How I Built This with Guy Raz - Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019)

Episode Date: August 26, 2019

Cotton muslin baby blankets are commonplace in Australia, where Raegan Moya-Jones grew up. But when she started a new life and family in NYC, she couldn't find them anywhere. So in 2006, she started the baby blanket company Aden + Anais, which now makes more than $100 million in annual revenue. We first ran this episode in 2017 – but about a year later, Raegan's role as leader and co-founder took a dramatic turn. She fills Guy in on what happened in this special updated episode. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," we check back with Brian Sonia-Wallace, who started the business Rent Poet, and makes a living writing spontaneous poetry at weddings, corporate events, and other gatherings. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. So really quick before we start the show, I want to tell you about our How I Built This Live Tour. It's happening this fall supported by American Express.

I'll be in New York talking with Christina Tosi of Milk Bar in Boston with Luke Holden and Ben Conniff. founders of Luke's Lobster in Washington, D.C. with Tristan Walker of Walker and Company, and wrapping up the tour in Denver with Kurt Richardson, founder of Otter Products. You can get tickets for all these shows and get more information at nprpresents.org. And I hope to see you on the road. If you run a company, a lot can change in a year or two. And that is certainly the case for Reagan-Moya-Jones, whose career took a major turn after we first ran this episode about two years ago.

So earlier this month, I called her up to get an update. You'll hear that brand new conversation at the end of this episode, which first aired in July of 2017. I had read a lot of literature about women entrepreneurs, and I had learned the statistic that only 2% of all women-owned businesses ever break a million dollar revenue. Is that true? Isn't that frightening?

That's shocking, yeah. But I'd set myself that goal. So I just said, right. Once I get to a million in revenue, I've done something that most women entrepreneurs aren't able to do. From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how one Australian mother searched for the right blankie. for her newborn, and when she couldn't find it, she built a baby blanket company, now making $100 million a year. So back in 2013, you might remember the birth of a brand new royal baby, the heir to the British throne.

The Duchess of Cambridge has been delivered of a son. The day after he was born, Mom and dad stood outside St. Mary's Hospital in Paddington and introduced Prince George to the world. He's got a good pair of lungs on, and that's for sure. He's a big boy. It's quite heavy. But we're still working on a name. And as the camera zoomed in on Baby George, you could just make out that he was wrapped up in a white cotton swaddle, printed with tiny cartoon birds.

And after a little internet sleuthing, people track down the maker of that swaddle. Aiden and Anay. It's a baby product company that sells swaddle blankets for about 15 bucks a piece. And of course, the effect was instantaneous. Within four hours, the company's website crashed, and then it crashed again the next day. And for Aiden and Aene's co-founder, Reagan, Moja Jones, it was a pretty big shock because the company was barely seven years old. And over that seven-year period, Aiden and Anay had been through a lot of ups and downs. starting with the recession in 2008, and then eventually a traumatic breakup between Reagan and her business partner that threatened to dissolve the entire company.

A company, by the way, with yearly revenue now of over $100 million. So how did she create this company, Aiden and Aenei? Well, the story begins when Reagan and her husband Marcos moved from Sydney, Australia, to New York in 1997 after he got a job. And Reagan at the time, she didn't really have any plans. I came here without a job, without a working visa, and I thought, you know what, I'll do some volunteer stuff. I'll learn to speak Spanish because my husband's Chilean. And I'll fill my time that way for two years

and sort of treat it as just a new and different journey rather than being, you know, 100 miles an hour with my work and my studies. And that didn't kind of work out for me. It was about four months in. My husband initially was working from home because, you know, they were really setting things up from the ground here in New York. And he walked into the living room and I was laying on the couch at 11 o'clock in my pajamas, you know. And he just said to me, what the hell are you doing?

Come on. You've got to get up and shake this off and find something to do. Were you getting depressed because you were bored? I don't know that I was depressed. I just, I didn't know anybody in New York and I just sort of fell into a rut, I think, and I underestimated how much I needed to be the person that, you know, had a very full schedule. So rather than using the downtime productively, I just used the downtime to lay on the couch and watch morning talk shows. Yeah, that does sound depressing. It was. It was horrible. Eventually, Reagan's visa did come through so she could start working. And within about a year, she landed a job as a sales rep for The Economist magazine.

And this sounds obnoxious, but I was really good at it. You know, the wonderful thing with sales is you live and die by the number that you're told to hit. And I was very fortunate that I never didn't hit the numbers. Did you like it? Did you have fun? I did have fun. Did I love it? Was it my passion? Absolutely not.

And I was very frustrated that I wasn't really taken seriously in terms of being able to be promoted and everything. I was very much sort of kept in my box of what I had always done, albeit in different areas of the business over 10 years. But that was a huge frustration to me that it was obvious. was never really going to go anywhere within the economist. Were you dreaming of leaving and starting your own thing? I wasn't going to leave it for another job. I think I have always been an entrepreneur.

I never defined myself as that. But there was always a desire for me to do something on my own. I just never had had an idea. I'd had lots of ideas, but none that I felt were worth sort of, you know, diving in the deep end for. But, I mean, at some point, I mean, you got an idea, the idea that would become Aiden and A&A, so what happened? Well, I had my first of my four daughters. That's what happened. I was pregnant with Aeney and I was, you know, getting ready as we all do when we're having

our first baby with all the paraphernalia that you think you need. And I went out looking for these muslin blankets that were, extremely common back home in Australia, so common that you could buy them in, you know, supermarkets. It was mind-blowing to me when I went looking for them in the US that they didn't actually exist. You couldn't find them. And I guess just to explain to somebody who doesn't know what a muslin blanket is, is it's sort of like a really soft cheesecloth kind of, right? Yes, it's like a gauze. And not only was it, in my opinion, and still in my opinion, The only thing you should wrap your baby in because it's lightweight and breathable

and big enough to be able to securely swat all the babies. It was the fact that this one blanket did multiple things. So you could use it as a burp cloth. You could use it as a portable crib sheet. You could use it as a nursing cover. You could use it as a stroller cover. You could, you know, you just use it to mop up the messes that are, you know, inevitable when you have newborn babies, that sort of thing.

And the thing with muslin is the more you wash it, the softer it gets. So in Australia, this is just normal. Like all babies were wrapped in these cotton muslin wraps. Yes. So that was, you know, and I just thought every Australian can't have this wrong. And if I introduced this product to American parents, I was just absolutely 100% certain that they would respond to it the same way as Aussies had. So you presumably took leave after Ana was born and then went back to the economist?

Yes. I had three months off. And did you go back to the economist with this idea churning in your head yet? Yes. And how do you then start to make this a reality? What's the first thing you do? Well, I had no supply chain or operational, you know, experience or knowledge. I'm a salesperson, you know, so I had to find out how I would even go about making this stuff. And that took a long time. So you had the idea in 2003 when Annay was born. And it took to 2006 to actually work out. how to make it and get it to market.

So did you start this process all by yourself? No, I had a partner. The one person that my husband knew from Australia, his best friend's ex-girlfriend, Claudia, who ended up marrying an American guy. And that was the first person I met here, and Claudia is Aidan's mom. She was the other co-founder of Aiden and Deney.

Wow. So you guys got together and she agreed. She said, this is crazy that you can't get these in America. Well, she had Aiden about seven or eight months after I had a name. So I had been in Australia and I was coming back from Australia and I would stop and hang out with Claudia and Mark, her husband, in L.A. to break up the trip. And I distinctly remember sitting on Aiden's nursery floor.

And I just said to her, we need to, we need to. we need to do this Claudia like you know we need to find a way to make this happen and she actually said well why don't we just try and become a distributor for the company that already makes it out of Australia yeah which seems like a reasonable right and I said well why would you do that I said and I want it to be better than what is already available in Australia and I remember saying and we can call the company Aidan and Deney after the babies and then that was sort of how it all got started. All right, just like a logistical question, because you kind of had a growing sense of

how to maybe start a business. But what about the design side of it? I mean, did you have, were you going to design the blankets? Were you going to design the patterns and the shapes on them? That's a great question. Because I am not the most artistic person. And actually, I, you know, my artistic skills don't go beyond stick people. Yeah.

