“Fearlessly pivoting to me is testing and learning…testing and learning means you can’t be attached to the outcome.”
In today’s fast-paced world where change is the only constant — the ability to pivot is paramount for success. Today’s guest knows all about how and when to pivot. Meet Rebecca Minkoff — iconic luxury fashion designer, trailblazing entrepreneur, co-founder of the Female Founder Collective, mother of three children under 10, and author of the book: “Fearless: The New Rules for Unlocking Creativity, Courage, and Success.”
In this interview, she sat down with Tori for a candid interview about the art of embracing change, seizing opportunities, and overcoming setbacks. Rebecca’s candid stories and advice offer listeners a roadmap for embracing change with confidence and resilience. Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or someone facing a career crossroads, this episode promises to inspire you to fearlessly pursue your dreams and aspirations, even amongst life’s unexpected twists and turns.
Tune in to hear:
- The biggest lessons Rebecca learned working in the fashion industry
- What prompted her decision to create an OnlyFans account
- Why you shouldn’t ask for help
- How to create a two-way street when building relationships
- Why you should forget about balance
- Why she stepped out of her CEO role
Notable quotes
“There is no such thing as balance…it’s like optimization of what you have, it’s some days I’m a great mother, some days I’m a great worker, some days I’m a great friend, I’m not all things all the time.”
“I believe in life design. You will have different times in your life where you’re focused on building different things. And you have to test your own boundaries.”
“If you want freedom, You have to have good people working with you. Or you’ll never get out of the rat race.”
Episode at-a-glance:
≫ 07:03 The evolution of Rebecca Minkoff’s brand and navigating the fashion industry
≫ 25:55 The emotional journey of selling your business and name
≫ 30:31 Navigating the challenges of being the face of your business
≫ 32:24 The importance of knowing your customer
≫ 35:22 Exploring new platforms — the OnlyFans experiment
≫ 36:50 Adapting to social media trends and platforms
≫ 38:00 Insights from Rebecca’s book “Fearless,” and her 21 rules
≫ 48:25 Building a supportive community for female entrepreneurs
Rebecca’s Links:
Get Rebecca’s book: Fearless: The New Rules for Unlocking Creativity, Courage, and Success
Subscribe to Rebecca’s Substack: https://rebeccaminkoff.substack.com/
Female Founder Collective: https://femalefoundercollective.com/
Check out Rebecca’s podcast: Superwomen with Rebecca Minkoff
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Meet Rebecca
Founder & Chief Creative Officer, Rebecca Minkoff, Co-Founder, Female Founder Collective.
An industry leader in accessible luxury handbags, accessories, footwear and apparel, Rebecca Minkoff’s modern bohemian designs are inspired by strong, confident and powerful women who are drawn towards a west-meets-east mentality. Rebecca Minkoff is a global brand with a wide range of apparel, handbags, footwear, jewelry and accessories products.
In September of 2018, she established the Female Founder Collective, a network of businesses led by women who invest in women’s financial power across a socio-economic spectrum by enabling and empowering female-owned businesses.
She introduced the RM Superwomen Podcast in 2017 after hosting sold out table talks out of her NYC flagship SoHo boutique. Each week designer, female founder and social activist Rebecca Minkoff talks to women from all walks of life, from CEOs to artists, and shows us what life is like without the pretty filters in order to help you navigate what it means to be vulnerable, how loss can make you stronger, and other ways to make your inner superwoman shine. In an intimate, share-all interview, Rebecca uncovers the many sides of powerful women and learn how they are raising up those around them to make the world a kinder, more inclusive place.
In 2021, Rebecca Minkoff became a best-selling published author and simultaneously entered the world of Web3 as the first American Female Fashion Designer to unveil a collection of branded NFTs timed to NYFW, which sold out in under 8 minutes.
Through products, content, conversations and experiences, Rebecca Minkoff is dedicated to creating the modern cultural and business narrative of togetherness and a shared success. She continues to push boundaries, lead the industry, and galvanize communities of women by promoting confidence, fearlessness and authenticity.
Transcript:
Rebecca Minkoff:
You have to put blinders on. You can’t look at social media and you go, “What do I want my life to look and feel like? And how do I begin to build that slowly?” And there is no balance. It’s like optimization of what you have. It’s some days I’m a great mother, some days I’m a great worker, some days I’m a great friend. I’m not all things all the time.
Tori Dunlap:
Hi, Financial Feminists. Welcome back to the show. I am thrilled to see you. Thank you for being here as always. If you are new to the show. Hi, my name is Tori. I fight the patriarchy by making you rich. I teach you how to save money, pay off debt, start investing, start businesses. And we talk about how money affects women differently on this show. It is the number one money podcast for women in the world, which is so cool and never gets tired of saying it. And if you’re an oldie but a goodie, you knew all that already, welcome back. Welcome back to the show. Today’s episode is a really great one with someone I have admired and whose businesses I have admired for a very long time, and who is very much the definition of someone who just supports women and advocates for women and teaches them how to do what she did.
So today’s guest is Rebecca Minkoff. An industry leader in accessible luxury handbags, accessories, footwear and apparel, Rebecca Minkoff’s modern bohemian designs are inspired by strong, confident, and powerful women who are drawn towards a West meets East mentality. Rebecca Minkoff is a global brand with a wide variety of apparel, handbags, footwear, jewelry, and accessory products. In September of 2018, she established the Female Founder Collective, a network of businesses led by women who invest in women’s financial power across the socioeconomic spectrum by enabling and empowering female-owned businesses. She introduced the RM Superwoman podcast in 2017 after hosting sold out table talks out of her NYC flagship Soho boutique. In intimate share all interviews, Rebecca uncovers the many sides of powerful women and learn how they’re raising up those around them to make the world a kinder, more inclusive place.
In 2021, Rebecca Minkoff became a bestselling published author and simultaneously entered the world of Web3 as the first American female fashion designer to unveil a collection of branded NFTs timed to New York Fashion Week, which sold out in under eight minutes. And that’s actually where I met Rebecca for the first time, was a dinner to kick that off. We talked about the launch of her iconic fashion brand and the highs and lows of running a company in one of the most vulnerable industries that are out there. We dig into the idea of a customer avatar and why that’s such an important part of your business. Something I love about Rebecca is how she is willing to innovate and try new things even if they weren’t immediately successful. So we talked about ways she’s pivoted to try things like NFTs and even starting an OnlyFans. We’ll talk more about it. We also talk about her book, Fearless and her work with the Female Founder Collective. So without further ado, let’s go ahead and get into it. But first a word from our sponsors.
