An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
To thrive and succeed you need to be disciplined. By this I mean simply see something through as best you can. This one really comes down to making sure what you are doing is something you care about. You could really be driven for it because of income, but also for love, or change. Make sure that what you’re doing aligns with your personal values. This is how you squeeze every drop from the discipline you put in when you sit down to make magic happen.
As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Bonnie Kuhl. Bonnie is the CEO and Founder of Archer and Olive, a luxury stationery brand with a focus on wellbeing and mental health. She is also the Co-Owner and Co-Founder of Aluma, a company focusing on mental wellness workbooks for mothers to make time for themselves in motherhood. After her own diagnosis of bipolar disorder and general anxiety disorder, Bonnie has dedicated her businesses to helping others with their mental wellness, developing innovative products that inspire people to be creative.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I would say I’ve always been a creative and art-focused person. In high school and college, I would scrapbook and create for fun. However, when I got into college my relationship with art and creativity changed. After a worrying time with my health during college, I was ultimately diagnosed with depression and bipolar disorder. Following my diagnosis, I used art as a tool to keep my mood stable, organize my thoughts, reduce my anxiety, and take control of my mental health.
During this time, I felt no companies were creating the high-quality journal products I needed, particularly with focus on mental wellness. Therefore, I set out to create this to help others achieve their goals, exercise their creativity and provide them with the tools to manage their mental health. Soon after, Archer and Olive was created!
Very recently, I co-founded a second business, Aluma. I was led to this, as being a mother and a business owner myself, I found that it was really difficult to make time just for me. Therefore, we created Aluma to give mothers the tool to explore themselves, and make time for things they have left behind in motherhood such as art and creativity to entrepreneurship. I look forward to seeing where this new adventure leads.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?
The one in most recent memory is when we had $140k worth of inventory stolen from our store via a bad coupon code. We had a vulnerability in one of our coupon code generation apps and one of our former affiliates used it to get 100% off their cart. They took advantage of this vulnerability to order THOUSANDS of books, pens and stickers. The warehouse literally shipped PALLETS to their house. Luckily the warehouse and our supply chain manager caught it so we could reverse most of it. We reached out to the person to give them the benefit of the doubt. Turns out they thought it was just “a good deal”. Sometimes really wild things happen!
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
There was a time when we started using a 3PL (third party logistics) company to do our shipping. We had grown a bit too much to be packing boxes in our home, so we thought we’d just move them there. Not long after that, we had an older woman who bought our notebook write in to tell us that she received the wrong package. It turns out she received an adult toy by mistake from the warehouse! Of course, we had a good laugh about that, but ultimately that kind of flipped a switch in my head: we’re playing in a different league now… put barcodes on the boxes, pay more attention to detail, and manage your vendors to keep up customer experience. People are less likely to give you “startup grace” when you’ve grown up a bit. But it did also highlight that we had done well with customer service since then, because the woman understood and also had a laugh.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I’m in EO (Entrepreneurs Organization) in Austin, which is probably one of the best decisions I’ve made professionally. Through EO I was connected with John Ratliff, currently of Align5. In a call with him about the company, he said one of the most common pieces of advice for what some might call “accidental entrepreneurs” is: Get a Line of Credit, Get a CFO, Watch your Cash Flow. Finance in business is not my strength, so this was important to hear. As long as money was coming in and we could pay bills I was like “great!”, but I wasn’t thinking about the strategy of money, how to use debt as a tool, and outsourcing the idea of all of that. Several months later I hired a CFO and re-oriented our financial strategy and I feel much more confident about our books and the longevity of our business. As opposed to before when it was just month to month.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. According to this EY report, only about 20 percent of funded companies have women founders. This reflects great historical progress, but it also shows that more work still has to be done to empower women to create companies. In your opinion and experience what is currently holding back women from founding companies?
Patriarchal society still exists. Men being in positions of influence with investing and banking. The good ole boys club.
Just getting directly to the point, I think middle-aged white men still hold decision making positions in all the relevant places that forge successful companies: Banks, Venture Capital, Funds and Nonprofits dedicated to business, etc. This isn’t to say they don’t choose to invest in female owned companies, but they certainly see it differently than another woman or person of color would.
We tend to like to work with people who make us comfortable, and we are comfortable with people who are more like us. That’s just how humans work. And when there are all of one type at the top, for the most part, that’s who is shaking hands all the time.
Can you help articulate a few things that can be done as individuals, as a society, or by the government, to help overcome those obstacles?
Having women and people of color be elected, promoted, or hired into decision making positions in investment, higher education, and Fortune 500 companies is another good step. We have made big strides preparing young women and girls to be anything the boys can be. It’s time we prepare the corporate leadership and higher education environments for them to thrive by creating success stories and high-level connections for them.
This might be intuitive to you as a woman founder but I think it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you share a few reasons why more women should become founders?
First of all, women are more than half the population on earth. Many of the people selling to those women are men. It seems intuitive that we could get a lot more women selling to women out there and have far more wins for women financially and otherwise. In the process we may discover great new ways to think or market because of the diversity.
The conversation around Pink Tax is something I’d like to hear more about as well. Having more women founders out there I think could broaden that discussion more, as when it comes to business, it gets really muddy really fast. Again, adding diversity to our business leadership helps us to see things differently.
What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a founder? Can you explain what you mean?
I hate when people say you have to have a thick skin, as if showing emotion or a softer side is a weakness. It’s ok to get hurt about something, get back up and do it again. Being resilient and having thick skin are not the same.
One thing I can’t stand to hear is “you need to have a thick skin to start a business”. You absolutely do not. I have a thin skin; I get upset. But here I am. Bringing a softer side to running a business is a huge multiplier for us also. It helps us build care for people into our customer service and our people and culture. It also makes sure that in business deals we find a spot where both people are happy, and not just lean on capitalist ideals to gain the edge. In a world where customers care about softness but most leaders don’t, I think the thin-skins have a distinct advantage.
Is everyone cut out to be a founder? In your opinion, which specific traits increase the likelihood that a person will be a successful founder and what type of person should perhaps seek a “regular job” as an employee? Can you explain what you mean?
Certainly not. The one thing I can point to is passion or obsession. If you feel this deep in your soul for something, and you have for some time, you should consider whether you should start a business. If, however, you really love the craft of what you do but feel like the stuff happening on the top sounds like a lot of extra, then maybe continue doing your regular job until you feel otherwise.
It’s not so clear cut to me to say there is a “person who should’’ and a “person who shouldn’t”. We are changing all the time, and there may be a time in your life where you feel it’s right, and a time where it’s not. The important thing is to try when you feel the time is right, and learn from it.
Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your opinion and experience, what are the “Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder?” (Please share a story or example for each.)
- Customer Obsession. Intimately knowing your audience and understanding your niche, your community and the connections you create when you sell your products are critical to the “thrive” elements of your business. To thrive as a Woman Founder however it requires you to be vulnerable and de-stigmatize “doing it all” being obsessed with your customers and your business, doesn’t mean that you do not take time for yourself too. For example, I personally share my vulnerable moments with my customers. Following this, many customers have reached out to share their experiences, and I believe it fosters a stronger connection and community.
- Flexibility/Adaptability. Making sure you are always agile and able to adapt to changing markets, circumstances and being flexible when schedules and time frames do not work in your favor. We’ve definitely had to adapt in the past year with increasing manufacturing and shipping times delaying product launches, and navigate how to continue hitting targets when this happens.
- Figure-it-out-iveness. By this I mean don’t let hard problems make you throw your hands up. You need to be able to figure out what it will cost to do it and make the decision. While it can lead to hard decisions, not being proactive in difficult situations just prolongs the problem. The problem is not going to fix itself, so be ready to find and execute a solution. When I tell other friends and business owners that we make our own paint pens at Archer and Olive, they are usually blown back with how complicated it sounds. And you know what? It was! I just remember thinking about the result, and only the result, when we started. I drew out, in my notebook, a picture of what I wanted and took a picture to send to some potential manufacturers. What followed were ten-thousand questions about molds and dimensions and ink, etc. It’s easy for a big picture thinker to throw their hands up at that point. But we just kept answering questions, most of which we didn’t at first have an answer to. I took a measuring tape and wrote dimensions for the barrels of the pen on my drawing and sent it back. After a big check, we had a mold made to specifications in a notebook. Then we emailed some people about ink, which we also had no idea about. The same thing happened. They asked questions, we did our best to answer or read and figure it out. The result is probably our most popular product. We knew nothing about any of that at the beginning, we just had to figure it out and keep our eyes out to the end.
- Decisiveness — Following on from figure-it-out-iveness, when you have made a decision, do not dwell on it. Sometimes you will realize later down the line you were wrong and there were better ways to fix that problem, and you’re going to have to fix it. However, dwelling on the problem will only prevent you from developing and evolving. To elaborate on our previous story, the Acrylograph Pens simply wouldn’t have happened if we stopped to mull everything over for a week. We had to figure out the best way to move forward with information we had and go. Lots of business people talk about time being money and you just have to do the simplest thing to get started, and all of that is 100% right. But honestly, what drives me in these things is my stubbornness to get some products on my desk to play with. A confession: I’m not always thinking about the numbers, the time, the critical path… I’m thinking about how impatient I am to have this new thing! It’s the passion that drives decisions for me. When we are approached by 20 vendors for the pens or given a bunch of options for the barrels of the pens, we just picked one and moved on. Sure, we could evaluate everything, but again, we had our eyes out to the end of the project and wanted to get there as quickly and surely as possible.
- Discipline — Finally, to thrive and succeed you need to be disciplined. By this I mean simply see something through as best you can. This one really comes down to making sure what you are doing is something you care about. You could really be driven for it because of income, but also for love, or change. Make sure that what you’re doing aligns with your personal values. This is how you squeeze every drop from the discipline you put in when you sit down to make magic happen. For me, I have always just loved making art. Archer & Olive is about helping other people do better through their art. The business part is about making beautiful things and selling them. Sitting down in the morning and being given the opportunity to design something or draw something and turn it into something that other people will use for their own benefit is my “secret” to discipline; I love the making part so it gives me the boost as a strategic advantage.
How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
We focus heavily on mental health. We’ve even shifted from being an art brand to being a mental health brand recently. As part of this we donate to lots of charities to make our products available to people who can’t afford them but feel they can grow from it. In the past this has included students in foster care, women in safe shelters, hospitalized children and their families and trans youth.
We also make it a strategic initiative to spotlight and collaborate with artists from underrepresented communities. Giving people a platform via Archer and Olive has been very rewarding.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
The ultimate goal for me is ending the stigma around mental health. Mental health is nothing to be ashamed of, nor is it something to shame people about. In more metropolitan communities, awareness is growing, but there are lots of communities where different types of mental health problems still marginalize people and it makes it hard for people (like me) to get ahead. I wish the resources I had in college could be made available to everyone with an illness.
We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
This may not be the answer you’re looking for but, I’ve always wanted to have a sit down with Jack Black. If I’m asked who I want to have a meal with I want to laugh and talk about interesting stories. I’m sure I could learn of a connection or two, but I want to have fun. From everything I read he seems like an approachable, down to earth guy who could deliver on that!
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Female Founders: Bonnie Kuhl On The Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.