YouSaid · the spoken record

Missy Park

lines on the record: 102
first: 2021-10-18
most recent: 2021-10-18
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

“They might pop me up here. I do have a Budweiser beer glass with Megan Rapino on it. I think that'll do. So it's kind of like I'm having a beer with her.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Straight pass through to the players. We're not asking, I don't want, and I said, like, I don't want to have a beer with the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team. Honestly, this is sure.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. It's percentages. It's not binary. It's not all luck or. All hard work. It's percentages. And I think Know if you want to talk about the luckiest things that probably had sort of the absolutely necessary parts of it. I had to be a young woman growing up in the 70s and 80s, not in the 40s and 50s. That's luck. I probably had to grow up in a family that was encouraging me to be an entrepreneur, even though that might not be something young women in the South did at the time. That's luck. I had to grow up. That's luck So, when you look at all those very lucky things, and then you add on to it all of the things that happenstance meetings and the people that offered me a hand up, I mean, I'd say it's 90% luck. But then what I would say is the part that I can control is the 10%”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I want to say no. And I want to say maybe a little bit yes in only the sort of frivolous way that a 20-year-old might like, we need to start the women's version of Nike, you know. And then once I got around to it. No, I don't think I ever could have envisioned what The work has become, and the people, right, that I've gotten to work with, I'm not sure I really had expectations, to be honest. I was like, this is going to be a fun adventure And I think that really when I think about business, it's the great game of business. You know, we're not curing cancer, Guy. I mean. So it can be fun. There can be times when it is hard and you take your losses, but it's a great game and it's been a great adventure. So I hope I have a few more adventures left in me.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over the next 10 to 15 years, I'll be able to pass Title IX on to the next group of owner operators who I hope will do it a whole heck of a lot better than I have. So I am not thinking actively about an exit strategy. I am thinking actively about leadership succession.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't have No, I think I'm coming more to what the exit strategy is as I, you know, I couldn't have answered it. It's important. It's absolutely incumbent upon me to be able to answer that question. If I want Title IX to outlast this generation of leaders, I need to be able to answer that question. And the thing that I know is that my goal is to get it in the hand of the next generation of female owner operators. I do not need a liquidity event because of the way we have grown it. At this point, we have zero debt. We have zero outside investors. So it is a good spot for someone to come in and be able to earn a seat at the ownership table. And that is my hope is that at some point,”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Guy, you are asking me the question that the accountants and the lawyers have been asking me since day one. What is the exit strategy?”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So we are in the women's sports and fitness business, right? We sell workout gear and sweatpants and stuff to do outdoors and people are doing that in droves. So retail is still coming back. Not quite there, but our direct, which we're before COVID, we were about 80% e-com and 20% retail. Then we were 100% e-comm and 0% retail. Now we've probably worked our way up to about 85% e-com and 15% retail, but a bigger number overall.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're able to bring everybody back to full pay, and then we were also able to give back to people the pay cuts they had taken.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've been pushing for us to move from print to digital for like six years COVID pushed us probably as far as we'd been in six years in six months. Everything moved digitally, stuff that had been paper-based was now online. So I really started first seeing the team just step up to the challenge of converting us to a fully accounting team went entirely paperless, which again, we've been pushing for. Our design team presented all their decks online. And then sales start to come back maybe in August or September. Of course, we didn't recover the year. We ended up in negative territory. But I would say we made up a lot of ground on it. So much so that by, I would say, July, we felt confident everybody had taken 25% or more pay cut. Wow.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know Have to shut all of the stores. We have to shut our headquarters and then probably the most challenging part for me was our distribution center, which, like Amazon, because it's selling goods that are shipping directly home, could remain open and also if we shut that, there is literally no cash. So shelter place comes. Sales drop like a rock. We're in the middle of what should have been our busiest season. We should have done about $10 million in sales and we lost million dollars of sales in the last two weeks of March alone. We had six weeks of cash on hand.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you for being gentle, but hell yeah, you know, sometimes the right woman for the job is a man. And I think that Johnny Lynn, he was Just what I feel like every time we have had a presidently needing the business, they have been exactly what we needed at the time they came in. We needed a diversity of ideas about how to run this business. And Johnny is going to bring that to us. And he is such a good leader. And I felt confident knowing that I wasn't going to be leading the company on a daily basis, that the next person we needed to lead was someone who could build a great executive team. So they could lead long past when I'm here.