I now? I'm 42. The kids are three, so 38.
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I'm 38. So I'm, you know, I'm not like quite yet a geriatric pregnancy as they like to call it in this country when a woman over the age of, you know, 40 has a baby. But I'm skimming, right? I'm on the edge of where fertility starts to become, you know, more of an issue. And anyway, for me, it was devastating because I really, really had something. And I'm sure so many women will tell you this.
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Once you've made up your mind that you're having another baby, that was it for me. Then it was just like, well, how is this going to happen? And I was so lucky in some ways that I was here. I lived in Beverly Hills at the time. Access to the best doctors was so, so easy. And so I went on what would become... a journey through IVF.
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And it was one of the hardest, most soul-destroying times of my life. I couldn't think about anything else. You know, you could be like, Emma, what do you want for dinner tonight? I'd be like, a baby. I just was single track. Like, all I could think about was, I need this. I need to be pregnant.
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You know, it was soul destroying because I went through multiple rounds of IVF and every single time for me, actually, it did work out. But then I lost a baby three times and it was really, it was just awful. You know, for me, it happened at nine weeks, 11 weeks and 16 weeks. And so, you know, at that point, 16 weeks, you're about to tell people you are, you know, you think you're past the
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sort of danger zone, so to speak. Something in my heart told me that it wasn't going to work out for me. Like, I actually think I knew deep down, but you're doing all the things, you know, I'm having the acupuncture and the doctors all feel great about it. And of course, you know, you have IVF and then it's successful. You're like, great, now I'm pregnant, I'm having a baby.
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And so that loss was just, it was so hard to deal with. And again, you know, it was a very isolating time because it was like COVID. I was on my, like, driving, you know, in gloves and a hazmat suit. You know, it was like the time when we really didn't know. And, you know, and the roads were empty and it was tough.
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You know, the police would pull you over and I'd be like, I'm going to the IVF clinic, which was like one of the few things that you were allowed to do. to be on the road and driving around for. So it was just very, very difficult. But, you know, I had a happy ending. And so for me, my journey ended in something that I never thought would be a way that I would go.
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But I ended up deciding that I would have a surrogate. And I met an incredible woman. And... She carried my twins, which was the single biggest... thing that anyone can ever do. You're like, what? This is so crazy. And it was amazing.
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My grandma worked in a bra factory, which I laugh about all the time now, thinking about how many bras I make. But that was, like, as close as anything I knew, like, anyone that had worked in, like, the apparel business. I certainly didn't understand the idea of entrepreneurialism, having your own business. To me, it was just a fantasy. Like, I'm here in Plastow. It's shit.
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I had such a profound, incredible pregnancy with this amazing, wonderful woman who, beyond what our contractual commitment was, because you hear horror stories, she asked me for nothing. It was a beautiful, amazing partnership. And my twins were born via surrogacy. And that was that.
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No. And, you know, I have to tell you, Stephen, I loved, like, and maybe I approached it more like a bit of a, like, I was very transactional about it.
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No.
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Oh, beyond, beyond, beyond complicated emotions, because you are, you know, I've had pregnancy loss before, before I decided to have children. You know, I've had a complicated, as so many women have, a complicated fertility journey. It was emotions that were I would say too hard to bear. And for somebody who's used to being able to get her way and work towards things being as they should be.
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And to me, it's like, The amount of effort I put in directly correlates to the result and there was no such thing in this. You could have all the shots and all the acupuncture and do everything that you're supposed to do, not work out too much, don't go in a sauna, you know, like be an angel, eat all of the right things and still I couldn't, you know, hold on to the pregnancy.
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So to me it was just something that I couldn't bear.
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You know what? I'll tell you, I wish I'd have spoken about it more with all of my friends that had gone through it. And I will tell you this story. I was, a couple of summers ago, you know, I'm often the person people confide in. And I happened to be, I won't say where, I was in this place, very confined, like on a boat. And all of the women were in some type of fertility thing.
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Like they had different things going on. And I looked around and I knew I was the only one of all five of us that knew everybody's thing. And I was like, we could be having such a good conversation now. It would be so rich and so useful because, again, there was somebody that had kids by IVF. There was someone who had just come from somewhere.
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There was somebody that was in the middle of diagnosing endometriosis. And there was somebody who was pregnant but not telling everyone she was pregnant because it was IVF and she'd had all the problems. But anyway, everybody had their own unique circumstances. And I was like, in a group of women where we discuss – I won't even say what we discuss, but we discuss every single thing –
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that that is like the last taboo. It says something about your womanhood, that it would be such a deeply held secret and something that you just can't discuss is such a shame. And I'm not saying that that's what it is for all women and all groups of friends, but it's definitely something that people really, really struggle with talking about.
