YouSaid · the spoken record

Raegan Moya-Jones

lines on the record: 64
first: 2019-08-26
most recent: 2019-08-26
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

“Yes, absolutely. But what I will say is it wasn't until I let go of the anger that I was really able to move forward. So the anger was killing me and it wasn't until I let go of all that that I was able to really go okay. That was that, and now let's prove that you can do it all over again.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is that is exactly what it is. And they really did, they killed my confidence, but only for a period of time, which was really tough for me to sort of start thinking, well, maybe they're right. You know, maybe I am useless and I can't do it. But you're right. They couldn't take away the ambition. She's absolutely right”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It purifies things. So our distiller who created the recipe for it had been working on it for 10 years and he's a chemical engineer. So he's combined the tradition of making moonshine with chemistry and just come up with this phenomenal recipe for moonshine. So it's a great product.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very interesting to be back going door to door, even though this time I'm just going door, door to door at bars and restaurants rather than to baby boutiques. But nonetheless, it's pretty much the same hustle.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it couldn't be further away from baby blankets. It's actually a premium moonshine company. So I've gone off on quite a tangent. So yes, it's a company called St. Lunar. And yeah, it's been fun.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it depends. I think it depends on who you are. I think most entrepreneurs are pretty type A-driven people, I would say. So for me being idle was actually a bad thing. I had to find something to focus on, something that was of interest meaningful to me. That was part of the healing.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I would say I was depressed. I put on nearly £30. I drank way too much wine. I was eating and drinking to cope. I was confused about what my next steps were going to be. But other than that, I was kind of thinking, well, what's next? What do I do now that I don't have this? Because as I said, I lived and breathed it for over a decade.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, and it still has my eldest daughter's name on the door, which Know a little bit of salt in the wound as well. It took me a good year to sort of get over it. Safe to say I'm back in the room now, but I definitely fell into a very big hole for about a year.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just don't give away the controlling interest because no matter what they're telling you when they're courting you once they have control, it's a very different story.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and that's absolutely correct, but it doesn't take away, and I'm going to go as far as to say the pain of having somebody rip what you've put your blood, sweat, and tears into for over a decade out from underneath you in, you know, because their perception is different to yours. They said to me, we need a superstar CEO in the chair now, Reagan, and we don't believe you're it. And I know there are many other founders out there who have gone through the same thing. And what I say to people is if you are still passionately involved in your business, if you still care, just don't sell the controlling interest to private equity or financial institute. Just don't do it. You can sell parts of it.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the thing is, guided And I'm doing that because if I can help one other entrepreneur avoid, quite frankly, the hell that I went through after being fired from a company that I'd lived and breathed for over a decade, then I'm happy to do it. But I do think that there's a lot of shame around being fired because I'm acutely aware that most people hearing this will go, well, she clearly really screwed up and that's why she got fired when I sort of know the ins and outs of it. But I'm prepared to have people think that I really messed up in the better interest of getting the story out there that this is actually what can happen and often does happen when you sell the controlling interest of your business to a private Equity firm”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The investors and I just didn't see eye to eye, and they didn't think that I was capable of continuing to run the business and it just became extremely cantankerous and unpleasant and because they had the controlling interest of the business they won, I guess, and ultimately fired me.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say it would be 40% luck and 60% hard work and tenacity because you've got to take advantage of the luck right so there has definitely been many serendipitous moments along the way of this journey but without really working hard and believing in what you're doing you that it's not going to be enough”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I really believe that that's where this brand is going. And do I think I could do it? I know I could do it. And selfishly being the mum of four little girls, my worst nightmare would be in 15 years time when I am sitting at a bar with my four girls as adult women not being able to turn to Aidan and Anne as a company and a brand and say, hey, your mum did that when you were tiny babies at our kitchen table and now look at it. It's a half a billion dollar global brand.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's I could never be the lady that lunches. It's just not, remember back to the story of me on the couch in my pajamas. So too much time is not a good thing for me. But not only do I think that it would be good for me that if I maybe wasn't the CEO of this business, it might be good for the business to bring in somebody who has run a business of this size and has scaled from 100 to”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is although what I will tell you, Guy, is I much prefer the entrepreneurial building of a company now that we're over $100 million. It's just very different, you know. Obviously, the way you run a hundred million dollar company to the way you run a 20 or even a 30, 40 million dollar company, you can get by with running your business on Excel spreadsheets at $30 million. It doesn't cut it at $100. Like at 30 million, I was still very much involved in a lot of the day-to-day. Whereas now at this size, oh my gosh, there is so much that, you know, I'm only getting updates once a week. I'm just not involved in that kind of way anymore. So I definitely do not enjoy this as much as I did when I was much more in the weeds of the business.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well now it's $49.95 when I started it was $44 and that was always I never set out to build a luxurious celebrity you know endorsed brand. I wanted to create and make other mothers aware of this amazing product that as a mother I just didn't understand how they could have babies without it.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was interesting Jungle Jam, which was the third pack that I ever released. So that particular design had been on the market for eight years when the royal baby came out in it.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, you know, the typical reaction, the royal effect our website crashed twice. We sold out of that around the world. People were coveting it to the point where they were paying three times the value of the it was insane. I was like, guys, we've got other patterns over here of the same, but they all just wanted what the royal baby had.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They left the hospital in an Aiden and Denay blanket, which blew my mind having been raised in Australia because that I would have bet every penny I had on the fact that was never going to happen because there's royal protocol and no royal baby has ever come out in anything other than a white wool blanket that has been royally appointed to the family, you know. And lo and behold, they walk out in Aiden and Anay and the world goes wild.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not back then, but we actually named a paparazzi once sort of as a nod to how many photographers photograph our blankets with the celebrities trying to hide their babies away.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One week after we went on the market, and when I say went on the market, me walking the product to the stores and handing it to the store owners in LA, Adam Sandler and his wife who just had their baby were photographed on Malibu Beach with their baby in a carrier with an Aiden and an A blanket draped over the front of the baby and it was a full page picture in us weekly. So we had celebrity press from a week after we went on the market.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it enabled me to scale. So it gave me some money to be able to hire some more people, buy more inventory because we would literally be the core team. There was about eight of us, nine of us. And we would be sitting there late at night going, okay, well, we'd do our inventory planning. We'd say, okay, well, we need this. And then we'd look at it and go, well, we can only afford half of it. And we'd just have to cut half of what we really needed. We could never keep up with the demand. So when the private equity firm came in, it enabled us to get closer to it at least back then.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We closed 2009 at just over 4 million. So as soon as I focused on it 100%, it changed the game. And then we more than doubled every year for the five years after that.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know what my biggest motivation always was with this guy and it was never about making a lot of money. Mine was very much proving to myself I could do it because I had been told by many people over the years that I was only capable of X when in my heart of hearts I always thought I was capable of Y, but I was just never afforded the opportunity to prove it.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't. I just said I've got another opportunity and here's my two weeks notice. And my then boss who I wasn't a huge fan of. I was having a discussion, and I distinctly remember it was about a week before I was, I handed in my resignation. So I knew it was coming. And I sat in his office and he said to me, oh, what would you know? You do not have an entrepreneurial bone in your body. And then here's even this story gets even better. That boss ended up working at Cranes. Yeah. And we have won multiple awards with cranes as the fastest, one of the fastest 50 growing entrepreneurial businesses in New York.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that I'd set myself that goal. So I just said, right, once I get to a million in revenue, I've done something that most women entrepreneurs aren't able to do. So at that point, I allowed myself to quit and focus on Aiden and A full-time.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I had read a lot of literature about women entrepreneurs and I had learned the statistic that only 2% of all women-owned businesses ever break a million dollar revenue. Is that true?”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Partners do you. And you move on, you continue to grow this business, believing that this is going to work. And at what point were you finally able to leave the economist? What was the milestone you hit in the company that made you comfortable that you could focus full time on this thing?”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know. People ask me why I didn't change the name, and it's why I still refer to myself as the co-founder, even though Claudia's been gone I co founded this business with her. So it didn't feel right to me to just sort of cut her out of the story.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fully said he was the one who actually, when I started to get a bit shaky through the whole drama with Claudia, and I said to him, look, I don't know if I can do this. And he said to me, do you believe in the business? And I said, I absolutely believe in the business. He said, well, then fight for it. You know, don't give up, fight for it.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. I never thought that. I thought I might collapse and I questioned whether or not I could keep going because obviously it was an extremely emotional time. But no, I've never ever doubted Aidan and Denay.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, she'd never spoke to me again because I just responded and said, Claude, what are you doing breaking my heart here? We can talk through this. You know, I was the legal guardian of their children. That's how close we were. And it was horrible. It is horrible. But, you know, it was, I wanted to talk to her. She just, in her mind, it was over. And look, I get it. She was under the pressure of her family and it was her marriage and all of those things. So I don't not understand why it happened. It was just heartbreaking that it did.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Claudia exited the business in 2000 very early 2000 and 2008. It was me. It was just me alone doing all the work. I was sales, customer service, manufacturing, marketing, finance. My husband was helping with the finance side of things. So I hired one person to at least alleviate some of the work that I was having to start doing at 8.30, 9 o'clock at night once my girls went to bed because that was also a line I drew very deeply in the sand for myself that these little girls did not sign on for an entrepreneurial mother. But I did believe in the business. And I went out to a few of my other friends who were watching what I was doing to raise the few hundred thousand dollars that Claudia wanted for the work that she put into the business so far.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We couldn't keep up anymore. There was no access to capital. You know, we started the business at the beginning of the worst recessions since the Great Depression. So Claudia said we just need to borrow money off. You know, Mark and his family, which I absolutely did not want to do. It was the last resort. But it had got to the point, I think we'd borrowed Hundred thousand off Claudia and Mark, and then we borrowed another $250,000 off Mark's dad. And very long story short, it was more Mark, I think, that was just not comfortable with the fact that in his mind they were funding the business. And it just got to the point where I got a demand of you've got 30 days to come up with this to buy us out if you can't do that. We have the right to pay you the same and if we can't come to an agreement, we're going to dissolve it.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Initially, it was all our savings. And the money part of it was actually what brought about the demise of Claudia and my partnership. I don't know if you want me to talk about that, but I can because, you know, the partner thing is always... Well, often a story with entrepreneurs, right So, Claudia and Mark were very wealthy. Mark, Os and I, not so much. You know, we were doing fine, but we didn't have, you know, millions of dollars Marcos and I kept up for as long as we could, Matt, you know, we'd put in 15,000, then we put in another 30, then we put in another 40, you know, that, and we kept up as long as we could until we got to a point where...”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Skew is like one four pack, so I presented six four packs thinking they might take one boy and one girl and Target took all six.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we started, we both started just putting $15,000 in for our first inventory and that we did the minimum. We had a boy pack, a girl pack, a white pack and a towel and washcloth. And I just went door to door in LA and New York to every baby store, to every, you know, I picked up the phone, I called bye bye baby. That was the sales girl coming out in me. And actually jumping ahead a bit a year later, the target buyer called me called me and said, can you come in? I took in six skews thinking they might take one or two.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I got home from the real job, I was well in mummy mode and I focused on my girls. And then when the girls went to bed at 8 30, that's when I would start my day of working on Aiden and Anna and I would do that until, you know, 3.30 every morning. And because it was a conscious decision on my part, I sort of never, I just never really complained about it. It was what it was.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was really, really hard, but it was a conscious decision that I made. So when I got home from, I used to call the economist my real job.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't want anybody looking or questioning me. And again, I go back to I was a salesperson. I never, ever, didn't make my budget. I didn't want to walk out that door. and then have people say well it's all good and well that she's created this business but it was at the expense of The economist”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A hell of a lot of failures along the way where we had full containers of product that when they arrived in the US, like the fabric had turned yellow. So there's so many stories about the trials and tribulations of actually perfecting the fabrication.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a myriad of back and forth in terms of getting the quality to where I wanted it. And I am not a textiles technical person. I have no idea. I understand the basics now having been in it for so many years, but I couldn't tell them the grade of cotton. I couldn't tell them the warp and weft counts. I couldn't tell them anything. I just basically said make it like this, but I need it to be softer. And then I worked with the factories over the years on the way to wash it and what to put in the wash to make it soft and obviously as a mum, I wouldn't let them use anything that was in any way, you know, they used to use for maldehyde in dyes on baby, but that stuff just blew.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I walk the entire trade show of probably 40 vendors and then I got to literally the last vendor before I was about to walk out the door and I walked over and I said, I'm trying to find someone that can make this fabric for me. It's called muslin. He said, I have no idea what this is, but I work for a major manufacturing company in China. Let me take this back and see what they say. And two weeks later I got an email saying we can make this for you and that was it.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is actually an interesting story, guy, because I was standing at the reception desk at the Economist and the mail arrived and on the top of the mail was a women's wear daily magazine. So I'm flipping through this and then there's a full page advertisement for an Asian textile sourcing trade show that was happening in New York City three days later. So obviously I went to that trade show.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“clear vision of what I like aesthetically from a design perspective and I am so type A, you know, that I was very much, I want these colors, I want these images, I want it to look like, you know, and we, Claudia and I hired a, you know, outside freelance design people to come up with our initial designs that launched the first products.”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great question because I am not the most artistic person. Actually, my artistic skills don't go beyond stick people. I really can't draw to save my life. But I am very opinionated and I have a very”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, just like a logistical question, because you kind of had a growing sense of how to maybe start a business, but what about the design side of it? I mean, did you have, were you going to design the blankets? Were you going to design the patterns and the shapes on them?”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out of Australia And I said, Well, why would you do that? I said, and I want it to be better than what is already available in Australia. And I remember saying, and we can call the company Aidan and Dene after the babies. And that was sort of how it all got started”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, she had Aiden about seven or eight months after I had a name. So I had been in Australia and I was coming back from Australia and I would stop and hang out with Claudia and Mark, her husband in LA to break up the trip. And I distinctly remember sitting on Aiden's nursery floor and I just said to her, we need to do this Claudia like you know we need to find a way to make this happen and she actually said well why don't we just try and become a distributor for the company that already makes it?”
2019-08-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT