FFW x Pickle - Julia - Raw Footage
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Hey, business besties. Welcome back to the Female Founder World podcast. I'm Jasmine Gunsworthy. I'm the creator of the Female Founder World universe and the host of this show. Today I'm chatting with Julia O'Mara, the co founder of Pickle. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me.
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You are now entering female founder world with your host, Jasmine
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For people that don't know Pickle, tell us about what you're building.
You're welcome. Yes, Pickle is a peer to peer fashion rental app where women are renting their clothes to and from each other. You can kind of think of it like Airbnb, but for your closet. And it's a great way to be able to wear something one time in a super circular, sustainable way, and then monetize the pieces in your closet that you aren't ready to sell or donate.
So the idea first kind of like came to you a few years ago, 2020, Talk me through what that time was like and how you thought that the world needed something like Pickle. Yes, the idea came in a bit of a roundabout way. We actually had a different company before we pivoted to this rental marketplace. So, [00:01:00] uh, the long story short is I met my co founder, Brian McMahon, when we were working back at Blackstone as Product manager, business analyst with their fundraising team.
So doing a bunch of data analytics and working with their fundraising teams on different analysis for investing decisions. And we left Blackstone in spring. It was April of 2021 to start the first version of Pickle. It was actually called Pickle. Pickle, poll. It was a social polling app where people were crowdsourcing opinions to make better purchase decisions.
So if you were in the market to buy something new you would post a poll to your community And they would vote on it and help you de risk that purchase. So if you were deciding between buying a dress, you might say, should I buy option A, option B, option C, et cetera. And what we saw was that people were using those polls in a bit of a unique way.
They were commenting and recommending items from their own closets and even commenting and saying, Oh, you don't need to buy that. You could just borrow it. And that was really interesting. We were not expecting [00:02:00] that from a polling app, but it gave us a lot of conviction to look in the rental space. And Obviously, borrowing items from people is not something that's not new.
We've done it with our sisters, our siblings, our sorority friends, um, girls in college, but it isn't something that has really translated in the professional world. And so we saw that gap in the rental space where no one's really tackled that peer to peer model where you're literally circulating items that are already existing in your community.
So we had a lot of conviction in that. And so then we pivoted over. in May of 2022, and have now been building it, , since then. Wow, okay, so you ended up, , raising some money from friends and family to like, get this started. Was that when you were doing the polling idea? Yes. Or once you pivoted? Yes, we raised around 250k from friends and family.
which was an interesting process. It's interesting to ask people in your network for money, but we took that process very seriously with a full pitch deck. And what was really important about that time of fundraising, what I [00:03:00] would recommend is thinking about the people that you are going to be raising from in that kind of round are people that are like, It's okay if this money doesn't go anywhere, or if this is potentially lost.
They're investing at the end of the day. Of course, they have to have some conviction in your idea and everything, but they're investing in you as founders, and so that's definitely where we found the most comfort, that our friends and family, the people that believed in us, then were investing in us as founders first, and that we would be, you know, resilient enough to get to that.
Okay, so talk me through the pivot and how you, how you kind of like executed that relaunch. 250, 000 to get started, like, it sounds like a lot, but when you build one product and then you're, you know, pivoting and building something else, like that money's going to go really fast. Really quick. Yeah. We ended up spreading out that 250k for almost two and a half years, so that was a very We thought we were scrappy when we first got it got started with the polling app But then when we were doing the pivot we had already [00:04:00] used a good amount of that capital on that first version so We are really tightening our belts.
Uh, but we had also had so many learnings from that first app, uh, that we were working on. I think a big fallacy that we had at first was build it and they will come. Both of us are product people. We are data driven, but we have been learning all of our growth and marketing skills on the job. And that that's really in my side of the house.
And so I've. Fully learned, uh, some different strategies and techniques there, and that's definitely something that we tackled much better when we did the pivot. So when we pivoted in May of 2022, we had shut down the first version of the app, retooled the platform really, really quickly, and launched a new version of it in like three weeks.
And we did that because we wanted to get something in the market immediately so that we could start learning. When you are going through a light beta version or you're going through something where you can't test it at. A large enough scale, it's really hard to learn. And so we had to get something out there and we had to figure out how are people even going to think [00:05:00] about using this new rental app that we were working on.
And so when we launched it, then we had three key things that we were focusing on. One, looking to build really high quality supply on the marketplace. So like great clothes, great clothes for people to rent. Exactly. We can't tell people to come rent unless there are items for them to rent on the platform.
So that was the first thing we were focusing on. We had a really interesting creator and influencer strategy that we started off with. We were also focusing on, uh, convenience. Even from the early days of the rental marketplace, we thought people need to be able to have access to these items at their door.
We wanted Pickle to feel like a true extension of their closet. So Brian and I, of course, were like, what? We'd have to have door to door delivery or else people won't be able to get these items fast enough. But we didn't have any money to be able to build out the technology to integrate couriers or to pay other couriers.
So Brian and I were the first Pickle delivery people. We were the couriers, which was a very interesting time, but we were hands on meeting our [00:06:00] customers at their doors. And then the last thing and the third pillar that we really focus on is community. And that's just the whole building of, of trust and reliability with Pickle.
Before we kind of had this interview, , I was looking through your story and I read that you and your co founder did like 4, 000 subway rides to deliver that product, which I just think like, I love that. It's just so relatable. Relatable. It was. It was so challenging at the time because we were spending so much time doing deliveries.
So there's no Wi Fi down there. There's no Wi Fi, there are the New York people that are on the subways, you are, we would, it was good because at the beginning when we would do the deliveries, we'd get really excited because we were super low volume and be like, oh my gosh, we got our first customer that wasn't one of my friends, you know, then all of a sudden we were getting a few more deliveries a day.
And then. All of a sudden we had grown enough where we were doing deliveries from 7 a. m. to 9 p. m. And then you have to work on building your business outside of that, which is obviously [00:07:00] challenging. And then you're physically drained from running around the city all day. I think my longest day I was at 22 miles marked on my, on my phone for how many things, how many miles I've walked.
Almost a marathon. So didn't run that last weekend, but maybe next year. But it was, the best part of the delivery experience was meeting our customers at their doors, literally, so we would go and talk to them and you're picking up an item from a lender and bringing it to a renter, so at both doors I would introduce myself and they would be very surprised to see me.
You are not a courier. Yes, well, I am one of the founders of Pickle and I am your courier today, but hopefully not for the in the future. And I would ask how they heard about Pickle and then any feedback that they might have. And then on when we were doing that would be on like the delivery side and of course on a return asking about their experience and how they how they liked it and what they were wearing their rental to and what they were doing with it.
And then it was helpful to also understand the way that Pickle was starting to spread [00:08:00] amongst the community. So we would start to see. The network effects in action because we would go and I would meet somebody and I would talk to them and they'd say, Oh, my friend, Hannah referred me or talked to me about it.
And I would know who Hannah was because I had done a delivery with Hannah maybe like a few days before and realized that these circles of friend groups were starting to really talk about their experience and loving their access to these items. Um, last minute,
Okay business besties, I want to just pause for a second. I've got Natalie here on the Female Founderboard team and I want to ask, Nat, are you ready for the holidays? Honestly, no, and I feel like it's coming up so quickly. It's coming up so quickly and that's why I wanted to take a second to chat about this season's presenting sponsor, Vistaprint.
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Oh of course, you got to bring the family into it and I I personally love a branded tote bag, but I also didn't know that they did embroidery. That's pretty cool. The embroidered caps are particularly cute. Oh, I love that. Highly recommend. So everyone, go and get your holiday shopping buttoned up with up to 50 percent off custom holiday cards, wall calendars, and more at vistaprint.
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you mentioned before like a micro influencer strategy and, You've been following this, I think, kind of like the whole time since you made this pivot.
[00:10:00] What is that and what advice do you have for anyone else who wants to tap micro influencers to build their brand? When we were thinking about the creator and influencer strategy, that was a very big supply play for the marketplace. So, obviously, getting the The best quality items onto the app. We had to think about who has really great closets, who has maybe a little bit of excess pieces of clothing, and who is really obsessed, obsessed with fashion and style.
And those are the fashion creators that are in New York city. People are literally following them for inspiration on what to wear and what to buy. And so that was the very first strategy of getting people to upload items onto the marketplace. It's very manual, very not scalable at the beginning. And that is.
Definitely a piece of advice I would give a lot of things that you have to do at the beginning are not going to scale like doing deliveries yourself, or like manually working with each creator that's getting onto your app. So there would be a few of the first girls, I would FaceTime with them and help them upload their first items, walk them through every single step.[00:11:00]
We had a creative idea that was piggybacked off of Airbnb's playbook, where we wanted to make sure that there were really high quality photos on the app so that when people were shopping the different Pickle rentals, they would see people in beautiful UGC, these pictures that would basically be translated from Instagram to Pickle, and so we would host these scrappy photoshoots in Soho, we would invite And Any micro nano influencer that would respond to a DM and I would stand on a corner with an intern who was kindly volunteering and with a green balloon and a photographer and people would show up and say, All right, we're going to do some street style photos in Soho, bring an outfit, bring a change of clothes so that you can have two different Instagram photos and then also have two items that we're going to help you upload on pickle.
And so that was a supply strategy that we started with. The nano and micro creator scene in New York is also pretty tight knit. They go to a lot of different, a lot of similar events. They're friends with each other. And so word of mouth also started spreading amongst that [00:12:00] community. And then kind of the final point on that was these creators also are going to tons of events.
They need to wear a lot of different outfits. So they were very interested in, of course. monetizing their closet on the lender side of the platform, but they also had a ton of rental use cases. So they would need a last minute outfit to go to a red carpet event or to go to a last minute birthday party or brand activation.
And Pickle was now a solution for them too. So we use them or worked with them on both sides. Then in December 2022, so you're still not a very old brand, but you tapped your first like macro influencer, your first big influencer. What was that experience? That was. An amazing experience, uh, it was Audrey Challenger, and, uh, we had been doing a lot of outbound outreach.
Now we get a lot So you're just DMing. We were DMing a ton of people. The response rate was very low. But that's what's expected at the beginning, and I would say don't be discouraged by that. That's very normal. My tip would be to play around with your hook of your first [00:13:00] four words that you get people to actually read your DM that you're sending.
Usually, we'll say something like, keep the intro not like, hi, this is Julia from Pickle, and say, hi, exclamation point, saw you're connected with, or saw, and try to just introduce something that would hook them into reading the rest of the message, and it might be from one of the first micro influencers that we were working with that they were friends with or followed on Instagram, and just wanted to build that mutual connection and a bit of social proof.
We're trying to build that social proof with the app in the early days. But Working with Audrey and we, she kindly, you know, got coffee with me in the, in Midtown East, where her, one of her first apartments was in New York. And I think she was just super open to a new idea and very receptive to something that could be pretty game changing for her closet.
She had some really cool pieces that she said, okay, these could be cool to, to share with some people and make some money off of them. And then I remember she was, talking about a few different brands that she was interested in accessing and she said, Oh, just let me [00:14:00] know if you guys get some of this on your platform.
And so then I started to see some of the demand of really cool, unique items or brands that these influencers would want access to and not have to spend 800 to be able to wear that item. So was that a paid partnership or totally organic? No, that was organic. She had kindly responded to one of our DMs and We, our entire strategy with creators is working with them in a strategic lens and with something that basically adds value without us paying them.
And so their value is they make money on Pickle by lending out their pieces. And they also see direct return when you put a little bit more investment into your Pickle closet, whether that's uploading some additional items to your closet, whether that's sharing with your followers at, Oh, I just wore this outfit out to this last event.
And now you can rent it on Pickle. They'll see that result in rentals and they'll see that result in followers of their closet on Pickle. And so there is this nice positive reinforcement [00:15:00] mechanism where the more they put in, the more they get out of it on Pickle. So that's what we focus on. We work on, hey, let's make your closet amazing.
Let's do a closet drop. Let's do a campaign. We're going to tell our audience about it. You should tell your audience about it. And before you know it, you'll be Paying your New York rent with your, with your closet. That's amazing. And, and I was looking through some of the stats that you, you and your team sent through before we had this conversation, and like people are paying their rent with, through Pickle.
Like they, people are making true, serious money by being suppliers on this app. Yes, it's, It's something that, I mean, when you're building something like this, you're not sure , how invested people are going to get, and obviously there are some of these creators and influencers that have access to amazing pieces, and they're, they have to wear a lot of items, um, for these different events and occasions, but they make up a very small portion of the inventory on the app, it's, it's less than 2 percent of the items on Pickle are in influencer closets, and You They aren't, most of our top lenders are not influencers, the large majority of [00:16:00] them.
And so these are women that are really passionate about fashion. They've invested in some high quality pieces. They are almost ahead of the trends. They know when something is going to sell out. They know when, they know that Miracle is going to be trending for the holidays and they're on top of those drops ready to invest in that piece of inventory and then start circulating it.
And they actually profit off of that item. Amazing. I want to talk a little bit about. tech piece of this, because your background, you're not an engineer and you were pretty scrappy when you started. You've raised more money now. We'll talk about that soon. But how does someone go about building a product like this?
Yes. Brian and I, when we were starting, there were a few different options of how we would actually build the technology. A few of them, one, we could have tried to find a third technical co founder, two, we could have, uh, used all of our money to hire a software engineer and build out and develop our app, or three, we could have tried to use a no code platform [00:17:00] and, and build it that way, um, without as much flexibility as when you are custom coding something.
Fortunately, Brian was very excited to be a self taught pickle developer, and so he actually learned how to code specifically for pickles. So he is not a trained software engineer, but he is a pickle engineer, and I would say still knows our, our code base better than anyone else on the team. That will change as our engineering team is, is growing and, and evolving, but that was something that we made a very pointed decision if we wanted to be super flexible and iterative, and so we decided to be the self taught pickle developer.
Developers, and I was a self taught designer, and we built that app together, ourselves. I think that is definitely a challenging route to take, obviously you're building from scratch and you're learning as you go, but we were so quick and scrappy with iterations. That's why we could retool that platform, our first app, in three weeks.
And it's why when we have a really good feature idea, we could think about it today, design it this morning, and then release [00:18:00] it tonight, because we can be super agile that way. What are some of those no code tools that people should check out if they want to build something? Do you know them or should I be asking your co founder or you're in it as well?
We don't use any of them is my problem. There's, uh, I want to look it up on my phone. I think there's one, like, it's called, like, Bubble. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Um, we have not used it because we have been able to use our own custom code. We use AWS, um, for our backend and our frontends built on React Native, but we haven't used the no code platforms.
I've heard great, wonderful things about it, and I think it allows people to get something into the market really quickly, but we, I can't personally vouch for them. Okay. Good to know. I want to fast forward to the middle of like 2023, last year, where you raised your seed round. How much did you raise and what was that process like?
We raised eight million dollars, which was a lot. We basically went from zero to eight million. Wow. The process for that was [00:19:00] Definitely challenging. Before we went out to go and raise that seed round of capital, we were looking to raise a pre seed round. Most people don't go from raising a family and friends to then raising a pretty large seed round, but we had a really hard time in the market raising a pre seed round.
We were going out and trying to raise one to two million dollars. We were going out and talking to investors and they would say, All right, here. Hit this level of traction, hit these numbers, and come back to us. And either that was the answer, or we'd get a ton of no's of, we're not interested in your space, people have tried this before, it doesn't work, whatever it might be, and so we got a ton of those no's immediately.
That's normal, by the way, in case anyone was wondering. And when we were going back out and we were starting to build traction, we had seen some amazing organic growth. We were starting to see, we were seeing consistent double digit growth numbers month over month. And we were seeing this all amplified organically on socials or through network effects within our own community, and that was very promising.
When we were [00:20:00] going back out with some of this additional traction, then we weren't at the right stage for some of these pre seed firms. We were almost a bit further than that in, in the sense of how much we had grown at that point. So then we were, we just thought, well, let's just go try to see if we can, if we have any reception for raising a seed round.
And so we ended up kind of reformatting our pitch deck a bit and went out for that and had, Some success there, which is great. We've raised from Kraft Ventures and Firstmark, as well as Burst Capital. Those are our three main investors. I want to know what's in that deck. What's in that deck? Tell me. I mean, Mostly a lot of numbers and graphs and then a bit about our story, of course, and all the things that we've been doing to build the Momentum and kind of that product market fit that they're seeing I think our investors were really really excited about the retention that they saw So that was something that we didn't have on the first app that we built you can get You can get people to download an app, but if they don't come back and consistently use it, you're clearly not providing enough utility there.
And so [00:21:00] that was a big learning that we saw within our polling app, but that was entirely different on pickle. And it was interesting because Even the early days, we saw that kind of retention. We might've had our first 100 customers, but they were coming back and they would, they would be renting again and they were consistently using the app.
And that is where it was pretty clear that we had something a bit special there. because people were, found it sticky and they were excited to come in and try the rental process again. And they were telling their friends about it. And that's where we started to have that early indication of product market fit that we had not seen with the previous app.
I want to talk about community building because you mentioned that that was kind of, you know, that's one of the pillars that has helped you grow Pickle. In a really tactical way, like what are some of those things that you're doing boots on the ground? build community because you're also you're in this like very um, different kind of space where it's it's location based, right?
So like I'm guessing IRL and having a [00:22:00] physical presence is important for that. Absolutely. And it's definitely something that we have been investing in and It's something that is sometimes hard to immediately measure that ROI, but it's something that pays off in dividends as you are growing your community and learning about the way that people are talking about your brand and spreading the word for you.
When you're, when you invest in that community, people become your organic ambassadors, and those are the best people to be talking about your app. Paid ads and paid channels. Um, and so we've definitely invested in community. We invested early days, obviously talking to our customers at their door. That was a very important part of the process.
We also were incredibly hands on with every single one of our customer support cases. Brian and I also did all of our customer support at the beginning. So we heard every single problem and every single qualm that somebody had with the app that allowed us to be very iterative and Improve, of course. We also [00:23:00] met our community in another forum there and made a lot of remedies if something would go wrong at the beginning to improve the app
and also just to mitigate that situation. , but since raising capital, we've also continued to invest in community. And one of the first things that we did for that was we actually opened a storefront in the West Village. And you can find it at 21 8th Ave. We had a little meetup meetup. So fun. It is a great place, of course, to be able to go and rent in person.
You still use the app, you just use the handoff method, so instead of having something delivered to your door, you can just pick it up from the store and then bring it back to the store or have it delivered back to the store. That location is an investment in our community. It is a place where we meet people in person.
We have panel events, we have different community activations, we work with other brands collaboratively there, we host some cool creator closets there, they'll do some meet and greets there. But that is number one, first and foremost, an investment in our community and marketing and meeting people [00:24:00] in real life.
Something that we have seen at the store is that we are able to learn and receive feedback from people. that we would never have access to just going through the app. At the store, there are tons of people that come in and they've never heard about Pickle before, or they might have heard about us, but they didn't have enough conviction to download the app yet, or they haven't tried a rental yet, and we get to ask them why they haven't, or what was their hesitation, or what were their questions that they have, and That is not something that we would have access to without that physical space because on the app, someone has already broken that barrier and decided to actually download and sign up.
When we did our event there, I met your team, and I'm guessing before you raised that eight million, you didn't really have a team, right? Right. So what do you do? Like, you know, the money hits your bank account. What's the first thing that you spend on and who did you hire? First thing we spent on were a few employees.
Uh, we had kindly had some people. So yes, it was Brian and I for a long [00:25:00] time, just us two as our full time employees, but we had some People along the way that were really passionate about our brand and kind of put in that sweat equity when we couldn't really afford to pay them. And so two of our first employees were interns that were working with us and were putting in that sweat equity and had kind of invested in Pickle along the way, even though we unfortunately didn't have the funds to be able to bring them on as a full time employee or really compensate them the way that we wanted to.
They had been people that were sourced from our community, uh, which was cool. So our first hire, Susan, who has worked on the growth marketing side of things. She is now kind of our, our TikTok guru and working within our, uh, paid ad strategy and performance marketing. Um, that has been a really great supplemental way to boost our organic growth that makes up 80 percent of our growth.
And then Madeline. We brought on as our first customer experience, and now she does customer experience hire. She now [00:26:00] does some product management with us as well, but she has fully helped build out and scale our support team, which has been an amazing, amazing value add. How many people are on the Pickle team now?
We have 11 full time employees. Does that feel weird? It's very different than only working with one other person, um, but I'm so grateful for them. I know that we wouldn't be able to scale without them and I wouldn't be able to scale myself. Yeah. So very grateful. How are you like bridging that gap between being that scrappy kind of doing everything myself, I'm on the subway all day, like that kind of founder to now it's like a very different style of leadership.
And this is something that I think about as well in my own business of like, there's a point where you just like can't do all of the things, right? And you need to trust and learn how to manage other people and empower them to do the stuff that you used to do. Like, how do you build those skills within yourself?
It's definitely been a learning process. It's something that I didn't have [00:27:00] experience before. I was, I had been working for just maybe, just under two years out of college. I wasn't managing anybody. I'd never really known how to build a team. So. I have learned a lot from other mentors, some of our investors, and then I've learned from our own employees that we've been bringing on.
I think the most important thing there to be able to work on delegating and giving away some responsibility and sharing it is investing in those employees that you truly trust. And so the people that we brought onto our team have been amazing. That's why I say I'm so grateful for them, but I've learned new things from each of them.
Uh, somebody who love to give a shout out to is Alex, our director of operations. She has been so incredible. She had amazing experience at Uber. We love, love, love working with people who have marketplace experience. And she is somebody that I have learned a ton of leadership skills from as well as management skills.
And I also fully trust her as somebody that has, Full ownership [00:28:00] mentality and she also definitely has that ownership where she acts like a founder Which is really hard to find it's people will say and I've heard this before No one will ever care as much as you care as a founder and I said, maybe that's true But I'm gonna try my hardest to find people that care almost as much We're right there with me so that we can all we're all at the same.
We are all invested in this I mean we do we are Compensate our employees with shares in the company. And so they are also. They do have ownership here. But finding somebody that has that kind of founder mentality is so important. That has been amazingly helpful in trusting our employees to be able to give over some of that responsibility.
And that has allowed me to understand that someone is going to be able to own and run with this because I trust them and what they're, And their intentions for the business. And that has allowed me to scale myself. But at the end of the day, there is still no task too small. Yeah. So we will get down and [00:29:00] dirty and do whatever it takes.
I would go do a delivery now if that's what I needed to do. I also find like, you know, you're talking about building a team and what you look for on team. Like, Something that I really noticed is some people just seem to want to like show the world what they can do and like really want to um they've they've got like something to prove and like those are often the people that are just going to go above and beyond because they just want to create something amazing and be part of something amazing and like when you find those people like you've got to figure out the way that They are going to be motivated and keep them and reward them in the way that they want to be rewarded Because I feel like those are the folks that just like absolutely business.
They're competitive I think is a big part of their nature Brian and I were both UN athletes. So we're very competitive and Not all of our you don't have to be an athlete for us to hire you but Every person that's on our team does have this kind of competitive drive and it's something that it has to come first and foremost in Intrinsically, I can't force you to want to work hard and I [00:30:00] can't say you need to come in at 8 a.
m And leave at 9 p. m That's something that people do themselves because they care that much about the company and our vision in the business and they're driven by their own Internal factors there. So now you're a little over two years in This business, since you've relaunched, what are some of the big learnings that you've had through this whole process, both, you know, for yourself as you've been developing, but also just about your business in general? Yes. So from the business angle, I think there are a few different things. One, and we definitely have done this since the early days of doing the deliveries, of immersing yourself into that full customer experience or process that you're looking to build. And the reason that you should do that is because you will learn the intricacies that you'll need to invest in the technology that you would eventually build there.
So I guess in another form, that is seeing how you might be able to test something at a really small scale. Unscalable way before investing a full developer resource or a [00:31:00] bunch of time and energy into something that has been a big learning for us. So if there is a feature or an idea that we have some conviction behind, how can we do this in a way that doesn't involve us pulling one of our engineers and devoting?
Three months of time to it. And so that might be leveraging our community and working with them in a quick survey or doing a poll on Instagram before we actually go and invest in that feature on pickle. Uh, another learning has definitely been. Getting things when you do have conviction, of course, in that feature, getting things into the market as fast as you can, you're never going to have something at 100%.
But if you can get it to that 80%, you're going to learn a lot more from your end customers. And so that's definitely been something that we've been working on. When we have a hypothesis around a new feature or an improvement of a feature. What are we testing? How are we going to measure the success of that?
And then let's get it to that 80 percent and get it out there so that we can start learning [00:32:00] and iterating on it. I've been wanting to ask you who did the pickle branding and this is like such a detour, but it looks so good. Thank you so much. It's so distinctive. Oh, thank you. We worked with a freelance designer brand consultant.
Her name is Izzy. She is awesome. Um, she, we, we had a different, very different branding that. Very much gave, uh, two tech founders that are not in the fashion world and had product management experience. That was our previous branding and we knew that we wanted to make sure that our branding kind of aligned with our overall kind of vision of helping people elevate their style and borrow the brand.
borrow items from the coolest closets in their city, it needed to align with that. And so when we were looking at the different options, one, reinvesting in branding or, or redoing your branding is, can be very expensive if you work with an agency. Um, Um, we aligned well with Izzy when she had used Pickle before.
She was a [00:33:00] passionate customer and she also just spent the time investing in understanding our overall vision for the brand. And so I think it has translated well and we're still continuing to iterate and improve upon it. But I think it's definitely as cohesive as it has been in our journey. I love it.
I love hearing when someone who has like really great branding didn't go with one of the big agencies and you've gone with a freelancer. And like we have a Um, database that's available in the business bestie dashboard for anyone who's a member, which is just recommended freelancers and contractors in, in this like graphic design space, but also like everything like paid ads, whatever, and it's what different founders are using.
So I feel like you can do amazing work without going with these big agencies and that goes across all the different categories that you need support in. So I love to hear that. Absolutely. I think there can often be. Alignment that is a bit more qualitative than quantitative you might look at someone's resume and they could be the perfect fit on paper But then when you talk with them and they're not [00:34:00] fully aligned with your vision of the company They might not be the best fit totally The last thing I want to ask you is just for a resource recommendation or multiple like more than one is great, too Something that's been helping you build pickle that you think people should go and check out One, The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen, it is an amazing book if you're looking to build a marketplace or a company that has network effects.
And they reference a lot of amazing other companies like Uber and Airbnb and that was kind of our bible and it's something that all of our employees read when they get started. And was, um, Basically, all of our research before we did our pivot from the social polling app to our rental marketplace. So definitely recommend that.
And then, uh, No Rules Rules is another book, uh, by Reed Hastings. And it is about Netflix and their culture and kind of their excellence that they have embodied by investing in, they call it stunning employees. Some people, uh, that are, uh, Really top notch that then [00:35:00] translates into a ton of freedom and responsibility and transparency in your culture.
So we are always continuing to work on that and improve on that, but those two books I would highly recommend. Amazing. Julia, thank you so much for coming on FEMA Found World. Thank you so much. It was so fun
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