197 | Finding Success Looking on the Not-So-Bright Side with Meredith Erin
Image of Meredith Erin, guest for episode 197 of the Awarepreneurs podcast.
Our guest on the pod this week is Meredith Erin. In a world obsessed with self-care, positive thinking, and one-size-fits-all wellness advice, Meredith founded contrarian brand Boredwalk and formed a community for people who don't see the world through rose-colored glasses. With it's unique brand of dark humor and a decidely gloomy outlook, Boredwalk had developed a cult following that unites and celebrates pessimists everywhere.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
COUPON CODE: Aware10
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What we can offer now is these imperfect show notes via the Otter.ai service. The transcription is far from perfect. But hopefully it’s close enough - even with the errors - to give those who aren’t able or inclined to learn from audio interviews a way to participate.
Meredith Erin Awarepreneurs Interview on Pessimism vs Optimism in Entrepreneurship
SPEAKERS
Meredith Erin, Paul Zelizer
Paul Zelizer 00:01
Hi, this is Paul Zelizer, and welcome to another episode of the Awarepreneurs podcast. This podcast is all about the intersection of three things, conscious business, social impact, and awareness practices. Each episode, I do a deep dive interview with a thought leader in this intersection, someone who has market tested experience, and is already transforming many lives. Before I introduce today's guests and our topic, I have one request. If you could go over to Apple podcasts or whatever app you're listening to the show on and do a rating and review it helps tremendously. Thank you so much. Today, I am thrilled to introduce you to Meredith Aaron. And our topic is finding success on the not so bright side. In a world obsessed with self care, positive thinking, and one size fits all wellness advice, merited there and founded her contrary and company boardwalk, and formed a community of people who didn't see the world through rose colored glasses. With its unique brand of dark humor, and decidedly gloomy outlook boardwalk has developed a cult following that unites and celebrates pessimists everywhere. Meredith, thank you so much for being on the show today. Thanks for having me. This is if you're listening listeners, and you know, toxic positivity is a thing in our space, we're going to be talking about some things that maybe aren't so helpful, this idea that everybody has to have an extremely positive outlet Connect guarantees success. And I just want to say from the start of this interview, we're talking to the founder of a seven figure company that's just launched, one of its most successful products ever tell you about that product. But this is not your average wellness conversation. And I really want to encourage people to listen so that we can be reflecting about our tendency as a impact and wellness space, to have certain biases that I don't think are always serving. So enough, I'll get off on my soapbox. I will ask Meredith Meredith and we're called Awarepreneurs, we love to start off our interviews is a way to get to know you a little bit. What's a wellness or awareness practice that you personally use to help you bring your most resource self to this really important work.
Meredith Erin 2:35
Um, one thing that I've gotten into in the last couple years that pandemic has made more difficult is boxing, which I know is a very unconventional answer. But it's been really helpful for me, my job is stressful and hard a lot of the time, and being able to like act on that frustration, instead of trying to stuff it and be like, cheerful has been helpful to me. And the other thing that I think boardwalk has really helped me just kind of be aware of and more accepting of and even embrace is just that there is this expectation in society that we should all be more positive. No one likes a Debbie Downer. I don't agree, I love a Debbie Downer, I have a Debbie Downer, and I'm having a fine time being my natural self. And I've given up on the idea of trying to be a more positive person. It's not who I am. So I'm happy being a little rave moonshine instead of a ray of sunshine. Would you say that that's been true, like through your whole life, that you've been more of a pessimist. I've always been this way since I was a kid. I've also always felt the pressure to not be this way from the outside world. And it's taken well into adulthood. For me to get to a point of deciding this is who I am. This is my nature, it's not going to change and constantly trying to change it. It's just driving me crazy. It's not helpful to me.
Paul Zelizer 3:27 If you had to guess Meredith, how many times in your life, you've either directly heard or felt in some implied or implicit way somebody was hinting at or very directly telling you, you need to be more you should be more positive than is your natural wiring, like if you added them all up, but were we talking dozens? Are we talking 100? Are we talking 1000s? I mean, if we're talking about like, between people saying it, and just like messaging you here.
Meredith Erin 04:12
Who knows? I'm sure millions of times over the course of the decades I've been on the earth. I feel like this has always been a thing that, you know, socially. We encourage people to do and I just don't think it's that helpful, because not everyone is that way. So before you started boardwalk, like what did you do for work? I was a software engineer. I've never been much of a people person. I was always kind of an introvert and right out of college, that work appealed to me because it's very solitary. And so I was very drawn to that kind of work. But if you know anything about tech, it's a boys club. I worked in that industry for about 15 years before starting my own business and it was a boys club when I started is one now so it is not the best environment to be a female professional and I'm happier, do my own thing. See kind of get tired of being a woman in the boys club and you know, somewhere One of the ways that I should start my own thing was boardwalk, your first startup, a sort of, I started another brand before it with my husband, he's my business partner. And we started another brand is kind of a side hustle slash hobbies. This was ages before boardwalk, but just to see if like, we could sell things on the internet. And we were able to, but you know how much you can sell the internet is commensurate with how much effort you can put into selling things on the internet. So it made a little bit of money. And then we eventually were like, not loving our jobs and thinking of selling some stuff without us putting a lot of effort into it. And maybe if we put some actual effort into it, we could sell a lot of things on the internet. And, you know, it was a journey to get there. But we ended up launching boardwalk as our second brand, we felt like our first brand was a little wasn't commercial enough to really be able to make a lot of money. And then we launched boardwalk. And we kind of eventually found a happy medium between doing what we wanted creatively and doing what we thought was could be commercially viable, which is kind of where boardwalk is found at success. And just to give our listeners a sense, I just went through and got a couple of examples off your site of some of the products I was seeing. So if you go to boardwalk shirts.com we'll put the link in the show notes. You might see a shirt something like living my own life, beautifully designed, and we'll talk about you know, created with care. Another one is Wake up and smell the disappointment, which does I totally cracked out. I laughed about that. So you get a sense. So here's another one. What a time to be alive and anxious. And these are all beautifully crafted environmentally, you know, conscious? Sure. Um, you also told me about another product that you just launched? And is your best sellers? Best Seller ever. Tell us about that one? Yeah, so a lot of the stuff that I met I designed for birdwalk is responsible and toxic positivity in the world. So the whole like living my best life. troper like, well, that's not happening. Look at my Okay, it's like, it's such a great shirt, you got to set expectations make them realistic. But yeah, we just launched a new product, it's our grievance journal is our response to gratitude journals. I've tried gratitude journaling, I've tried every wellness prescription out there pretty much like I've tried them all, most of them don't work for me. I've tried gratitude journaling, a lot of times and I tried to stick with it for like months and months, I was like, I'll just push through and make it work for me, never worked for me never had any impact on me. But I did find myself sometimes writing about things that were bothering me. And I was like, I feel better. After I write about things that are bothering me, I don't feel better writing about things that I'm grateful for. And that was kind of the seed for this product idea. And so it's modeled after gratitude journals, which will have like inspirational quotes and writing prompts. Ours has led to motivational quotes and writing prompts. I mean, they're funny, devotionals, but they're a little more realistic. So it's, you know, by pessimists for pessimists. Yeah, that's our new product. It's been very popular with our audience, we're really excited about having been able to bring this to the world, because I feel like this is something that was missing missing in the journaling space. And when you like, started boardwalk, like, did you have a sense, this is like, we're going to create products that are more for people who have a pessimistic side of life, as they're like, we can't be the only ones that are a little tired of this toxic positivity. I'm not immediately, but it was something that started like kind of evolving into the work that we were putting out in the world, I would say, relatively early on, and people responded to it. It was just kind of, we started just like a test to see if it would do okay, and maybe some of our most successful stuff were like, great, we can be our true selves and talk about what we want to talk about. So if somebody is nodding their head, and they're saying, Oh, my gosh, thank goodness, because I also have a little bit, you know, rainbows and unicorns is not a very fulfilling diet. For me personally, I am more of an optimist, but like I, I feel, I get a little fed up to be, you know, with that extreme positivity and to push in on others and to imply that this is the only way to succeed as an entrepreneur, that's where it really starts to raise my hackles. It's somebody listening in, they're like, Oh, my gosh, I felt so much pressure. Like if like I want to, I'm thinking of when I started my business, you know, I had a kid, I had been a social worker, I didn't have a lot of money in the bank, I wanted to succeed and I was in those cultures, entrepreneurial circles, you're supposed to be positive in the zigzag colors and all the you know, the Tony Robbins, etc, etc. all the quoted, folks very much had strong opinions about mindset. If somebody is listening, and they've got that sort of like, gnawing at their stomach, like I want to succeed, and I'm being told I'm supposed to think certain ways, and it's not their natural way of approaching the world. They're more of like, kind of neutral or maybe they're a passive means what would you say?
10:00
That person is like, yeah, has seen so much of an optimistic worldview equates to success. Like how many times do you go on LinkedIn or Instagram and see a meme like that every day multiple times? Right? What would you say to that person who's like, it never really resonated with me. But I'm trying to create something that works. And I'm scared to let go of this because so many just repetition I hear over and over and over and over. Again, I just I don't think it's true. And I'm friends with a ton of entrepreneurs. A lot of people that run seven and eight figure brands and I would say about half of my friends in that cohort, there are optimists that the other half are definitely not optimists, they are just as gloomy as I am. One of my best friends. He's also one of the smartest entrepreneurs, I know, he and I are constantly like, trading links with each other about like the worst news of the day. That's just kind of how we are and he's an incredibly successful person. So I just don't think it's true. It's not been my experience. And I feel like there's a lot of this kind of
Meredith Erin 11:02
entrepreneur porn for lack of a better word, like just this content coming from people who haven't been successful entrepreneurs trying to tell other people how to be successful entrepreneurs, all the successful entrepreneurs, I know people that are actually doing it and running successful companies, they don't pay attention to this stuff. Like if it doesn't suit them to be sunny and cheerful be arch, and may or may not be part of their branding, depending on what they sell. But they don't feel constrained by these things, all these little like pop psychology articles that you might see on things like Forbes, Business Insider, one of those kinds of sites. No one I know that runs a company reads those that religiously they tend to read Inc. But also like these lists of things like things successful people do. They don't complain, they don't engage in negativity, that's just not true.
Paul Zelizer 11:46
So what would you if you're gonna, like, give some bullet points? Or if it's not that positive mindset, like, you know, pedal to the metal? Like if you're not flooring it with positivity, then you're gonna starve if that's not it, what would you say? What are a couple of points from your experience, and then people you're talking to who are running successful companies, what is most important than, um, I don't want to sugarcoat it because being an entrepreneur is certainly hard. I think that it's glamorized too much in our culture. And people make it seem like it's super easy and accessible, and anyone can do it, and you can make a million dollars in your sleep, that's someone trying to sell you something that's not reality. I think that actually what's important is, first of all, that you're conscious of who the customer is, what do they want, like, a lot of people I see that approach off intrapreneurship from what they want to put into the world more than they think about is there a market for it. So that's the first thing is sell something people want to buy and there's an audience for and that you're going to be successful in selling that product. And then the other thing is, you have to do all the hard, boring, tedious stuff, you just have to it sucks but in reality, like describe my day to you yesterday, like no one but my job I had like a conversation with my bookkeeper about some mistakes they made with our profit and loss statement. We had to argue with a vendor that had built something incorrectly it was just like, it's a slog. It's like any other job, it's not as glamorous as it sounds. What are the things they you in the bio that you said, you talked about? Like when I look at what you've done with boardwalk, this sentence or this clip seems really important, he said formed a community of people who don't see the world through rose colored glasses. When I look at what you're doing, yeah, with boardwalk and the consistency of the humor, and then not toxic positivity, like you're playing with it right living, okay, it's the life right? There's a sense my empathy sort of radar, you know, we have these things called mirror neurons, if anybody else is a neuro geek like me, right? My mirror neurons are saying, oh, Meredith and her team know they're people. You know, there's something about the way you're connected with your people and who they are and how they see the world and you've kind of drawn them in. That's my story. Am I like anywhere in the realm of possibility? And my totally off?
Meredith Erin 14:17
No, I think that's true. I think we do know our audience really well. Because we a lot of what we do creatively comes from our own experiences of life, which a lot of people have the same experiences, which is, I think, why they become so relatable to our audience, but part of the fun of running boardwalk because, as I was saying a minute ago, like running a company is hard. But one of the fun things about it is that you get to connect with people that you wouldn't otherwise get to connect with people that appreciate your worldview and the product that you're putting out in the world. And one of the parts I like about it, it's not just that I can connect with them, but that I can connect to them with each other. So we really do a lot of things on our social media accounts to encourage a lot of conversation between the people that follow our brands, or follow our brand, so that they're getting to know each other and not just us and it really does Feel like a community for people that are a part of that kind of mainstream self care. Everything is sunshine and roses universe.
Paul Zelizer 15:08
And listeners, you can go check out our were printers on look at our about page our core values is right there, but one of our core values is community. And when people create us and not every single person who's created a successful business, but particularly those who have created successful impact businesses and marriage, we're going to talk about the impact. You don't just sell shirts, they're super cool shirts. And they're really funny. There's some deeper things going on here that we're going to talk about in a minute. But I don't want to jump from this community police to quick. There's a way in which you've really successfully done that and has its own sort of like, it's like an avalanche. You get it going downhill and it gathers its own steam and the people find each other. And that's certainly been true for aware printers as well. If somebody wants to get that snowball rolling downhill kind of effect with community, what kind of suggestions do you have for them?
Meredith Erin 16:03
I think the most important thing is that you are constantly pumping out really engaging content all the time, like our approach to our business is definitely like entertain first sell second. So content is always top of mind. So if you go to our social media accounts, yeah, there's posts about products. But we also do something called Question of the day where we ask a question so that it's, you know, just like to start a conversation for the day, I'll usually do a screenshot of something that I've tweeted recently, that's funny and relatable. And then people that have commenting on it and sharing it on so and then we send three emails a week that also are very content focused, they're not really about selling people things will send people a customer interview or links we found that we think they'll find funny, but it's always something that's designed to entertain them first, not just sell them things. And so I think that that's an important way to keep an audience engaged and like on your side is you got to think about what they want know what you want from them, and they want to be entertained, or you know, they want to be informed, maybe depending on your business. But that's something that's always top of mind for me and Matt.
