đ Oct 6th - Women In Power Summit · Tickets Now On Sale đ„
By Shope Delano
ventually, I stopped making pitch decks and took myself to the desert. Not Coachella, Silicon Valley, or Burning Man, but to a barren place, absent of any resources, but charged with potential.
Eventually, I stopped making pitch decks and took myself to the desert. Not Coachella, Silicon Valley, or Burning Man, but to a barren place, absent of any resources, but charged with potential.
My imagination.
I swivel away from my laptop, apathetic about the reality that âpre-launchâ investment doesnât quite exist for individuals like me, businesses like mine. I press pause on the doing, and give myself a moment to dream.
Iâm walking down the street. Itâs Spring - sticky yet fresh. A woman walks past me, late 30âs. Sheâs helplessly animated, mid-voice note to her business partner. Thereâs a tote bag slung over one shoulder, Birkenstocks or Camperâs on her feet, in one-hand a caffeinated drink and in the other, a childâs school folder.
Sheâs wearing what looks like a jumpsuit-suit situation. Styled with an (unironed) white tee underneath, and a vintage waistcoat thrown on top. The fabric is a little crinkled, worn-in.
Already knowing the answer, I stop her and ask âI love your outfit! Whereâs the set from?â
She responds âKind Regards.â
For so long, Iâve obsessed over the way women work. Itâs so sprawling, so secretive, so business-as-usual. So much of it goes unregistered. I read a tweet the other day âEveryone has the same 24 hours, except men, they have 39â. Where did this time go? (No - the answer is not as simple as âchildrenâ). How do we get this time back?
I started to think about all the different kinds of things all the women around me were holding in tension every day.
It was all work, it is all work, created and acknowledged unequally but valid, hard and time-consuming all the same.
Money-making work. Creative work. Familial work. Domestic work. Beauty work. Caring work.
Hearing and talking about the universality of this messy work kept me going when I couldnât synthesise what Kind Regards wanted to be. When I felt paralysed by the expectation of how a business Should be launched.
In the autumn of 2020 - the height of the pandemic, when it wasnât sunny anymore - I wrote an open letter about all of this. It was viewed, liked, or shared >100,000 times. In keeping with my pre-ordained habit to analyse, pick apart, and find the âwhatâs underneathâ, I have a theory for why the letter resonated so.
Many of us were tired of being at war.
âGirl bossâ, âlean inâ, âshe canâ are all helplessly tethered to an ideal, a system, that hasnât served us for many years. It puts us in the continual mode of pushing back, of proving, of being in defence, being at war. Any notoriety built in such close proximity to (and in reliance of) narrow, unforgiving ideals around success, would be short-lived, painfully so, as weâve seen time and time again.
Whilst girl boss fatigue is well-worn territory now, when I wrote the letter, the idea of girlresting was only just making its way into the mainstream.
Self-definition as an organising principle of work and life was the call-to-arms of the letter, and feels like the only palpable alternative to me.
Alongside this, I knew workwear for the multiple âself-definedâ contexts we moved through didnât exist. Sartorially, we were still being siloed, as if our working life wasnât sprawling and bleeding, all-inclusive. What do you wear to be busy and always moving and multifaceted? Comfortable and chic?
And so it began: Clothes and conversations for self-defined working women.
I started iterating, asking for help, coming face to face with the reality of building in a desert, leaning into the constraints and freedom that came with self-funding. I had such tiny margins for error, letâs face it no margins, and well, I made a lot of errors. I am in debt.
I made two jump(suit)s, painfully, slowly, they took me months each and they were bad. I got grittier, more determined, and forced myself back inside the process deeper and deeper each time. I learnt a whole new language, partnered with a brilliant designer, and met the best (and worst) people in Londonâs factory scene.
Finally, we nail our first unit - a (jump)suit - is a jumpsuit-suit hybrid made from deadstock Italian fabrics, that can be styled 6 ways for every work-life event. Our model uses deposits - half upfront, half when the garment is ready - to minimise waste and allow customers to spread the investment. Every customer that shops during the soft launch becomes a Friend of KR, and through that, is gifted a small piece of ownership in the brand.
Getting to this point has everything and nothing to do with italian fabrics, tapered cuts, and a âsoft launchâ strategy.
It has more to do with my quiet desire to untether myself from the (unexamined) desires of the world around me.
Those which encourage you to âfind your purposeâ and âbe true to yourselfâ in the same breath as telling you to take that promotion, and marry the man who looks good on paper.
Those which may have come from the world around me to begin with, but now come from within me, my internal voice and the voice of âauthorityâ being somewhat indistinguishable.
On the heels of any enthusiasm I hear in response to an act of self-definition, is a steady trickle of âshouldsâ that will put you in the same emotional space you seek to escape, in 5-10 years time. But perhaps with nicer shoes.
Throughout this comically difficult journey of me âstarting something my wayâ, Iâve found that the phrase âGod loves a trierâ jumps out of my throat whenever discussing my efforts, or describing the latest setback.
Itâs a cute, insincere cover. One that lifts the mood that Iâm accidentally bringing down with my startup woes, that no one cares about. But what I really mean is âI love a trierâ. I love to try. I canât help but to try. To apply myself, in pursuit of doing something that I want to do.
Perhaps itâs because those things come rarely. Untethered, self-directed desires, that is. (As mentioned, the scales are tipped, and weâll fall into the done thing without even realising it). Iâve let a fair few of them come and go in my time. But for whatever reason Kind Regards is one that I hung onto (and hang on to) for dear life.
Maybe it was the pandemic, reaching my late twenties, the mortifying speed with which the glee of an Achievement turns into apathy. (Tracking at about 3 minutes)
Iâm not sure. But either way, I not only hung on, but I grabbed it with both hands, dragged it down, and wrestled with it in the mud, until I got to this point. Day 0. I worked when Instagram told me to rest, I trusted when my intuition told me to turn right, even though people who âknew more than meâ told me to turn left.
As I soft launch our very first product with my nervous system wildly dysregulated, I realise the desert of my mind, now exists in reality, and in ways I will never understand, I love it.
I love the grit, the accountability, the fear, my friends, my community. The badgering ways in which I ask âbut why?â, the bravery and freedom Iâve found in asking people to help me, and the compassion Iâve experienced from all the women in every corner of my life.
Maybe Iâll build a home here. In self-definition.
Kind Regards, Shope
Getting to Day 0: The Shift from Dreaming to Doing - Shope Delano
By Shope Delano
The Stack catches up with co-founder Lucy Hall ahead of the LOANHOOD pop-up to talk About gen-Zâs place in the rental space, the path to investment and the power of unlocking a communities economic power
From Goldman Sachs to running a nail-tech startup, Gina Farran is the founder and CEO of Glaize committed to finding âthe cure to the manicureâ. And in just under three years, sheâs found the solution