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Inventory way too much inventory But in those moments, I mean, we have good people. And I wish I could have been the coach that they needed me to be. And I think I'm getting better at it. I would say that the progress is slow. But I think, you know, the lessons that I have to learn now are the lessons of leadership more than they are entrepreneurship.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I remember talking to Dana at one point and I was like, you know, I think we're going to have to take out a mortgage on the house and I just need you to tell me that you're willing to go back to work.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes No, it's just too late. No, it's not happening. Don't get me wrong, print is an awesome secret weapon to have. They're a part of your marketing mix, but in 2014-2015, yikes. I mean, maybe they were eighty percent of the marketing mix. Now when you consider our digital, you consider our retail prints only 30% of the marketing mix. So a dramatic change in six years.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's a great thing, but it's also a challenging thing. I couldn't figure out how to rebuild the organization around digital. And I think I set the team up for maybe the only time in the history of the company where we were not all playing off the same sheet of music. There were folks who were very committed to the print model.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Influencers and things like that. All of that. And it's, you know, I mean, it's one of those things where, you know, if a company's been around a long time, it has a legacy.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, very rough. You know, when I was a kid, something bad happened to somebody and a self-inflicted wound. And I talked to my mom about it. I'd say, well, it was their own fault. And my mom would say, well, those are the worst kind. I mean, and I would say that I have a lifetime of the worst kind of self-inflicted wounds. Some of the biggest mistakes are people mistakes. And mostly they are my own failures and leadership that negatively impacted team members or the whole team. And 2014-15, while it had its share of people mistakes, I think it was really a failure on my part to recognize how quickly we needed to shift from a print and bricks and mortar model to a digital model.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I am filled up by seeing these women come in and grow their businesses. We share resources and sometimes even finances with these kinds of businesses. And we're all stronger and better for it. So it's just a different game.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, and I think it's, you know, when I think about that guy, I think about how this choice that we made and that we remake every day is informed by our business practices and it's everything from the suppliers we choose to who we choose to hire. I mean, probably in the most important way is that we have chosen to mentor up and coming female executives rather than some plug and play C-level. I have to say one of the things I'm still very proud of is that we grew the business from probably zero. With not one person that knew anything about retail or apparel or business at all. I mean, it's just like pure passion about women and the transformative power of sports. And we have this pitch fest that we do twice a year for up-and-coming women run brands.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have. I think we all have always measured this idea of value creation much more broadly. And I think my philosophy, and I think it's all of our philosophy now, can probably be summed up with one of my favorite sayings, not all things that count can be counted.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. No, but it's spot on. It's spot on. So I play basketball in college and I have to tell you, I never played better basketball than when I was having to compete for a spot. So, I mean, I think that having more folks in the field helps us all raise our game. At the same time, I'd say we're Some ways we're competing on the same game, but in other ways we're not. And to be really honest, if Title I were a publicly traded company, someone should fire me right now. I mean, that's just the facts of it. They should fire me because the fact is the sole purpose of a publicly traded company or a private equity-backed company is to maximize shareholder value in purely financial terms. And plain and simple, I haven't done that. But I would say that at Title IX,”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, kind of in the nicest way possible, what you're saying is, why'd you let all those late players come in and squash you like a bug?”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But at a certain point, she decided she was more interested in fitness instruction understandably than in making sports bras. So she said, hey, I want to get out of this business. Would you like to buy the rights and designs for this, we called it the frog bra. And I said, sure. And then she coached us up on how to get into the manufacturing business”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, what I would say about us is mostly what we are, and I think you have to be if you're going to be owner-operated, we are very opportunistic. So the very first thing we ended up manufacturing ourself was a sports bra. And it was because I found a sports bra that someone else was selling. It was kind of a passion project for her. She was maybe a yoga teacher and she couldn't find a sports bra she liked. So she made this one. It ended up being a top-selling sports bra for us for many, many years.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes it's going to be, I am really digging in on work, and sometimes it's going to be I am really digging in on home. And then for those ordinary days, hopefully I get home in time for dinner every day.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, really young, and she's all like swaddled, and she's on one of those finny chairs, like spinny roley chairs. And she's just lying there all swaddled up, like right on the chair. There's no one around. I'm like, ha But I think I needed to have that and realized like, wow, that's really, that's really screwed up. I got to do better. But then I think now when people talk about work-life balance, I think You know, there's really no such thing as balance. If you want to do something really great, whether that's be a great mom or be a great entrepreneur or a great business person, you're really going to have to dig in and have a lot of imbalance for a while. But it always has to flip back. There's going to be a teeter-totter.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And I think, you know, that's a little bit of a hero complex there, right? You know, the business was doing well. I was still running the business at that point, but the business was doing well enough. But, you know, I mean, that's the thing about running a business. You get so much positive reinforcement, especially if you're the founder, owner, entrepreneur, you've done every job, you know all the answers. And then I suppose there's something about like, wow, I know mom. I don't know any answers. I think I'd rather go back to the place where I know answers. I mean, if, you know, you want me to get into sort of the psychological underpinnings of that choice, you know, I have this picture. It's like a polaroid of Gilly. So she comes to the office with me.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Second piece, though, I will say is our sports bra business ended up there was a small piece of that that ended up being a big part of our business to high school and college athletes, even now. We have a lot of mother, daughter, first trips to buy sports bras happened at our retail stores.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably we think of our customers as sort of like that 30 to 50 age range. And it was pretty much that then as well. You know, they're not, they have some disposable income because, you know, at that point direct or e-com wasn't as big a thing that very few people were willing to buy something sight unseen. But what we found mostly was people were coming from all over the country. We were flying to SFO And they would come to our store. So we were really looking for that woman who is in the workforce now and is coming into her own either in aerobic studios or, you know, in the outdoors and needs to find the gear that works for her.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know what the most incredible statistic about that first store was? The amazing thing about that store was that over fifty percent of the customers that came to that store came from more than two hours away.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think we just weren't sophisticated. I wasn't sophisticated enough to think like that. I was just, I want to control everything that I can. I know it's a delusion, but I still want to control it, right? I mean, certainly people propose them, but I just couldn't again remember, we're mostly selling other people's brands at this point.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stay with us for a long time, but it's not like we're going out there and we're going to do a hundred million dollar marketing campaign that's going to net us a whole bunch more new customers all at once. That's just never been the model.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way we did it is the old fashioned way, you know. We went to a lot of races and tournaments and we would sell stuff like our excess inventory. We would sell there and we would build up our mailing list by doing that. And then The hard work of building a customer file, you know, selling people. Sports bra selling a woman a sports bra, she can't do without, and you earn her trust on that, and she comes back to you for all of her athletic apparel needs. And to this day, I would say that we are much better at keeping our customers than we are at acquiring new ones. That's just always, and I think that's, again, that sort of bootstrappy hitting singles. You know, our customers know that we get them, that we're product users and product testers, so that once they find us.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said, you know what? If it works out, then maybe you can keep doing some work. And so that was really how I hired my first actual paid employee as Renee Thomas Jacobs. We are still good friends. She ended up being our first president. But it felt like a big step. Like there's Who can I afford to do this Should I just be working harder myself?”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every time someone asked me that, I'm taken back to my own decisions around that and how hard it was. You know, first we just had people who would help us out and volunteer. And then I remember, and this is probably one of the conflicts and maybe something about being a female entrepreneur, I really wanted to go home to South Carolina for Christmas. And the phones were going to ring and people were going to want to place orders and return product. I wanted to be in South Carolina and I couldn't be because of the phones. And this was before call forwarding and all the stuff that you could do now. So I had a teammate and I said, hey, and she lived in California. I was like, would you be up for minding the store while I go home for Christmas? And she said, sure.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But by the same token, what I would say is if you hit singles, Which we do, and we're good at, you're not going to hit a grand slam. And that's just you need to make your peace with that. And I think I would take the staying in the game of singles to striking out a whole bunch and every once in a while getting a grand slam.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just about how we've, you know, people want to riding by the door on scooters, so there's chaos. We play a lot of games at work. So there's a lot of stuff going on around. So he's walked into a foreign country. Maybe I'm talking about every year we do something called the Title IX Olympics and we divide up into teams and we play sports together for a day. people, you know, get hurt, hopefully not badly, but we play hard. And that just didn't work in his investment banker mind, right? And then Estelle came in and she sits down and she starts talking to him. And that guy was so visibly relieved and just talking to her. I just realized I don't even know the language to talk. So, to answer your question Do we consider it yes? Would it have to be someone who is very different from me to really get that deal done? Yes.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm talking to him. And guy literally, the longer I talk, the more nervous he is getting, as if he has walked into some sort of alternate universe that does not speak his language.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you always, it always has to stay on your radar because you never know what's going to happen, right? But it's never a real option. I think the time I was most aware of. How impossible it would be to go out and get investors as we had a president, the first president we had who came in and Estelle de Musi, she did a great job running the business. She'd done everything. She bought businesses, sold businesses, and she came in and ran the business for a while. And I said, you know, somebody contacted me from one of the big investment banks. I can't remember who now. I told a sale of, I said, would you like to talk with this guy? Would you like us to talk to this guy? She's like, sure, let's do it. Let's do it. So the guy comes and I'm meeting with him first. I really literally cannot remember his name anymore, but he comes into the office.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Experience, marketing experience. We had everybody was just true believers, product users that are really interested in women's outdoor gear and athletic apparel. That's it.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know what I would say is it's just like staying in the game, right? I mean, that's just the best way I can describe it. It's just for me, I'm just like, I'm going to just stay in the game here. I'm going to kind of keep hitting little singles. And I think it kind of goes to basically a business philosophy to just sort of fail faster to succeed sooner. And, you know, if you're going to make big mistakes, those take a long time. Little mistakes don't take a very long time. You can make a lot of little mistakes really fast. So I think it was just because we didn't have anybody really until we were over $40 million. We didn't have anybody who had retail experience.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably shortly after that we moved into again another converted warehouse just a it was next to an ice cream manufacturer also a small entrepreneurial lead and every morning it would smell like chocolate when I came in so everything that we shipped out started smelling like chocolate”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What happened was we had installed some racks in the garage, and by we I mean Dana. And she's handy but not super handy. And they probably weren't installed in the most professional manner. So they came crashing down in the middle of the night, but we're not in the garage. We're asleep. We don't hear it. And then there's a rainstorm. And, you know, like Berkeley garages, there's just the water swooped up in there. And I think it was about that point where I decided it was time for us to. Get real office space. I'm like, this is ridiculous. We need to stop doing this.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think that's the thing those little lifelines that someone can offer you. It's not like, oh, and then we got investor and I got a million dollars and everything was fine. It's like, no, there were a lot of little lifelines all along the road and continue to be.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what would I do in terms of the stress relief? And Dana reminds me of this all the time because it's, you never get out of that. I mean, we're always in it for the rest of building a business. You have those times. And my solution then was to call my dad because he was, whenever I talked with him, he always just had like the one good piece of advice that I needed to hold on to. I remember very early on when I was ready to hang it up. And I called him and I was just like, Dad, I just It's just not happening. I can't learn fast enough. I just don't think I can do it. And then he would just go to the business. And he's like, well, tell me about your customers. Tell me about how much it costs you to get a new customer now. How much did it cost you to get a customer this time last year? And he would just find the successes.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, you know, that's a matter of laws or a matter of practice. Right. Because we actually couldn't be officially married until, believe it or not, something like 2012 or 15. I mean, which is crazy.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Dana actually had a real job and a good job. So her paycheck was supporting both of us. Oh, wow. So by this time, you know, I wasn't taking any money out of the business.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In and out, no cash. Constantly. Constantly out of cash. And I remember like two times a year I would be, and even now I sort of have sort of stress reactions around these two times of year. It's the time when we're building up a lot of inventory. Yeah. And, you know, there are these two times when you have invested a lot of money in marketing, you've invested a lot of money in inventory and sales are going to come. You hope they're going to come, but you don't know if they are. And it kind of two times a year. I just be done. I'm just like, you want.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and just kind of, you know, the ways you think about. So we did the first catalog, it went poorly, saw a little opportunity for sports bra, so I was going to make the most of that that I could. But I was also even then trying to figure out, okay. How do I kind of get out of this and just go back and get a job again? I can't just quit after one, but I'll do a second one and it'll be super, super cheap. It'll just be like a folded up piece of paper. It's like super cheap. So I did a super cheap folded up piece of paper and it did a little better even though it was a little worse.”
2021-10-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Title Nine: Missy Park · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT