647: I Started a Jewelry Brand With $25K and the WRONG Business Model | Noura Sakkijha

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Today's guest, Nora Sakitja, founder and CEO of majority. In 2013 she launched majority with a radical mission, create fine jewelry for women to buy for themselves. What started as a crowd sourcing platform quickly pivoted into something much bigger. And over 11 years, majority has sold 6.5 million pieces of jewelry and is expanding now globally. And in this conversation, you're going to discover why she completely pivoted the business model after just one year when the crowd sourcing platform failed. The brutal 2021 lesson about hiring ahead of growth and why she now refuses to hire until the team feels real pain. And why she prioritises culture fit over skills every single time because a bad culture hire creates noise that kills momentum. This is an honest conversation about building a globally recognised jewelry brand while challenging an industry that's been doing things the same way for generations. Here are the stories. Learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the founder podcast with Nathan Chan. Your third generation, Jula, who worked in industrial engineering at a bank. What was the moment in 2013 that made you realise that traditional jewelry and that whole model was fundamentally broken and needed to be fixed? As someone who grew up in jewelry, I had the privilege of seeing things from the inside. And I loved so much about it. I loved, you know, hand crafting. I love the idea that jewelry can stay forever. But to be honest, I didn't necessarily love how traditional fine jewelry is. And by that, what I mean is fine jewelry were always conditioned to think it's, you know, exclusive from a price point standpoint. It's also always marketed as a gift and traditional gifting to men buying for women, which I think is a really traditional way of thinking of things and doesn't necessarily mesh well with how women live their lives right now. So I decided to take a detour. As you said, I studied engineering, I moved to Canada, I worked at consulting. And that's when I started to make my own disposable income. And when I wanted to buy jewelry for myself, I didn't find that there's a brand that I connect with. And it was the aha moment because that's when the DTC also was starting. And that was the moment when I realised that, you know, I want to create a brand for women to buy jewelry for themselves or as we see at majority by yourself, the damn diamond. And the concept is very intuitive, but we really had to rethink a lot in terms of design and context and the brand positioning. So that was the start of it. Yeah. So talk me through setting up your base in Canada, set up with Shopify assume, right? Talk me through your first order. Like how did that go? We actually didn't start with Shopify. We had a very complicated tech stack because we started the business as a crowdsourcing platform in 2013. And that required its own technology. And anyway, it was a big, big thing. So we started as a crowdsourcing platform and operated the business for about a year after which we decided to completely pivot into the jewelry, what it is today. And so we carried that legacy technology and our tech team hated it for a long time. And we just pre-platformed last year. But to answer your question, to be honest, I cannot remember the first sale, which is a little bit sad. But I can remember the first time that I walked down the street and I saw a woman wearing a jewelry that somebody I didn't know. And it was a moment that was amazing. It's like somebody I don't know is wearing a jewelry and it felt really, really amazing. But that was after the pivot. So talk me through that pivot and that first year. And how did you know that it wasn't working? You had it, it sounds like you would have had an engineering team. What was the cost there? Like how much were you in the business? Like how much you put in to get it all going to begin with? Like talk us through that part. Yeah. So I started the business with my partner and why I was working full time in engineering. So the beginning was pretty tough. And the whole idea of the crowdsourcing was, we are going to cultivate the creativity from designers around the world because I truly believe in design and aesthetics. And because we know jewelry, we were going to produce the jewelry at high quality. And so we started that model. We got a lot of demand from designers. But when it came to customers, we didn't get a lot of sales. And that's the moment that you realize there's no revenue. There's no product market fit. And that was frankly, the, I would say a lesson that I learned the hard way is the importance of building a brand is about having a specific POV. That's what's missing in the market and staying consistent with it. And I would say that's why I'm overprotective of the brand right now because the customer doesn't just want to buy a product. They want to belong any universe that feels amazing. And so we made that pivot in 2015. But to talk about the costs, the way that we started the businesses, we won a grant. And it was $25,000 Canadian dollars. It was not much. And that's when we hired our first engineer to start the text tag. And obviously me and my partner were not paid. And so that's how we started the business. And then we started to get grants here and there to to pour into the business. Yeah, there you go. My partner, she's doing her PhD. She's a neurologist and she's, you know, about this really groundbreaking discovery as part of her PhD. And she's really excited. And she's like, Oh, she's like, I might be able to get a grant or something. I said, or something along those lines. I said, Oh, cause you can get funding and so it's like, Oh, it's so much work. Can I mark these days? You could do, I get it, like I had to do it. Like filling out and like applying for grants. It's like, it's a lot of work. Yes. Some people hire people to write the applications for them. It's like a business. Yeah. Okay. So how many grants did you get? We got a two to three and they were a small, small checks here and there. And then we started to raise capital, I would say, like serious seed round in 2016. And that's when we got our first million in capital. Got you. Okay. So you relanced in 2015, talk me before we go to that and talk about the business model of majority as it is now. I just want to go back to like, cause there would be some people feeling this where they're not getting sales. It's not working. You're working really hard after work before work, sleep plus nights or not much sleep. And you have that question, Oh my God. Like, am I wasting my time? Yeah. You would have been going through that. You obviously probably putting, I don't know how much of your own money, tens of thousands of dollars because building software back then is is is expensive. It is extensive. Yeah. You've still got your job, which is great, but talk me through that. Like, how did you know you had to make a fundamental shift? What was that turning point? What was that realization? And how what would you say to founders? It was by far one of the toughest periods. I would say there's like, things don't get easier as the business case. It's just you get more experience and it gets different. But that period, because I would say most founders are high achievers and they associate themselves so much with what they do. And in the beginning, when you're trying and failing, trying and failing, you can imagine the mental pressure that puts on you. And I remember it was one of the my lowest points in my life. It was the period where I'm trying, working every single day, but it's not working. One of the things that worked super well for me is at that point, we got we got into 500 start. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but it's an accelerator in San Francisco. And so I decided to go with my other our creative officer at the time. And we went together and I went into that room and it's a bunch of amazing people who are so smart, who are doing things and they're so comfortable with failure. And that gave me a massive boost. It's like, it's really, really important to treat failure as a data point and it's really important to distance yourself from it because it's going to be part of the journey. And culturally, I come from a culture where failure is a little bit shameful. And so it took me a little bit of time to rewire my brain and think, this is not me. This is just something I'm trying. And that gives you a lot of a lot of power. But the point when we decided to pivot was when I got a call before 500 start up. is to essentially go into another accelerator Montreal. And at that point, we decided now we have a little bit of funding. We know it's not working. Now is the only opportunity in order for us to pivot into a brand and pursue this the way that I dream for it to be done. Because typical startup accelerators, they tend to be more tech focused and you kind of pivot it from tech to direct to consumer, which is a totally different business. Now I've done both. I've done kind of more tech side software or all that, but then also D2C. I find D2C funer because you can touch it and feel the product, but yeah. Well, I love product creation is probably my favorite thing in the business. And then you also talk to the customers consistently. It's awesome. So how did you come up with the version of Missouri that it is now? Talk me through that. Talk me through how you found your manufacturer source product, all of that stuff. Yeah, when we decided to launch Missouri as a brand and come out of the crowdsourcing platform, it became the first person that we brought on board was a creative person who worked alongside me. She's one of the co-founders. She's worked alongside me for 10 years. So we were partners throughout the journey. And so we started to create the brand universe. And what is the aspiration? We started to create product design. But I remember distinctly, obviously, at that point we didn't have a big manufacturing network. So I got introduced to manufacturers in Toronto, kind of in our backyard. And I literally used to take every single order, every single product from one room to another to make sure that everything gets done on time. It was crazy. But I remember we had at that point launched, what I would say, your essential 14-carat and diurn products. And I remember the first moment I saw them. I felt like this is it. This is exactly what I would buy. This is exactly what my friends would buy. And I felt like my heart skipped a beat, to be honest with you looking at the product. And at that moment, I realized we had something. And from then, we started to build the business. But obviously, you have to scale manufacturing. And everything starts with an introduction. We got introduced to one. And that manufacturer started to work with us. And our capacity increased. And when it increases, our demand increased, I should say. When it increases, then you have a lot more power to go and talk to manufacturers and onboard new ones. And so one door opens the other essentially. And that's how it started. It started with me, literally, meeting with manufacturers in Toronto, taking the product, buying the jumpstones, buying the diamonds, and making it happen, to then scaling it into manufacturing partners overseas. At what stage? Because with jewelry businesses, it's relatively low, M.O.Q, especially if you can make the product yourself by hand, or you have that skin set. And we have a lot of people in our community that have jewelry businesses where they go to art and craft markets, et cetera, et cetera. Tell me how you drove gross in the early days. Because I know you delayed paid marketing. But I want to talk about those early years. What really opened things up to drive demand? Because there are a lot of jewelry brands, or D2C brands in general, that they kind of stay somewhat $100,000, $200,000. They don't get to the level of scale that you guys have, 6.5 million pieces of jewelry since 2015. So the past 10 years, that's a lot of product. There's a lot of volume. It's a great question. One of the things that I always tell people, so when I raised our seed funding, it was the hardest around that I had to raise for, even though I raised tens of millions after. Because at that point, I was trying to convince people to invest in a jewelry business when everybody was pitching AI. And you can imagine, I had to work really hard for people to listen to me and to see the opportunity. So because I worked so hard for the first million, I think it's actually one of the best things that happened to us because when you have constraints and you realize, I don't have access to a lot of capital. So I really have to hone in on the right metrics and do the right things. And at that point, I started to decipher what is a vanity metric like in the beginning, people say, how many employees do you have or how much money did you raise or which articles were you part of? All of that doesn't matter. At the end of the day, do you have customers who are coming to your business? And are they repeating? Are they coming back? Those are the most important things in the beginning. And so that healthy constraint really sharpened how I think of the business. And so what activities were you doing in the early days to drive sales? At the early days, some of the things that we focused on because it was primarily organic growth, email marketing was really important. So obviously brand partnerships. So being where the customer is doing sweeps together, growing our email list was one of the KPIs that we were working on. And obviously using that to then create campaigns. The second thing that was worked in our favor is at the time, Instagram was really scaling. And so we were setting fine jewelry beautiful pieces. And so we were able to work with influencers on Instagram and have them contextualize the jewelry. And that was a big, big propeller for us because we were able to create a community of influencers who truly love the brand. Put the products on, they have huge engagement with their community. And that was a big propeller for us. And I always say this to entrepreneurs when they ask me, we, you always have to drive steps every single day in different disciplines in order for you to create momentum. So it wasn't one thing or the other. It was Instagram, it was Facebook, it was email marketing, truly trying to be where the customer is. - Yeah, okay. So you did pay marketing a lot later. So it sounds like a big traffic channel for you was organic Instagram. I remember those days, early Instagram days for founder was massive too. I remember, I first kind of discovered Instagram in 2015. I remember feeling late to the game. It kind of crazy, probably same for you, right? Like you just launched a business that you feel like late to the game. And it was the Wild West, really. Like it was the Wild West. Like influencer marketing was still in its infancy. But if you did it and did it well, you did very, very, very well. And majority-- - Yeah, they were the most really friendly at the time. And influencers were, to your point, were everywhere. And there were influencers, I remember, who are so in touch with their community. That was amazing to see how much their community would listen to them. And so, yeah, we were lucky to find these partnerships. Now, when did you start the drop model? Because that was something that was really pioneered back when it wasn't that much of a thing. But now it's quite popular, but it's very powerful part of your model. Like your wait list often exceeds 70,000 to 100,000 people. Like from a brand from a marketing perspective, who wouldn't want that? That's like a brand owner's dream. Yeah. The drop model was always from the beginning of the business. And a funny story, because when you look back as a founder about the moments that you actually made some big decisions, sometimes it's so maybe a little bit naive because you don't know where you're gonna end up. But it was essentially me and our creative officer. And I'm like, you know, I think newness is really important for us. I think we want to make sure that we have freshness in our products. And so why don't we start this drop model next week? And she's like, okay, let's start it next week. And that was in 2016. And we continue with the drop model. And the drop model is essentially what it means is every single week we're introducing that new products. It doesn't mean that we're introducing a lot more than other jewelry brands. It just means that we're not necessarily always introducing massive cohesive collections. We're introducing two drops, two pieces here to 10 pieces there. And what was important for us is that this drove a lot of loyalty in the brand. One of the things we wanted to change is the idea that jewelry is something that you buy once a year. We wanted to make sure that this is something that you can buy, you can stack, you can create and express yourself. And so now 50% of our monthly revenue is from customers that we've acquired. And I do attribute some of this to the drop model. We're obviously now much bigger and we're changing what that looks like for us and what the right frequency looks like. But it was certainly a big engine for us to engage our community and to keep them engaged with us. - So first year revenue, would you be able to share like kind of just to give people a gauge of how effective, like, and how much that perfect storm was there? - First year revenue, it was sub-a million I think. First year, if I go back in time. - And then eventually you raised multiple rounds. Series A, seed, seed, series A, series B. - Yeah. - What metrics did you have to track? Was it still mainly repeat purchase and just growth to raise? - Yeah, so seed is very different seed where essentially the investors are looking at product market fit. Do you have sales? Do you have a little bit of repeat? Who are the founders? Are they in it to win it? That sort of thing. Then you raise your series A and things get a little bit more sophisticated and then you have KPIs across the board all the way from CAC to LTV. to revenue. And seriously, you have to get a lot more sophisticated with forecasting and meeting these forecasts. So I feel like it keeps getting obviously more sophisticated as you grow the business. And then it's essentially the same over time. And are you able to scale what is brand awareness? So it just evolves. But the fundamentals are the fundamentals. I find the most important things is like you have revenue, how your customers feel about you, and where your repeat rate are some of the most important things. So at what point did you realize this can be a big business? And you're like, you know what, I'm going to, I'm going to go for it. I'm going to raise raise a significant amount of money to fuel the growth here because I see the sub multi nine figure billion dollar plus opportunity. I had started this wanting to make it a massive business. And I remember my co-founders make fun of me because we literally had nothing and I had like this sticker on the wall that says the number one global jewelry brand for the next generation. We literally had 25,000 Canadian dollars in the bank. It barely we're working website. And that was the vision. So I knew from the beginning that this is a massive market. I knew from the beginning that there is a white space that I can see super clearly. And I wanted to go behind. And that was why from the beginning, I wanted to raise capital in order for us to accelerate our growth. But obviously the moment when I started to feel like when I walk in the street and I see people who are wearing the jewelry and I don't know them when I hear positive feedback about the brand, like I started to feel people are coming to me and telling me stories about why they bought their jewelry, which is exactly what we set out to do. For example, people would tell me, you know, I bought this because I ended a bad relationship. I bought this because I got promoted. And that's exactly what we set out to do. We're building something that is beyond jewelry. We're building essentially a way for women to celebrate their own journeys and their own minor stones is what we call them. And that felt like this is this can be really, really big and really exciting. Yeah, I can really respect the point of view because you said to me before, if you're going to do something, you really needed to build the brand and you really more than ever, even to this day, you were so passionate about the brand and the point of view. What advice would you have to found as coming into somewhat of a red ocean? Because if you look at, if you look at your industry, yeah, it did not look like a blue ocean for many, but you guys over time have carved out a really strong differentiator point of view, different model. Like, so what would you say to found as when it comes to like looking at the competition, looking at their marketplace and landscape and going, oh, wow, this is, while it is a large term or a big market, it is so competitive. How can I stand out? Yeah, I think it's really important to have a very specific point of view and really identify where you can capture. Like, you cannot go to an overly saturated market with the same point of view as somebody else. And for us, it was, I had to study the market by study means like read analyses of the jewelry industry to understand where we want to be. It was, it's a massive industry. It's a 200 over 200 billion and only 20% of it is branded. Whereas when you compare it with watches, 60% of watches is branded. What that told me is there's a ton of fragmentation in fine jewelry and therefore an opportunity for a brand to come and combine market share. And so I would say to founders to look at these anecdotes on what is it that is missing in the industry and where do you, what, what is the consumer looking for? And when you define that, have a very, very specific point of view. And honestly, use it as your guiding star. What are we and what are we not? Because it's important to know what you're not as much as it's important to be this is who we are and stay consistent. Consistency is the thing that builds reputation. And, and this is the recipe I would follow. Now, as you start to get scale on the DTC side, you didn't stop there. You set up an omnichannel approach, which is actually quite brilliant. If I think back in those times, you know, you set up 50 plus doors starting with a showroom in 2017. And, you know, now, you know, like back then, it was only really kind of Apple that did these kinds of things where they have, you know, your flagship stores, where people can go, try, feel the products. So I think it was a really smart clever approach before now. You see a lot of brands do this now. Some brands do and pull back a little like. So I'd love to hear kind of where that inspiration came from. You eventually did get into retail as well, but the stores were a big part of it. Your own flagship store. So talk me through that. We were determined to be just online and we started to get a lot of feedback from our customers to want to come and touch and feel the jewelry. So what we did in the beginning is we actually invited them to our office. So during the holidays, you would walk into our office and you would see people trying jewelry and getting styled. And so we said, okay, what the heck? Why don't we just start a showroom? And our assumption was, whoever's going to come to the showroom is going to be probably our customers who already buy from us. But what we realized is there's a lot of people who knew about the about majority, but they didn't buy online because they wanted to touch and feel the jewelry and they wanted to feel in the experience of the brand. And so it soon became apparent to us that retail is a growth channel. It's a way for us to build awareness and a way for us to get connected to the customer. The conversion rate is high in retail stores and obviously sometimes your costs can be lower because you're not doing shipping. So also the numbers checked out. We opened our second store. The numbers continued to be 60% of the people who are transacting in the stores are net new customers. So it became a growth channel for us. The AOV in the stores is higher than the AOV online. And so all of these things started to become really important for us that, you know, retail is part of the journey. And building a next generation brand is also about accessibility and access to the brand. And you really do have to build for convenience. And you really also do have to build IRL experiences. There's a lot of noise online. There's a lot of overwhelming information online. And sometimes you just want to go and experience brands and relive touch the product, get style, do the old fashioned way. And that feels amazing. And retail now is a big part of the business. It's about 50% of our revenue. So what advice would you give to founders if they have traction, they're doing well on D2C because that's where founders usually tend to start. Yeah. Retailers are tapping them on the shoulder. Some great ones. Yeah. Margin's nowhere near, you know, and like you obviously would have, that's one of the reasons you raised might, that's probably why you did your series A if I'm correct to go with the store expansion. Yeah. To perhaps they don't want to raise and they just want to kind of grow slowly. And not with your level of scale. What advice would you give to founders if they have retailers that are tapping them on the shoulder, they, you know, it's a well-known retail. Sounds like an amazing opportunity. The margins are not strong. They say they'll move product. They'll give you shelf space, but you've got to do a big P.O. You've got cash flow. It'll come sometimes when cash flow challenges. How do you know when to kind of make that move? We've never done a wholesale agreement because our margins are not built for wholesale. We've done concessions. We do concessions, which is a shop and shop where we essentially just opening in Nordstrom and Southridge as a whole trend crew. And these are fantastic partnerships because you're tapping into that audience. But I would say honestly my take and if you're building a brand and you have a product that is recognizable, wholesale can be a great way to access a lot of people. But if you're building a brand and you really want to control the experience with a customer, I would try to stay D to C because then you have access to the customer, especially in the early days when you want to learn iterate, improve customer feedback is everything. It's your north star. And having access to these customers is really, really important. And it probably far outweighs having that access in the beginning. I think over time when you feel like you're ready, your product is strong, it's recognizable. You don't need a lot of explanation around it. You can certainly go into the wholesale route. But that's not easy for jewelry. I don't think it's a different experience. Yep, make sense. When did you guys start doing a direct mayo? Because that's a cool one. Like that's old school. That's a very, very, very cool old school channel. It's a dying art form. Who doesn't like getting stuff in the mayo? Found our start as a digital magazine, then we did some print stuff and we used to send things in the mayo to people just for fun. It definitely makes a difference. Like the quality of the relationship you have with your community or customer. If you send them something in the mail, it is powerful. Now you guys obviously use it from a acquisition standpoint and retention. But talk me through that. We started, I would say a few years ago. I love a tactile experience. I think it's fantastic because especially I would say now that the costs on digital advertising is increasing. And it's becoming really noisy on digital. I think it's really important to do different types of ways of reaching the customer. And I think direct mail is a way to hit also frequency because when you're seeing the brand only online and you're not necessarily interacting with it in any other way, sometimes you might forget about it. And I do think having the customer see the brand often and more frequently is a way to build conviction. So obviously as long as the economics makes sense for you, what I like personally about direct mail to is you can be super targeted into the areas or the places that you think your customer is in. And you can introduce them to the brand. You can say so much in it. We find that it works well for us closer to the holidays, like key moments in the year we're not running it all year round. And you do a typical catalog? No, it's just like one card. One card, okay. And can you give an example for when founders should explore a channel like this, what revenue range, what kind of expectation would you have from a direct measurable impact on return on spend? I don't know about the revenue range. Like we started this recently, but to be honest, the marketing mix is changing right now. So I don't know that our way is the way because like I said, at the time that we start retargeting was much easier, digital advertising was much easier. So I would say maybe people can start way earlier when they hit a few millions. They can tap into this. They can do incrementality testing, which I believe is what our team uses primarily to figure out if it's effective or not. Everything is a test. Like honestly, at the end of the day, all of these channels we test, we do a small send. And then we figure out is there a return to your point and then we scale it. We do it either at a city level, we do it, you know, suburbs, whatever that may be where you want to target. And everything starts small and then we scale it. And that's the approach that I would take and see if your revenue level does this make sense, is it returning anything or are you better off working with influencers? Are you better off doing digital ads? When it comes to what is working now, what would you say at a business of a majority scale? What is the strongest channel at this stage? Still email? Most likely right? The biggest acquisition for us right now is till when we ask where did you hear about this is primarily word of mouth. So I would say retail, pizza, big roll, having a substantial customer base, pizza, big roll. But it's a combination email is really important for us from a retention standpoint. Ads are important but they're not the primary driver thankfully because I never want them to be. It is a combination of this, of this group of thing. I think partnerships is really important. We've been a little bit, I would say quiet on the partnership side, but this is something that I'm looking to ramp up. Yeah. I'm curious as well. It made a hundred percent sense that in the early days of your brand, the KPI of email list growth was a really good North Star metric. I find though from experience, some brands get too obsessed with trying to drive email versus purchase. For some brands, email is often forgotten and it's just an exit pop up with a coupon code which is probably the least. And then there's some brands that are running full scale kind of sign up to my email list, paid like, that makes no sense to me personally. Unless they have a model similar to yours where it's a drop model consistent fret. So there's something that's on. Yeah. I get it for B to B. I get it for from a lead gen high ALTV service type products. But what would you say to founders? Because email is such a powerful channel where one of our big time partners for founder is Omnisend. Their benchmark is 30% of your revenue from a D to C standpoint should represent your overall D to C revenue pool, at least 30% that shows healthy. From email. Yeah, 30% of revenue should come from email. That's what they believe. Yeah. So, and when we've seen that across like members of our community and stuff like that. And so, you know, 20 or 30% is good. I'm curious, what would you say to founders? How do you prioritize? Right? Like, because yeah, for me, it personally doesn't make sense. I think just having the exit pop is not enough. I've seen some brands have quiz funnels, which I think are very clever. But yeah, what's your take there? I do think email. I like a long term relationship. And I feel like an email is getting us in a long term relationship with the customer or the prospect. And so, I do think it's a really, really important one. But you have to look at it as revenue by email, not necessarily how many emails you have, because there could be a lot of emails that are not necessarily interested or, you know, not necessarily the leads that you want. So, I think revenue per email is a really key metric. I like an email because you can romanticize, you can introduce the brand. It's not always selling a product. It's also selling the universe if you're building a brand. And so, who are we? I find it a miss when I sign up to an email to a company's email and I don't receive welcome emails or welcome series that explains what is very unique about this brand or what is very unique about this company because you catch them. There's a little bit of interest. You have to really solidify what's important about you. And so, it's not just about product. It's about explaining your universe. It's about car, car abandonment, flows. There's so many flows that are so important in email to keep in touch with customers and convert them or with prospects to convert them to customers. So, I'm a big proponent, but somewhere in the middle of what you've mentioned. Yeah. Okay. I'd love to talk about how your team obsesses over your customer support team, obsesses over single negative experiences. Can you talk to me around what signals, metrics you guys use around customer happiness and your whole philosophy there? Yeah. It's really important because as the business skates, it's one of these things that sometimes is you have to scale the team and make sure it's operating at high quality. And it's one of the things that I feel so strongly to be close to. So we have the standard metrics in the beginning. So service level agreement, are we delivering the products on time in full? Are we responding to inquiries on time? We have net promoter score by channel. So retail versus e-commerce. And then on the other side, I also like to spend time with the team on what is not working. How many pieces are delayed? How many customers are unhappy? What are they unhappy about? So it's almost like also facing the tough realities of the things that you need to improve. So I like to look at both of these. And we do deep dives on a monthly basis to make sure that we're addressing or getting to the root cause of the things that we need to fix. Yes. And when it comes to your fund, can you tell us how much, how much have you guys contributed in scholarships since you've launched it? And why do you do these philanthropic programs and what was the reason for introducing this? It is called the Empowerment Fund, which I believe is the core and the essence of the brand is about empowerment and designing the life that you want, celebrating your own milestones. And we've deployed a million dollars so far since 2020. And that is towards scholarships who are underrepresented women. High scholarships in education because I do believe that women who learn skills or education are able to find jobs and therefore are able to be financially independent and design their own life. And I feel very passionate about the idea of ensuring that women are empowered and are independent. And that is the premise of it. And it started in 2020. A lot of things were happening in the world at that time. And it felt like even though we didn't have infinite resources, but it felt like we wanted to be part of doing something great, something bigger. And that's when we started the Empowerment Fund. Incredible. And I find that from speaking to other founders, we don't have any kind of philanthropic arm of founder. I do plan to have that one day and I have an ambition to do something similar kind of initiative. Do you find that it's something that is really powerful for your team to wrap around as well, especially adding to the culture too? Yes, big time. Just honestly talking about the stories about the impact that we can bring, it is massive. Everybody appreciates when we do things to help other people and to have a mission that is outside of obviously selling jewelry. And it's just a human thing. It's amazing. Yeah, I agree. So one thing that you've mentioned is you had twins. Congratulations. And you returned to work three months postpartum and that's something that if you were to do again, you've mentioned that you would have taken some more time. What advice would you give to founders around setting boundaries to have that balance with work, especially as a founder, because you're always on and it's like your own other baby and it's hard. you know. because no one's gonna care as much as you. - It was, honestly, the reason I regret that is mainly because of the pressure that I put on myself. Like, if I actually take a step back and say to myself, if I had stayed two more months, what would happen? And I think as a founder sometimes, at that point, obviously we had a team and I could have delegated. And it's the pressure that you put on yourself and unrealistic expectations that you have to be back. And if I had stepped away for more, I don't think anything bad would have happened. And so the my advice to founders is to really have that really honest dialogue with yourself of what you think you should versus what you think you can do and still not impact the business. Because you're still a human at the end of the day and you're a whole human and you have to attend to all of your parts in order for you to be effective. And so I think that is my biggest regret. And I've become a lot softer with myself over time. - It's funny as well. I find that you always have this thought in your mind that when you take time off, everything's gonna, you go to the worst depths of what are the old things that will happen and what is. And then I didn't know if you found this from your experience, but when you do take time off, sometimes the business growth actually grows faster. - Yeah, 100%. Sometimes we're getting in the way and people just need to fly. And you need to get out of their way. - I agree. You talk about your mission around building the number one jewelry brand in the world. How do you know when you've hit that and what is next for you to hit that? - I want to build one of the most loved jewelry brands in the world. I would love to see it at a global scale. I would love to spread the message of empowerment at a global scale like that to me is amazing. If I walk in different cities in the world and see a jewelry store, as I see them buzzing and see people interacting and feeling joyful and that the brand is making them feel happy. And so we started our international expansion, which I'm super proud of. And so what's next to be honest, and I think something that I will say over and over again, especially now that the market is changing, the prices of gold and silver and everything is changing is really protect the brand and make sure that it's highly distinctive and that it's standing out. This is something that I obsess about every single day. And I think it's now more important, more than ever. And I'm really excited about international expansion. We did open in Australia. We just expanded into the Middle East as well. So we're working hard on expanding at a global level. - Amazing. One last question as well. What has been some great lessons where you've got it wrong and you're like, "I'm never gonna do that again?" - One tough one was, you know, you hear two contradicting views. One is higher ahead of growth. I don't know if you've ever heard about that saying. - Higher before you need the person. - It's the worst thing you can ever do. I'll tell you why. We were growing so fast. And we raised funding and we were hiring for, we're continuing the trajectory. The market crashed in 2021. And when they say the market is fickle, you understand these things in theory, but you don't necessarily understand it until you live it. And when the market crashes, like obviously demand is gonna decrease, you're gonna have to revise your forecast, you're gonna have to readjust. And at that time, we've hired a lot of people ahead of growth based on the advice that we always hear and getting ready to launch the ship. But it's not necessarily materialized in the same way. So I now feel higher when you feel a lot of pain because also at the same time, I always feel, whenever you ask somebody they always in the team, they always wanna hire somebody. And the last thing they're looking at is process. The last thing they're looking at is how are we working effectively together? It's just human nature. And I think you really have to feel the pain before you hire. That's my perspective could be contradictory, but that's how I think about it. And higher for culture, a lot more than skill. If you hire somebody that is not on culture, it just simply doesn't work and it causes a lot of noise. And so vetting for mindset and vetting for a culture is really, really important. I would even prioritize them over skill because skill can be taught. - Yeah, I agree, 100%. - All right, last question, any final words of wisdom to our community on building, growing, a large-scale DTC branch? You've done so well. This is such an incredible business. Yeah, any final words of wisdom. - If you have huge conviction in what you're building, don't let anybody tell you that you can do it. Just keep going. Most of 50% of the work is showing up every single day and doing your best. - Well, Nora, thank you so much for taking the time. Congratulations on all your success thus far. And I look forward to continuing to follow your journey from afar. - Thank you so much for having me. - Hey, founder fam. Thank you so much for tuning in today. And if you enjoyed this episode, please take the time to leave us a review and let us know what you think. This podcast is 100% free. 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