I really can't draw to save my life. But I am very opinionated and I have a very clear vision of what I like aesthetically from a design perspective. And I am so type A, you know, that I was very much, I want these colors, I want these images, I want it to look like, you know. And we, Claudia and I hired, you know, outside freelance design people to come up with our initial designs that launched the first products. So where did you find the manufacturing facility? How did you find somebody who could make these muslin cotton blankets? This is actually an interesting story, guy, because I was standing at the reception desk at the economist.

And the mail arrived and on the top of the mail was a winter. Women's Wear Daily magazine. So I'm flipping through this and then there's a full-page advertisement for an Asian textile sourcing trade show that was happening in New York City three days later. So obviously I went to that trade show and I walked the entire trade show of probably 40 vendors and then I got to literally the last vendor before. I was about to walk out the door, and I walked over, and I said, I'm trying to find someone

that can make this fabric for me. It's called muslin. He said, I have no idea what this is, but I work for a major manufacturing company in China. Let me take this back and see what they say, and two weeks later, I got an email saying, we can make this for you, and that was it. So it was literally the last booth you went to. Absolutely. True story. I was out the door bar one booth and they ended up becoming my manufacturer for 10 years. Unbelievable.

So when they sent you the first sample, did they get it right right away? No. Okay. There was a myriad of back and forth in terms of getting the quality to where I wanted it. and I am not a textiles technical person. I have no idea. I understand the basics now, having been in it for so many years, but I couldn't tell them the grade of cotton. I couldn't tell them the warp and weft counts. I couldn't tell them anything. I just basically said, make it like this, but I need it to be softer. And then I worked with the factories over the

years on the way to wash it and what to put in the wash to make it soft. And obviously as a mum, I wouldn't let them use anything that was in any way. You know, they used to use formaldehyde in dyes on baby, but that stuff just blew my mind. So obviously that was very important to me that there was none of that in any Aiden and A products, and it was a long and laborious process with a hell of a lot of failures along the way

where we had full containers of product that when they arrived in the U.S., like the fabric had turned yellow. So, you know, there's so many stories about the trials and tribulations of actually perfecting the fabrication. Were you still working at the economist at this point? Yes. I stayed working at the economist until May of 2009. Did you tell your colleagues about it? Did they find out?

No. Nobody knew. Were you keeping it secret because you just didn't want to? I didn't want anybody looking or questioning me. And again, I go back to, I was a salesperson. I never, ever didn't make my budget. I didn't want to walk out that door and then have people say, well, it's all good and well that she's created this business,

but it was at the expense of the economist. Yeah, right. At this point, I guess 2006, NA is three. and then did you have another child by that point? I actually had three of my four daughters by that point. Okay, so you were still working full time at the economist and presumably flying back and forth to L.A. to work with Claudia on this side business. And you were also raising three kids.

I mean, how did you make all of this work? It was really, really hard. But it was a conscious decision that I made. So when I got home from, I used to call the economy, economist, my real job. When I got home from the real job, I was well in mummy mode and I focused on my girls. And then when the girls went to bed at 8.30, that's when I would start my day of working on Aiden and Aeney and I would do that until, you know, 3.30 every morning. And because it was a conscious decision on my part, I sort of never, I just never really complained about it. It

was what it was. So it's 2006, you have, you make your first big order. How many, what was that order like? What do you remember? Well, we both started just putting $15,000 in for our first inventory and that we did the minimum. We had a boy pack, a girl pack, a white pack and a towel and washcloth. And I just went door to door in.

LA and New York to every baby store, to every, you know, I picked up the phone, I called bye-bye baby. You know, that was the sales girl coming out in me and actually jumping ahead a bit. A year later, the target buyer called me, called me and said, can you come in? I took in, you know, six skews thinking they might take one or two. How much is a skew? A skew is like one four-pack. So I presented six four packs thinking they might take one boy and one girl.

Yeah. And Target took all six. Wow. And rolled it out into all Target stores from day one. Once you got orders from these big companies, I mean, you had to then make the order with a factory in China and I guess pay the money. How did you fund that? We initially it was, you know, all our savings. And the money part of it was actually what brought about the demise of Claudia and my partnership.

I don't know if you want me to talk about that, but I can because, you know, the partner thing is always, well, often a story with entrepreneurs, right? Yeah. So Claudia and Mark were very wealthy. Marcos and I, not so much. You know, we were doing fine, but we didn't have, you know, millions of dollars. Yeah. So, Marcos and I kept up for as long as we could, Matt, you know, we'd put in 15,000, then we put in another 30, then we put in another 40, you know that.

And we kept up as long as we could until we got to a point where we couldn't keep up anymore. There was no access to capital, you know. We started the business at the beginning of the worst recession since the Great Depression. So Claudia said, we just need to borrow money off, you know, Mark and, you know, his family, which I absolutely did not want to do. It was the last resort. But it had got to the point, I think we'd borrowed 100,000 off Claudia and Mark, and then we borrowed another 250,000 off Mark's dad, and very long, story short. It was more Mark, I think, that was just not comfortable with the fact that in his mind they were funding the business. And it just got to the point

where, you know, I got a demand of you've got 30 days to come up with this to buy us out. If you can't do that, we have the right to pay you the same. And if we can't come to an agreement, we're going to dissolve it. When we come back in a moment, how Reagan's company and friendship with Claudia changed forever. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So when Reagan's friend and business partner Claudia told her she wanted out of Aiden and A&A,

Reagan had to figure out how to hold on to the company. When Claudia exited the business in 2008, it was me. It was just me alone doing all the work. I was sales, customer service, manufacturing, marketing, finance. My husband was helping with the finance side of things. So I hired one person to at least alleviate some of the work that I was having to start doing at 8.30, 9 o'clock at night once my girls went to bed because that was also a line I drew very deeply in the sand for myself that these little girls did not sign on for an entrepreneurial mother. But I did believe in the business.

and I went out to a few of my other friends who were watching what I was doing to raise the few hundred thousand dollars that Ploria, you know, wanted for, you know, the work that she'd put into the business so far. To buy her out. To buy her out. So three other people came into the business and bought 49% of the business for like $500,000. Wow. This is a really important story because we don't get to hear these stories too often about the reality of starting a business with a partner where at the beginning there's this vision of kind of a utopian business and there are partnerships that really work. But oftentimes the case is more like this where money gets involved and tension builds and people get nervous about the investment.

And you can kind of understand where Claudia and Mark were coming from. I mean, they were getting nervous. They had a lot of money on the line. But, I mean, I have to imagine that it took a toll on your friendship. Oh, well, she never spoke to me again. Because I just responded and said, Claude, what are you doing? Breaking my heart here.

We can talk through this. I was the legal guardian of their children. That's how close we were. And it was horrible. It is horrible. But, you know, it was, I wanted to talk to her. In her mind it was over. And look, and I get it.

She was under the pressure of her family, and it was her marriage and all of those things. So I don't not understand why it happened. It was just heartbreaking that it did. Did you think that the business was going to collapse? No. I never thought that. I thought I might collapse. And I questioned whether or not I could keep going,

because obviously it was an extremely emotional time. But no, I've never ever doubted Aiden and Deney. Was there any tension in your marriage? I mean, was Marcos fully supportive? He was the one who actually, when I started to get a bit shaky through the whole drama with Claudia, and I said to him, look, I don't know if I can do this. And he said to me, do you believe in the business?

And I said, I absolutely believe in the business. He said, well, then fight for it. Yeah. You know, don't give up, fight for it. Have you ever had any contact with Claudia since the breakup? Absolutely none. Unfortunately, the friendship was very much a casualty of the business. But she must know where the company has gone.

Her child's name is on it. I know. People ask me why I didn't change the name. And it's why I still refer to myself as the co-founder, even though Claudia's being gone for forever. I co-founded this business with her. So it didn't feel right to me to just sort of cut her out of the story. So you buy out Claudia's share? Well, I don't.

Your partners do. And you move on. You continue to grow this business, believing that this is going to work. And at what point were you finally able to leave the economist? What was the milestone you hit in the company that made you comfortable that you could focus full time on this thing? Well, I had read a lot of literature about women entrepreneurs. And I had learned the statistic that only 2% of all women-owned businesses ever break a million dollar revenue. Is that true?

Yes, isn't that frightening? That's shocking, yeah. So that, I set myself that goal. So I just said, right, once I get to a million in revenue, I've done something that most women entrepreneurs aren't able to do. So at that point, I allowed myself to quit and focus on Aiden and a full-time. All right. So finally, when you leave the economist, I'm assuming you told them why.

No. You didn't? No, I didn't. I just said I've got another opportunity. and here's my two weeks notice. And my then boss, who I wasn't a huge fan of, I was having a discussion. And I distinctly remember it was about a week before I handed him my resignation.

So I knew it was coming. And I sat in his office and he said to me, oh, what would you know? You do not have an entrepreneurial bone in your body. And then here's even, this story gets even better. That boss ended up working at, cranes. And we have won multiple awards with cranes as one of the fastest 50 growing entrepreneurial businesses in New York. I mean, do experiences like that with your boss, do they

like add fuel to your fire? Are they powerful motivators for you? You know what my biggest motivation always was with this guy and it was never about making a lot of money. Mine was very much proving to myself I could do it because I had been told by many people over the years that I was only capable of X. When in my heart of hearts, I always thought I was capable of Y, but I was just never afforded the opportunity to prove it. Okay, so by 2009, you leave the economist and then I guess you're profitable, but by the way, what is your revenue that year? We closed 2009 at just over 4 million. So as soon as I focused on it, you know, 100%, it changed the game.

And then we more than doubled every year for the five years after that. I guess it was around 2010 where you took on some outside investment. That's correct. I took on my first private equity firm in 2010. Why did you do that? I mean, up until this point, you are the majority owner, you know, you're doing well, four million revenue, what did that enable you guys to do? Well, it enabled me to scale. So it gave me some money to be able to hire some more people, buy more inventory, because we would literally

be, you know, the core team. There was about eight of us, nine of us. And we would be sitting there late at night going, okay, well, we need, we'd do our inventory planning. We'd say, okay, well, we'd need this. And then we'd look at it and go, well, we can only afford half of it. And we'd just to have to cut half of what we really needed, we could never keep up with the demand. So when the private equity firm came in, it enabled us to get closer to it at least back then. Yeah. I know that at a certain point, celebrities started to be like, you know, us weekly like that.

They're just like us. They swaddle their babies, except the swaddle was like your swaddle blankets. When did you start to see celebrities using the blankets? One week after we went on the market, when I say went on the market, me walking, the product to the stores and handing it to the store owners in LA. Adam Sandler and his wife, who just had their baby, were photographed on Malibu Beach with their baby in a carrier with an Aiden and a naid blanket draped over the front of the baby, and it was a full-page picture in Us Weekly.

So we had celebrity press from a week after we went on the market. Did anybody know what the blanket was, though? No, not back then, but we actually named a pack paparats. He wants sort of as a nod to how many photographers photograph our blankets with the celebrities trying to hide their babies away. Back in 2013, Prince William and Kate Middleton, I guess we should call them the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, they had a baby, Prince George. They leave the hospital and what did you see?

They left the hospital in an Aiden and Nenei blanket, which blew my mind having been raised in Australia because that I would have bet every penny I had on the fact that was never going to happen because there's royal protocol and no royal baby has ever come out in anything other than a white wool blanket that has been royally appointed to the family you know and lo and behold they walk out in Aiden and Aine and the world goes wild and so did sales just go crazy Yes, you know, the typical reaction, the royal effect, our website crashed twice, we sold out of that around the world, people were coveting it to the point where they were paying three times the value of the... Wow. It was insane.

I was like, guys, we've got other patterns over here of the same, but they all just wanted what the royal baby had. What was the pattern that he had, by the way? It was, interestingly, it was from a pack called Jungle Jam, which was a... the third pack that I ever released. So that particular design had been on the market for eight years when the Royal Baby came out in it. I mean, just to be clear, these are not like super crazy expensive, right? I mean, how much is a four pack? Well, now it's $49.95.