Paul Zelizer 17:02
And I love that you said that. And here we are in a podcast. And why do I do a podcast because it's about entertainment, some but more. It's about engagement and dialogue and richness and learning together and community. I love podcasting that way. So, you know, I've had people say to me, like somebody could look at your business. And on a very surface level, they could say, Meredith, you're selling t shirts and the anti gratitude grievance journal and and what are you talking about, like all this work about social media and content and newsletters and all that stuff? Paul, I just want to sell shirts, you know, or I just want to, you know, do this service, or I just want to like sell solar or whatever the product or services. Entrepreneurs at times have told me that they don't want to do content, that's like irrelevant. It's like, but somebody else does. Or you know, that's not important. And I want to highlight what you just said that in this digital world that we all live in. I would agree with you. I think we're all content. Any of us who want to succeed and are smart business owners, we recognize that the ecosystems we plan and rather than fight it, we just accept it. And then what I've heard you do is you make it fun, you make it interesting, you make it yours. It's not somebody else's version of content. It's what's fun, or engaging or interesting to you and your audience. Is that fair to say?
Meredith Erin 18:26
Yeah, I think so I think what I've seen of people that want to be entrepreneurs is there's this tendency to want to foist tasks that they don't want to do onto someone else, or like hire someone else to do things that will somehow like save their business or like, I just want to design the product. But I want someone else to handle like the marketing or the sales or the operations. It's just not realistic. You can hire staff, and we do have staff, we have a team about 12 people, but I didn't hire any of them to like run our company or save our company, man, I figured out how to do every little thing ourselves, including all this content stuff. And then we can teach them how to do things and have them do things to help us run the day to day. But if you're thinking about starting something, and you're thinking, well, I don't want to do all these parts, it's probably not going to work. You have to be willing to do all the parts of that stuff. Unfortunately.
Paul Zelizer 19:11
I've certainly seen some nightmares of people try to outsource things at least too soon. Like, yeah, getting to know your voice. If you try to outsource your brand and outsource your story and outsource your ability to engage people too soon. You know, I think it is possible to have a marketing manager or Chief Marketing Officer very successfully when a company or when a brand knows its story and knows its audience has a sense of the voice. And it can be consistent and powerful to time when you're just starting and you say Oh, I hate this stuff. And yeah, I'm gonna pay somebody in a market and then it doesn't go very well kind of like Yeah, well, what do you expect?
19:54
Yeah.
Meredith Erin 19:57
I'm kind of more of a de motivational speaker when it comes to But entrepreneurship, I mean, I will tell people the Absolute Truth. And it's not only my truth, but like I said, I have a lot of friends that do this. And they would 100% agree with what I'm saying. We talk about it all the time. But the reality of it is, it's, it's hard. And there's a lot of tedious, slow, annoying parts. It's like planting a little seed in the ground and try and turn it into a tree. It takes a long time and a lot of work.
Paul Zelizer 20:20
So talk to us a little bit about like, how do you start to What does developing products look like now? Like, where are we I can't quite remember when did boardwalk get started?
Meredith Erin 20:32
But work started in 2014. And the creative team has always been me and my husband, Matt, we are kind of like a band where someone writes lyrics and sings and someone else plays the instrument writes the music. Matt is more of a technician. Although I've done some of our designs, he's done most of them. He's a much more skilled designer than I am. But I tend to be the art director and the ideas person. So I tend to come up with the all the all the ideas, and then do the art directions while typically give Matt like a mood board, I like a Pinterest account that he and I share that I'll pin things to for specific products so that he can see what I'm thinking in terms of like, this color scheme, this composition, this typeface, like all these little elements that I'm pulling in to point out to him like, this is the concept. So these are the pieces that I want to cobble together to turn it into its own thing. And that's usually how he and I worked together, then he'll start working on it. And I'll give him feedback as he's going and tell him you know, change this color, move this here, change this font, stuff like that. And that's typically how we work.
Paul Zelizer 21:29
And I know a bunch of occupy entrepreneurs who work with spouses or partners, and sometimes it works really well. And sometimes it's how, what what would you say to somebody who's either thinking about working with their partner or starting a business with a partner or spouse? Like, do you feel like you have a good working relationship? How does it affect your marriage?
Meredith Erin 21:55
Man, I love working together, Matt and I are two of the most happily married people I know of, like, I have a couple of friends and I would say seem to be as happy together as Matt and I are. And I know that sounds like such a brag, I have plenty of other things wrong in my life. Like my husband is one nice thing the universe sent me but um, you know, we get along great, we don't fight often, we're very similar, very similar dispositions and ideas and like, worldview and all of that stuff. And so he and I just got along so well. And we also have different areas of things that we're both good at. So it makes it easier for us to divide and conquer when we have things that we have to get done. I personally love it. I will say if we do have arguments, it typically is something that's been caused by the business. But most of the time we do get along, and we really like it. I know tons of couples would say they can't do it. You know your relationship. If you don't feel like it's a good idea for your relationship, don't do it.
