How to grow your brand with Instagram with Year & Day Founder Kathryn Duryea Wyndowe

02/12/20 • 45 min

On this episode Abadesi talks to Kathryn Duryea Wyndowe, founder and CEO of Year & Day. They make beautiful tableware that they sell direct-to-consumer online via their website.

In this episode they talk about...

How she came up with the idea for Year & Day

“I felt very empowered by this idea of buying a new set of plates outside of this proposition of getting married and a wedding registry.”

Kathryn graduated from Stanford GSB and started working at Tiffany & Co., helping to bring them online. She was inspired by the new direct-to-consumer brands and had always loved the ritual of setting the table. She decided she wanted to make “tableware fun again.” Through trying to buy a set of tableware for herself, she found that the experience was confusing and uninspiring. After going through that, she “turned on the other side of her brain” and dug into the market for tableware, which accounts for $7B in annual spend, which led her to start Year & Day.

Her crazy year preparing to launch the brand

“It took about 11 months, almost a year, to go from basically this is my full attention, full-time professional endeavor to now we are selling to customers.”

Kathryn thought that she could launch in eight months, but it actually took almost a year. She talks about the wide range of tasks that she had to tackle, basically by herself, from design to manufacturing to fulfilment to arranging for web development. She talks about “fighting against the inertia of the world” to will the brand new company into existence. She says that her launch strategy was to email 500 of her friends about the company and that in the beginning she had her brother doing customer service. Since then they’ve grown to a team of 8 based in San Francisco.

“All aspects of starting a business are both wildly thrilling with high highs and low lows and real challenges, but what's so exciting about those early months and days is that this idea that you formulated, now you're starting to bring it into shape into the real world.”

The power of Instagram and the rise of direct-to-consumer

“A lot of the product discovery these days happens on social media on platforms like Instagram. People are relying more and more on people that they follow there to help them discover products that they’ll love, that suit their lives.”

The rules for marketing to the digital-native generation have changed with the advent of social media platforms and influencers. Kathryn explains why Instagram is such a powerful platform and why people are gravitating towards a different kind of shopping experience. She talks about the importance of curation when it comes to products like tableware.

She also talks about some of her favorite productivity hacks, including why she meditates, works from home one morning a week, and why she still uses good old fashioned pen-and-paper for her to-do lists.

“As an entrepreneur you could literally work 24 hours a day and still feel like your list is growing, so in order to have a healthy balance you need to actually set some boundaries.”

She also discusses some of her favorite products.

We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Big thanks to Knowable for their support. 😸

Companies and Products Mentioned on This Episode

Audm — The world’s best longform journalism, read aloud.

Insight Timer — The best free meditation timer.

Snagit — The best screen capture software.

On this episode Abadesi talks to Kathryn Duryea Wyndowe, founder and CEO of Year & Day. They make beautiful tableware that they sell direct-to-consumer online via their website.

In this episode they talk about...

How she came up with the idea for Year & Day

“I felt very empowered by this idea of buying a new set of plates outside of this proposition of getting married and a wedding registry.”

Her crazy year preparing to launch the brand

“It took about 11 months, almost a year, to go from basically this is my full attention, full-time professional endeavor to now we are selling to customers.”

The power of Instagram and the rise of direct-to-consumer

“As an entrepreneur you could literally work 24 hours a day and still feel like your list is growing, so in order to have a healthy balance you need to actually set some boundaries.”

She also discusses some of her favorite products.

Companies and Products Mentioned on This Episode

Audm — The world’s best longform journalism, read aloud.

Insight Timer — The best free meditation timer.

Snagit — The best screen capture software.

Previous Episode

How to improve your focus in a world of distraction with Readup founders Bill Loundy and Jeff Camera

On this episode Abadesi talks to Bill Loundy and Jeff Camera, co-founders of Readup. Jeff is the sole developer on the team, and Bill handles everything else. Readup is a social reading platform designed to help you track and improve your online reading habits.

In this episode they talk about...

How they came up with the idea for Readup and how it has evolved over time

“Pick a problem that’s personal for you, because otherwise how can you care and keep working on it?”

Bill and Jeff are longtime collaborators and have actually been friends since preschool — when they’re not working on Readup, they also like to work on motorcycles together. They explain to Aba how the original spark of an idea for Readup evolved into what it is today. They were frustrated with social media and were lamenting the quality of the comments on online articles, so they got together to build a Chrome extension that would measure the amount of time that you spent on a page, in order to determine whether a person had actually read the article or not. It has since turned into a new take on community and led to the creation of a tool that is like “Fitbit for online reading.” They also discuss the design of the site and why they’ve taken a minimalist approach to it.

How you can have a more peaceful existence on the web and the problems with the current state of social media

“What we’re doing is measuring very precisely the amount of time and engagement that you have on an article and tying that to your reputation and experience, so in some ways we are actually a true attention economy.”

They explain why social media is broken today and why we are perpetually distracted online. They say that social media has become like a slot machine, but that there is no reason that we should have to navigate a slot machine to find someone else’s baby pictures. They point out that we need tools to help us have a better relationship with the web, because we can’t exercise the immense amount of self-control that we would need to block out all the distraction out there on the web. They also talk about some of their favorite books about how the internet has evolved and the unhealthy trends that have sprung up from it.

The challenges of being a maker and how they have overcome them

“Sometimes things are really dark and like it doesn't feel like things are connecting and making sense. For me, the way to survive that experience is to always remember how big the need is for what we're building.”

They talk about the immense effort that went into getting something out there — not just in building the site but also in overcoming the self-doubt they felt to finally release what they’d been working on into the world.

“The extreme indifference that the rest of the world has to your ideas has kind of helped. The first time we put it out there it was crickets. When we posted it again, we would start to get more feedback and it was helpful. I don’t know what we were afraid of.”

They talk about how they overcome the dark days that they sometimes encounter when working as indie makers, and why being reminded of the magnitude of the problem they’re solving helps them persevere through them.

They also talk about why books are still their favorite products of all time.

Next Episode

How to invest in overlooked ideas with Harlem Capital's John Henry

On this episode Abadesi talks to John Henry, venture partner at Harlem Capital and host of Hustle on VICELAND.

In this episode they talk about...

How he got into entrepreneurship and how the expectations for today’s entrepreneurs have changed

“I think the world of business and entrepreneurship can seem pretty scary these days. There's so much at stake, you got to get it right, you got to raise money, you got to go public.“

John got his start as an entrepreneur through trying to help out his family when he was young, starting a dry cleaning service in New York. He says that he didn’t have big aspirations at the time and that he didn’t come to entrepreneurship with visions of a glamorous lifestyle in his future.

He says that these days entrepreneurship can seem very daunting and that rather than feeling the weight of the expectations that people have you should instead take the approach of doing something creative and fun and then see if you can sell it to folks.

“I have to be honest, if I were starting now versus a decade ago when I started I might feel like the weight of the the expectation might have crushed the seed of enthusiasm that I had to start.”

Why he says getting a regular job is riskier than starting a company

“There are a lot of macroeconomic changes and not only are older corporations cutting jobs but you also see it in new companies. For me taking a normal job felt riskier because your own income was not in your own hands.”

When John started working he realized that it would be better for him to put his time and effort into building a company instead of putting it into working for someone else at a conventional job. He says that although it can take years to get off the ground, it’s nevertheless better to work at something that you own entirely.

How he discovered financial literacy and how to be a “multi-dimensional earner”

“I’ve discovered this entirely new way of earning that I never would have known about when I was a doorman ten years ago because back then my best understanding of how to earn income was clocking in.”

John says that he is investing in assets rather than experiences these days. He says that through doing so he wants to “build something for your family that can’t be taken away.” He explains how he learned about how to effectively invest his money after coming from a disadvantaged background where he didn’t normally have much exposure to those types of concepts.

He also talks about how to find a good business idea for aspiring entrepreneurs and how he has diversified his income streams so that he’s not reliant on any one of them. He explains that he is making sure to “circulate” the funds that he earns so that he’s always re-investing and putting them to work instead of just stashing them away in a savings account.

“You have to meet the moment. For anyone who is listening who is curious for one reason or another what they can do to earn income, look around at the moment. There are a lot of changes that are specific to right now, to 2020.”

The history of VC and how they’re changing the flow of capital to underrepresented founders at Harlem Capital

John explains some of the ins-and-outs of venture capital and the history of the space including how it came to be that a “handful of zip codes and a handful of schools determine which companies go public.” He explains what kinds of barriers to entry exist for people who find themselves outside of the networks of privileged people with connections to the large institutions that normally contribute to venture capital funds (yes, venture capitalists have to fundraise too!).

He also talks about how he invests in personal development and talks about some of the products he’s loving right now.

We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.