I’m going to say 95% of the time if our client can think of it, we can probably do it.
- katzdan3
- Oct 19
- 25 min read
Updated: Oct 26
Regina Renda
Kick Ass Swag | Las Vegas, NV
[Regina’s wife Dani sat in on the interview; Dani officially joined Kick Ass Swag last year and has been instrumental in keeping the administrative aspects of the business running smoothly. Her comments appear in brackets throughout the story.]
I’m originally from Brooklyn and my parents moved us to Las Vegas when I was 11. I was here until I was in my 20s and then during 2009 in the recession I moved back to New York and worked in a family friend’s pharmacy. It was great, I loved it, working for a small group of close friends of the family… which has its ups and downs. But finally I was like, “I want to get back to Vegas,” because I’m approaching 30, I want to start thinking about my future, 401(k), benefits, all the things I didn’t have there.
Zappos is in Vegas; everybody’s talking about it, it was like a vibe there. I read Delivering Happiness, which was the book that Tony Hsieh had written about the company culture. When I was done reading it, I looked at my boss Frank and I was like, “I want to go work for Zappos. I haven’t gotten a job yet, there’s no openings, but I’ve done a lot of research and I want to go back to Vegas. I love you guys but I really just want to get back there.” And I was making like $50,000. He’s like, “Well, how much are they going to pay you?” “Uh, it’s like $12.50 to start.” And he goes, “WHAT? Are you fucking crazy? You’re going to step over a dollar to pick up a quarter? That’s insane!”
A couple months later, a position comes open and I apply. I fly myself out because it’s an entry level position — they don’t fly you out for this. I fly myself out, I interview, and they basically hired me on the spot. Amazing, I’m thrilled. I’m going to go five steps back in life financially, move back to Vegas, be with my friends, life’s looking good. So I go back to New York and tell them I’m moving back to Vegas and it’s not going to be for a few months. Fast forward a few months later I pack up my car, move back to Vegas, and work for Zappos. I wrote “Zappos or bust” on my car, I drove across the country, it was a whole thing.
I got a job working in customer service on the phones which I vowed I would never do again in my life, because I did that once before for a health insurance company and it just sucks. You’re on the phone, tied to your desk, all these metrics… nobody likes that job. It sucked, but it was your way in, your path to something better, so I did that for about 18 months. You could get involved with different organizations or volunteer opportunities for events, so shortly into my position there I volunteered to be part of the Zappos All Hands Team. Zappos holds an all-hands meeting every quarter and about 2,000 people gather in the Smith Center here or at the Cashman Field or wherever and they talk about what’s going on in the company, tech updates, financial updates… sometimes there’s performances, so we had Brené Brown one year, Simon Sinek, so many big name authors and speakers. I was part of the team that put it all together and helped on the back end of it. I was on that team until I left. It was great because it gave you access to other people in the company. You’re really close with production people, the A/V people, the events people, the Tony team (and when I say Tony, I mean Tony Hsieh, who was the CEO at the time).
18 months later, there’s a position that comes up for corporate company culture, like employee engagement. I apply for it, I get it. That’s what starts my path to where I am today — I am the person at Zappos who handles all company-wide programs for recognition. At Zappos, when you’re an employee and it’s your birthday, you get a birthday gift that’s branded. When you have a baby, you get a baby package that’s all Zappos branded swag. We had holiday parties so when it was Halloween time, they had a big Halloween event and all the kids that came who were employees’ kids, they all got a pillowcase or a tote bag and it was all branded. They spent about $3 million a year in company-branded merchandise. I was the person, boots on the ground, who was buying all of that Zappos-branded merch. I was working with a distributor, which is what I am now, to buy that merchandise.
Fast forward a year, year and a half later, I’m getting boxes of merchandise and I’m like, “Well, where’s this coming from?” So I’m taking the stickers off the box because they weren’t doing what’s called blind shipping where they don’t say where it’s coming from. I’m taking the sticker off the box, putting it on my desk, taking the sticker off the box, putting it on my desk... Eventually, I didn’t like the relationship I had with the distributor because there wasn’t great customer service, there wasn’t great communication, things weren’t where I wanted them to be, because I came from Zappos, a place that was driven by customer experience and customer service.
Zappos is owned by Amazon. They started out just selling shoes and then morphed into apparel, home goods, handbags. And then in 2009, Amazon bought them, so now they’re an Amazon subsidiary. But their focus from the start has always been about employee culture. That’s kind of dwindled down since Tony Hsieh left the company, that was his core, what he was driven by. Customer service and employee culture were huge.
I was one of the 38 employees authors in The Power of Wow book, if you ever get a chance to check out that book. There were 38 Zappos employees that wrote excerpts and were authors in that book.
Eventually, Zappos was going down a path of, you create your own path. If you have an idea that’s going to move the company forward and you have an entrepreneurial spirit, “Bring it to us, and we’ll help you do it.” I went to my boss who was the VP of People Operations and the Director of Charity and I said, “Hey, why don’t we start our own swag company?” We spend all this money on swag, other departments can buy swag from us, we can generate a little bit of revenue, we can save money, we can do all these things, our partners can buy swag from us. And they were like, “We love this idea, let’s do it.” We called it Swag Source and it was like a subsidiary of Zappos. I was still an employee, I still drew a paycheck, I wasn’t paid commission, I didn’t own the business. I ran that for about six years. I was the single person on that team. I did all the work, worked tirelessly endless hours, 12 hours a day sometimes… it was insane.
But the one good thing about it was that I had unlimited resources in terms of money, so if I made a mistake, it was on somebody else’s dime and I had all this opportunity to learn. I didn’t know anything about being a business owner… sometimes you still really don’t, even when you truly do become a business owner. I didn’t know anything about this new industry that I was breaking into. It was very taboo that I was an end user, meaning the person who receives swag is now becoming a business owner in the swag industry because there are associations that protect the end user, Zappos, from becoming a distributor. I had to really navigate the waters of how to do it. Companies like Disney and Google, they do it, so we had to strategically figure that out, which I had to do. I had to figure that out by the name and separating ourselves from Zappos and making it appear that we were different.
[Dani: But she had the resources to do it. So she had the accounting department to help with books, she didn’t have to do everything, there was a little bit of outside help: money, resources, support.]
It was incredible to have all that at my fingertips and not have to worry. We had an order once go south, we got scammed for like 7,500 USB drives and it was like, no love lost. If I got scammed for 7,500 USB drives, I’d be like I’m going to fly somewhere and go find them!
I did that until COVID and when COVID happened we were all working from home and things weren’t where they needed to be. In September of 2020, we got an offer to basically leave. There were 300 people, my whole entire team — I was in the HR department, I was part of employee engagement, so all of HR, part of marketing… all these different teams. It was basically, “Leave, or we’re going to let you go.” And leave with a nice severance or we’re going to let you go with nothing. So I end up leaving. Tony Hsieh, the former CEO of Zappos, left the month before in August. He was up in Park City and he had a handful of employees working for him privately. He was doing all these special projects: podcasts, building a lab, he was doing all these crazy things. I went up to visit him because I was very friendly with him and a lot of people on his team. I went up to visit for Labor Day weekend, and he was like, “Come work here,” and I was like, “I’m not going to come and live in Park City; I have a family, I have a wife and two kids, but I can do every other week,” because at the time we had the kids week-on, week-off. We have two teenagers and then during COVID we became foster parents and adopted an infant. And he was like, “That’s fine, work remote on the off week and then come up here.”
There was a bus that would pick us up from downtown and take us to Park City overnight. It was cool, it was like Jellyroll’s bus or Chris Stapleton’s bus or Carrie Underwood’s bus, like whoever’s rockstar bus. It wasn’t a Coach USA bus, it wasn’t a Greyhound, it was a BUS: TVs and snacks and drinks, bunks to sleep in, amazing. I was like, “This is the life! Who can ask for anything more?”
In order to work for Tony, I had to become a contractor, which meant starting a business, so I had to become an LLC, get insurance, do all these things that I didn’t really know much about. So I started the business and was employed by Tony… be that as it may, he died a few months later. I started working for him in September and he passed away right before Thanksgiving. And I’m like, “Now I have this business that I just started and I paid all this money to start this business and now I have all this knowledge of this industry that I worked in.” All these things are happening and I’m like, “What are we going to do?” Dani’s like, “What are you going to do? You’re going to start your own business!”
So that was how we got into Kick Ass Swag. I already was doing the work. I had external clients outside of Zappos, we were working with a crypto company through a relationship and Ameriprise Financial through a relationship, so big companies were working through us when we were employed at Zappos. And then when I left them, it was like…
[Dani: They now didn’t have anybody to get their merch from. Zappos doesn’t have that anymore, but she still had the relationship with the distributors.]
Zappos wasn’t doing that business anymore. I had an agreement with Zappos that whatever I was doing, I could still continue to do, just under a different name. So we started Kick Ass Swag. I was like, “I’m going to name it something cool.” Before it was Swag Source, and that was neat, it was catchy, rolled right off the tongue and any time I went to a show, people were like, “That’s a really cool name.” Yeah, because we’re the swag, we’re the source for swag. And now, I was like, “I need something that’s going to trump that, something that’s going to speak to who I am.” Because I walk up to a chamber event in shorts and a t-shirt, I’m not buttoned up, that’s not who I am. I’m bold, I’m kind of loud, I’m authentic and true to myself. So I was like, “Let’s call it Kick Ass Swag, because that’ll be a head-turner.” When people get an e-mail from Kick Ass Swag, they’re going to be like, “Wait, what’s that?” and click on it, or they’re going to be like, “Oh, no, we’re not doing business with these people.”
[Dani: But we don’t want to do business with people who don’t want to do business with us. We’re taking our own trash out.]
We love that. We don’t want to do business with people who can’t even say the word. I get if you’re at a school or something, but still.
[Dani: Oh yeah, there’s been people when I’ve called and I’ll introduce myself and they’re like, “I can’t say that at work.” You can’t say Kick Ass Swag at work? Ok, there’s going to be problems.]
That’s where it all started and it’s been great. We’ve had some really, really amazing times and some rough patches for sure. People will tell you, “Owning your own business is great, it’s amazing,” and it is. When I’m out at a chamber event or at a networking group or talking to another colleague — because we’re friendly in this industry — they’re like, “We’re having a rough week, there’s no sales.” And I’m like, “Listen, you could wake up on Monday, 8 a.m., 9 a.m., and you have nothing, you don’t know when your next dollar is coming in. On Monday, you think you’re going out of business at 9 a.m., but by 4:00, it was the busiest day you’ve ever had to date.”
[Dani: Whenever it is a little slow and the stress starts to work up, just go back to basics. Go back to stirring the pot, meeting the people, sending the e-mails, just go back to the basics because you know that the next day, the next hour, the next week, it’s going to be too busy to handle.]
Looking back at me as a child, I feel like I was destined to be a business owner. Because even as a young kid, I was hustling lollipops and candy bars. I was working at like 14 off the books. I was that kid. When Dani was trying to tell me, “You need to start a business” and I was like, “I can’t!” and I’m crying… she’s like, “You have to leap and the net will appear,” and all these things. But looking back at that, I know she was right and I was really destined to be a business owner.
Swag, branded merch, or promotional items — there’s so many things people call it. Some people call it tchotchkes. We don’t like tchotchkes, we call that junk. Swag is branded merchandise, so a tangible product with your company’s message or something that you want to deliver to another person or user. And that could be anything. I look around, I go out sometimes, and there’s merch everywhere. You go to a Taylor Swift concert and there’s merch there. That’s swag. But there are a lot of companies that just logo-slap and they slap their logo on products that are cheap and inefficient and don’t really tell their brand story.
[Dani: But, having said that, some of our clients think that stress balls, pens, that stuff is the way to do it. And in some industries, maybe that is. We’re not to judge. So if we get a pen order, we’ll do it.]
We do do that, but it’s also about educating the client. I just wrote about this; we have a newsletter and we just started it last month and this is our second issue. It’s about how the swag is going to represent your brand, so if you’re putting your branding on a product that is cheap and may potentially end up — well, all swag is going to end up in a landfill at some point or another.
I think it’s about knowing who your customer’s customer is. If we’re partnering with a construction company or a roofer or a plumber, we know what their budget looks like (or we try to know, at least) and maybe a tape measure would be good for them. Because it’s useful. Stress balls, nobody likes stress balls. At least get a bouncy ball or something that you can use differently. Stress balls are a waste in my opinion.
[Dani: But I have a client that wants stress balls.]
We do, we have them. But honestly, for a small business I think it’s hard to turn away business.
[Dani: But when a client wants to order something that’s run-of-the-mill, we’ll also throw some really cool stuff on that presentation deck, like, “We thought about your industry and here are some really great ideas. Sometimes, they’ll be like, “Oh I love that, I didn’t even think outside the square, I didn’t even know those things were available.” Or they’ll go, “No, just the pens, thanks.”]
It’s doing that dance of what they want, what you know you can get them, and if they just pay a little bit more, it could be really, really cool.
One thing we try to do quite often is spec samples. And what a spec sample is, is that we have our clients’ logos or people that we’re prospecting. So if we want to work with Dave Wilson’s Toyota, the Toyota dealership up the block, whoever, we get their logo either by asking them for it (because we’ve worked with them in the past) or we get their logo off their website and then we convert it, because we want to use it and then send them a gift with their logo on it.
[Dani: Think about in the olden days when you’d get the pens sent to you by distributors with your name on it and it would come in that packaging — we go a step above that; we’ll get a speaker made with their company’s logo, or a mini tool kit and that goes out to the company with our business card information. That’s why we do the spec samples a lot, to lead gen. Sometimes we have to pay to get the artwork converted, so we invest a little bit in order to hopefully catch the big fish.]
We’re pretty much only business-to-business, so if someone came in off the street and they were like, “We need jerseys for our kid’s team,” of course we’d do that, but our primary focus is business-to-business. We work in corporate, we work in nonprofit, we work in financial/tech. And our clients span the globe. We’re based in Las Vegas but our clients are from California to Maine and we’re shipping products from Missouri to Costa Rica and from L.A. to Shanghai.
[Dani: We have the UK clients who come into town every year for a convention, so we hook them up with all of their swag.]
Yes, we get a lot of people who are coming to the states from overseas and need merch; they don’t want to drag their merch across the pond. It’s cheaper to just buy it and hopefully either just sell it or hand it out.
I’ve been doing this for almost 10 years now; I started in this industry in 2016, so it’ll be 10 years next year. I kind of know who’s good, who’s not, and who’s now out of business, from experience. I mentioned earlier there’s an association that protects the end users to go direct to the suppliers. You have to be part of the association in order to have access to the suppliers. Just like in the food industry — think about a grocery store, you can’t go direct to buy Purdue chicken wholesale, you’re paying retail. Every industry has this, whether you’re in the sign industry, in the promotional product industry, the food industry, the cannabis industry — there’s predominately associations that keep the end user from going direct and you have to join the association. Or, you can scrap everyone all together and go direct to overseas. But it’s risky to do that because you don’t know who you’re working with overseas. You don’t have those connections, so you have to either know somebody who has those connections or who has done this before. It gets a little… for a long time, I never went overseas, never.
[Dani: But, your experience has shown you that mentor groups and reaching out to peers who are open to chatting about all of his stuff has been invaluable.]
We’re member of an association, a couple of them; we’re also a part of a mentorship group, it’s like a mastermind group that we pay to be a part of and there’s people like me that are a small business; we’re not the 4Imprints of the world, but there are people in that group that compete with 4Imprint. They’re big, million, million, million dollar businesses with 60 employees.
I can call up and say, “Hey, I got a 10,000-piece t-shirt order, what do you suggest? How do I move the needle to make sure I don’t fuck this up?” Because that’s happened to me, I had a six-figure order and I almost died, I was like, “What the hell? What do I do?” That’s a lot of moving parts. When I called one of the guys in our mentor group, he was like, “Don’t worry, it’s going to be ok. Even for the big companies, these orders don’t come around very often, so that’s a good one for you.” It’s about navigating all these relationships with people.
If we have a customer that’s in California or Nevada or Arizona or Utah, we try and source products from the West Coast or the Midwest because shipping gets expensive and you don’t want them to have to pay more than they need to. I’m more sales-focused so I’m of the mindset, why would a client have to ship something from New York all the way to Vegas unless they have to, unless the price is so good or maybe that manufacturer is offsetting their shipping somehow? Same thing goes for East Coast clients or Midwest clients, we try to source products from wherever they are.
In terms of international shipping, we have clients that have employees all over the globe: Canada, Shanghai, Costa Rica, South America, all over. So what happens is, the products are directly shipped from the manufacturer. They just drop ship directly from their facility and the client pays all that shipping, the duties, the tariffs, all that stuff. And they know it’s probably cheaper for them to get it produced here because they know what they’re getting, the quality of the product. They don’t really know what they’re getting [from overseas] and it’s kind of hard to match the product and the quality if they’re getting it from Sao Paulo, Canada, Shenzhen, wherever. They want it all streamlined so they get it all from one location and drop ship it.
We’ve done drop shipping programs right from here, from our dining room table. We’ve kitted 200 items right from our dining room table, which has been crazy. We’ve had partners overseas, distributors, that had U.S. based clients and shipped us their products and said, “We have to hire you for their kitting.” For a competitor of ours, we’ve kit their clients’ projects.
[Dani: Kitting is basically just getting a box or a container and putting all the things that they need to go in it, whether it looks pretty or they want it in a certain way. We did backpacks filled with stuff one time, we’ve done boxes filled with stuff.]
It’s like when you get an onboarding box and you open it up and there’s a pen and a t-shirt and a journal or a hat or whatever. That’s kitting. Somebody had to put all that stuff in there because it’s not coming from all the same place. People think, “All this stuff is coming from 4Imprint.” No, it’s actually not. All this stuff is coming from Supplier A, Supplier B, Supplier C, because the printer or the decorator for all these products is not the same. If you’re doing a t-shirt and a hat, it might be the same place. But your pen and your tumbler, 65% chance it’s different.
Some businesses, especially right now, things are rough, I get it. You go to the grocery store, you go everywhere and you feel it. So we do have some customers that are very cost conservative, which is causing us to think outside the box. We’re doing a little more overseas sourcing for a keychain or for a certain type of pen. Some things we will go overseas for, because if you can save 75% of the cost… the problem is the lead time is so much longer because it’s coming all the way across the Pacific Ocean.
[Dani: We get a lot of clients that are like, “We need something by the end of the month.” Ok, so that option’s out now.]
We can, but we have to work backwards in that sense. If you need something in a week or five days or in two days, we can do it, but now it’s about what you can get and not what you want.
We just kind of came into a kerfuffle with some race medals that we did overseas. And race medals generally are done overseas for your 5K, 10K, marathon, and whatnot. They all are done overseas but we went direct. Our supplier here will go to their factory overseas, so you’re paying extra because you’re paying for that middleman. So we went direct to the factory.
[Dani: And it’s cool because they’re custom shaped and designed and cut-out and they’re beautiful.]
They’re super, super nice and I’ve done lots of race medals. I’d never gone direct and this time I went direct because the client was a nonprofit; they had a really tight budget. It was my first time working with them and you want to make them look good because you want them to hopefully work with you again. I sponsored their bibs, I paid for the bibs. I was like, “Let’s try and make his happen.” What happened was, their race medals got stuck in customs. Their race medals shipped in the middle of August, with plenty of time. They were going to get there weeks and weeks early. The race was just this past Saturday, yesterday. They just got their race medals on Monday.
[Dani: They sat in customs for like 10 days with no tracking and no movement and then the panic started for us, for our warehouse representative, for the vendor, everybody.]
We had a plan B, we were going to make them a different race medal and ship them express. Those things do happen — they’re out of our control, out of the factory’s control, the client’s not responsible. It’s like an act of god. This is not the phone call I like to have. And I told them that, “It’s my first time working with you, this is not what I like to do.” When I worked at Zappos, we had UPS trucks go on fire, so I know things like that happen from a logistics perspective. It’s very rare that I have to make those calls or send those e-mails, but usually it’s a phone call, you don’t ever send an e-mail saying, “Sorry, not sorry! Your shit’s not arriving, we don’t know what to tell you.” But they did get it, and they were super happy and posted all over social media. She messaged me when they arrived and said, “They are so nice, I want to cry.”
When you order from overseas, you get a price that’s called Delivered Duty Paid, or DDP pricing. It’s from the factory’s door to the client’s door, and that includes everything: tariffs, duties, taxes, the cost of the item, shipping, the whole nine yards. I don’t do a lot of overseas sourcing so I can’t compare what a multitool pen costs now to last year. What I do know is that a multitool pen from overseas versus a multitool pen stateside, is a lot cheaper. I think what is happening is that the suppliers stateside are still getting it from overseas, they’re bringing it over here and they’re paying the tariffs — because we essentially pay the tariffs — so they’re paying the tariff and then they’re taking advantage of having the opportunity to upcharge a little bit more and put their margins on it. Some items it doesn’t make sense to go overseas for, like I would probably never go overseas for apparel. Some headwear we’ve done overseas projects with our stateside supplier, but I’m going to start exploring what it looks like to go overseas direct. We have a trading partner and that’s what we use. You normally don’t go direct to the factory. Most of us go to a trading partner and that trading partner has relationships with all these different factories. One of our clients that we’re working with wants a Ridge bolt action pen. I’ve never seen that in our industry, I’ve never even seen this pen. He whipped it out and was like, “I really like this pen,” it has bolt action, it’s a gel pen, it’s like an $80 pen. I took a picture of it, I went on the Ridge website, I sent our factory rep the website, the picture of the pen, and in 20 minutes I got an e-mail back, “We can get this pen.” I’m going to say 95% of the time if our client can think of it, we can probably do it.
[Dani: It’s not as taboo these days because it’s not just plastic shit from overseas. It’s high quality, really nice-wearing stuff that works. And we explain that to potential clients: “We can’t get it anywhere else. Do you want this? We have it, we like it, we use it.”]
Just a few weeks ago, a client was like, “We’d love to meet you, can we come down to your shop?” It’s always doing that dance of, “We don’t have a shop, we work remote. We’re based here, so how about I come to you. I’ll bring you some samples or I’ll drop ship samples to you.” Because sometimes people want that old-school meet-and-schmooze stuff. Which is fine, because that new customer, I’m almost positive that we’re going to end up working together. It’s going to be a big deal for us, I believe. So that hour schmooze of me going down there with a bag full of fun samples… I’ll do that. I like people, the gift of gab is my gift. It’s what I do.
[Dani: We’re really exploring because we realize that our work is where our laptops are so if we can get internet, then we can go work there. We share custody of the big kids, so we have them week on/week off, so we’ve really been taking advantage of that. Regina and the little guy and myself, we tried Mexico for a month just to see if we could even do it. We found a great nanny there and she came 20 hours a week, and we were like, “We can do it.” So then we booked Australia; I’m from Australia originally so we’re heading back for three months. As long as we’ve got internet and a nice place to stay and work… right now we’re looking for a babysitter so once we get that in place we’ll be cool to do that in Australia for three months.]
I say this quite often: I don’t want to be a multi-multi-million dollar business. Big big big business is big big big headaches. There are lots of businesses our size that work remote that are successful. It’s just how do you separate yourself from the others? You have to keep doing what you’re doing and developing good client relationships. Just keep at it. I don’t want to die a slow death… eventually what happens, in my opinion, is that some of these small businesses become mid-sized and then become big, and then they get bought out or go into private equity or all this other shit. And then it’s just another corporation, and they start to lose sight of who they were in terms of culture, sales tactics, who they are for their people. I can’t lose sight of that because I am who I am. Money makes people funny; you make too much of it, you’re going to lose sight of who you are. I want to make enough to not have any debt, live a good life, travel, do all the things. But I don’t want to make so much of it where I have to hire a bunch of employees and do all these extra things and lose sight of who we are because I think in the end, people do. That makes for bad business. So let all those other people do that, because we’re still going to be doing this!
[Dani: I can see that for us, I can see that we’re encouraging our teenagers to help out with social media and little bits and pieces as far as the business goes, to teach them all of that stuff but also help us out. I think the slow expansion, opportunities… whatever comes across our desk, we consider. We had a virtual assistant for a little while, we had an acquaintance in the business who was looking for some outside sales work, whatever comes across our desk, we’re happy to entertain.]
Right now we’re entertaining opportunities to collaborate. There’s an opportunity I’m taking to collaborate with a competitor of ours who’s huge, a global company, but they primarily focus on just soft goods, so apparel, headwear, screen printing, printing on soft goods. They go after big national brands, but when that big national brand comes to them and says, “Hey, we need 48 banners,” they don’t do that. Or when they say, “We need a thousand keychains,” they don’t do that. So instead of them saying, “Sorry, we can’t help you,” they’ll say — hopefully, and this is what we’re talking about now — they’ll say, “We can help you.” I take the order and give them a 10% cut. I think there’s room for that for us. I would rather have 90% of something than 100% of nothing. I think there’s opportunities out there.
[Dani: I did touch on a little bit about how we are good team players: she picks up the things that I’m not good at and I pick up the things that she’s not good at. It did take some adjustment to figure out what those things were and it also took some learning of control for Regina, because she had done everything. Those first few months she would ask me to do something and then as I’m doing it, she’s doing it as well. I had to explain to her that if you want me to do something, you have to allow me to have the time and the grace to do it. Even if I do it wrong, just like a regular employer-employee relationship. So we had to change that dynamic a little bit. Sometimes I’m good at things but she doesn’t know because she’s already done it. That was really the main struggle — her giving up that bit of control. When I first started working with her, she had 120,000 e-mails in her inbox. In the inbox, not junk mail. And she’d fork through them each morning to find the ones that were important and just ignore all the others. It took me a few weeks, but I got everything filed away and nothing got deleted because she might need to possibly find it one day in the future. These days, there’s never more than 50 e-mails in her inbox and everything else is filed away. Little things like that is where I thrive. I’m an organizer, so I’m the one filing things and putting them away. She’s now the one asking me where everything is. That’s also part of the reason I stepped in to help: she was working seven days a week, nighttime, morning time, evening time, middle of the night, whatever it was because clients are on the East Coast and clients are here and vendors are over there. The backlog of paperwork and other things that needed to get done behind the scenes was a struggle.]
I have one hat, and it’s the Regina hat and the Regina hat encompasses everything: being a mother, being a partner, being an entrepreneur and trying to do good at all of them. But the problem is I’m always on and the reason why I’m always on is because we need to be different than the next person that they’re going to call. So when somebody sends an e-mail, I want to be able to be responsive.
[Dani: You’re right, if somebody e-mails or sends a contact form on a Sunday, it’s responded to immediately.]
I know when I was buying swag at Zappos, I didn’t get a response for three days. When you e-mail on a Friday mid-day and you don’t get a response until Monday, it feels like an eternity. It really does. If I get an e-mail on Friday, I’m responding on Friday. And I’m going to try to respond soon as I see it. So I’m checking my e-mail multiple times a day. I’m getting text messages; my cell phone number is everywhere: it’s on my website, it’s in my business cards. People are texting me, DMing me on Instagram, they’re on LinkedIn. I want that, we’re a small business and that’s how I put food on the table. So in times like this when shit’s going crazy with prices and tariffs, you kind of have to be full-on when you’re a small business. When someone else is paying you, that’s a different story, you have to worry about getting laid off. We have to worry about feeding our kids. It’s a dance we have to do.
Sometimes you go to work and every day’s the same. You log in and it’s the same username and password everyday — it’s the same thing over and over, the same phone calls and the same problems. This shit is different every day. It’s never the same fire, it’s always something new and it’s fun. When you get a rush order, it’s like living on the edge of your seat. There’s so many things and we just have fun with it every day. No day is the same.
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