Paul Zelizer 22:46
Let's do this. I want to take a quick break here word from our sponsor, and we come back, I want to hear about the impact part of your business, and also what the business looks like now seven years into your journey. But first a word from our sponsor. You have a business and you want it to grow, you want it to have more impact, and you want to earn more income. If so, I'd like to talk about podcasting for a moment. Let me tell you why. The people who listen to podcasts are pretty unique, incredible bunch of humans. And I'll just give you three data points for an example. But there's many more. The first one is the people who listen to podcasts, the research tells us, they tend to be early adaptors. They're looking for new ideas. And they're the in that first 10% said, ooh, this is a really cool idea. I think there's something to this, I'm going to try it. They're also tend to be natural leaders. In other words, that people in their professional and personal networks, turn to them and say, you know, you always have your finger on the pulse of what's going on in this space that we care about whether it's entrepreneurship, or trail running, or knitting or whatever it is. and natural leaders listen to podcasts to get new ideas. It's kind of they keep the flow of information and creative, innovative ideas flowing. The last thing that I'll share today's podcast listeners make more money, not just a little bit more money, but a lot more money. You put that all together, and you get a sense that the audience is pretty unique there. And then there's the medium of podcasting itself. The average podcast episode is 43 minutes long. So you have time to get into the nuances and the intersections in a way. That's pretty uncommon. In most media today, when you put that all together, who's listening in the medium itself, it's really an incredible opportunity for people who are dealing with harder and more complex issues. So if you'd like to learn about podcasting, whether you want to be a guest, or you want to start your own podcast and be a host, or I personally do both. Wear printers, as a podcast success team will walk you through every step of the way, what it takes to succeed what your choice points are the technology to use to sound Good excetera you can go check it out at a where printers.com forward slash podcast dash success. And thank you to everybody who's in our podcast success team and sponsors this podcast. So bear to talk to us a little bit. Not only do you sell these really cool, interesting out of the box, like antidote to like toxic positivity products, but you also have some impact goals baked into the DNA of the company, for instance, one of the things you do is you treat your employees well, and you, you have some very clear definitions about what that means. Tell us a little bit about why you think it's important to treat your employees Well, for instance, paying them well benefits etc. Like, how did you come to that? And why do you think that's important for a company.
Meredith Erin 25:50
Um, so I've always been kind of a progressive ever since I was a kid like, I've been feagan since I was a kid, just because it was something I chose to do for myself, I've always been like very politically engaged, I was that teenager that was like, writing letters for Amnesty International and doing beach cleanups with the environmental club. It's just kind of who I've always been as a person. And even though I'm a pessimist, I see the world is a bad place. That doesn't mean that I have to be part of making it worse, I think I can be part of making my little tiny quarter of it that I have influence over a little better. And one of the things I have influence over is the experience the people that I hire. So when I started hiring people, I was conscious of the fact that I wanted to treat the people that were working at our company the way I would want to be treated if I were working at our company. And so that's always been an influencing factor in decision making about wages and benefits. We're a small company, but everyone that works for us, we typically hire full time people, we've had team members that have become part time, but that was their decision, because they want it to be part time. But I tend to hire people as full time employees consistent 40 hour week job same hours every day, so they don't feel like their schedule is constantly in flux. Our minimum wage at our company is 15 an hour because we believe that it should be the national minimum wage. But all of our team members make more than that. We look for opportunities to promote people and give them raises and help them grow with our organization. They all get health care benefits, retirement benefits, paid time off, we get about 20 days of paid time off eight paid holidays, we're just really mindful of the fact that it's important to be a good employer so that people want to work for us and do a good job for us. And it's the world we want to live in. So we try to do what we want other employers to do.
Paul Zelizer 27:31
And what would you say to companies that say, well, we can't afford data, that will lead into our profits, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla,
Meredith Erin 27:39
it is expensive, I'm not gonna lie, it's true. I'm just, you know, add employees as you can afford them at benefits as you can afford them. But I think that it's such an important expense that it needs to be top of mind as you're starting to hire people, I would rather pay myself a little bit less, and make sure that people that work at my company are taking care of and hoard all the profits for myself and do the bare minimum for the other people that are helping make our company successful.
Paul Zelizer 28:04
Do people tend to stick around?
Meredith Erin 28:07
Typically, yes. Um, so this is one thing I will say about that we have grown a lot over the last few years. And we made this big jump from this little dingy 1200 square foot warehouse, to this huge, beautiful, 7000 square foot building. The whole place is climate controlled, and very, very nice. When that happened, um, we had a bunch of turnover within like a few months of moving, and I was like, this is an upgrade, but it's happening. And I talked to a lot of my entrepreneur friends who've, you know, been further along with their attorneys. And I've been through this stuff and they said, this happens to everyone. And whenever you hit this, like big growth milestone in your company, and like you really level up, your search has to turn over you're like, it's just a thing that happens apparently, is just a phenomenon that no one talks about it. So now I'm telling you all if you scale your company from out of working out of your home garage by yourself to working in a 7000 square foot building with 12 employees, like somewhere along that journey, you will have some turnover and it's not you it's not them. It's just what happens. But generally speaking, yes, I would say people tend to stick around like before that happened, the team is kind of the same until we moved. And since we've moved, the team has settled down again, we've had the same people.
Paul Zelizer 29:17
You think about the environmental impact, I'm thinking of an episode that we did with Zack Hurley. And in that episode, I'll put a link in our listeners in the show notes. He introduced me to the concept of what he called fast fashion, cheap, cheap fabrics, and you know, using dyes and fabrics that have very negative consequences for both people and environment. And you've thought about this, for instance, the dyes he has talked to us a little bit about the how you think about environmental impact at boardwalk.
Meredith Erin 29:52
Well we try it first of all, we try and put out products that we think are gonna last a very long time and we protested ourselves by you know, owning These products and wearing them and having them and so we know they last for years if you take decent care of them which, for clothing, if you want it to last a long time wash cold hang dry, it'll last 10 times longer than if you're like hot water, high heat dryers, it's just that's just the nature of fabric, no matter what kind of high end fabric you're using, that's true. But for cheap, crappy fabric, even if you do those things, it's gonna fall apart, we made a point of picking products that they're really comfortable to wear, they're very durable, so that if you take care of them properly, they will last for years and years. So your cost per wear is less expensive, meaning like if you pay $20 for a shirt, and you wear it twice, that's $14 per wear. Whereas if you weren't 28 times it would be $1 per wear. So we think about that in terms of economics for the customer, but also in terms of like how long will it be before this thing ends up in a landfill knowing Oh, clothing eventually will end up there because none of it lasts forever, but we want it to last as long as possible. So that does enter our thinking, just putting out a product that we think will last a long time and that people will enjoy for a long time. And we do that with our designs, too. We try to make our designs really timeless. So it's a design you would still want to wear for several years. And then the other thing that we do is our production process in house, we print the shirts in our facility. And we use this process called direct to garment printing, which has become a lot more popular in the last few years. They use water based inks, and there's not a lot of waste with it, or it's like the screen printing. It's more common to use plastic based inks, and you have a lot more waste with it. So our process is a little bit cleaner and a little gentler on the environment. So we do like that about it.
Paul Zelizer 31:29
One of the other things you do as a company is you make contributions to social justice organizations, how did that come to be about and why?
Meredith Erin 31:38
So when I first started our brand, I was reticent to be open about our politics. Matt and I are progressives. And I, the people will tell you the conventional rule of running a business is don't talk about politics never
Paul Zelizer 31:51
talk about politics, right? Of course, I talk about politics all the time, but don't ever talk about it. Right.
Meredith Erin 31:57
So yeah, we first started, we didn't. And then this Trump situation just made us so angry that we were like, I don't care if we lose customers, we're going to talk about it. And we started being more open about it and sort of being more open about the fact that we wanted to give money to social justice organizations. And I think it helped our brand more than hurt. We definitely lost people but don't want them anyway, don't care, we'll still to this day, like get people that message us like I'll never support your brand. You're a bunch of lefties, and I'm like fine. I don't care. Other people will. So yeah, that is something that came about kind of in a fit of rage, but ultimately just became a good thing for our company. We're pretty open about our values. We've done a tos quite a few social justice organizations, since we've been in business. This past election year, I ended up spending a lot of my own money contributing to political campaigns to try to make sure that the democrats were able to win both houses and get rid of Trump. So yeah, those are things that have always been important to me. I mean, even before I ran a business, those were things that were important to me, and having a business and a platform to talk about those things and get other people interested in those things, has been nice. It's not just about money. I also will do a lot of volunteering with organizations on like, I did a bunch of phone banking, text banking leading up to the election. And I talked about it publicly and shared links on our social media so other people can get involved and do those things. Because I know people follow what we do. And like, well, if I'm doing it, maybe only for someone else to do it.
Paul Zelizer 33:23
So you're seven years in and you got like a beats 12 employees a 7000 square foot facility, you're printing the products yourself whenever possible. Like, how are you thinking about boardwalk now? And when you like, look ahead, I don't know, five years from now, what do you hope for boardwalk? Oh,
Meredith Erin 33:46
I mean, to be transparent, long term, and I don't want to work forever. So at some point, we do want to exit. Um, but in the near term, you know, we want to continue to grow this company that is bringing value to the people that work there, the people that shop there, an investor in the future when someone eventually buys the company. Those are all things that you know, are top of mind for us, we're always looking to expand our product line. So last year, we actually intended to release a lot of non apparel products, so things like journals, and then COVID screwed up our plans. And we ended up having to basically just keep things from burning to the ground last year, but this year, we're kind of back on track, we got that turtle released. We have plans to do a bunch of other products this year that aren't clothing. So just being able to expand into other product lines that store reflect the brand's attitude but can shorten people's lives in other ways.
Paul Zelizer 34:36
Do the people who follow board walk in and love your products and by the grievance journal? Did they tend to like you said earlier that you tried like every wellness for lots of wellness practices and tried the gratitude journal then like did they tend to be wellness people who have tried to fit into some of those practices that they've seen or Is your experience fairly unique? Or like you've had that experience and then wanted to create something that was more inclusive of a pessimistic worldview?
Meredith Erin 35:10
I think there's like both. I mean, we definitely have optimists in the boardwalk community, for sure. And I don't think there's anything wrong with being an optimist. I think it's better that the world has diversity, and all kinds of viewpoints and all kinds of people, I just think we need to be tolerant of one another and not trying to make each other all the same. So I think there's some of all of that, like, we have this one shirt that says therapy dropout, which is me, I tried therapy for years and years and years and so much time and money down the drain didn't feel like I was getting anything out of it and eventually gave up. And that's just fine with that. And I'm not anti therapy. I'm pro therapy. People should try it. I tried it. It wasn't for me. But when I released that, I'd say like the overwhelming majority of our customers, they got it. They were like, Oh, me, too. I tried. It just was not for me. I'm like, Yeah, like you're not alone, which I think is something that people get from us and is really meaningful. I had maybe a handful of people say, Why are you so anti therapy, and I'm like, I'm not, I'm Pro. I'm just saying that it's not for everyone. And we can acknowledge that. Not all the same things work for everybody. Boxing is the thing that has really been meaningful for my mental health. But I'm not telling other people if boxing doesn't work for you, you're the problem of saying, try it. And if you don't like it, or you don't want to try it, that's fine, too. I used
Paul Zelizer 36:19
to be a therapist, I did a 15 year career in community mental health and have been to therapy and gotten value. And the thing that works for me is trial running. our listeners know that I love trail running, being in nature, especially with some of the people I run with. You're awesome humans we share on the trail. And at this point, if there's like a particular thing I would go to I'm not like anti therapy, but I'm going to try to run a lot faster, then I'm going to try. Whatever. Yeah, I hear you loud and clear.
Meredith Erin 36:50
I think therapy does work really well. For a lot of people. I don't discourage people from trying it at all. I just don't think it works for everyone. And I've, towards the end of me trying therapy. I had a therapist acknowledge that and just say yeah, therapy isn't for everyone. I was like, Yeah, no, I'm not doing this anymore.
Paul Zelizer 37:03
Exactly. Definitely not. So when you're like as you've been growing boardwalk, and you're doing it in your own way, do you have other entrepreneurs who are like reaching out and saying, Oh, my gosh, Meredith, you built a company, and it's not full of toxic positivity. And you're so real. And you're like, you share, like who you actually are? Are people approaching you and saying, like, how did you do this? And what can you tell me about how I might do something that fits who I am and what my goals are.
Meredith Erin 37:39
So when people try and ask me for business advice, I'm willing to share with people as much as time allows. But if you're looking for somebody that's going to tell you how easy it is, and how anyone could do it. I'm not your person. Like I'm not here to sugarcoat it. I know what a struggle it is. I know how long the hours can be. And I tend to tell people the truth. If they asked me about a specific thing, like how did you do this one thing? You know, I'll recommend things like, you know, how did you scale your Facebook ads, I can recommend a coach that I hired that taught me how to run our Facebook ads and taught Matt. That's how we learn. So I can answer more tactical questions like that with a pretty straightforward answer. But when people are like, how do I do this? I'm like, you want me to condense seven years of professional experience into an email? That's probably not realistic.
Paul Zelizer 38:24
When you look at I mean, you're in this industry with there's a lot of your you've got to put in two different industries, you've got a foot in the apparel industry, right? Not all but many your products or apparel related here, you're thinking about expanding and you have, but certainly historically, and then you have a foot in the wellness industry, and they each have their challenges and their nuances and their quirky industry. Right? Like, as you're thinking about straddling these two industries, do you think about those larger industries? Or is it just kind of blinders on? We're part rock, we do our thing? And what the wellness industry know, whatever, and whatever, the apparel industry, whatever or you like, noticing trends? And do you see that being around for a while and kind of doing things differently than what you might see in these two industries traditionally, is it? Is it having any ripple effects?
Meredith Erin 39:27
I don't know how much influence we have does on other people, but in terms of what other people do, and whether it has an influence on us? Um, I can't say none, but I wouldn't say it's like the biggest influence I you know, of course, I look at what's trending in apparel, and what's trending and wellness and what people are talking about, because I want products that are on trend, so people want to buy them and if there's some trend taking over the wellness space, my customers are probably aware of it and have thoughts on it and I want to talk about it. So I do pay some attention to these things. But I wouldn't say these things like rule how we do things. We have plenty of our own ideas without how Thinking to entirely rely on those things.
Paul Zelizer 40:03
In terms of how boardwalk works as a company now, like you'd have, I imagine, you didn't always have as many a lot of products now, right? And do you have a few that tend to like fun, most like you have some bestsellers, and they're really what carries the company. And then you just offer diversity, you know, as a way to, like, have fun and give people choice, etc, etc. We're like, are most of your products profitable now.
Meredith Erin 40:31
So we have bestsellers, I think that's pretty typical of anyone with like a decent sized product line, you'll have your things that you sell the most of, but we tend to discontinue things that don't sell super well, just so they're not jumping up our site. So we just bit did a big call of slower selling products. this past January. And of course, we ended up with so many emails asking where they went. So we're like, we'll do this for you if you want to order it off menu. But the thing is, is we can make stuff to order, like this thing is being discontinued. And I think it just makes your site a little easier to shop. If it's not completely crammed with products, I probably should have called more things. And I'm sure we will again later this year. But we try to stick to things that are either new or selling really well or at least selling moderately well.
Paul Zelizer 41:15
Do you have a favorite product? Or is that like asking a parent like which their favorite child is? Yeah, that's
Meredith Erin 41:21
hard. I mean, my favorite product my changes every few months, depending on like what we've done recently, or I don't know, I'll see something that we've done that I like it when we start doing when we start selling it. And then I've seen it so many times and said that I get tired of it. So that's hard. I mean, I'm really excited about this journal, because it's new. And it was something that I've been wanting to do for a while and I was really pleased that it was successful. We have this new shirt that says everything is terrible, but it's got like stars and rainbows on it. And I haven't even printed a copy for myself yet. It's only a couple weeks old, but I have been meaning shoe. Um, so I like that one a lot. I have a little record that says everything is trash, because you know, records like stick around in the trash. I like that one. I'm wearing that one a lot lately.
Paul Zelizer 42:03
When you're like how much of the impact part many of our listeners are listening? Because they're trying to figure out how to have positive impact and how to make a good living while doing it. What was the impact always like, part of the company? And is it in your mind? Is it a large part of it as a small part of it? Is it somewhere in the middle?
Meredith Erin 42:25
I mean, I kind of would say like, is being a woman a large part of who I am as a person. I mean, it's part of who I am, it's not all of who I am, um, you know, there's a lot of this, you know, desire to make the world a better place, whether it's helping our customers feel seen, because we released a product that really speaks to them, or creating good jobs for our employees, like these are all things that are just kind of in our DNA in our organization. So I don't know, it's like asking a fish, how water it's, it's just kind of part of what we do and how we are. So it's not something we aren't consciously thinking of all the time. But I think it's something that permeates our mindset all the time, even if we're not conscious about it all the time.
Paul Zelizer 43:02
And what would you say to other business owners that want to have these impact, you know, as part of their business, and how do you get it to the point where, like, like, I know, I know, a lot of successful social entrepreneurs and and the answer you just gave? That's the kind of answer. It's like, yes, it's absolutely who I am. But I'm not always out there talking about it and screaming about it. And many of the people who are sometimes it feels like well, they're not really they don't. It's called social entrepreneur or an impact business if you don't have much of a business. And you haven't quite figured out the entrepreneur part. It seems like sometimes that's where the most talk is, and the people who are actually having impact. They're busy running businesses, and then they share they'll share about it when it's appropriate. But they don't have to shout from the rooftops. Does that make sense?
Meredith Erin 43:50
Yeah, I agree with that. It's definitely not something we talk about constantly. I'm just as likely to talk about my frustration with the news as I am to talk about my frustrations with myself or the lack of new things on Netflix, because we've all been at home for a year watching television. And I've watched everything on there. So like all of these things are fair game as far as things that I might be likely to talk about.
Paul Zelizer 44:11
It's been really fun hanging out with you if there's something you were hoping that we were going to talk about today and we haven't gotten to it yet. Or there's something you want to leave our listeners with as we start to say goodbye. What would that be?
Meredith Erin 44:23
Well, if you are a fellow not so rose colored glasses person and you want to check out our site, you can visit I love boardwalk calm and you will find us. If you are listening to this podcast and you want 10% off, you can use the code aware 10 and that'll take 10% off your order. If you see some things you like maybe a grievance trolled or write about the things that are frustrating you stop by and check it out. And you can use aware 10 to save a little bit of money.
Paul Zelizer 44:49
Thank you so much, Meredith. And I just want to really thank you for being an embodied example of something that I want to raise my hand I should have Say this earlier, but I think I fell into that pattern of toxic positivity in my early business journey, because that's what I saw. And I've tried to step out of that over the past few years and be more real. Like if you knew me personally, not from a business. Like I said, I am more on the optimistic side, but not like in a rah, rah, rah, awesome, you got this cheer, cheer, cheer to your rainbow unicorn kind of way, which is kind of quietly gone about my work. I'm an introvert as well. And so I just want to say I got caught up in that. And if you listeners are feeling a push to be something other than you are, I'm so grateful to you, America to be a real world example. And many of them all successful entrepreneurs, I know Don't, don't feel the need to like, wherever they are on the optimistic pessimist spectrum. They don't feel the need to shout it from the rooftops and tell other people how they should be thinking about business but rather like hey, here's the action steps and do the thing as opposed to spend so much energy about, you know, where on the optimism, pessimism scary you are. So I just so appreciate you kind of helping us blow that up a little bit marathoners, that deep out here. Sure. Thank
Meredith Erin 46:16
you for having me.
Paul Zelizer 46:18
So that's all the time we have for today's interview. Thank you so much for listening. Before we go. Just a reminder, we love listener suggested topics and guests. If you have a suggestion, please just go to our website, go to our contact page, we have three criteria that kind of give you a sense of what we're looking for and how we that who we invite onto the show. And if you take a look at those and you say I got somebody, great, we'd love to hear from. For now, I just want to say thank you so much for listening. Please take really good care in these intense times. And thank you for all the positive impact that you're working for in our world.