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And certainly for me, going down the surrogacy route, I really felt an element of... I wouldn't say shame, but it was like, I was willing to do this myself. Like, why couldn't I? You know, I should have just been able to do it. I was ready, you know, at 38 to, like, have to, like, go back on the workouts and, you know, like, you know, figure myself out again.
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How do I get away from it? And, you know, to me, it was like, it's almost like the movies. It could have just as well been Hollywood. It was like... That's over there. It's beautiful. It's glamorous. Wouldn't that be fantastic to be part of that somehow?
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And so I felt like I'd been robbed of an opportunity to do something. And then, you know, coming out of it, I was like, wow, that was such a profound experience that I would never have had, had all of these things not happened. And so in a weird way, I was just kind of grateful for the opportunity to have been... you know, to have been able to see how selfless like another human being could be.
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Yeah, I was, although I have to tell you that there's nothing, you know... For most women, we spend all of our time thinking about how to not get pregnant. It's just like, you know, I just want to like not get pregnant forever until it's your moment that you want to get pregnant. And then there's this second moment where it's like, it's no longer your choice.
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And the window's really, really narrow. And so I, you know, again, I have hundreds of women in my office. And I mentioned to you at the start of this conversation, you know, there was some fertility seminar yesterday. I think that there's still so many myths around it. You know, there is no good time. You can freeze eggs, but it's not like freezing embryos. It's very different, right? And so...
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The idea that the decision is all ours is just not realistic and that there is a window and it is narrow and it is something that you have to think about. And I think there are a lot of women that know that they don't want children. That's fine. But if you do, it's really something that you ought to be more planful of because it's bloody difficult and it's not how you think.
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The clock is ticking.
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Stephen, whatever you say, I will do. It's a great idea. Let's go. What should it be called?
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That is great.
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Stephen, you're so incredibly smart and thoughtful. Oh, thank you. And I feel like if my podcast could be born here and be just half the podcast that you have...
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They level up.
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Yes.
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Yeah, you know, I'm so glad that you asked a question like that because for me, it is a little bit of a mission. And I think that the more success I've had, and I'm sure this is very similar to you and you've mentioned it on a few occasions. And actually, I remember being out with you in Manchester. Do you remember when we had to like walk?
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like from the studio to the bar where I was doing that thing. And, you know, it's like inundated with people and questions and people just wanted like, just get like this one thing that they're trying to figure out across the line and say like, Stephen, like, how does, how do I do this? And so that happens to me all the time, wherever I go.
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And I've made it a habit of mine in the morning on the way to the work to just like jump on the phone to someone for half an hour. I do it almost every day, four days out of five. And I'll speak to some founder and give them like 30 minutes of whatever it is that I can. And so the podcast was honestly from the beginning about figuring out like, how can I scale mentorship?
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How can you get to this place where all of these people that want to ask me questions can actually get some answers from me? And, you know, the podcasting was not the first thing that came to my head. But the more I looked into it, because I'm a
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huge podcast listener I listen to so many podcasts but it's kind of interesting that for such a kind of broad space there is kind of such a narrow point of view in so many ways it's so many men hosting podcasts and when we start to think about business it becomes even more male dominated and And so in my head, I was like, well, I just have a very different point of view.
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I have very different experience. I have a very different, you know, access. And what's been so interesting is all the people I called out to do a podcast, they'd never done a podcast before. Yeah. Everyone that I was like, hey, would you come on? They were like, I've never done this. And I was like, well, that's interesting.
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And immediately, even just from that kind of casting point of view, I was like, oh, maybe I have a distinct point of view that could be interesting here. But All I want to do is very, very simply is take what I've learned and take the people that I know and have it be impactful because I feel like everyone aspires to something. Everybody wants to build the life of their dreams.
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Like... Like... best friend, like the best thing ever. I mean, you know, we worshipped money. We worshipped money. We worshipped what money could bring. We worshipped the material stuff that you could get for having the money. It was all about the car and the bag and the thing and the thing. That was it.
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And so I was really thinking about this as something that maybe if I could facilitate conversations and conversations tell people more about the journey that I've been on and be really thoughtful about what it takes, right? Because I just feel like, again, in... Like, the female, like, media landscape, there's so much toxic positivity.
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And I'm like, babe, you're not going to be able to manifest your way there. Like, I'll tell you the truth if you want to listen. And if you're willing to put the work in, like, all of these things could be, you know, applicable and, you know, you could have access. And so that's what I want to do. I want to just, like...
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do things how I do them, be honest with people, bring in people that I know and be honest about my journey. And I'm excited to do it. Like it's been, I've done a couple of episodes and I'm like, just having a chat.
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That means so much.
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It's a responsibility. I see it as a responsibility. It's one that I'm taking really seriously because I feel like there is an amazing opportunity there. And if you take anything... seriously and you apply yourself and you think about like, who are you here to serve? You know, and I think about that every day. I told you, it's like, I'm obsessed with customers. I'll be obsessed with listeners.
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And at the end of the day, I just want to do something where it's like, it's just about doing a good job. Right now I'm obsessed with like, what is the content that you put out? How do you have a conversation that's not currently being had? And I feel like there are such incredible people like yourself that are having beautiful conversations that are actually moving us forward in ways.
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It's like, I text you when you have an amazing episode. I'm like, I love that episode. And I'm so proud that you could be in like,
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None of it around. Absolutely none. I mean, I knew people that had money, but they were kind of over there doing their thing. They were not part of my thing. But it was so obvious to me when I was a kid that money was something that I needed to find. So in my head, that was always like playing out in my mind of like, how do I get away from from that being my reality.
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black guy from england who's doing these things who's at the top of the charts and i i look at that and i think that's so important and so for me it's like it's interesting to think about how this could be important for a certain group of people right now it's going to be important beyond what you'll ever see or realize or understand or be able to measure and it's hoping and we've you know if you know that if that's 15 year old emma there had seen this emma
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Well, Jens loves me the most, doesn't he?
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More than my mum. More than my lovely mum. You know, I would say whether it was my mum or it was Jens, you know, when you are... When you're so loved, you know, and I feel like someone who is so loved, you know, my sisters love me, my kids love me, my mum really loves me, Jens loves me. You have, like, such capacity... And that's what I always feel.
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When I think about what it is that kind of keeps me going and gets me up, I have such a huge capacity for more. I have such a huge capacity to give, to put the work in, to receive, to make things better. And I honestly think that that is what's happened to me, that I've, like, my ability has just grown so much and continues and my capacity just keeps growing.
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And it's a really interesting thing as you get older to see that, like, happen within you, you know, because we always talk about, like, having insane energy in our 20s and then, you know, it's like I'm 42 now and I think I have more capacity for learning, for giving, for being... you know, open to new things than I've ever had in my life. And I think that that is because I'm really loved.
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And it's so interesting. I don't think it's about what I've achieved. I don't think it's about anything else. I think that I know I feel so safe and so secure and so seen that I can do anything because even the biggest mistakes, like these people, they'll always love me. Like it's totally fine whatever I do. So it's like, I would say that.
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Thank you, darling.
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Oh, I hope so. I'm so proud of you. I really am. I look at everything you're doing and I'm so happy that you're here in America about to take it over. Come on, babes. Thank you so much. No pressure.
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And I've, you know, I wanted to leave where I was. You know, I wanted to be, I used to have this like vision and I would draw this fireplace and this beautiful Christmas tree and this credenza. And I would, you know, and I'd imagine like that's the house of my dreams. And it's so, you're going to think I'm insane. But years later, the first, so I had Grey on December 20th.
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And got him back home, sat down with my baby in my living room for the first time and literally burst into tears. And my husband was like, oh, my God, isn't it like amazing? We've got this baby. And I was like, no, it's amazing. I drew this scene. This is the scene that I drew my whole childhood and had this beautiful townhouse in Clerkenwell.
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And it was like the window and the credenza and the Christmas tree. And I was like, I did it. And I will never forget the moment. It almost eclipsed having the baby. I was like, this is insane. Like, I visualised it. I made that happen. I've drawn this 500 times and here it is and here I am.
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Yeah, yeah, of course we do. Well, first of all, I wouldn't tell them to draw it because that's just not me. That wouldn't be part of what I would say. Absolutely not. I think that certainly in this space of, like, you know... mindset, manifestation, visualization. There's a lot of toxic positivity around here for women. And what you need to do is like get to work.
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Like that is the first thing to say. So I have like, yes, you can dream it. You can believe it. You can create a vision board, all the things, but don't forget what comes under that. And what comes under that is an enormous amount of work and an enormous amount of planning. I think that what I do uniquely well, Stephen, is that I have an ability to focus on what I'm doing.
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I have an ability to get better at what I'm doing, right? Like to constantly get better at whatever it is that I'm focusing on. And then I have an ability to drown out and kind of disregard the noise of everyone around me. And those three things are important because focus is like a force multiplier in work, right?
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When you have a plan and you have a focus and you can kind of go into what it is that you find important and double down on a very finite number of things simultaneously,
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that's what propels you forward and i was very fixated on working in fashion but i also knew that i didn't have talent as a designer and as much as i wanted to be a fashion designer i couldn't draw that drawing wasn't a very good one actually if you look at it now it's like i couldn't sketch i don't have much creative talent what i am is a great enabler to talent i can sit next to a talent and understand their vision and figure out a way to turn that vision into a reality
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But the creative part isn't what I do so well. And so really understanding like what is your plan and how you can double down and get into the things that you are uniquely good at and that you uniquely have skills for is important. I think getting outside of your head is like really important because so many people have dreams and ambitions and ideas, but it just exists here.