YouSaid · the spoken record

Ariel Kaye

lines on the record: 92
first: 2024-02-05
most recent: 2024-02-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I actually just went karaoke recently and I started with Whitney Houston Dance with somebody, which is not an easy song. That's hard. How do you get those notes? It's a very hard song, but you know what? It really just turns it up. You know, the room gets excited. You need some good fun upbeat musics to kick everything off and to get people in the mood.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Luck is certainly a part of it. I mean, I think from a timing perspective, you know, being first to market, launching in 2014, the market was not nearly as saturated as it was today. I mean, you could get to decent scale spending relatively little marketing dollars. I mean, it's just a different world. And in some ways, it's so much easier to launch a company today. I've worked pretty hard. I mean, I've hustled, man. I've hustled. You know, but I've also been so lucky to have such strong people around the table. But yeah, I mean, this was it. This was the vision. And it's... It feels like it's been a million years and five minutes at the same time”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love what I do. I truly do. And I love the people that I get to work with. And I'm in it for the long haul. I mean, there's going to be exciting moments for consumer brands that have strong customer bases in the next few years. And for me, as long as I'm continuing to learn and grow and feel challenged, like I am engaged. And that is never slowed down.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I made a choice in 2021 that I was going to make time. I was going to make time at whatever cost. I had to. But then also the beginning of this year, I actually stepped down as CEO. And I passed the baton to our former COO. And it's also allowed me to get back to the parts of the business that I love, which is the creative side of everything. And so I'm spending all of my time now focused on the brand evolution and who we are and who we're going to be for the next 10 years and the creative. And that's been really fun too.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Super professional human that could function, and in reality, I couldn't. And I'm very pleased to say that in the past, you know, year and a half, two years, I've really prioritized a lot of my own personal development and growth and have done a lot of what we like to call in LA the work. And in retrospect, again, I wish I had asked for more help. I wish I would have said, you know, I'm going through this. I think what I would have found out is that I was not alone and I probably would have been connected to a number of people who had experienced similar things. And, you know, I think. People often tell me how strong I am, especially now knowing what I've gone through, and I hate that word Because it just implies this ability to ignore pain and not feel and not fall apart. And I think that.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was the hardest time of my life, honestly. You know, I think a lot about when things started to fall apart in my personal life and the gratitude I had for my professional life, because while things were somewhat in chaos and crisis behind closed doors, I had this other door that I could walk through where things were seemingly perfect and where things were Positive and there was growth. And even during some of our more challenging times at Parachute, I was very private about what was going on. So, you know, most of my executive team members didn't really know what was even happening. And I felt very guarded and I felt very alone. Many ways ashamed of what was happening and also this real desire to show up as this like”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was tough. I mean, it was a big change. You know, I think up until that moment of becoming a mom, my career and this role as leader and CEO and founder was my entire identity. And it was also important for my team. I mean, you know, at that point, I had some really strong leadership and it was great to be able to watch people step into these bigger roles in my absence. I love being a mom. I mean, being a mom is one of my greatest joys and being a mom that can share my company and my success with my daughter and now son, you know, is Amazing. I mean, I love bringing my kids to parachute stores and the whole thing.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In 2018, I got married on my way to my rehearsal dinner. I signed a term sheet. And two weeks later, I opened a store in New York City, and a week later I found out I was pregnant. May 2018 was a busy month.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we started with bed frames, which again made sense, but we decided that we wanted to do furniture in other rooms, so in the living room. And it was successful in many ways, and it was unsuccessful in others. I mean, the logistics were just so complicated. And I think we were unprepared for how difficult getting the products from our manufacturer to the customer would be. And in an effort to focus on profitability, we've slowed that part of our growth down for now. I mean, we've got some incredible furniture in our office that we have designed and are designing. And, you know, it's the category will come back. We just are going to relaunch it with more information and a Better supply chain”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the idea. Yeah, I mean, we wanted to be in every room of the home. So as we looked at the home and we looked at the revenue opportunities, you know, furniture is a huge lion's share of this home category. Yeah.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We went to towels, so we were focused on bedding for the first two years, but then we also had an incredible customer base that were asking for more. I mean, and we were building that trust with them so that they would say, you know, I want this and I want that and can you, I'm having a baby and I want products that are also clean and don't have chemicals and look just like yours, but in a miniature size. And so we were leveraging the customer feedback and over time we started moving to other categories like rugs and window treatments and kitchen and decorative pillows and then eventually into some furniture.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I knew that retail was going to be part of our strategy from the beginning. I mean, it's in my first pitch deck. This is a category where historically 90% of purchases were made offline when I started this brand. We were already doing something very different. And I knew that there was just going to be this consumer that it was going to be a much harder shift in their behavior to buy online. And so we rented a window of a store, like a little window area in Venice. And we put some signage up and we just saw the way that people responded when they touched and felt our products that it was a real selling point. Like our products felt good. And I think because we knew that everyone was buying offline, it just felt like, you know.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's California cool. Which is where we're from, so it was very authentic to us. You know, I mean, and it was just like, this is all how we lived. You know, it wasn't like we had to hire an outside branding agency to tell us how to do this. We were just like, but this is what our bed actually looks like. Why don't we take a picture of that? And then why don't we put a model in there or a person in the early days, we just had friends and people that were real people because we wanted it to be really real, you know. And it worked.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I felt like, you know, while we weren't going to put the word parachute all over our sheets, we weren't going to brand them. We weren't going to make, we weren't going to move into parachute t-shirts as branding opportunities. But we did need to create a look and feel and an aesthetic that was recognizable. And so for us, that meant this art of the undone bed, this effortless luxury. This very specific vibe”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Humans, humans, yeah. There were no like imagery of beds to cell bedding never had a human in them There was never a family curled up. There was never a person snuggling with their blanket.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. One of the things that I believed was an opportunity was to humanize this category because, you know, it was a brandless category. And I looked around and realized that there were no models ever in a bed.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it came naturally. I mean, I think that the team of two to team of 20 is a really special time. You know, everyone is somewhat sitting around the table together. There's a lot of communication and collaboration. And of course, there's like, you know, various issues that come up. But there was just so much energy and excitement. I think what helped me the most, to be honest, is that my first few jobs at a college, I had pretty challenging managers and I worked at companies with pretty poor culture. And so while I didn't necessarily have a model of what to do, I had a very clear model of what not to do. And that went a long way.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they were wearing our robes to their live tapings. I mean, we were one of their first. I think two, maybe three advertisers. We were before they even launched. We just had a hunch that because it was a political year and the election year, that would be a popular podcast.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, and I just was like committed to building a healthy business. Were we profitable every year from day one? No. Like that, we were trying to grow and we had venture investors telling us to spend millions of dollars on marketing. And once we started to do marketing and we did do some podcasts, we were actually the first podcast advertiser on PodSave America. And that changed our business. That was one of the most successful advertising things that we ever did. I mean, it was. Crazy what it did”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wanted to grow with the customer. I wanted to build trust. I wanted to move into different categories. I knew that would cost money. I wanted to build the right team. I just, I don't know. And I had venture investors, but I think I only took their advice like 50% of the time And today, one of my biggest issues with the startup venture private equity world is that no one gives credit for financial discipline”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, exactly. And so I think for me. There were moments, like, yes, moments of deep anxiety and fear, and we're not doing this quick enough and I don't have enough money and I can't do this, you know, I can't spend $200 million on marketing to become a household name overnight. But when I could come out of that spiral, I could put myself back into a place where I could say with confidence, both to myself and my team and frankly my investors, that building a brand does not happen overnight. And I think also because I had started this business after an early crop of companies had raised too much money and kind of crashed and burned, there was this cautionary tale. And I think I just like, I believed”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Than nobody else had, obviously, because it was my idea. And then three months later, other brands are popping up. And so, you know, presumably we're all working on these products at the same time. But, you know, I think the reality was, is that... You know, I looked and I was like, look, this is a $30 billion market. And when you looked at all of our websites, they all had a very different look and feel. They all had a very different value proposition. And while, of course, people are going to compare shop, we are all slightly different price points. I just decided that I was going to keep my head down. I mean, obviously be aware of what's happening because that is your job. The thing when I think about this time is that Venture capital, especially at this time, thinks you can build brands quick.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it definitely caused some anxiety in the sense that I felt a little blindsided, you know, like here I was with my head down building this brand and thinking I had this great unique idea”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a good problem to have, and it was a devastating problem for me at the time. You know, I thought that it was over. It was a good lesson in communication and just how to be transparent with customers and say this is what's happening, and we're a growing business and we sold through our inventory. It's getting made in Italy. We're going to give you a play by play and we're part of this journey and we're so grateful. And I'd say about 90% of the people were like, congratulations, we're proud of you. And yes, we. No one's going to trust us. And, you know, it was really upsetting. But we made it through.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. Yeah. And then we sold out. I mean, we sold out really quickly. We had this blurb in the Wall Street Journal that really put us on the map. I mean, it was maybe three sentences in a larger story. And we. We sold out of everything, and then we put our products on pre order and sold through the pre orders. I mean, it just became a bit of a disaster. So we had all these orders on pre order, and some of that inventory was going to be two or three weeks late. But then we had accidentally sold through the pre-order. So I had to go and email, you know, 75 people and say, hey, you're not going to get your bedding for four months”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so as a result, I was getting meetings with the top investors in LA, San Francisco, New York, and I was able to run a process quite quickly because at Launchpad, they were able to say, you know, this brand just launched. It's a consumer brand that got product market fit, you know, the press has been amazing. Sales are through the roof. There's something really happening here. And they were a trusted resource for deal flow. I remember being at South by Southwest that year and I had brought about 2,000 eye masks that said Dream Big, ParachuteHome.com. I was wearing them like headbands, passing them out, running around to every party, throwing them at DJ booths. Meeting investors there. I was able to close some additional investors there. And all of a sudden I had raised almost a million dollars.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so one of the benefits of being, and one of the reasons why I wanted to join Launchpad, I mean, there were so many benefits, but one was that this was a time where investors reached out to accelerators and said, what's going on here? Like, how do we need to deploy capital? You guys have access to these companies. Who should we be investing in?”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, our margin wasn't great. I mean, it wasn't horrible, but it wasn't great. We weren't losing money when all said and done. I mean, I wasn't buying anything at scale. So there was no economies of scale. Yeah, it was. I wasn't losing money.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am out of my mind. But when I look back at this time, I can't help but smile ear to ear. Like this, it was incredible. And also, by the way, I'd been in this accelerator program for like three months at this point. And people were like, what's going on in that corner? Everyone else is building software companies. Like I am the only person that has a consumer product. And so everyone's, you know, making their websites and apps and things. Of a sudden, I launched this business and I'm like everyone out of the way. I've got boxes coming in. It was happening, you know, it was like I did not, there was not one minute of it that I was not loving.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so every morning I would get the orders from the day. I would print out my packing slips. I would print out the shipping label. I would fold the boxes together. I would take home these packing slips. I go directly to the storage unit. I pack my car full of the products. I come to the office. I pack the boxes, call UPS, and it was like, that was, and then in the middle of the day, I'm like doing customer service emails. I'm trying to pitch investors. I'm doing all these mentorship calls. I'm like,”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Decor, Harper's Bazaar, apartment therapy. I mean, we had, and then we got more press because of the press, you know, and so the first few weeks, all of a sudden it went from, you know, two orders a day to three orders a day to ten orders a day to all of a sudden I'm looking at my order list and I'm like, I don't know any of these people. I've never even heard of these towns. Like what is happening here?”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do the launch So having worked in PR, I actually really did believe in the power of PR. I knew the power of a launch moment. You know, it's like you only launch once. And especially in that moment, a new direct-to-consumer brand. In a category with very little, you know, innovation or certainly never an online brand. I mean, that was unheard of. I mean, we were really first to market. And so I hired an agency and they took a chance. And, you know, I promised that I would pay them more later, you know, once we had money. But we launched on in January of 2014 with incredible press.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your first tagline was like a designed in LA, made in Europe, delivered directly to you. You know, and in those conversations, I was educating people about thread count, and that was like a big, I mean, people love that story. You know, people love learning that Thread Count is a marketing gimmick. And so that became a real hook for people. But, you know, and in December as well, I did a big photo shoot. So I rented an Airbnb and I shot all these products and I hired a PR agency with my last $3,000.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was the majority of it, and it took a long time and it was complicated and we built this custom CMS program. And that's what we used to launch. three weeks after I well almost immediately after I launched I realized when I was like oh I see this like error we got to fix this or we got to fix that and they're like oh that'll be two weeks that'll be three weeks it'll take and I was like”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I worked with the design firm. And so the thing about these days was that Shopify and it was like Shopify and Magento and neither of them had very sophisticated CMS platforms at the time. I mean, they did, but what I was told by the designers that I worked with was that we needed to build a custom platform.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I sent lots of emails. I did a few holiday trunk shows and gifting markets. And at that point, the website was finished so I could place orders and just fulfill there.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Immediately when I heard the name, I said yes. Actually, Eddie was in that meeting with me. We looked at each other and we were like, oh my God. And it was inspired by, you know, the movement of the fabric when you make your bed and the sheet billows down like a parachute. And one of the other insights that I had going into starting this brand was that, you know, this was a predominantly female centric category. Like women were buying sheets And I felt like there's this huge opportunity to create a brand that appealed to both men and women. But yeah, it was Parachute. It was from that moment on, it was like Go Time. It was, I mean, it was a home run.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so my rules were that it couldn't have an ampersand and it couldn't have any missing vowels because that was a very popular thing at the time. And I, you know, saffrons like the most expensive spice. It was like luxury and oak is how you build a home. That's where it came from. Anyway, but I walked into the design meeting and the owner of the design company said, you know, I had this idea. What about parachute?”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, so credit goes to our design agency for coming up with the name Parachute. I walked into a meeting. We were eating a bunch of sandwiches and we had been working on a number of other names, none of which were right, but at some point we had had to incorporate. So we had like picked a name that, you know, to just use as a placeholder.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My to-do list was endless. My to-do list was everything. I mean, I actually remember one day, like catching up with a friend and my friend being like, so what do you even do every day? And I burst into tears. I was like, what do you mean, what do I do every day? And, you know, I think it's so interesting because the phase of pre-build, especially when no one around you understands what you're doing is really dark. It's really lonely. I mean, being a founder in general can be really lonely and really isolating and feel like you're an island of one. But before you have a physical product to show someone, I mean, to be fair, it was a fair question. You know, like, what do you do every day? I mean, I was figuring out how to import. I was figuring out how to get boxes. I was figuring out how to get a website. I was figuring out how to take pictures of products. I mean, I did not know how to do anything.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Work always came first, you know, like that this company was going to be my life. And that meant missing weddings, missing dinners, missing social events, missing parties. It meant this was going to be it for me for many years. Like this was going to be my number one priority.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was forced to ask for help, and I needed help. I mean, there was, I knew so little about what I was trying to do when I was figuring everything out on the go and also being around other founders, I finally felt like I was like not crazy because I wasn't just like in a bedroom by myself. I like had people to talk to. And I think at that point, that was when I knew the amount of sacrifice that I was going to be making.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They gave $25,000 in office and resources, which by the way, when people ask me about raising capital, that was invaluable to me. That $25,000. So I had raised $30,000, which allowed me to start building this website. And then that $25,000 came in at the 11th hour and allowed me to buy inventory. And that is what allowed me to start this business. And I actually think that one of the biggest things that I learned in that experience was how to ask for help, which by the way is a superpower. It is. It is one of my superpowers. And I think a lot of founders go through building companies thinking that asking for help is a sign of weakness, but I”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so my friend Sam Teller, who ran this accelerator program called Launchpad, and some really great companies came out of Launchpad. I was actually in the final class.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally. And I did need to turn it up. And it was the best feedback I got was turn it up because people aren't mind readers and you learn that. You know, if you want something, you need to ask. And if you want people to know how you feel, it's important to tell them.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From that day Yeah, and I was like, so I need to be running late. I need to be like sweating profusely. I need to have bruises on my arms because I like dropped a box of product on me. It was like, oh, got it.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for sure. And, you know, there was a day where I was running really late and I was going for a meeting, and I came in and I had this like crazy energy because I was like, oh my God, I was like trying to do this and I was that. But the feedback I got was phenomenal. From that.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because It was hard, you know. I mean, there were days, you know, I would have a great meeting and be like, I'm on top of the world, I'm the most successful person ever. This is going to be amazing. And then I'd, you know, have another meeting and I'd be like, I quit. And it was exhausting. But I finally did raise $30,000. My good friend Eddie brought three friends to the table and I got $30,000 from them collectively.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what I kept hearing was, cool, keep it up. Let's talk in a month. Let's talk in a few months. Why don't you show me a model? Why don't you do this? Can you show me a site? Can you show that there is interest here? Like, can you put up a website and drive some early sales?”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I was going to be a digital business. And so, in those early days, too, you know, I thought I was supposed to play it cool, you know? I'm sure that I did not walk into those rooms with the intensity that I felt inside. You know, I walked in being like, I got this great idea. Like, come on, we're going for a ride.”
2024-02-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Parachute Home: Ariel Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT