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Lesson Info

How To Build A Media Juggernaut with Piera Gelardi

Hey everybody, how's it going? I'm Chase Jarvis. I wanna welcome you to another episode of the Chase Jarvis Live Show here on CreativeLive. You know the show. This is where I sit down with the world's top creators, thought leaders, and people who are generally helpful to helping you live your dreams, and career, hobby and life. My guest today is someone you'll know. She's the co-founder and executive creative director, this is a mouthful, executive creative director and co-founder, of course, of Refinery29, Piera Gelardi. Yay! It's me! (upbeat music) (applauding) They love you! Welcome to the show. Thank you. So happy to be here. I'm, this is a long time coming. I have been following your career, following Refinery29. I feel like we're on the, if the last 10,000 years has been way too much about men, I think the future has an amazing feminine quality to it. I can see it emerging in popular culture. I think you are a champion, a leader in that world. Was this intentional? Or are...

you just following your intuition, and here we are, you have this insanely successful site, a career built on supporting, driving the world of feminism. Tell us a little bit about that. It was intentional and intuition, kind of a mix of both, which I think is sort of a theme throughout my career and life. But yeah, I grew up with feminist parents. My mom was someone who really wanted to raise me with feminist values. That radical notion that all humans are equal? Yeah, that all humans are equal, that me and my brother were equal, that I should have the opportunity to choose things in my life, and not have it be assumed that I would follow the stereotypical path. And so, yeah, I was raised that way, and going to pro-choice rallies, and reading feminist literature, and my mom would read us feminist fairy tales when were going to bed, because she wanted both my brother and I to have examples of fierce female protagonists. So I grew up with that, and that was always kind of ingrained in who I was, and then as I started to grow in my life, that was something that was just a part of me that I really identified with, but it almost, because I was raised with it, it almost wasn't so much in my consciousness, as a thing? Yeah, I wanna make sure that I'm not trying to overly frame that. I think it's just a piece of your DNA, that I find, as someone's who read a lot about you, and followed the story of you and Refinery29, it's just a piece of that, the DNA, it seems like? Oh, totally. I was wondering what the basis was, and you were raised with it, clearly. Yeah. And how have you imported that into Refinery29? Yeah, I mean, it's totally a piece of my DNA, so yeah, because it's just how I was raised, and something that didn't seem out of the ordinary to me. Yeah, it's wasn't a thing that you went to the store and got, and said, "Oh, we'll put this into our thing." Yeah, it's like, now when I think back and I have that perspective, and I've talked to my mom about those choices that she made, the fact that she sought out those specific types of books in order to be the type of mom that she wanted to be. I think now I have the perspective to realize it, but then I didn't quite realize it. But it was something I always gravitated toward. As a teenager, I loved Sassy Magazine, and Bikini Kill, and I was just really drawn to sort of publications and culture that celebrated iconoclastic, powerful women, who were really doing their own thing, and that had spunk and courage and exuberance to them. So that always inspired me and I think also moving to New York. I grew up in this small town in Maine, and it was pretty homogenous, in terms of culture and style and all these different things. So coming to New York, I was completely in awe. So there's this first place. Yeah, I remember my first time going to Coney Island. And I was like, this is the most beautiful place in the world, just because of the incredible mix of cultures and style, and to me, that's so fascinating and gorgeous, and so yeah, when we were starting Refinery29, we wanted to celebrate personal style. We felt like, I've never been what I think of as a fashion person. I've never identified in that way, but I always valued style as a form of self expression, and I always admired people that express themselves that way, that were so confident in their own skin that they could have that expression, and that goes way back in humanity is adorning your body, and using makeup and clothing to express something. So I love that about style, but I felt alienated by a lot of fashion publications and fashion brands. Mainstream. And advertising, 'cause it just felt, A, it was serving up this really narrow lens of what beauty looked like. It was sort of like everybody should aspire to be tall, thin, white and rich. And I was like, that's boring. And also, kind of designed to make you feel bad about yourself, like you need these things to be filled, to change you. So yeah, we started Refinery to celebrate personal style. We were really inspired by all these different independent boutiques that we were seeing around us in New York, that had a really unique perspective on what style was, and that had totally different communities of style. Like you had Lyle in Nolita, that was kind of all 20s, 30s, 40s vintage inspired, and there were all these amazing retro women that were wearing that, and they had their own unique style, to A Life in the Lower East Side, which was much more, they were more celebrating street culture and sneakers, and they had their whole own community around them, and having performances in their backyard. So we loved just seeing all these communities of style that were really different, but that were an expression of more than just what you put on your body. They were an expression of different ways of curating your life, and different interests. So it's a much more cultural look at what style was. So yeah, that's how we started Refinery29, and I think that emphasis on individuality, celebrating more the personal style of fashion, that grew, and actually, in the beginning, we were unisex. We wanted to focus on both men's and women's, we had a really unisex aesthetic, and over not that much time, but over I think two years, we decided to focus on women. We felt like there was more of an opportunity there. There was more interest from women, and we felt like the gap between what we wanted to create and what the women's media and fashion media was making was a bigger -- That was the opportunity. It was a big opportunity. It was just what we were doing felt really different, and really exciting to us, and we just saw a lot of opportunity to change the way women were represented, to change the idea of what women should aspire to, because my parents and the way I grew up, it was always about aspiring to be the best version of yourself, and to continue to learn and grow and be curious and develop your interests, and I was like, why would I aspire to just copy this cookie cutter thing, and that's not representative of what I think is most beautiful in life and in culture. Well, obviously you have done an amazing job Thank you. Of creating the thing that you just described. For the folks at home, I don't know anyone who's not really familiar with Refinery29. You guys are such an iconic brand. Thank you. In media now, and you guys have done an amazing job breaking through. But as an audience of creators and builders and makers, and doers and entrepreneurs, Aka, our tribe. Yeah, that's right. Our homies, aka our homies. This was true for myself. A long time ago, I feel like I know differently now, but there's a lot of folks at home that are like, wow. I can't even take the first step, because there are things like Refinery that have done it already. I know just enough about your founding story to be dangerous, but not enough to tell the people, and besides, they'd want to hear it from you. Sure. So give us a little, with the goal of helping people understand that we didn't have it figured out, that we didn't have any money, it was more like ready, fire, aim, as opposed to going around, so can you give us a little insight into that? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that taking that first step can be so daunting, and I certainly would have been absolutely terrified if it was like, I thought I was taking the first step to create a company that spoke to hundreds of millions of people every day, or had 500 people on staff. I don't think I would've taken that step, because it would just seem so terrifying, and I'd be like, I'm 23 years old. What do I know about building a business of that size? But I think you just take the first step. You don't have to go 12 years into the future and do this thing just yet. So I think because we built it slowly over time, it's not as daunting. I mean, so when we started it, as I said, we were inspired by all these independent boutiques in New York, and we launched, actually, with this, what looked like a really cool, interactive mall map of the 29 best stores in New York, and you could kinda browse them, and learn more about them, and we did a lot of street style with the different communities of people that went to those places. But it wasn't this big revelatory thing when it launched. It was cool, it was unique. But where we have taken it is to this whole other place, where now we're doing, we have so many different realms of what we're doing. We're creating 200 plus stories a day across all these different platforms. 200? Yeah, it's crazy. Oh my God. We have a short film series that we've been doing with different women directors. We have live events that we do, like this event, 29 Rooms. Yeah, I definitely wanna talk about that. Which is this kind of huge, ambitious project. So where it started to where it is is so vastly evolved, but I think as you're creating, you start to see these new steps. I think what's interesting to me is when we started, I saw an opportunity, but it was kind of like, right here, and then as you start to build, the window and the vision that you have gets bigger and bigger. So now I feel like where we're at is just the tip of the iceberg, because once you start to grow and see -- Like unlocking levels in a video game. Yeah, totally. It's like, oh my God. There's a whole 'nother world over here. Exactly. Well, I think that's super refreshing. Can you talk a little bit about the tactics? Oh yeah. Like I heard you had five grand or something? Totally. I only half answered your question. No, no! I answered like the second part for the audience. Nah, that's cool, and I think that's the part that is the dreamer part, and you have to have dreams before you put tactics in place. But you know, it's important for the folks at home to understand that there was a time when you didn't know where your next job was gonna come from, and didn't know if it was gonna work, and maybe it's just for your homies, and it wasn't for 500 million people. So can you take us back to the mindset and the actual, what you had or what you didn't have? I definitely can. Step into my time machine. (laughing) Go back. (mimicking wind) Yeah, so we launched it. I have three co-founders, Philip, Justin, and Christine. Philip and Justin had the original idea for Refinery 29. I basically starting doing it as my side hustle, kind of as a friend/consultant, and Philip, at the time, was my boyfriend, and is now my husband of 12 years. Congratulations. And Justin was his friend from high school, and then Christine had been my boss at a magazine that I had worked at before starting Refinery, so yeah, we started the company with this map. You built the website yourself. We built, no, I had a friend who I had -- There you go, it's unfolding right there, like a friend's like, hey, can you help me with this thing? Exactly, I had had a friend that I worked with a lot at the magazine that I had been at previously, who was my age, and so asked her and her company, she had a small company, to do the logo and design the website through her founded developer to launch it, and yeah, we launched it. To kind of start the company, Philip and Justin, actually through friends and family, scrummaged together $5000, which was how we -- Five grand? I love it. How we started the business. And we started it very scrappy. Like I still was working at the magazine when I first started, and I would basically just be up really late at night, working on it, would spend the weekends going store to store, photographing and taking street style and product pictures and all this stuff, and then after some time, I quit my job, but I still did freelance for, I think almost a year and a half. This is important, too. Yeah. I did freelance for a year and a half. I would basically do anything that came to me, that sort of allowed me to just go, it was like a day rate situation, so anything where I didn't have to think about it before or after, just go, do the job, and then get out. So I did a lot of production assisting, styling assisting, some random illustration jobs, just really anything that was fixed, so that I could use most of my brain, my active brainpower on creating the company. But you know, that was how we got it started. We bootstrapped it 100%, used our office as our headquarters. Your everything, or your world headquarters. Yeah, it's actually so funny, because sometimes I think back and I remember that Justin, our partner and co-founder, would come over and of course, Philip and I lived together, because you know, we're married. So he would come over, and I remember once, we decided at lunch, I had leftover risotto, and we just fried up some orecchini, and it's so funny for me to think about this now. I'm like, what were doing? And also the funny thing to me is that I felt so overwhelmed and so busy back then. And now when I think about it, I was like, why did I, what was I doing that made me feel that way? Because in perspective, it feels like it was this totally different level, but yeah, we bootstrapped it, and I think what helped us to be successful was having an unique and differentiated point of view, and a lot of people told us we would never be successful, because we were focusing on these independent brands that didn't have a lot of marketing budgets, they weren't global conglomerates. But actually, that was an advantage for us, because we were too small to work with The Gap. We had a small, niche, dedicated audience that cared about what we were doing, and actually those small brands that everybody said would be our downfall, it was a self-supporting community. Oak in Brooklyn was our first advertiser for a whopping $1000. Nice. And then after a couple of years, Stephen Allen, who owns stores all over the world now, although he was a more New York-focused retailer then, he was our first investor. So that community helped support us as we grew. Okay, so many things you just said. I wanna deconstruct them. Okay. Let's pick things apart! Let's pick them apart. So in particular is, well, gosh, which one of those things should I go into first. Yeah, there's so many layers, that I think the, let's go to the part where you transitioned into this career that was something that you really wanted. I think there's a cultural narrative, it's like, yeah, you're an entrepreneur, you go all in, you just push your chips in, and you jump off the bridge, and the people that I know that are the most successful entrepreneurs, none of them did that. Right. Are you committed? Yes. But is there things like, or are there things like rent and food, that if you can't provide for yourself, that it's gonna cause real problems, and I think that segue, that transition from you in your magazine job, into living your dream career, to me that's a massive black hole for so many people who wanna get started. So give me a little bit, you talked about doing things that didn't suck up all your time. Yeah. To me, that's a big thing. Because people are like, oh, yeah, I have my full-time job, and then between the hours of 9:00 pm and 5:00 am, that's where I'm doing my thing, the classic side hustle, which I'm not against that, but I think you're constraining the other things is massively important. It's a gap. Talk to me about that. Well, I think it depends what your job is. I mean, my job at the magazine was a great job. It was very creative. I loved the people that I worked with, and it was creatively rewarding, so I had a lot of freedom. It was a really interesting place, and I learned a lot there. However, my entrepreneurial roots and my fierce independence made me wanna do my own thing. But I'm also someone that I can't, like I was all in at that magazine job. It wasn't my company, but I was all in, and that's sort of just my personality. It's like, I'm doing what I'm doing, and I'm gonna give it my all. So for me, it was, when we started the company, I was doing it, yeah. I was doing it at nights and weekends, and was having some success at doing that, but it was just really hard for me to think bigger about it, because of knowing, just still having the creative energy going into my job. So I think some people who are really great at kind of -- Compartmentalizing. Compartmentalizing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And are really disciplined, can handle doing a side hustle with a full-time job. And like, kudos to them, and I think they're amazing. But that's just not how my brain works, so I knew that if I wanted to pursue Refinery, and building it, and taking a real shot at starting my own thing, that I was gonna need to leave the magazine. But financially, I couldn't just quit, and be like, okay, now I'm doing this thing that doesn't pay me any money. So yeah, it helped to just find, I think within whatever career you're in, because I was a photo director at a magazine, which involved production and art direction, I was involved in styling, I was able to kind of transition that into these different -- Smaller. Smaller freelance gigs that had decent day rates, and it was actually an amazing year and a half or two years. Our fashion director from the magazine had also gone freelance, and so he was my savior. He kept booking me on these different jobs. It's an inside job! Yeah, so I would assist him, and styling assisting is like logistics. Yeah, it's like $250 a day, but sometimes on commercial jobs I would get $500 a day, which was awesome. And yeah, it just involves, it's so compartmentalized. Like you're there, you're doing the job, you're focused on it, and then when you leave, it's done; you just have to invoice. But it's amazing to me how that act of compartmentalizing frees you up, and I think you don't wanna have that as career. Some people do. They wanna have their 9 to 5, and then when they get off, they're off, and I respect people for that, but that's not really the entrepreneurial spirit. Most of the folks that I know don't have that compartmentalization. They're sort of all in, and to me, having done exactly the same thing you're talking about, but with sort of waiting tables, and it was because I couldn't get work in photography, I didn't know any photographers to start out, that little missing piece of how do you compartmentalize it, because you know, the 10 hour days, a long grind, get out of the house, you gotta commute, and then really how much energy, and the reality is, if you want to change your life, you have to put the time in, but the simple act of how much do I need to make every month, how can I compartmentalize it, go to work, do my thing, get paid, and get the hell out of there and get back to dreaming and doing the thing that I care about? Massive, I think that's a powerful insight. So that's one of the things I wanted to deconstruct. Another one is that you didn't have, you did all of the jobs. Like you talked about doing so many of the things at your new magazine, and creating community, and bringing in your friends, and how important was that to getting the business off the ground? I mean, I think it was really critical. In order to launch our business, I had to learn so many things that I didn't know. Like I learned Google Analytics so I could send traffic reports and understand what people were reading, and what they were engaging with, and what they were interested in. But you were creative! Yeah. This is my point. I think that idea of the creative -- Thank you for blowing this up. I can see where you're going. Keep going. Yeah, I mean, I think the idea of this monolithic glowing creative that has all the big ideas, but doesn't have to get in the weeds. There's no shovels or yeah, it's bullshit. I just think it's bullshit. I think from multiple levels. I mean, I think that from my experience, and I know we have so many stories in our culture that are about things just popping off, and this overnight successes, and I mean, it took us eight years to be an overnight success. We always joke that that's the case, and it took so much hard work, having to do so many different things that were outside of my job description, not that I've ever really had a job description. And I think that also that idea of that monolithic creative is really antiquated, because I think to be, for me, being creatively successful is about community, it's about listening to many different people's ideas, it's about not having to be the loudest voice in the room, but actually being the one with the antennas up. Yeah, with the best ears, that's connecting the dots on what people are saying and attuned to other people. So I think that idea is, to me, not one that I resonate with, and I do wonder if that's because that's the general idea of the creative or the creative director. I sometimes wonder if that's why only 4% of creative directors are women, because people have this different, this antiquated and different idea of what it means. Anyway, but going back to your question, yeah, I think as we grew, it's really been about learning different skills, and taking on different things, and the four of us used to joke, like at Refinery29, no job is too small, as Philip and Justin almost got crushed by an air conditioner that they had to buy off Craigslist for our office, because that's the one that we could afford. Yeah. Or, you know, we're lugging the trash out of the office at night. You know, it's just all these things that you just kind of figure out how to do it, and you do it. It's very unsexy. Yeah, I guess it's, I think it's sexy. Good. I love that answer. Love to hear it from you. Yeah, I don't know. Work is sexy. I've always thought work was sexy. I mean, that's also, just to go back to my background, like I grew up in a family business, everyone sort of worked in some capacity of the family business, and I just felt like everyone in my family was always collaborating on stuff, so I always thought work was very exciting, very sexy. I had a job from a very young age, and yeah, I don't know. Let's put a pin in that for a second, because confession, before the cameras started rolling, we were talking a little bit about each of our backgrounds, and you came from an entrepreneurial family, and at one time, your father had the largest business in Maine, and experienced some problems, and did that background, and you're living your life in that family. How did it prepare you for what you're doing now, and is having that background required for someone? No. Okay, so give us a little backstory, and how you've applied some of those lessons to your career arc as a creator and as an entrepreneur. Yeah. I mean, I think that that's, I'm gonna answer the question, I promise. Okay. But I'm gonna have a slight non sequitur first. Great. Let's do it. Yes. Yes, anywhere you wanna go. No, I think that it's great to look to people for inspiration, and to glean ideas and confidence from seeing other people's stories of success or failure, whatever. But I think that thinking there's one way of doing things, or that there's one path to a desired outcome is totally erroneous, and everyone can find their own path. I don't think my path to what I am doing, even though I came from an entrepreneurial background, it's not a linear path, and it really is, I think you are the most successful when you find your own strengths, you create your own story, and you're not trying to model yourself completely off of someone else's success. I think it's just so important to know what success looks like for you, and to really create that from the place of your background, your interests, your skills. So you don't have to have the same background as me to do something similar to what I do. Awesome. I had coffee with James Victore. I don't know if you know, James is an amazing designer. He's got some stuff in the MoMA. He found the show. The things that make you weird as a kid will make you great as an entrepreneur. Yes. So sort of lean into those things, is what you're saying. Yeah, lean into what makes you you. I think that that's something that I've learned again and again over time, and something I definitely suggest that people think about. But yeah, so growing up, I grew up, my dad and his brother had a business called Shape, and it was a manufacturing business, manufacturing CDs, VHS, cassettes in the 80s. Oh, in the 80s. In the 80s, when those things were all the rage. But they were very innovative in technology, engineering and manufacturing, and they had a big business, so I grew up putting on my clean -- Going to the factory? Yeah, going to the factory with the little hoodie, and the booties, yeah, and I would get all the rejected CDs and my cousins and I would make armor and jewelry out of them, but yeah, so I grew up with him and his brother having this business, and my mom worked in the business, my aunt worked in the business, my cousins would come for the summer and work at Shape. My brother and I worked at Shape at different points. So I think just seeing that, and it was always blending. Because we lived in Maine, and they had clients from all over, they would actually use that as an advantage, and have business clients come, and so we would have these clambakes, like multiple nights a week for my dad's clients. Nice. Coastal Maine, there. They had to lure them in, because it was like, wait, we're going for a business meeting in Maine? So yeah, he had this successful business, but then a couple of different things happened, from manufacturing moving, starting to move to China, the cost of one of the plastics that they used went way up, and they had a bad investor, that through the series of all these things, they ended up going bankrupt. My dad got fired from his own business. Oh my God. And also, they were like a Cinderella story in the press, because they both came from working class background, a military family, and they completely built this thing from the ground up, but then it was like the downfall, 'cause everyone loves to build 'em up and then tear 'em down. Yeah. Which is an unfortunate aspect of our culture. So yeah, I saw that happen, but I just think it was such an amazing foundational thing to see. I think it's kind of, had two effects. One is that I have a healthy dose of paranoia, and not in a bad way. I think it's just an awareness that -- That all this could go away. Yeah, that everything can go away, and that's actually okay, but that it's important to never get too comfortable or confident in what you're doing, knowing that the industry's always changing, that the factors at play can always shift but being aware of those things can help you to avoid them sideswiping you. So that's something I definitely took away from it, but also, it's just amazing to see, that was really challenging for my dad. It's still something that we talk about a lot, but it changed his life in so many different ways. I feel like he actually, it taught him a lot more about what was important to him, and he's just, I think he's a better person for it, so to me, it also just makes it okay that that can happen. It makes me grateful in the moment to recognize, okay, right now, things are really great, and I'm truly grateful for that, and if things change, that's okay too. Yeah, you're adaptable, or that you can solve problems. Yeah, like he never reached that same level. That's the thing, I think also, about success and knowing what's successful to you, because he never had a company that size again, that scale, but he's maintained his passion, he's had a lot of other businesses, he's become so much more. Since that point, he became so much more involved in our family's life, and that's something that has given him so much joy, and so I think seeing that, and realizing that success doesn't have to mean having this -- The biggest company in Maine. This crazy thing. Yeah. I mean, sometimes people ask me, "When did you become successful?" or "When did you feel like you'd really made it?" And the funny thing is when we launched that little map, and 500 people came to the site, like I was high fiving. We went out for pizza, we were like, this is awesome! And I felt so successful. So I think, I forget who said this, but I think about it a lot, which is that comparison is the killer of joy. So I just think about that a lot because it really is about knowing what success looks like to you, what fulfillment is for you, and not feeling like you have to model that off of something else that exists in the world. That is a beautiful segue to what I'd like to shift gears to now. Nice, perfect, of course. Let's go to a little bit more philosophical place, around the mission and focus of Refinery29, and obviously your personal DNA overlaps deeply with that. And culture. So there's a lot of folks out there that are like, what does diversity and inclusion bring to my business, or to my work? Maybe you can talk about imprinting your own DNA and specifically, for other leaders who are listening. I have a very visceral, very strong reaction to what it's done for me in my business and the people I get to work with, but I'd love to hear yours. How do you think about that, and what role has your mission played, and diversity and inclusion played in the strength of what you've built? Sure. So I think for us, as we were building Refinery29, inclusivity has always played a huge part. Again, from starting, and seeing all these incredible communities within New York that were really diverse in all different ways, in terms of their style, race, body type, background, everything, and again, to me, that's such a huge source of strength and beauty and power. You know, the other thing was as we were creating, we were creating for a new generation of women, and the millennial generation is the most diverse generation in US history, now superseded by Gen Z, and by 2044, the majority of America will be made of minorities. So minorities will be the majority, so I think that that's just something that's so important to recognize. For us, it's always been really pivotal to reflect our audience in our content, to make sure that the content that we create is not just our idea, but is actually something that is meaningful, that reflects the people consuming it back to them. So that's been at the core for a long time, and actually, to do that was not, it's still not always easy. When we first started doing original photography, for example, most of the modeling agencies only had majority white models, and it was also pretty much all straight sized models. Yep. So kind of hiring a model through a modeling agency is the easy way to do it, and it's the way most people do it, but we started doing street casting, we started making cards that I would pass out, that me and our photo editors would pass out in the subway, or we'd go to the music festivals, and pass them out, so that we could start actually reflecting the women reading Refinery29, or women that looked like them in our content. So I remember, I think it was in 2010 or that we did this idea that was the month of hair. Amazing. So we wanted to, every day of the month, be talking about hair, but be talking about different kinds of hair, and we wanted that to be the most diverse representation of hair in terms of style, and length and texture, and so it was like, yeah, I was out casting at the Madewell store. I was at the gym across the street, and there was this beautiful, Afro-Latina receptionist that had this beautiful head of hair, and so I was like, please be in this, so really through doing that, we tried to represent a huge range, and what was amazing about it was just the response that we got, people thanking us for seeing hair like theirs in our content, and it seems like such a small thing, but it's actually really meaningful, and that was something that was important to us, but I feel like that was a moment where we realized how important it could be to people, and so since then, we've really continued to work on focusing on shifting the representation of women, and I think that's on multiple levels. That was one of my next questions. Like you're talking in terms of hair and fashion, but it presumably operates at so many different levels. Maybe you could touch on a couple of those. Totally. Yeah, I mean, I think there was just such a gap, I think what was happening in a lot of mainstream media, as I mentioned before, was this narrow lens of what beauty looked like. It was also this limiting lens of what women could be. Even when you think about the proliferation of articles about how to please your man, and not these publications not really telling women that they have their own power, that their own pleasure is something that is a source of power, that they should be thinking about men's pleasure, not their own pleasure. That's an example, I think, of the thought process that was happening. Just fractured, so messed up, yeah. Yeah, we wanna be a catalyst for women to feel, see, and claim their power. That's our mission, and part of that, we've all heard that expression, if you can't see it, you can't be it. So we try and represent that on all different levels, from when we started doing sex content, we said, "We're not gonna presume "the sexual orientation of our audience. "We're gonna say partner, "we're not gonna say boyfriend." So little choices like that, but also really thinking about the photography that we have on site, and how we can represent women through that. Last year we launched this project called The 67 Percent Project, 'cause I think it's also important in life and in work, to constantly be taking stock and thinking about what is it I'm trying to accomplish, and checking in, and saying, "How am I doing?" And also, culture is always changing, so it's important to say, "Am I where I need to be?" So last year, we did that exercise. We learned that 67% of women in the US are a size 14 and up, and median advertising only represent them 2% in images, which is really damaging. If you don't see yourself represented, that teaches you that you should be ashamed of who you are, and I do think that we have been so, women in particular have been so brainwashed by the imagery that we see, and this ideal of beauty that is a falsity, so we're trying to unwind that, and it has been shown that you can start to unwind bias by showing people different images. So if you see a different image, you can start to shift your mindset, and your bias. In fact, it's the only way, really is, right, if you are aware of it, that's the first step toward change. Yes, exactly. I was familiar with that, the 67% thing, and that the 2 to 4%, that was just so shocking, and I think that underpins so many of the things that have made you and Refinery29 successful, is leaning into those things. Yeah. You talked about them as little details, and there's an Eames quote that I love, that the details aren't the details, the details are the things. Yeah, the details are the things. Yeah, and when folks are looking to make their mark in the world, and make a difference, and if you try to speak to everybody, you end up speaking to nobody, so what can you focus on, and what details can you apply that are uniquely you, or things that you care deeply about? That ends up being the differentiator, when I think of Refinery29, I think like just so in touch with culture. Thanks. You guys nailed it. Thank you. Well, I think, for us, when we learn that step, and we actually looked at our own site, and we've been talking about body positivity, we've been aiming toward inclusivity for years, but actually, when we took stock of our own site, we were far behind. We weren't representing 67% of our images of plus sized women. And we said, "You know what? "We need to change this. "We can't just talk about this. "We need to actually do it." So we spent months shooting new images, and really trying to re-picture, 'cause also, when you look at, it was like, when we looked at what existing images there were on stock sites of plus sized women, the majority of them, the woman's weight was the subject of the image, so it was a woman measuring her waist, or a woman standing on a scale, so it wasn't a woman working out, or getting a coffee, or talking to her friend. It was like all these images of plus sized women were just about her weight, so you can kind of infer what that's sort of saying about the image, that this person isn't a whole, complete person. She's just fixated on her weight, because that's abnormal. And didn't you guys do a project with Getty -- Yeah. Can you talk about, just small departure, for a second, talk about that? Yeah. 'Cause that's really interesting. You recognize there's a problem, and then you fixed it. Or not fixed it. We definitely haven't fixed it. To be clear, sorry. But in stock photography, you said, "Let's do something. "Let's take action." Can you give us, small departure on how you went about trying to make an impact on that area where you saw a problem? Yeah. Yeah, it was kind of small steps over time, but when we committed ourselves to doing this 67 Percent Project, and we're still working towards getting to that, consistently representing 67 percent of our images showing plus size women, reflecting back the reality of America. But as we started banking all these images, creating all these new images, to sort of re-picture what women look like, I met the director of Visual Trends at Getty, whose name is Pamela Grossman. She's amazing. She's just someone that I think is so phenomenally interesting and talented. Anyways, so I met her, and we were talking, 'cause we are very much like kindred spirits, in terms of wanting to disrupt taboos and challenge convention, and re-picture the way that women are represented, with a goal of showing women in all of their complete glory, not kind of tokeninzing these different elements of women's existence. So we had dinner, and we were just jiving so hard, and it was clear that we needed to do something together, and it was like, when we thought about it, it was like, okay, so we can make this change on our own site and our platforms, and ourselves do better at representing women, or we can have a much bigger impact by actually giving these images to anyone in the industry, whether that's in editorial or advertising, and saying, "Look, you can no longer say "that you can't find an awesome of a plus-sized woman, "because here's all these amazing images, "so have at it, use them." So beautifully disruptive and supportive, and I just love action, instead of just pointing at a problem, and saying "This is a problem." Like what are you gonna do to taking a role in fixing it? I think that is amazing. Thank you. It's so cool. I mean, I think that that's something that I think about a lot, and I love hearing examples. Like I always think about, there's a moving company that donates time to helping people that are escaping, women who are escaping domestic violence move themselves and their families. And I think about it all the time, because I love that as an example of using what your skill is, your calling or your job, and finding a way to tie that to something that you're passionate about changing in the world, and I think for me, that was, it feel like my calling in a way, because I come from a visual, photo background, I went to art school, and was working at a fashion magazine, which was really creative, but I don't know, in a lot of ways, I guess still reinforcing sort of, not fully, I do think we were doing a better than average job, but it wasn't really moving the needle in the way that I wanted to, and it's just been really exciting, and again, to talk about the window of possibility opening, it's like you do one small thing, you just start going out and passing out these street casting cards, and then over time, it builds into this collaboration with Getty. So I think that's so important to realize, just make a decisions, take the first step, and then make the most of it. I mean, I think that that's the best advice I can give, because people can be so daunted about doing something big. Well, that's okay. You don't have to do something big. Just do something small, and then do the next small thing, and then it kind of is like a breadcrumb trail that leads you somewhere. Incredible. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah. To go back to, I pulled you off track a little bit to go down -- I go off track on my own. But this is, the people at home, this is what they wanna hear. They wanna hear you, so I'm just trying to provide a couple of guide rails here, and I wanna go back to not just The 67 Percent thing, but basically a focus on providing perspective, because there's so many folks, I said earlier in the interview, when you try and do something for everybody, you do something for nobody. Yeah. How important has focus been? You started out, you guys iterated a little bit, you talked about how you used to be for men and women, and then you've narrowed, and now you're addressing some women, women in power, gender diversity, how has that focus been a huge positive for you? Or maybe what, I'm framing the question too much. What have been the results of you furthering your focus? Has it been successful, or do you find that it creates rifts in the company or in your audience, or how has it been for you? Yeah, I mean, I think we've focused in more in some ways, but expanded in a lot of other ways, so I do think when you're starting something, having focus is super important. One, because, generally, if you're starting something, there's an element of bootstrapping, and you don't have a ton of resources, so trying to do too many different things, or trying to appeal to too many different audiences is just gonna fragment your time and your energy, and it's better to actually build off of, maybe you know that you wanna go here, but starting at that small point that feels like where is the most differentiated and interesting place to start? But what can you do with what you've got? Yeah. So yeah, we did start focused on men and women, quickly honed in on women, and I think then we've built on that. We started focused on style and beauty, but also really infusing those with a bigger message, sort of we're talking about style and beauty, which a lot of people think are superficial, but what we're actually showing you with these are tools for self expression; we're actually using these as a way to talk about individuality, and to celebrate diversity. So started from that place, and started to build. We started to say, we were interested in experimenting in health and sex, and seeing if our audience was interested in those things, and we did some small experiments, and it was like the couple of stories we did in that realm, did way better than anything else that we were putting out, and we were like, oh, wow. Like, let's lean into this, and we saw that that was just something that there was just a huge appetite for, and I think because we were differentiated in our perspective, we weren't talking about how to please a man, we were talking about how to please yourself, and get a lot of knowledge that was sort of taboo, and you could only read about it either in scary medical places, or in places that were like, winking, and you didn't even know what they were saying. It was using so many cheeky languages. So yeah, I think as we started to grow, we started to do little experiments and tests. I think that's the other thing that's been so important to how we've grown, is not just jumping off the cliff into the I don't know. Abyss? Abyss. Thank you. Sure. I was like, ocean? Or not like just launching some crazy, huge thing without doing any sort of testing. We've really done our model is more to do these little tests and we talk a lot about, yeah, we'll do a couple little tests with maybe small stories that don't take a lot of resources, and then if we see a big reaction, then we build it into a short series. If that does amazing, then it builds into something bigger, until it's a full-blown thing on its own. Got it. But a lot of those little tests don't go anywhere, so I think it's important to stay focused, and if you have other things that you wanna try, that's awesome. Just test them out in small ways that don't fracture all of your time and attention. I love the theme of experimenting, A/B testing or whatever in the web world. A/B testing. It's a thing. It's a real thing. But that's nice little nugget of advice. Anything other tactical pieces of advice? You know, I'm trying to, you know, for the folks that are out there, that already identify as a creator, or they're on their way, and they're trying to get the next thing, what advice do you have, clearly testing small, we've talked about how to transition into that thing, there's been a lot of good tactical stuff. Other pieces of advice that I could say, you know what? Here's what Piera said. Here's the advice. Oh. Risky, but you gotta go there. Advice. Yeah. I mean, one thing that might sound like an oxymoron, but I think be confidently humble. So for us, knowing what it was that we didn't know, and what we needed to learn helped us to grow, helped us to ask for help, helped us to seek out people that could complement and fill in the blanks that we had. I think so often, people are scared to admit that they don't know something, or are scared to be vulnerable. And that can really be an achilles heel on something that keeps you from growing. So for us, yeah, I know it does sound like an oxymoron, but knowing confidently what you don't know. No, it's beautiful. Knowing what you don't know. For sure. And being confident as you ask for help and advice, because building a business, even if it's in your area that you studied, that you had a previous job in, there's so many elements that you can't know. I mean, every phase that we get to with our business, I'm like, I don't know how the hell to do this. Like, who am I to take our business to this next level? And you can tell yourself different narratives. Like I have told myself in the past, you don't know what you're doing, you didn't study business, you went to art school, you're just an indie kid, so what the hell business do you have running a company with this many people? 500 people. I can tell myself that narrative, but I also know that to get to this point, there is no road map. I think there were points where I was like, I don't have this experience, I don't have the road map. No one taught me to do this. And yeah, 'cause there is no road map. There is no one that can teach you how to do this thing, because you're the one doing it, and it's probably the first time it's been done in this exact way. Yep. So I think, for me, that's been helpful to remember that, and realize that, and give myself credit, and also to remember that you're never done growing. I've had so many times when I've thought, you know what? I'm gonna have to quit this business because I don't know what I'm doing, I don't know how to take it to that next level. I don't have this exact experience, but that's such a limiting thought. And I think so often, we have those limiting thoughts, and we listen to ourselves, and we stop, we stop out of fear, and remembering that you're never done growing, that we all have the capacity to learn and grow, and that creativity is boundless is a really powerful thing to remember. Can I interrupt you for just one second? Yeah, I'm just, you know. No, no, we could talk forever. Going on and on and on and on. I'm gonna hang up here, and then we're gonna talk for hours. You're not going anywhere! (laughing) No, so when, I think, are there tactics that you use? You talked about the story that we tell ourselves. What do you mean by tactics? I'm not great with, like -- In the morning, when you wake up, I always tell myself three nice things about myself, or are there specifically intentional things you do to maintain a growth mindset? How do you combat that 3 am voice in the head that says you're not good enough, you haven't done this before? What do you, do you just shut it up? Do you take a shot of tequila and go do it anyway? What's your approach to solving that really -- Tactically. How do you do it? Yeah. I mean, I think now when I have self doubt, first I recognize it. I don't try and push it down. I just say, "Oh, I'm feeling really depleted. "I'm feeling bad about myself, "I'm having a lot of self-doubt." And I try and be compassionate to myself, and say, okay, maybe right now is not the right time to do this big thinking thing that you're trying to do, because you're not in the right mindset, so try to be a little bit more sympathetic, because I used to kind of have that moment, and then spiral, try and continue to spiral into it, and now I try and recognize it and then take a break, like, okay, this is not the moment to engage with this inner dialogue. The other thing that I do that's very specific is at the end of every day, I write down highlights, I write down low light, and I write down something I learned, or something that was an idea that was percolating, and it's just a nice moment of reflection, but it's also super informative to look back at it, because you A, get a lot of perspective and gratitude for all the different things that are happening, but then when I look at the low lights, for example, I often, it helps me to recognize patterns, and realize things that I need to address, or narratives that I'm telling myself that are not helpful. So it's just, I think, a lot of self awareness, and taking stock is very helpful in combating those things. I love it. You talked about creativity, creativity being boundless, that's one of my personal missions, is to unlock that, the mission of CreativeLive is to unlock that at millions of people all over the world. Tell me about The Peach Pit. Ah, The Peach Pit. Yes. Okay. Tell us about The Peach Pit. So The Peach Pit is my office, and I call it The Peach Pit for multiple reasons, one, 'cause it's painted peach color, the other is it's kind of a cozy environment, and then, I'm a child of the 90s, so it's a 90210 reference. But yeah, I mean, my office, I got my own office two years ago. It's the first time I've ever had my own office. You've been in business for how many years? Almost 13, actually. Okay. Amazing. I love it. Yeah, so I got my first office, although it does have a clear glass door, because I don't want to be totally sectioned off. I get a lot of my energy from people and conversations and stuff, but in The Peach Pit, I have a special kind of brainstorm that I do in there called The Peach Pit Brainstorm. Once a month, I have people from all different parts of the company, anyone can sign up, come to The Peach Pit, and it's really a place where I have everyone bring something that they want everyone else's thoughts on. So sometimes people bring practical challenges that they're having, in their function of their job. Sometimes people bring things that they're inspired by that they want to think about how they could bring into their work. But it's super amazing, because it does multiple things, and we start every Peach Pit by, we do this improv shakeout. So it's very silly and fun, and it just levels the playing field, 'cause people are coming from all different teams and levels and I feel like they might be intimidated by I also sometimes get intimated to meet new people, so just kind of having that warmup. We're all in this together. Yeah, A, it kind of gets you out of your head, into your body, you have to kind of leave your inhibitions at the door, because everyone's doing this ridiculous thing, it's like, okay. We're just all on the same level now, so let's just. We're all ridiculous. Yeah, we're all ridiculous. Let's just, inhibitions, goodbye. But yeah, it's a really nice format. I love it because I meet different people, and everyone that's in there meets different people. You get a sense of what other people do, and what they're thinking about, and a lot of really awesome ideas have been incubated in there. Nice. Yeah, so it's fun. You have a buzzer, too. I heard the story about a buzzer. Oh, yes. Yes, I have a crystal bedazzled, or it's like a plastic gemstone, 'cause they're not really crystals, bedazzled, I think Balderdash buzzer. Amazing. And we used that to -- Why do you buzz people? So in the creative process, actually sometimes constraints can bring about a huge amount of creativity, but I think in the setting of The Peach Pit, because it's all people from all different parts of the company, not all of whom would identify as a creative, even though everyone is creative, I wanna have it be free and open. So the buzzer is if someone talks about budget, they get buzzed. If someone says, "Oh, well, that's not gonna drive a lot of traffic," they get buzzed, because I want it to be a place that is limitless, and that people can feel really free and open to express things. That's such a cool thing. Thank you. That's so cool. What was the genesis of the idea? Did it evolve, or was it just something, like, (snapping fingers) I got this thing. We're gonna bring people into my office, and we're gonna talk creative? I like taking inspiration from different places, and taking things that have moved me in different ways, and kind of mashing them together, like designing my own things and ways of working, and bringing my own unique flavor to them. So it's multiple things, like one, I took an improv class that really, I loved, and recommend that everyone take improv, because it was just so liberating. It was great for just thinking on your toes, for feeling uninhibited to express yourself. I loved it. But in it, they did this warmup, and it just changed my energy so much, and I could tell it changed the energy of everyone in the room. There was people that were more introverted, that were nervous to be there, so I kind of pulled that, and I actually just randomly had that buzzer. We didn't actually make it for The Peach Pit, but I had it, and one day, I saw it, and I just grabbed it and said, "We're not gonna limit ourselves in here," and so we started using it. So it kind of evolved naturally. It's so cool to embed that ethos of creativity, not just in your space, but in your company, that that's, anyone can sign up for that. Is this something, would you stand up in front of the company as a core value and talk about creativity? What role does creativity play for you personally, and for Refinery29? So one of our core values is actually imagination, which I think is interchangeable with creativity, but I think that yeah, continuing to reimagine the way that we do things, and the way that people can, you know, there's just so much imagination that's possible in all different aspects and functions, from office management to accounting. Creative accounting. (laughing) Maybe not creative accounting. You know, I think about our HR team. Oh, there's so much opportunity. Yeah, there's so much opportunity there to think about how does someone get an offer letter? What does it feel like? Is it just a form in the mail, or do they get a package that really tells them something about the brand? So that's something I try to embed in our culture is expressing to people what the values of the brand are, what the mission of the brand is, and then workshopping with different teams, how they bring those to life in their work, and it's an amazing process, because we recently sat down with our growth team, and we walked them through, and at first, they were like, oh, we're not, we don't really drive the brand with our work, and then we did this workshop with them, and by the end, they were like, we're hugely influential, we get our brand out there, and they just came alive, and they just really could see how they are part of creating something, and I think that, to me, that's so important, is helping people to A, understand what the values are, and then how they can interpret them, because to go back to that monolithic creative director, or the monolith founder, or CEO, or whoever it is. The way that you create an amazing company is through the power of all the different people, and giving them the tools and the confidence to really excel in each of their roles. So for me, that's what I get really excited about, and geek out on, and think about different Peach Pit-y type workshops, and ways that we can infuse that into people across the company. It's so impressive. It's obviously contributed deeply to your growth. I wanna talk, just one more thing I wanna address before, we're getting close to time here. We are? I know, it's crazy. It's just flown by. Isn't it crazy? Yes. 80 minutes. What? Yeah. 76 minutes. I thought we were talking for about 25 minutes. Crazy, right? Crazy. Yeah. Time is a construct. It is. (laughing) Believe me, when you were talking and riffing on creativity right there and how the growth team at Refinery29. I find these constrained things in CreativeLive, and I try and undo them, and when I travel and speak to other folks, and I see these limiting mindsets, to me, how you unlock them, and the process, that that's such a focus for you and for the company, I think it's an important lesson for people out there, 'cause they see your success, and they say, wow, you have hundreds of millions of uniques and a hundred million dollars, and oh my gosh, you guys have made such an impact. Talk to me about 29 Rooms. 'Cause to me, that seems almost like, yeah, but that's not core to our business. Right. You could easily talk about that, is that a KPI? You know, for those non-business folks out there, these are how we think about the business, and how we drive it, and yet, this is something that was wildly creative, so tell us a little bit about it, and then what role it plays in your growth and your brand, and I'm sure people, through extension, can think about how they could implant that in their own lives. Yeah, so 29 Rooms is our immersive fun house of style, culture and technology. It's something that's hard to describe, because it's really unique, but we bring to life the ideas and themes that we have in our content in 29 different rooms that we work with, 29 different artists and collaborators, to bring to life. In real life. In real life. So it's kind of like a fun house meets an art installation, and it's super imaginative. And what role does it play for you guys? To me, that's an amazing concept. I've seen it done in hotels that were about to get destroyed. Yeah. They bring in some artists, and they'll do that. But what role does that exercise, seemingly whimsical, but when you have investors, and deadlines and metrics that you need to hit, but yet, you've gone off and done this thing, what role does that play for you and the team, and the brand? Yeah, I mean, I think when we did the first 29 Rooms back two years ago, and this September we'll be doing our third, and actually we're expanding from there, but when we first did it, I think if you had looked at it, it might feel like a non sequitur for us. We're a digital media brand, so why are we creating this huge experiential event? It was a couple of things. So one, it was our 10 year anniversary, so it gave us an opportunity to say, "What do we wanna do to celebrate 10 years?" And we were thinking about the fact that we wanted to do something during New York Fashion Week, because our roots as a brand are in style. It's also a time that already has stuff going on, buzz around it, and there's cultural awareness, but we wanted to do something to disrupt that, and to also show the fact that for us, style is so much more than what you wear, and that our brand has expanded so far beyond style. And we also were thinking back, it's our 10 year anniversary, so we were thinking back to the core values of the company, inclusivity, imagination, impact, and went all the way back to that mall map that I described and the fact that we started with this digital map of 29 different spaces. So we said, "What if we create that in real life, "and we bring to life all the different kind of topics, "and ideas that we write about into this space?" I love it. And so we were hugely inspired by a lot of museum installations, and immersive, things like fun houses, because we wanted to create a space where it was really joyful and fun, and people let their guard down, and almost felt child-like. So it opened them up. But then within it, also delve into though provoking, deep topics. So to have that sort of emotional arc, and kind of create a transformative experience. And for me, what was most gratifying was the first year, we did it, and it was a huge risk, it almost didn't happen because it was just very hard to convince people that it was a good idea, because it was something we'd never done before, that we hadn't really seen done before. Probably kind of expensive, there was some other reach things that you could possibly do. Yeah, exactly. It was an investment, it was a stretch for us to produce it. I still look back at that, and I was like, that was a miracle that we did that. But we did it, and it was amazing. It was such a huge, it was so much more of a success than we even thought it could be, on many different levels. Just the social reach alone. We brought in amazing brand partners for it, and for me, one of the most gratifying things was just the audience reaction. We had such demand for the experience, and we have people going through and saying, "Wow, this even made me want "to start dreaming bigger," or "this event made me feel creative", and I think that's the beauty of it, is that it really does have that transformative effect, and it's like when you take a risk like that, when you create something that is exuberantly creative, that is inclusive in that way, it's kind of contagious. People leave it, and they feel the intention that we put into it, and they take it into their own lives. So the role it's played in our business is multiple fold. One, we created it as a digital brand, but also seeing that our audience was really starting to, we all live in our digital world like this, and we started to see our audience was really interested in experiential events, they wanted to, they were more interested in investing in experiences than in products, so it was multiple fold, but that was sort of a trend that we were seeing, and so now 29 Rooms really functions as our touchstone with our audience, our biggest event of the year, where we can really bring them into our world, give them this amazing experience, and gift, interact with them, and it's also something that drives press, it drives social reach, just brand awareness and we work with amazing brands to put it on, so it drives revenue, so now it's become this much bigger thing, and it's just the tip of the iceberg. I really see this being its whole own world unto itself. Well, that's, I think the takeaway there is obviously there's so many things to take away, but what underpins it all is this thing that was a risk that you qualified and quantified, you had this instinct that there was something there, but it was gonna be scary and hard and expensive. And you did it anyway, and now, it's one of the things that, it sounds like, it's a flagship piece of what you've built. Yeah, it's our most successful franchise. I think there were times when we were pushing to create 29 Rooms, where there was so much resistance, and I thought, I was there in my mind, I could see it, and the creative team that came up with the idea with me, we all were there, and we were like, this is gonna be amazing. We felt it. And it's important to hold onto that feeling, because for me, the creative process is usually like, thinking, thinking, excited, excited, breakthrough, like holy shit, I have a great idea. Or we have a great idea. And then it kind of goes like teeth gnashing, like how the hell do we make this thing, resistance, self doubt, crawling through the grime, and then finally breaking through to the other side. So I think during that crawling through the grime period, it's important to hold onto the vision that you had, and I think it's really helpful with any creative project, to really be able to focus on how you describe that, and how you really walk someone through the vision, very tangibly, because that was a breakthrough moment for us, in pitching 29 Rooms, was we were describing it as this fun house of art and style and culture, and people were like, oh, that sounds cool, but when we started describing it as you're gonna show up at this Brooklyn warehouse, and you're not gonna quite know where you are, but then when you walk inside, they're gonna go through a glitter lips doorway, through a lipstick mirror maze, and then into a VR room, where you can travel to three different cities. Then people were like, whoa. That sounds cool. I wanna experience that. And I think that's something that can be really helpful when you're pitching out an idea is to really put yourself in the shoes of the other person, and try and make it easy for them to transport themselves there, to help them get there, because I found that in my own, is sometimes I have this idea and I'm trying to explain it, but I don't have, if you don't have good articulation, that is kind of like, this is gonna sound harsh, but idiot proof. Make it something that everyone can understand. That can really help kind of get an idea through. At the core of that is storytelling. Yeah. That's one of the things that I'm also, it's so many people I've sat next to, creating a narrative around something, especially if you're selling an idea. You can be wildly creative, but the ability to package it, and get people to buy into your idea is every bit as important as the most wildly creative ideas. More important, most of the time. Yeah. Tell me about that. We'll end on that, because I know this is an important piece. How important is it to be able to package your creative ideas? I think being able to package your creative ideas, and make it so anyone can understand them is completely invaluable, because otherwise, you're kind of just the lone, this lone wolf imagineer with all these ideas, but you risk kind of be isolated and not having people buy in, which can be something that is very isolating. Yeah, and self-defeating. Yeah, and some people need help with that. Not everyone is, because the idea can be so in your head, sometimes you need to sit with someone, and say, like I tell a lot of creatives on our team to do that. Like I say, "okay, but just go and show this "to someone on a totally different team, "and make sure that they get it." That it's not crazy. Sometimes if we're designing something, just make sure, it's like how you user test. So you don't have to be totally responsible all on your own for packaging. It's good to have friends and loved ones and co-workers than can help bounce things off of, but knowing how to encapsulate your idea in a way that people can understand it will help you to get buy-in, to get funding, to get people on board with what you want to create, because it's really hard to go it alone. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you! I'll see you again, probably tomorrow. Bye, bye, bye, bye, all you cameras. Bye. Thank you. Thank you. (upbeat music)