When I started, it was $44. And that was always, I never set out to build a luxurious celebrity, you know, endorsed brand. I wanted to create and make other mothers aware of this amazing product that as a mother, I just didn't understand how they could have babies without it. When you around, I guess, around 2013, you guys got a big investment, right? That's correct. Swanda Pace Capital entered in and they became the majority shareholders. So explain how this works.

Because they bought a big share of the company, but that allowed you to cash out some of the value of the company? That's correct. They bought the whole company. What I did was bought back in as a major shareholder in the company. I mean, so in a sense, I guess that made you financially, I mean, you were at that point sort of sat financially for the rest of your life. Yes. Baby blankets have afforded my family an incredibly wonderful life. So a pretty incredible result.

It is. Although what I will tell you, Guy, is I much prefer the entrepreneurial building of a company. Now that we're over $100 million, it's just very different. You know, obviously the way you run a $100 million company to the way you run a, you know, a 20 or even a 30, $40 million company. You know, you can get by with running your business on Excel. spreadsheets at 30 million, it doesn't cut it at 100. Like at 30 million, I was still very much involved, you know, in a lot of the day today. Whereas now at this size, oh my gosh, there is so much that, you know, I'm only getting updates once a week. I'm just not involved in that kind of way anymore.

So I definitely do not enjoy this as much as I did when I was much more in the weeds of the business. That's interesting. You know, I miss that. Given that you got this big payout, do you ever think, I don't know, maybe I'll just like stop working and just take up a hobby or do something completely different for a while? Well, it's, I could never be the lady that lunches. It's just not, remember back to the story of me on the couch in my pajamas, you know, so too much time is not a good thing for me. But not only do I think that it would be good for me that if I maybe wasn't the CEO of this business,

it might be good for the business to bring in somebody who has run a business of this size and has scaled from 100 to 300 because I really believe that that's where this brand is going. And do I think I could do it? I know I could do it. And selfishly, being the mum of four little girls, My worst nightmare would be in 15 years' time when I am sitting at a bar with my four girls as adult women,

not being able to turn to Aiden and Aeney as a company and a brand and say, hey, your mum did that when you were tiny babies at our kitchen table and now look at it. It's a half a billion dollar global brand. How much of what happened to you and the... company is because of luck and how much because you're just really smart and hardworking? I would say it would be 40% luck and 60% hard work and tenacity. You know, because you've got to take advantage of the luck, right?

So there has definitely been many serendipitous moments along the way of this journey But without really working hard and believing in what you're doing, that's not going to be enough. That's Reagan, Moja, Jones. I first talked to Reagan about two years ago. And about a year after that conversation, her business, her whole life, in fact, took a dramatic turn. So I called her up a few weeks ago to hear about what happened. So Reagan, we are back together again for a quick. little update. Obviously, the last time we talked to you, things have changed a bit, actually

quite a bit. Can you tell us about that? What happened in an NA in 2018? Well, plain and simple, I got fired from my own business, which was pretty heartbreaking. The investors and I just didn't see eye to eye, and they didn't think that I was capable of continuing to run the business, and it just became extremely cantankerous and unpleasant. And because they had the controlling interest of the business, they won, I guess, and ultimately fired me. I mean, this is the crazy thing, right? Which we don't often hear about on the show, which is when you create something, right?

Like you start this going door to door, selling these muslin kind of blankets, and pounding the pavement and going to buy-by-baby and trying to convince people that they need to sell this thing. You build it up. And then the moment, you know, you really have to scale it, oftentimes you need to bring in outside money. But there are strings attached with that decision. On the one hand, you will make a lot of money personally. But on the other hand, it basically means that you're giving up a lot of control over the thing you built. Exactly. Single worst decision of my life, I would say. Wow. Wow. And the thing is, Guy, it actually

happens more often than you think. I'm just someone that is willing to speak openly about it. And I'm doing that because if I can help one other entrepreneur avoid, quite frankly, the hell that I went through after being fired from a company that I'd lived and breathed for over a decade, then I'm, you know, I'm happy to do it. But I do think that there's a lot of shame around being fired because I'm acutely aware that most people hearing this will go, well, she clearly really screwed up and that's why she got fired when I sort of know the ins and outs of it. But, you know, I'm prepared to have people think that I really messed up in the better interest of getting the story out there, that this is actually what it can happen and often does happen when you sell the controlling interest of your business to a private equity firm.

I mean, here's a thing, Reagan, right? I actually think a lot of people who've just heard our original interview right and listening to us now, I actually think a lot, and I'm trying to channel their thoughts. think a lot of people will be thinking, hang on, she, you know, moved to the United States. She struggled to kind of figure out what she wanted to do. She built this company from nothing. She turned it into a $100 million company. She walked out of it set for life, financially set for life. And, okay, she was fired by a bunch of investors and private equity people, but man, she succeeded. I think actually a lot of people sort of see it that way. Yes, and that's absolutely

correct, but it doesn't take away, and I'm going to go as far as to say the pain of having somebody rip what you've put your blood, sweat and tears into for over a decade out from underneath you, because their perception is different to yours. They said to me, we need a superstar CEO in the chair now, Reagan. And we don't believe you're it. And I know there are many other founders out there who have gone through the same thing. And what I say to people is, if you are still passionately involved in your business, if you still care, just don't sell the controlling interest to a private equity or a financial institute. Just don't do it. You can sell parts of it that just don't give away the controlling interest because no matter what they're

telling you when they're courting you once they have control, you know, it's a very different story. This is a really important point because a lot of people will say to me, God, you know, are most of the people you interview motivated by money? And the answer is absolutely no. I mean, yes, of course, financial security and success is exciting. But this actually is a great example of how that's not the case. Because the money's there.

You have the money. Yes. It's the emotional connection. It's that thing. That it was your identity. It is your identity. That's what's painful. Exactly.

And it still has my eldest daughter's name on the door, which is just a little bit of salt in the wound as well. It took me a good year to sort of get over it. I, you know, safe to say I'm back in the room now, but I definitely fell into a very big hole for about a year. Did you get depressed? Yeah, I would say I was depressed. I put on nearly 30 pounds.

I drank way too much wine. I, you know, I was eating and drinking to cope. I was confused about what my next steps were going to be. But other than that, I was kind of thinking, well, what's next? What do I do now that I don't? have this because, as I said, I lived and breathed it for over a decade. I'm curious, Reagan. I mean, and you're still pretty close to it, so it may not be the right time for you to kind of answer this question.

But if somebody, if this happened to somebody else, right, that they were fired from the company they started, how important do you think it is to just take time off to just kind of disincentive? engage from entrepreneurship and business entirely for a period. Do you think that's healthy? Was it healthy for you? I think it depends. I think it depends on who you are. I think most entrepreneurs are pretty type A driven people, I would say. So for me, being idle was actually a bad thing. I had to find something to focus on something that was of interest, meaningful to me. that was part of the healing. You are so driven, you know, and who knows where that drive comes from, and anyone, right?

Right. And I know that you decided to start a new company recently. Can you tell me about it? Yes. It couldn't be further away from baby blankets. It's actually a premium moonshine company, so I've gone off on quite a tangent. So yes, it's a company called St. Luna, and yeah, it's been fun. It's been...

Yeah. It's very interesting to be back going door to door, even though this time I'm just going door door to door at bars and restaurants rather than to, you know, baby boutiques. But nonetheless, it's pretty much the same hustle. So you've got this new company. It's called St. Luna Spirits. It is moonshine, but it is, I guess, it's charcoal-infused moonshine.

This is like a really trendy thing, charcoal, like water and... What is the charcoal thing? Tell me about that. It purifies things. So our distiller, who created the recipe for it, had been working on it for 10 years, and he's a chemical engineer. So he's combined the tradition of making moonshine with chemistry and just come up with this phenomenal recipe for moonshine. So it's a great product. What do you distill it from? Wheat or corn or?

No, it's actually. rye-based. Oh, wow. Rye and molasses. So it's very smooth. That's so cool. So you're back out there. You're hustling.

I'm hustling. You're back hustling. Yeah. Yeah. You know, there's a great quote from an episode that we had a couple years ago with Whitney Wolf, the founder of Bumble. And she said, you know, you can temporarily kill someone's confidence, but you cannot kill ambition. And I thought about that so many times.

And that's the same story here. It is. That is exactly what it is. And they really did, they killed my confidence, but only for a period of time, which was really tough for me to sort of start thinking, well, maybe they're right. You know, maybe I am useless and I can't do it. But you're right. They, you know, they didn't break my spirit and they didn't, they couldn't take away the ambition.

She's absolutely right. I mean, there's also something to the idea, like, at least in my experience, I wonder if this resonates with you that, I mean, that kind of anger, you know, when somebody does that to you, it can generate a kind of anger that can actually be very productive, an anger that can really motivate you to, you know, almost to kind of show them that you actually are really talented. Yes, absolutely. But what I will say is it wasn't until I let go of the anger that I was really able to move for. So the anger was killing me. And it wasn't until I let go of all that that I was able to really go, okay, that was that was that. And now let's prove that you can do it all over again.

That's Reagan, Moia Jones. She's the co-founder of Aden and Aeney. And now St. Luna's Spirits. By the way, before she was fired from Aiden and Aeney, she had just finished writing a book about her life story. But after leaving the company, she had to call it the publisher and tell them she had to, Well, rework the ending. Her revamped book came out earlier this year. It's called What It Takes, How I Built a $100 million business against the odds.

Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And today we're updating a story that we first ran about a year ago. This is Brian Sonia Wallace tapping away on his vintage Smith Corona typewriter in his apartment in Los Angeles. He uses it for his business, which is writing poetry. on demand. Poetry is like the ultimate non-commercial art form. You know, unless you're a professor or an Instagram celebrity poet, you're really not usually making a living doing this.

But about four years ago, Brian sort of stumbled into the poetry business when he was laid off from his job writing grants for a nonprofit. I thought, okay, let me see if I can pay my rent for one month. It was this experiment in whether, you could make any money off of this poetry thing. So Brian started to show up at arts festivals and other events around town with his typewriter and a small table. I originally had a sign that said, give me a topic, I'll write you a poem, pay me what

you think it's worth. And it turns out, people would pay anywhere between $5 and $40 for a custom poem about their boyfriends or their girlfriends, even about their dogs. Anyway, by the end of that month, Brian had earned enough money to pay his, rent and his utilities. And it was funny because after the month I was like, okay, well, now I'm going to hang my typewriter up and focus on other things. And I kept getting calls from either people who I had met on the street or people who had

seen something about it asking me to do private events. But when it came to private events, Brian had no idea what to charge. And I remember there were a couple early ones. One in particular, I remember I did like an investment banking conference. and I didn't really understand that you could set a baseline price and that people had budgets and would pay for event entertainment. Brian even scored a gig at the Mall of America, where people lined up for custom poems,

including one particularly interesting customer. Did my usual open, hi, how are you? What do you need a poem about? She thought for a minute, she said, you know, I've actually just come from a week-long silent meditation retreat. It was really intense and emotional, and so I just came to get some dip-and-dots as a reward. So Brian got to work, and a few minutes later, he presented her with the poem. It's scary, how hectic a week of silence can be, left alone with our thoughts, and no-release valve.

Do we implode? That woman ended up hugging Brian after he read her that poem. Apparently it happens to him a lot. finding a lightness that starts deep in the core of my belly and ends with dip and dots at the mall. Brian Sonia Wallace's business is called Rent Poet. This year he expects to hit $100,000 in revenue, which is a big boost since last year. He now works with a small team of people, eight freelancers, all trained in the art of spontaneous poetry. If you want to find out more about Rent Poet, head to our podcast.

podcast page, how I built this.npr.org. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. We love hearing what you're building. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also write to us at hibt at npr.org. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at How I Built This. I'm at Guy Raz. Our show was produced this week by Rachel Faulkner with original music composed by Rumpteen Arablui. Thanks also to Julia Carney, Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkampur, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is David Jop. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.