Truly, and I will say this now that we’re recording on mic, but I would say this to you offline too, it was one of the best events I’ve ever been to. The connections were so important. Literally, I think Karina and I, who’s our COO, literally have said to each other, “Oh, at the NET Retreat,” probably once a week since we got back. At least.
Rebecca Minkoff:
That makes me happy.
Tori Dunlap:
At least. Yeah, so it was just was such a great event and it was so nice to finally see you again and meet the team, and yeah, it was just great. We loved it.
Rebecca Minkoff:
I’m so glad. We’re talking about another one for again in the fall, so TBD.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay, keep me posted. We’d love to be there for round two. Yeah, so great. I’m so excited to have you. So excited to have this conversation. We typically ask our guests, especially who are business owners or who are finance creators, what their first money memory is. What is the first time that you remember thinking about money?
Rebecca Minkoff:
I thought about money when I was eight years old and I wanted this dress. It was $20 and my mom said no. She said, “I’ll teach you how to sew instead.” And that’s when I actually got hooked. So I hated her for it, but then I loved the fact that I could make whatever I wanted after she taught me how to sew.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, so you were frustrated in the moment and then you were like, “All right, but now I can do whatever I want to do.”
Rebecca Minkoff:
Yes, yes. And then she would sell these things, they’re called cast covers, they were trendy in the ’80s. Almost imagine spandex for your cast in like neons. And she would sell them at the flea market. And I was like, “Well, I’m going to sell something too.” And so I would sell what I made. No one bought anything of mine. But I got very excited about my little card table at the flea market with my things that I made.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and little did they know that they could have bought something off of you pre true Rebecca Minkoff, everything, and it would’ve probably been worth a good chunk of money now. That’s so fun.
Rebecca Minkoff:
I know.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, I love those stories. “No, I’m not going to buy it for you, but it’ll teach you.” And ultimately that is such a parent response, which is great when you’re looking back. But yeah, so frustrating when you’re a kid, you’re like, “No, I just want this right now.”
Rebecca Minkoff:
Well, I do it now to my kids and I hope it sticks. Always saying no, always. I’m like, “No, but you can earn it.” Or, “No, I’ll teach…” And if I know how to make it, I’m like, “You’re going to learn how to make it.”
Tori Dunlap:
My next question for you is when did you become interested in fashion as a career path? But I feel like it started at eight years old maybe. What was that journey like for you?
Rebecca Minkoff:
So the journey was I was eight, I fell in love with sewing. I then hit my teenage puberty years and I was a painfully thin, very awkward, not confident, very tall, gangly girl, and I couldn’t find clothing to fit. But what I could do is I could alter it. So I became obsessed with buying stuff at thrift stores, buying fabric, making things fit my own body. And that gave me a lot of confidence. And it was something I pursued very seriously in a high school. It was a performing arts high school that I went to. And it was like what I got to work on four hours of every day because that was your elective. So after figuring out that I love this and want to pursue it, I said, “I have to go to New York. That’s where fashion is.” And I moved to New York at 18 with an internship.
Tori Dunlap:
I want to come back to and I will round back to what you just said, which I think is so important, which is tailoring clothes to fit your body and how confident that makes you, because I just had that experience for the first time recently. But let’s talk about the journey of that. So you moved to New York at 18, and you had some success, but it wasn’t really until you developed the Morning After Bag that things started exploding for you. Can you walk us through the stages of starting out to launching your business and then to growing to 100 million in revenue?
Rebecca Minkoff:
Yes. So I launched the handbags in 2005. It was one handbag. Things were so much slower then. You could have one handbag in many colors. And the appetite for this more and more and more didn’t exist yet because social media was non-existent. And with a couple of key publications, DailyCandy, if you’re old enough to remember, and a bunch of celebrities wearing the bag, things took off very quickly. So we very quickly grew from 200,000 to a million to 5 million to 10, and it was this crazy experience to be growing that fast. But what a lot of people don’t know is you don’t have the money to pay for that growth. So we were bootstrapping and my brother was mortgaging his house, he was putting leather on credit cards. We couldn’t get a loan because people don’t just go loan random people money very easily, as we know. And it’s not like we had a prior business that we could show we had great credit.
So when we finally got to a breaking point, that’s when we got introduced to a factor, which is a very fashion-specific bank that loans on your purchase orders. And then from there we had a little bit of like, “Someone’s going to help us fund this thing.” And so over the course of 15 years, we grew as high as 115 million. We also shrunk down to 30 million during the pandemic. So we’ve experienced the highs, the lows, you name it, of what it’s like to have this thing pop and then grow and then stabilize and then shrink and then go back to growth.
Tori Dunlap:
What was that like for you personally? Because I imagine your life changed dramatically in a very short period of time.
Rebecca Minkoff:
It changed dramatically in that you are dealing with this juggernaut. But again, because you don’t have the funds to keep up, it is very stressful. You don’t necessarily have the funds to hire the best in talent. Whenever a CFO would make a mistake, and I would freak out at my brother, he’d be like, “Well, we can’t afford someone better,” would be his response. The type of person that would catch these things is paid double. He didn’t pay himself for the first five years. I basically made enough to pay my rent and live, barely. And it was just about investing in the business and investing as we could in people. So it was very stressful and I feel very lucky that I did not have a family at that time. It was just focus on growth. All I did was work. And I loved it, by the way, but that was my baby.
Tori Dunlap:
Totally. It’s very much how I feel about Her First $100K. This is the thing. I’m growing and raising and nurturing like a child. Yeah, completely.
Rebecca Minkoff:
Yeah. I mean, I give props to women that can launch a business and have kids. I don’t think I could have been one of those people.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, it’s bananas and I deeply admire people who can do that. You mentioned that this was pre-social media. Talk to me about the difference of launching a business, but specifically launching a business in fashion, what that was like before social media and how everything’s changed dramatically since the popularity of social media.
Rebecca Minkoff:
So pre-social media, it was about getting the right placement in a magazine, getting it on a great celebrity and selling to your wholesale accounts. Direct-to-consumer was just beginning, but it’s not necessarily a hub, it was more like a static homepage. And so we really just had to focus on servicing our wholesale and making sure that we could figure out things that engaged their consumers and then being friends with editors. And so that was kind of the focus for the first, I’d say, five years. And as social media began to be something that was important, obviously we dove headfirst. Often we were the first to do a lot of things in that space. And now you see brands popping up left and right. I was at a dinner with a designer the other night who popped off on social media and has these crazy collaborations and has probably never talked to an editor and will never sell wholesale. So it’s completely different.
Tori Dunlap:
Even you just saying direct-to-consumer wasn’t really a thing kind of blows my mind to think about. Because yeah, if this is, what, you said, 2004, 2005? Yeah. I guess direct-to-consumer is not a thing. And for those who maybe don’t run a business, direct-to-consumer is just like you selling on your own website, right? It’s exactly what it sounds like. Direct-to-consumer as opposed to going through wholesaler, as opposed to going through a middleman company to get there. And now it feels like so many things are direct-to-consumer, but it’s crazy to think that that was not a thing.
Rebecca Minkoff:
It was definitely not a thing. And neither, again was social media, blogging. I remember very clearly a very big important influential president of a huge wholesaler department store sat us down and was like, “You can’t talk to these people. You can’t engage these lowlifes.” We used to have these influencer events at our showroom, and they’d be like, “Why are you entertaining these people and feeding them?” And even at our fashion shows, the editors would refuse to sit in front of the bloggers and influencers, so we had to stagger where people sat because one could not look across and see the lowlife of the influencer across from them. It was a very different time.
Tori Dunlap:
And such a status thing too, and such a, “Yeah, I will not be seen with people who I deem not as high a status as me.”
Rebecca Minkoff:
Not even seem with, I will not look at them. I don’t want them in my line of sight.
Tori Dunlap:
That’s like Marie Antoinette shit. That’s like… Yeah, wow. I don’t have the experience of running a 100 million dollar company. I think most of our listeners do not have the experience of running a 100 million dollar company.
Rebecca Minkoff:
Neither do I because I didn’t run it.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, that’s my next question for you is talk to me about that transition of, again, growing so quickly and then realizing, “Okay, I need resources, I need capital, I need money, I need the team, I need support.” And then eventually, “Okay, I’m choosing to sell this business.” As detailed as you can be, walk me through all of that in your head of the kind of decisions you’re making at every time and when it feels right.
Rebecca Minkoff:
Yeah. So my brother was my co-founder and CEO. So when it came time, the mortgage was done, the Amex was fully maxed out, the factor that I mentioned was like, “We will not loan you anything more.” Right around that time, this was 2012, the private equity world was circling around brands and it became very sexy to be wooed by them. So that was when we said, “Okay, we’ve been doing this for seven years, we’ve bootstrapped.” I think at the time, size wise, we were probably doing 50 to 60 million in sales. And we said, “Okay, let’s sell a quarter of the company, take that cash, fuel the business, open stores, ramp up our e-commerce to really sell, expand categories like shoes, clothing, jewelry, eyewear, you name it.”
Tori Dunlap:
Was it just bags at that point? Was it just bags seven years in?
Rebecca Minkoff:
It was bags, clothing and shoes, but shoes and bags were very small because we just didn’t have the funds to invest in those categories.
Tori Dunlap:
Got it. Okay.
Rebecca Minkoff:
So we did that. We blew through the money. Then we went back out fundraising a year more, sold 10% more of the company, blew through that money, and then lived again on our own fumes until we had the whole thing sold in 2022. So I think when you ask, “What was that like?” It was every emotion on the map. It was frustration, anger, excitement, opportunity. You hear these things, “Oh, next billion dollar brand, look at your competition.” And then your competition’s all IPO-ing, and you’re like, “We can do that too.” Then all of a sudden the investor sentiment switched and it was like, “Are you profitable?” Because no one cared for a long time if anybody was profitable. And then we got that question, we’re like, “No, we’re not profitable. What’s that?” And so it was like, “Okay, let’s do the deep work to get profitable.” And that doesn’t happen overnight. So it’s been a wild ride.
Tori Dunlap:
Entrepreneurship, I think, especially on social… I’ve just taken a deep breath just like that’s so crazy to think about. I think one of the things I have learned, and I have talked to so many women who run businesses, and I know you feel this way too, entrepreneurship gets glamorized on social media and there’s so many incredible parts to it, but then I’m hearing you talk, and honestly, I’m just tired hearing you just explain everything that happened. And I’m just like, “Oh man.” For me, there’s so much that I’ve been through in the last just year of running our company at a way micro scale compared to where yours was.
And so one of the things I always want to highlight for women who want to be business owners is like, yes, there’s so many incredible things about it and there’s so much impact you can make and there’s so much money that’s often on the table for you. But it’s also, I sometimes dream of a 9 to 5 job. There’s something about a 9 to 5 now that also just feels very exciting of I get to turn my brain off, I get to close my laptop. And what has the experience been like as a business owner? Because you’re talking like every emotion, highs, lows. The highs are so high and the lows are so low.
Rebecca Minkoff:
I think the biggest thing is where did we all get the idea that it was going to be easy? Because we all go in and it’s not like it was advertised that it was easy, and everyone I know talks about how hard it is, but you still are like, “Oh, this is going to be easy.” And then it’s not. Or, “It’s going to get easier.” Or, “I’ll reach a point which I put my legs up and lean back and I’m good.” And I just go, we have to disabuse ourselves with that idea. As an entrepreneur, it’s always going to be this thing that you are attached to. It’s your baby, it’s your love, it’s your joy, but it’s also your pain sometimes. And you have to almost accept those two things going together or else you’re just going to be disappointed all the time. And I think that it took me a long time to learn that lesson.
And I also think as you get older, I feel trite saying this, but as you get older, you just begin to have perspective like, “Okay, if I don’t answer the emails on the weekends, what happens? Guess what? Nothing. Nothing happens.” And so I stopped answering emails on the weekend. Or, “What happens if I don’t write back 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM? Nothing happens.” So I think that it’s learning to just say, “Okay, I’m not curing cancer. It’s going to be okay if I begin to sort of let myself have some breathing space.” Otherwise, you will burn yourself out.
Tori Dunlap:
In your journey too I’m seeing a lot of, maybe not full pivots, but a lot of like, “Okay, this isn’t working, so we’re going to do this or we’re going to do this.” For business owners listening out there, what tips do you have of being quick to pivot, being quick to make a decision, even if it’s the hard one?
Rebecca Minkoff:
We have never shied away from testing, and I will take an example. I worked with Intel a couple of years ago in their attempt to make tech sexy and appeal to more women and get more female engineers. And so I liked that idea. I was like, “There should be more female engineers, because then maybe the algorithms won’t be so biased.” And what we found was engineers have a very clinical approach to trial and error. There’s a failure funnel, and if something doesn’t work, it goes in the failure funnel and no one’s crying about it and no one’s berating themselves or going and eating a tub of ice cream because of it.”
And so I think for us, it was like, “All right, that didn’t work, next.” But we were constantly trying stuff, whether it was trialing in-person events, trying new technologies, A/B testing on our site, and so if we failed, “Okay, move on.” And sometimes those failures were very public. So I think that the bigger company you are, the less inclined you are to take risks, but I think that you should. And I think you just have to say to the entrepreneur, “Try it, survey it. Always be testing and learning. You never know what’s going to work.”
Tori Dunlap:
One thing we’ve talked about on the show a lot, especially in the last year or so, is I think a lot of women deem a failure not as an incident that happened, but as their identity of, “It’s not just like this failed or even the business failed, I failed. I am a failure.” And what I’m hearing is it’s like, no, you have to let go of that personal connection. You can’t take a failure personally and just be like, “Okay, that didn’t work. We’re going to move on and try something else.”
Rebecca Minkoff:
Yeah, I think you have to disconnect the “I” from it and just know that you are constantly iterating. Innovation happens only when you’re constantly testing and trying stuff. And guess what? Here’s some more bad news. What works for you or someone else might not work for the other. And so you have to figure out what works for you. Even if you’re the same two white T-shirt companies, different approaches are going to have different results.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and yeah, your market might be different or your price point might be different. Something is probably different about… You’re a different entrepreneur than the other person who is making maybe the exact same white T-shirt as you.
Rebecca Minkoff:
Exactly.
Tori Dunlap:
We talked to Madeline Pendleton on the show earlier, and she works in fashion, and she mentioned that it’s one of the most volatile industries to be a part of that not only is it super cutthroat, but it’s deeply affected by even really tiny minute economic changes. What are some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned working in this industry that just feels so combustible all the time?
Rebecca Minkoff:
Communication and relationships. When the wonderful, what was the name of that boat that got stuck in the canal, the Suez Canal during COVID?
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, I know exactly what you’re talking about, but I don’t remember the name. Hold on, I’ll Google it and I’ll give back to you. Keep going.
Rebecca Minkoff:
Okay. So that boat. And all the boats had to go around and our shipping times increased by 30, 60, 90 days. You have got to have great relationship and communication because we were calling all of our stores saying, “We know you ordered spring and you wanted it to arrive in January, but it’s going to arrive in May.” And those goods aren’t going to be trend right or well suited for that time period now. You’re making those calls, you’re leaning on your relationships, and you’re saying, “Everyone has to hold hands.” And I think that what we have done a good job of over the years is with every big hiccup, overly communicating, making sure these people felt like we were going to be in it with them and help take care of them. And I think that saved us many, many times.
Tori Dunlap:
It was the Evergiven ship. I wouldn’t have known it.
Rebecca Minkoff:
And it’s still ever giving.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, truly.
How do you learn to handle the seasonality of fashion? Are there ways that you prep as a business owner? Because I’m thinking, we get a lot of questions from people listening who are like, “Yeah, my business is seasonal, or I can do a great great month in January, but February, March, April are just dead.” So how do you handle that, both as a business owner, but also how does the business work to handle, “Okay, yeah, we are featured in this magazine or this influencer blew our shit up, but then it’s just dry for a period of time”?
Rebecca Minkoff:
Yeah, so we know that as a leather goods company, our biggest 70% of the year is done September, October, November, December. So we have our financial plans and our spend aligned, outside of CapEx, everything else is aligned to live and breathe on the first eight months of the year being somewhat smaller. And we really know January, it’s not that much. People just got all their gifts, they’re returning them, businesses on sale, July tumbleweeds. And so we just financially plan for those to be the leaner months. And you’ll start to see these cycles in your business go through a year or two, and then you just have to be really smart about financially planning and setting aside during the farmer when they’re… It’s like farming, right? You’re doing the land and then you got to figure out how to live the rest of the winter. And so after 20 years, I hope we figure that out. But it does take a couple of years in business to begin to see those cycles.
Tori Dunlap:
That is wild to me. So September, October, November, December, you said, so four months drives the whole rest of the year of the business?
Rebecca Minkoff:
70% of the year, yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Fuck. That’s crazy. So how long did it take you to figure that out?
Rebecca Minkoff:
Oh, pretty early.
Tori Dunlap:
Pretty early.
Rebecca Minkoff:
“That’s weird.” Just put yourself in the customer’s position. Yes, we offer some non-leather, but it’s not the bulk of our business. Who wants to be sweaty and hot with a big leather tote in the summertime? Nobody. So it’s like we just begin to understand that for the bulk of our goods, there are timely leathers and materials that she likes.
Tori Dunlap:
Right. Well, actually talk to me about that because you just said, “Okay, we do other things besides leather,” but if leathers the signature, I imagine especially if you’re a newer business owner, you’re going, “Well, okay, but I need to sell during the other months, so I’m going to do something else. I’m going to try to drive this other thing.” Was that successful? Or is it just like, “No, we know what we’re good at and we’re just going to stay in our lane for the most part”?
Rebecca Minkoff:
No, we know what we’re good at and we also know that we have a healthy nylon business, we have a healthy straw business. Again, these are things that we have tested and learned. I think for a minute we tested an athleisure line of gym bags, didn’t sell. Not going to continue. But she does like a nylon bag for her computer or her weekend activities. And so I think we’re always offering those right type of products during the times that she’s going to buy them. We just know that it’s never going to be hundreds of millions of dollars in sales on those types of items.
Tori Dunlap:
Right, because it’s what you’re known for and what you do well is the leather, yeah. I have both a personal question for you, but also something that I think the listeners will relate to. So you sold your company in 2022, you also sold your name. Personally, what was that like for you of literally somebody else… I don’t know, somebody else own your name? How did that work? I imagine that that was almost like a mourning period of just like, “Okay, I’m selling not only the thing that I built that I care about the most, but literally my name is attached to it.”
Rebecca Minkoff:
So that part of it happened in phases. So in 2012 when we sold our first 26% to the private equity firm, that was when my name sold.
Tori Dunlap:
Wow. Okay.
Rebecca Minkoff:
So it didn’t feel bad or that I didn’t own it, because we still owned a majority and we controlled the company. And they didn’t have hardly any controls. So I could stamp my feet around and be like, “This has to be this way,” and we would get our way. I think it felt really real in 2022 when it was like 100%, well, 97%, because I still own a small piece, and it’s theirs. And I’ll never forget, and I’m still here and I love the company, but I’ll never forget when I went downstairs to meet one of the teams that was working on a different project and my name was all over these things and I was like, “Oh, no. Oh no, no, no. No. Take it off. Just take it off. That name cannot be on that.”
And that was when I had my moment of like, “Oh my gosh, I really don’t own it now. And I can stamp my feet and yell and scream, but guess what? Not when the whole thing’s gone.” So I definitely remember leaving that day and taking a very long walk around the city and just trying to be like, “All right, new phase. How do I look at the positive of this versus always being scared? Again, I’m not my name, so how do I make sure that I can contribute to a better outcome with these partners?” And so far, so good.
Tori Dunlap:
The second question I have related to that is my own personal question is I don’t think I want to be CEO of Her First $100K forever.
Rebecca Minkoff:
Wow.
Tori Dunlap:
Uh-huh, yeah. And I’ve actually never talked about that on the podcast. But I’m starting to… If we’re doing 3, 5, 10 year plans, it’s becoming clear to me that I don’t think I want to manage the day-to-day of the business anymore. And correct me if I’m wrong, I think you stepped back from CEO to creative director, is that right?
Rebecca Minkoff:
No, I was never CEO, I was always creative director. But pre acquisition, I was right there with my brother. So every business decision, every failure, every hole in the boat, I might not be running it, but I’m there like, “Oh God, oh no, oh no, oh no.” And now I’m not in any of those meetings. Now, I get to be my best self, creative, design.
Tori Dunlap:
That was my question is are you moving from more strategy to creative? And also, I’m literally just asking this for me, how do you let go? How do you let go of the thing that you built and also that is for you, your name? How do you let go of that?
Rebecca Minkoff:
I let go of it because after 17 years, three kids, I said, “I need to be able to have head space for something else.” And at first I didn’t let go, and then I slowly did and it felt a little weird and I felt sometimes, “Why didn’t they include me in that budget meeting or that P&L meeting? Or why didn’t they invite me to that?” And then I was like, “You know what? I’m more creative, I’m more excited and I’m more fueled today than I was when I was bogged down with all those things that would get me in a bad mood or upset me and I didn’t know what to do to then get back into my creative zone.” So for me, it’s been a blessing.
And let me tell you, Tori, I am sure your listeners are not necessarily at childbearing age, but the difference in head space I have for my one-year-old versus the difference in head space I had for my first three where I was always stressed and I was always like, “Oh, go to sleep so I can get back to work,” versus now I’m just like, “Let’s have a leisurely evening. Let’s take a bath. What else do you want to do?” It is night and day and I love it. So there’s hope for you, and I think you just have to find the right partner. And when you do, it’s not a quick breakup, it’s a slow passing of the baton, and then you’re always there to make sure it’s happening. But enjoy that ability to be like, “I built something so good and so certain that it can be handed off.”
Tori Dunlap:
My biggest fear for me, especially as the face of the business, and again, your business is your name, that it won’t succeed if I am not the face of it. And that’s the biggest fear I have, and I think in some way and capacity, I’m going to have to stay the face regardless. But yeah, it’s not just the strategic or the day-to-day that I’m doing, it’s also like, “Can this business exist without me?”
Rebecca Minkoff:
No.
Tori Dunlap:
Can I make myself obsolete?
Rebecca Minkoff:
No, you are the face and that doesn’t go away. I’ll never forget this influencer that I followed had a media company and then she started featuring her employees because she wanted to pull back. And I was like, “I don’t want to see that chick in your dress. I want to see you.” And I was like, “Uh.” And then I watched it happen to another one where she started featuring other people in her business and other things, and I was like, “I’m not interested at all. I just want the one person that I liked and I don’t want all the friends of.” And so I think that-
Tori Dunlap:
We tried that and it didn’t work. We tried it, didn’t work.
Rebecca Minkoff:
They want you because you’re the magic. But what are the duties that no one is visually looking at that you can begin to hand off that I think will make a change and you’ll feel better.
Tori Dunlap:
Right. It’s a personal problem. I don’t know if there’s anybody out here also running a business with their name or their likeness or their face. But yeah, it’s something that we’re figuring out. And to your point, it is not a cold turkey thing, and this is why we’re even starting to talk about it, is it won’t happen for a couple more years most likely. But it’s got to be a kind of slow transition, yeah.
You keep mentioning your customer, you keep calling her her, and I love that. One of the biggest mistakes I see new entrepreneurs or want to be entrepreneurs make is they just don’t define their customer or they don’t know their customer is. Tell me why that’s so important for a business owner to know exactly who they’re trying to talk to.
Rebecca Minkoff:
I think that we spend a lot of time talking, getting to know, meeting in real life our customer, and it’s made all the difference from a community, a connection point of view. Our aesthetic is always going to be rock and roll, little bohemian, downtown, a little edgy, take away New York and Los Angeles and some of the big cities, in the middle, we are the edge for our customer. When she’s like, “Ooh, I want some edge in my life,” she goes to us. I think that we’ve learned her taste, what she likes, price points, and what our brand’s promise is to her.
And so I think we paint, obviously every brand paints the glossy aspirational image for the customer to know, “Okay, I’m going to close my eyes. And when I think of Rebecca Minkoff, it’s edgy, rock and roll, studs, zippers, dog clips,” whatever it is. And then we give you an opportunity to have the really edgy stuff or the touch. Because not everyone wants that in full-blown. And I think that the more you can get to know your customer, what she eats, what she wears, her perfume, her music tastes, what other brands she shops, it’s really great. I mean, good or bad, that Cambridge Analytica, the opportunity we had to get to know our customer prior to that scandal was really great.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, I’ve always said, you should know the TV shows they watch. You should know what they’re watching on Netflix. Yeah, I love the perfume, what perfume they’re wearing. And again, it’s not going to be every single person who ever purchases your materials or uses your goods or services, but it’s the person you’re appealing to or the person you’re trying to reach.
