If I had gone into it thinking, this is going to be the hero product that’s going to change our brand, then I probably wouldn’t have named it The Nap Dress, because people might think it’s a nightgown. But in the moment, it was a name that was so personal to me and really made me giggle. It was aligned with my whole idea that I’m like a Victorian ghost who can nap anywhere—like, I need a fainting couch. I wanted a dress that, at any moment, I could take just lay down and take a nap in, because I’m that comfortable. I never thought the name would catch on like it did, but one thing that business school taught me is that regardless of whether you think something is going to resonate or not, if you come up with something, you trademark it. There’s this blind confidence that you have to have with everything you do as an entrepreneur that almost makes the hits indistinguishable from the misses. Every time we launch something, I’m proud to introduce it to the world, because it feels really special and has the opportunity to become something entirely different once people actually live in it. For example, the first round of Nap Dresses didn’t have pockets, and pockets very quickly became essential to the product and something people can’t live without.
Compare and despair. It can be so easy to start out, especially as an entrepreneur, and just compare yourself to all the other businesses that either started at the same time as you were in the same category as you. My best advice is that whenever somebody tells me they’re starting a business is to mentally hit mute. Your energy and your time is so precious; wasting energy on focusing on what other people are doing is not going to get you to the place where you deserve to be. It’s easier said than done; we all have our moments where we’re doomscrolling and just feeling that anxiety of comparison, but it’s so important. I think the mute feature on Instagram is the best thing ever for that feeling. If I feel a tinge of anxiety or comparison about a friend group or if somebody didn’t invite me to something, I hit mute.
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