Like-minded soul

I read this and felt instantly connected to a like-minded soul!  Enjoy.  ----Katherine

 

5 entrepreneurial lessons from my life as a dressmaker

Erin McKean, Contributing Writer
Sep 16, 2014, 12:35pm CDT

Image provided by Getty Images (Photojope)

Reverb founder Erin McKean is also a prolific sewing blogger. The two have more in common than you might think.

Part of the mythology of the startup entrepreneur is an adolescence spent tinkering. Taking apart small electronics in the garage, building a computer from a kit, assembling a trebuchet in the backyard and scaring the neighbors. Taking things apart and putting them back together again symbolizes the inquisitive, creative, disruptive entrepreneurial mindset, with an additional dose of “I can do it better” arrogance.
Because the world of startup founders is so overwhelmingly male, when we look at an early history of “making” as proof of entrepreneurial destiny, we tend to focus on boys and their toys.
In fact, any sufficiently nerdy activity, if pursued with enough single-minded focus, can prepare you for founding a startup.

See Also

• ​5 principles to thinking like an entrepreneur (even if you work for a large company)
• What Uber's success can teach entrepreneurs
• Do the French need to update their definition of profit?

For me, that sufficiently nerdy activity is sewing. Along with being a tech startup founder, I’m also a longtime sewing blogger and published author of articles about sewing and books about fashion. A lot of what sewing has taught me applies equally well to entrepreneurship.

1. Ignore What Other People Think

When I started sewing back in junior high school, in the depths of the fashion sinkhole known as the 1980s, sewing was deeply uncool. Sewing was what you were forced to do in Home Economics class. In fact, wearing clothes “made by loving hands at home” and therefore being made fun of by other kids is even a sturdy trope of children’s literature.
When you start down the startup path, there is no shortage of people who are willing to tell that what you’re doing will never work, that there are too many other, better options out there, and oh, by the way, you look stupid. Early training in ignoring that kind of feedback is extremely valuable.
Being confident in your ideas – whether you’re working on a new application or a new dress — is essential in realizing your vision. (It’s as important to ignore wrong positive comments as it is to ignore wrong negative comments!)

2. Tweak Until You Get It Right

Often people imagine that sewing a dress is just a matter of finding a pattern, adding some fabric, and emerging from a pop-soundtrack montage a few hours later to twirl in front of the mirror in your perfect garment.
The actual process involves something that’s closer to product development than the ballgown scene in Cinderella. There’s a prototype, which I usually make in ugly (or at least humorous) fabric. I tweak that for fit and other important qualities, such as making sure the pockets are deep enough to hold all my stuff (up to and including an iPad mini). Then I make multiple subsequent versions, each one iterating on some key feature (honestly, usually pockets), until I feel comfortable sewing it up in the (usually expensive) fabric that was my original goal.
In sewing, just as in product design, it’s the folks who expect perfect versions on the first go-round who are the most discouraged when things don’t go to plan. The more comfortable you are with let’s-try-it-and-see, the better things go in the long run.

3. Don’t Be Afraid to Let It Go

People who sew have a special word for those projects that are so frustrating, so unrewarding, or so just plain WRONG. We call them “wadders,” as in “just wad them up in the back of the closet and try to forget them.”
It’s tempting to think that you can rescue something that you know in your heart is a wadder with just a little more time, with a little more work, a few more alterations … The truth is, you can’t. Nothing you can do will make something in an itchy fabric completely comfortable. No amount of coaching will help a team member who has radically different goals than the rest of the organization. A product that only gets a tepid “meh” response, no matter how many different audiences you put it in front of, is not a product that will respond dramatically to tweaking.
It can be hard to admit that something you’ve put so much time and effort (and often love) into is destined for the ragbag. But every minute you spend on a wadder is a minute you aren’t sewing something new and rewarding.

4. You Do You

In a startup, it’s always tempting to look around at what everyone else is doing. “Wow,” you think, “startup X is doing great things … maybe we should be trying that too?” Suddenly, pivoting to “Yo for Dogs” seems like a viable idea.
In sewing, there are plenty of people who will teach you how to make a version of whatever’s the hot new fashion, however ill-advised. Leather jeggings? There’s a pattern for that. In the same way that the most successful startup founders aren’t in it to cash in on a me-too idea, the most accomplished seamstresses aren’t merely trying to get a designer wardrobe on the cheap. The highest calling in either endeavor is to create something completely new, something the world wouldn’t have seen if not for your idea. Sometimes that’s a Tetris dress, and sometimes that’s a new take on the dictionary, and sometimes that’s a discovery reader. Sewing gave me the confidence to keep going with my own ideas, instead of producing knockoff versions of other people’s.

5. The Joy of Making

When you get right down to it, sewing is hard work (there’s a reason most fast fashion is produced in sweatshops, in places where people are happy to earn pennies for repetitive, backbreaking labor). Depending on the materials you use and the equipment you invest in, sewing may not save you much money (especially if you factor in the opportunity cost of money-making activities you could have done in the same time). The main reason that people sew, in these days of $2 T-shirts, is because they enjoy it.
Likewise, startups are not (mythology to the contrary) instant tickets to riches and renown. Most startup founders, if they calculated their hourly salaries, would crumple up the paper and throw it away — and then get back to work.
There’s a lot to be said for the psychic paycheck that comes from the joy of making — of taking an idea and bringing it into existence, whether it’s a dress that is exactly what you want, or whether it’s an API that lets other people build what THEY want.
I hope that somewhere out there is another teen bent over a hand-me-down sewing machine, cranking out the nth iteration of her own idea, learning all the skills of inventiveness, persistence, problem-solving, and joyful creation that my years bent over my own sewing machine have taught me. I hope that when she launches her own startup, she’ll let me invest!

Erin McKean is the founder of Reverb , a news discovery app for the iPhone and iPad, and the online dictionary Wordnik.com. Previously, she was the editor in chief of American dictionaries for Oxford University Press. A lexicographer by training, she is also the author of several books, including "Weird and Wonderful Words" and "The Secret Lives of Dresses."

At a Wedding, You Are What You Wear By JOYCE WADLER of the New York Times

 I thought this was funny, but poignant.  All Mothers of the Groom will relate!  Enjoy!--Katherine

I’m going to a wedding this summer, which means once again I am dealing with the sleeve problem. You ladies of a certain age know what I am talking about. There comes a time in your life, even if you have a personal trainer and are taking your meals in the gym, when the muscles and skin on your inner upper arms give up. It’s as if they’re saying: “Oh, the hell with it. Where’s the bar?” They’re just hanging off the bone, exhausted.

I’m feeling pretty buff these days. I’ve lost 20 pounds (I don’t think I’ve mentioned that for two columns), I’ve been training for a bike trip and I still cannot find a dress for an afternoon wedding. The cutest dresses are sleeveless, and I don’t feel I can wear them unless I get a pair of five-pound weights and do repetitions three times a day. I envision my shopping list: 1) sleeveless cocktail dress; 2) weights. This doesn’t seem right.

I don’t like the sleeveless dresses with the little bolero jackets either. The chutzpah of this is appalling: We’re going to sell you something you can wear only if you cover it up. That will be $700. I do understand how these dresses are supposed to work, though. You wear the jacket at the ceremony, then you go to the reception and have a few snorts and toss if off because you have ceased to care.

My only choice, if I insist on sleeves, seems to be to go to the mother-of-the-bride favela on the outskirts of the bridal department and get a long-sleeved garment in navy blue or — shoot me if I ever do this — lavender. I’m not sure what to call the style of these dresses, but if you’ve ever seen those things people put over their toasters, you have a general idea. They might as well have the words “Boring Matron, Has Not Had Sex in Eight Years” emblazoned in sequins.

The plus side, I guess, is that at least I am not the mother of the groom, or, as she is referred to on wedding sites, the MOG. I have had friends go through this, and it is a whole other kind of hell because they need to get outfit approval from the bride’s family. Here is how the wedding planning site The Knot puts it: “Per general etiquette, the MOB is to buy her wedding day frock first and then notify the MOG in a friendly, nonthreatening format.”

I used to think being a bridesmaid was bad, but that is nothing compared to the abasement of being the mother of a groom. Here’s how her shopping experience works:

She sees a dress she loves, she takes a picture, and she sends it to the mother of the bride. The mother of the bride looks at the dress, realizes it’s way more sophisticated than the rag she’s picked out for herself, and texts the mother of the groom:

Gorgeous, but that burnt sienna conflicts with the blackened orange cocktail napkins we’ll be using for the after-party. Don’t hate me, but could you possibly try to find something else? I only ask because I know one day you will want to see your grandchildren.

No detail of the MOG’s outfit is too small. You might think that in a $75,000 wedding in which the bride is decked out in 40 yards of tulle, bearing down on the guests like an 18th-century battleship in full sail, no one will notice the shoes the groom’s mother is wearing, particularly because by the time the bride and her mother are through with her, she will be wearing a navy suit cut like a shoe box. (Navy is not merely the suggested color for a mother-of-the-groom outfit, in some Southern states it is law.)

The MOG may not always hear directly from the MOB on smaller matters of dress, but, just as in the Gestapo, there is a chain of command. The mother of the bride will talk to the bride, who will talk to the groom, who will call his mother. The MOG, who by now is such a nervous wreck that she’s dissolving 1.5-milligram tablets of Klonopin in her morning coffee, will sense something is up because her son will be making this call from a business trip in Dubai.

Hey, Ma, I got a call from the woman who will decide how often we visit when you are in the old-people’s home, and she said you haven’t said a word about your shoes. The wedding is only six months away. No big deal, but could you text her the picture the minute you get off the phone? Otherwise, we’ll be spending every Thanksgiving with her parents.

I went through something like this myself when I was a maid of honor in the late ’60s. The style for weddings then was aggressively anti-establishment; the bridal party was not bound by deadly tradition. My friend the bride, who was following a strict health-food regimen of eight to 10 diet pills a day to maintain a Twiggy-like figure, was going to be wearing a white crochet minidress that fell a good six inches below her behind. I had been scouring Greenwich Village shops for several weeks trying to find something that went with it. This was difficult because, really, nothing went with it.

I had my doubts about the marriage. The groom was bisexual; he was also high-strung, although after weeks of trying to find the right thing to wear, who among the bridal party was not? Anyway, I finally found an understated gray and white dress that couldn’t upstage a nun and got the bride’s approval. Then I got an innocuous pair of white high-heel sandals to go with the dress. Then I got a call from the groom.

“You bought WHITE SHOES!” he screamed. “You’re RUINING my wedding! ONLY THE BRIDE WEARS WHITE!”

He was not such a stickler for tradition on the honeymoon, where he and his wife engaged in a three-way with a fellow whose interest, according to what the bride told me, was focused entirely on the groom. This was also what it looked like in the Polaroids.

It will not surprise you to learn that this marriage did not last. I like to think it had nothing to do with my shoes.