Skimm'd from the Couch: Ariane Goldman

May 27, 2020

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Ariane Goldman is no stranger to taking risks. She climbed the corporate ladder for years before quitting to dive into fashion. She started HATCH, a company creating style solutions for pregnant women. And it’s now changing the conversation about maternity. But she founded the brand when no one was paying attention to the category. This week, she told us why she risked it to be the first mover in a new space. 

On Leading With “Human First”

Carly: How are you balancing productivity while working from home while maintaining sanity?

Ariane: When thinking about your employees and their productivity working from home, they’re not working from home in a normal situation. We're working from home in a crisis. Right? So it's just a totally different playing field. And our expectations are totally different. And so this time around, we're leading with empathy and making sure that our employees are feeling safe and okay.

... So uniting and making sure that the team knows that we're there for them, and leading with human first has been a real win for us.

On Side Hustles

Carly: I want to understand your approach to side hustles, especially right now in a time where a lot of people need to be creative about thinking how to turn their side hustles into their main hustle.

Ariane: I think anything that inspires you on the side... if that passion is inside you and you can feed it daily somehow [in] one way- designing your logo, putting it on a business card… anything that's kind of low-lift to get that ball rolling... you're not necessarily doing a 180 and shifting everything.

... My advice would be to do something every day that just kind of drives that forward, because before you know it, you're going to build something really beautiful or you're going to ask your questions and find out the hard way that maybe it's not viable. But at least you're doing it on the side where you don't have everything on the table.

On Getting Started

Ariane: I didn't know what I didn't know, which was the blessing. Because if you understand what a big beast it is to build a business, I wouldn't have gotten started.

... We mean something to people. That, to me, is what it's like to build a brand. So, when you start that, every day is a different challenge, experience, failure… Fear and ambition together is incredibly powerful. I didn't know where I was going to go. I just knew that women needed this. And if women need this, it was just a matter of figuring out how to get it to them.

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