Rebecca Minkoff:
100%. And your customer is not always going to be who you fantasize it to be. When I moved to New York and I was trying to break into the scene, I fantasized that my customer was going to be the coolest fashion editor and the coolest influencer. Guess what those women are wearing? They’re wearing designer brands that are like Valentino, Louis Vuitton, every high brand. Yes, they’ll wear my bag sometimes, but they’re at a level of being exposed and being immersed into a different world. “Okay, great, who else is out there? Great. Oh, here’s my customer. She loves me, let’s go.” And I think you have to get that ego off and just embrace and love your customer, whoever she is.
Tori Dunlap:
Totally. My favorite little fun fact about you launched an OnlyFans account, but for your business. The creative idea behind it, how has it paid off? This is so intriguing to me.
Rebecca Minkoff:
Okay. Well, when we talked earlier about testing and learning, OnlyFans at that time had announced that they were trying to get away from explicit content and really move into the creator space. And we thought, “Great, this is a new platform, let’s try it.” And we did. But then OnlyFans came back out and said, “JK, explicit content is what pays the bills.” And if you’ve been on my OnlyFans lately, you can see that there is no activity because I personally don’t want to align with the values of that platform. So we tried it, it worked. I was good when it was like, “Okay, we’re going to try this.” And then their values and mind don’t align, so it’s done. But again, we learned a lot.
Tori Dunlap:
So it was almost like a Patreon kind of play. It was truly fans of the brand, fans of you, not sexually explicit content. Yeah, right.
Rebecca Minkoff:
No, there was nothing sexual on there at all. It was all-
Tori Dunlap:
Using the platform and testing it, which I love. I think that’s great.
Rebecca Minkoff:
And they had a good amount of creators, but they couldn’t pay the bills, so they had to go back to explicit content. And as a mom and whatever, I was like, “That’s not my jam. So we’re off.”
Tori Dunlap:
Totally.
Rebecca Minkoff:
Close it down.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. And to your point, I remember when Threads really popped off and we actually had a team conversation the other day, we do monthly meetings about, “Okay, what’s going on with our partnerships? What’s going on with our podcast? What’s going on with our social?” And it was really funny, because we had a whole slide on threads of, “Our Threads are still continuing to grow.” And I literally had to ask my team, I was like, “Is anybody still on this?” And half of our team was like, “Yeah, I am.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” But that was that moment, that two weeks that threads was popping off where it was like, “Yeah, let’s go see. Let’s go test.” And I love that idea of like, “Yeah, let’s figure out what this platform is and if it’s going to be a big deal.” And most of them aren’t, most of them, “Okay, cool. I’ll sign up our username, I’ll make sure somebody else doesn’t take it. But I’m never going to log back in again.” But it also may be something that’s really interesting. So who knows?
Rebecca Minkoff:
I think you never know. We did Threads, no one cared. And I was like, “Good, I’m done.” We know that our Twitter account, or X, whatever you want to call it, is mainly a customer service, or if we ever get back into NFTs and crypto, a crypto crowd. And so I think you just have to try stuff. I never went on Lemonade or whatever, but [inaudible 00:37:57].
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, I signed up for that. It didn’t do anything.
Rebecca Minkoff:
No.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Let’s talk about your book. Your book, Fearless goes through 21 rules. Can we talk about a few that stuck out to us? And I would love for you to tell us the subtitles or talk about them too, because when I’m just going to read them, they sound different than what I think, of course, when we read the book, you intend. So one of them is Don’t Ask For Help. Talk to me about that one.
Rebecca Minkoff:
I can’t tell you the amount of times you are like, “Hey, I need your help. Can I just pick your brain? Can we have coffee?” I’m like, “No, we cannot have coffee and you cannot pick my brain. I need you to tell me one specific thing. I think it’s don’t ask for help, ask for what you need.” I want people to be so specific when they ask for something, whether it’s the busiest person in the room or, Tori, they get in the room with you and they’ve got five seconds of your time. “Tori, can you introduce me to blah? Tori, can you follow me back?” Whatever it is, you have to get so specific. And I think that that helps frame an ask and shows that you know exactly what you want and you have a plan. You’re not just this, “Tell me your story and how you got started.” “No, why would I go to lunch to do that unless I needed my ego stroked?” And often when you’re asking for help from a very, very busy CEO or entrepreneur, they don’t have time. And so if we can just handle it for you in a minute or two, that’s the best way for you to get what you need and for us to help you.
Tori Dunlap:
And you’re more likely to get a response. Because I could not agree more with what you just said. The number one question we get asked when it comes to personal finance is, “How do I start?” The amount of times we get that in our DMS every day and I literally have a page on my website that says, “Start here.” I can’t be more clear about where we start. And also you asking me, this is going to get me riled up, you asking me, “Where do I start?” implies that you’ve done no up front work on your part to figure out where to go. You are asking me, who is not only a busy person but has produced thousands of hours of content for you and a podcast and a book, and all of these things, I’ve produced this for you and you’ve said, “Oh no, I’m not going to do five seconds of up front work. I just want it handed to me.” And I’m like, “I can’t do that for you.” So I love what you just said. Plus one, all of it.
Rebecca Minkoff:
Yes. Now those emails, “Can I just pick your…” Delete, delete.
Tori Dunlap:
Delete, delete. “Can I pick your brain? Can I have 30 minutes of your time? And I’m not going to tell you what for.” No, no, definitely not. All right, the second chapter I want to talk about is Create Two-Way Streets. What is the idea behind that? Tell me more.
Rebecca Minkoff:
I think that there is a lot on your way up of asking for favors, and there’s definitely a feeling on your way up that you have nothing to give. And I learned from my Japanese boss, you always have something to give and you should always show your gratitude. So I’m always of the mindset of if anyone helps me out all along my journey, I’m immediately like, “Is there anything I can do for you?” Even if it’s like, no, but you bought them a plant, whatever it is, there’s always something you can do, even if you’re just starting out. And to keep that two-way street going, because people remember gratitude, they remember your offer. If they come back around in 10 years and they’re like, “Hey, can you do this for me?” you’re like, “Yeah, I can.” I had a friend, a company that was huge in the beginning of my career and really helped us, but then she lost her way and then came back recently and was like, “Can you come on the podcast?” I was like, “Absolutely. You were big for me when I started and now I can help you.” So I think it’s just always keeping that flow open of what can you do for others?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, I think it’s always asking, “What can I do to support you?” I will literally end this interview, and after I will ask you, “What do you need from me? How can I support you?” And I think that’s so incredibly important, and especially if you’re early on in your career or you’re a baby business owner and you’re like, “I don’t have anything to offer.” To your point, yes you do. I remember being a college student and thinking, “I’m going to ask for an informational interview from this person and I can’t give anything to them.” And it’s like, “Actually, yes you can.” Mentorship goes both ways. Partnerships go both ways. You have something to offer this other person, even if you’re just out of college or even if you are in your first year of business, you have something to offer the people that you’re trying to work with, partner with, mentor. My last chapter I want to ask you about is Forget About Balance.
Rebecca Minkoff:
Again, it’s another one of those words that our little evil man behind the keyboard, or woman is like, “Ooh, let’s aim this word at women. They’re going to feel like failures and it’s going to be awesome.” So there is no such thing as balance. Men have never had it either, newsflash. We go back to caveman days, they had to go out and get murdered by beasts while we were stirring the fire. So it’s never existed for either species or either sex. And what I do believe is life design. You will have different times in your life where you’re focused on building different things and you have to test your own boundaries.
And I’m not going to sit here and tell you that pre-kids I worked as many hours of the week that was possible, I didn’t sleep. I had a kid, I began to test it and pull back and say, “What’s too much for me? What’s not enough? When are the times where I’m not going to see my kid? Or when are the times that I have to travel overseas? And guess what, he’s coming with me and that sucks for me, but I’m going to be able to be with him.” And so you have to put blinders on. You can’t look at social media and you go, “What do I want my life to look and feel like? And how do I begin to build that slowly?” And there is no balance. It’s like optimization of what you have. It’s some days I’m a great mother, some days I’m a great worker, some days I’m a great friend. I’m not all things all the time.
Tori Dunlap:
I needed to hear that first of all. Second, I think, yeah, I’m realizing again in my own life and my own business, it’s like I think there’s seasons. There are seasons of pushing yourself and the business really hard. When I launched my book, I’ve talked about this on the show, but that was a season of, “I am running, sprinting to the finish line to get this book out, to have it sell well, to hit the New York Times Bestseller List.”
And then it was like, “Okay, so we did that really hard thing and I was willing to sprint for it. I am never willing to do that again. But I did it and now I know.” And I also wasn’t going to be satisfied if I didn’t sprint to the finish, if I didn’t go full out. But then it was the realization of like, “Okay, so we did that. And for me, I’m never going to do that again. So now where is our focus going to go?” And for me this year, it’s taking care of myself because I sacrificed my physical health to do that. So now it’s like, “Okay, I am going to take better care of myself, nurture my in-person community, and yes, continue to show up for the business, but in a different way.”
Rebecca Minkoff:
I fully agree with you on seasons. And like you, I sprinted and killed myself for the book. And I was like, “You know what? The only way I’ll ever do this if is I am paid double, triple what my advance was.” Which was a great advance, I’m not complaining. If I have to work that hard, I am going to really triple that number.
Tori Dunlap:
I have never worked so hard in my life for so little money, ever.
Rebecca Minkoff:
I know, it’s wild. When you amortize the hours you spent for the advance you got, you’re like, “Wow, this is wild.” But I do think that if you or I had to do it again, we’ve learned so much, we would be smarter about it. And I think when you can find that person that works as hard as you or just a little less, but they’re smarter and savvier, it sounds dumb, but as you grow, if you want more freedom, you have to find a great bricklayer or many bricklayers. And a wise man said to me once, “You are paying someone money from your own pocket, if they’re not making your life easier, they go. If they haven’t taken a load off, they go.” There’s no, “But she’s trying. She has good intentions. But she means well.” Uh-uh. That could be your friend. That ain’t your employee. So if you want freedom, you have to have good people working with you or you’ll never get out of the rat race.
Tori Dunlap:
If there’s one thing I learned in the past year, it’s like if you are causing me more stress than solving problems, that’s a massive issue. That’s something that, yeah, if you are causing me more grief than you are making my life easier or making the company better, that’s really difficult. Yeah.
Rebecca Minkoff:
Yes. And you have to nip it in the bud. It is like, “Oh, but we just hired them.” “No, it’s been a month. Basta.”
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and your gut knows too, and we’ve talked about this in the show before. And actually that was one of the most important things I heard at the NET Retreat, which you hosted was like, what was it? Hire slow, fire fast? No, what was it? It was like… I’m trying to remember who said it too.
Rebecca Minkoff:
I think it’s hire slow, fire fast.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, yeah. It was just make a good decision, and then if you know they’re not right, and this isn’t you making a decision that you haven’t thought through or the one mistake somebody’s out, it’s not that. It’s like you know in your gut, your intuition tells you yes, this is working, or no, it’s not.
Rebecca Minkoff:
Yeah, I think we need to rely on our guts. I just think that we don’t do that enough. And then if you trusted your gut and it was wrong, you’re like, “Ah, I trusted my gut and it was wrong.” But there is a reason why 90% of the serotonin you make is in your gut. There’s a reason why people say that, is it is something that you should check in with, you, your knowingness, your ability to perceive, and begin to trust it. And I think it’s like a muscle. The more you do that, the stronger it gets.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, and the more you learn to trust yourself that you are actually capable of making smart decisions and you’re capable of doing the things that you want to do, yeah.
I talked about the NET Retreat at the beginning, and I just would love to talk about Female Founders Collective. The goal is to get more female entrepreneurs in a room together. We were talking about entrepreneurship’s fucking hard and it’s lonely and it’s the highest highs and the lowest lows. And one of the things that I have realized now growing this business is it’s like I need support from other people who understand and who are at a similar level of business. And I just loved being in that room with other entrepreneurs. What to you has been the biggest impact of building this community? And why was it so important for you to build?
Rebecca Minkoff:
I think it was important to build because to me, empowering women with access to education and tools to succeed and grow their businesses is the quickest way I know to make women more wealthy and more successful. And most of us start our business with a passion with no roadmap outside of that. And so our goal is to surround you with experts that have been there, done that, that can give you those much needed answers to those questions. And so the best thing that’s come out of it is women are making more money, women are being more successful. When I see someone not renew, and the reason is, “I’ve outgrown the need for this because my business has gotten so big,” and they might be looking for another tier that we don’t offer yet, I’m like, “Hallelujah. She started year one, year two, she’s in year five, and she needs the next level of opportunity.” And so I think that it’s the only way I can think of to make the wage gap smaller and making us all more wealthy.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Well, and it truly is such an isolating experience. And I have my incredible partner, who is not an entrepreneur, and I can go to him and he can be supportive but doesn’t fully get it. Or I can go to my best friend who’s also not an entrepreneur who, again, supportive, but doesn’t fully get it. And it’s just so helpful just being in a room with other people who understand what it’s like, but also the connections that come from it and the relationships that are built, I think is just so powerful. And men do this shit all the time. They go out golfing, they go in a boardroom together and they talk about business. And it’s just like this is so needed for women to get ourselves to the next level, support our employees in the best way, to support the business in the best way possible.
Rebecca Minkoff:
Yeah. I think also we need to share with each other and be vulnerable. Men don’t mind sharing. And we need to do that so that we can actually help each other a lot more instead of being like, “Did you hear what she did this year in revenue? She’s a loser.” Which we can do to each other, and it’s terrible.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, as opposed to being open and vulnerable. And also, perfect segue into what we do at Her First $100K, but talking about money, talking about, “Here’s how I got this, here’s what we did, here’s who I talked to. Here’s exactly how much we brought in this certain category.” That’s so helpful to hear. Because yeah, you might see somebody killing it, but you’re wondering, “How? How did that happen? Okay, if they’re doing this partnership or they’ve launched this thing, where did they get the money to do that? How much did they raise? How much are they making now?” That’s so, so helpful to know because otherwise it’s just this veiled thing that we have no idea about.
Rebecca Minkoff:
For sure. And I think that one of my favorite quotes, I think it was Sallie Krawchek was on my podcast, and she was like, “If women talked about money as much as they talked about sex, how much more money would we all be making right now instead of that being the thing you gossip with your friends about?”
Tori Dunlap:
Right, right. It’s the number one conversation we will avoid talking about. We’ll talk about sex, death, politics, religion, any other uncomfy topic before we will talk about money.
Rebecca Minkoff:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
You mentioned crypto and NFTs. I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you really quick, how’s that going?
Rebecca Minkoff:
Oh, how’s it going? Let’s go back to the test and learn. We were part of something, we tested it. We made some good money, then the whole thing died. And now the things that I didn’t sell in time are sitting at half their value. I mean, except for Bitcoin, which is up. But I think that we felt that it was important to be able to provide digital garments to our customer, to collect, to wear in games and trade, and there was a market for it. Then the market changed, and I said, “Good, we’re done there. We’ll go back if it heats up again.” So I never looked at it as a failure because there was complete lack of me to control what happened in that arena. But we had great success in it when we did.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and again, to your point about testing, I love this idea of like, “Yeah, let’s see what happens. Let’s see what happens.” As opposed to thinking, “Oh my God, this might be a failure, so I’m never going to do it.” And it’s like, yeah, it’s always how you define failure, like as a failure it did not succeed. “Well, what did you learn? Who did you meet? What happened from it?” I don’t think that’s a failure.
Rebecca Minkoff:
Not at all. And we had great [inaudible 00:53:45] media from it. We had great press, we had great exposure. We got a new-
Tori Dunlap:
The first time I ever met you was a dinner with our friends over at SoFi and you were talking about, “Here’s what we’re doing.” That was the first time I met you.
Rebecca Minkoff:
That’s right. So if we had never had an NFT, you and I had never would’ve met.
Tori Dunlap:
Look at that. NFT is bringing people together. Who would’ve thunk it? Rebecca, thank you so much for being here. Thank you both personally just for your mentorship and for your support. It’s going to make me a little weepy. But yeah, this is fucking hard and it’s just really validating to know that not only can women fucking go out and kill it, but also that you are passing the baton and bringing us with you. And that means just the world. And also just professionally, just how big of an impact you’ve made for literally millions of women across the world. So thank you. Where can people find you, find out more about you? Plug away.
Rebecca Minkoff:
Okay, here come all the plugs You can buy my book, Fearless: The New Rules for Unlocking Creativity, Courage and Success, wherever you buy books. You can subscribe to my new Substack, rebeccaminkoff.substack.com. That’s more the personal side of life. My Instagram @BeckyMinkoff, or @RebeccaMinkoff if you want the brand, rebeccaminkoff.com to buy the best bags ever. Is that it? I think that’s it. Oh, and my podcast. Duh. Superwomen with Rebecca Minkoff, which you’re going to be coming on soon, which I can’t wait. And if you are an entrepreneur and you want a community, femalefoundercollective.com.
Tori Dunlap:
Amazing. Thank you.
Rebecca Minkoff:
Thank you.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you to Rebecca as always for joining us. You can access all good things Rebecca Minkoff at RebeccaMinkoff.com. Please also join the Female Founder Collective. It is one of the most incredible communities I found for women in entrepreneurship. I actually spoke at their 7 Figure Summit last year, their NET Retreat, all about how to grow your social media and grow your Instagram. It is such an incredibly powerful, well-connected group of women, who is actually teaching people how to run a business. It’s not just like show up, take pretty photos, because I’ve been to those events too. It is like, “Here’s how to raise money. Here’s how to find the people you need to talk to. Here’s how to hire, here’s how to fire.” If you want to run a business or are running a business and you’re trying to get to the next level, could not recommend Female Founder Collective enough.
Thank you as always for being here, Financial Feminists. To support the show, which is very expensive for us to produce, but free for you to listen, you can subscribe, you can share it with a friend, you can leave us a five star review. We really appreciate it, and it’s the easiest thing you can do to support us and make sure this show continues running. So we appreciate it very much. Thank you, as always. We’ll catch you on the flip side. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First $100K podcast. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap, produced by Kristen Fields. Associate producer, Tamisha Grant. Researched by Arielle Johnson. Audio and video engineering by Alyssa Medcalf. Marketing and operations by Karina Patel, Amanda LeFeu, Elizabeth McCumber, Masha Bakhmakiyeva, Taylor Cho, Kaylin Sprinkle, Sasha Bonar, Claire Karonen, Daryl Ann Ingman, and Janelle Reisner. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolf, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First $100K team and community for supporting this show. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over one million women negotiate salary, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of almost 250,000 on Instagram and more than 1.6 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
