- For Starters
- Posts
- Build the life you want
For Starters is a weekly newsletter for the next-generation of small biz owners. It’s curated by Danny Giacopelli, formerly of Courier & Monocle magazines.
Hey starter! Read on for…
Inspiration ➠ Listen to cats
Advice ➠ Why content is king
Ideas ➠ Reloved furniture
Tools ➠ Vote for the Tiny Awards
Community ➠ Food & photo clubs
➠ Get inspired
Sun Showers | @quiettownhome
1. Quiet success. Lisa Schulner-Fine and Michael Fine weren’t exactly planning to start a home brand, they just couldn’t find a shower curtain they actually liked. So in 2016, the Brooklyn couple, pulling from her design chops as director of styling at Madewell and his eye as a fashion photographer, started making their own — think sturdy canvas, great colors, beautiful textures. In 2020, nights and weekends turned the side hustle into Quiet Town – a full-blown home goods brand with rugs, towels, and their cult-favorite “Sun Shower” curtain. 🛁
The biz now brings in more than $3m yearly (!) they said in a recent interview. Lisa had this advice for business owners…
"No matter how small or big you grow [the business] to, you have to believe in it so passionately, 1000%, because it really does take over your life in so many ways… Unless that thing is something you really, really believe in, do not give it that much power over your life.”
2. Signs from beyond. After two decades in New York, creative director–turned–shopkeeper Jennie Maneri got an unexpected nudge from her late cat, Chester: a real estate listing in the Connecticut town of, yup, Chester. A road trip later, she fell for nearby Deep River (pop. 4,000), where she found an old barn and home with tons of potential. (I’m sure Chester would understand). In May 2023, she opened Deep River Home, curating objects with her heart and gut and sharing her fav things with visitors (alongside Sailor the shop dog). 🐱👻🐶
3. Glass Cowboy. Meanwhile, over in Glendale, California, second-generation stained glass artist Ben Tuna, who runs his family company Glass Visions Studio and his own brand Glass Cowboy, is transforming the empty windows of cars ruined in the recent wildfires into unbelievable stained glass art. Gorgeous. 🚗
4. Tailored for Paris. And everyone’s favorite door-to-door clothing alterations and repairs platform, SOJO, has been on a brick-and-mortar-building streak in recent weeks and is now breaking beyond the UK for the first time. Bravo to founder Josephine Philips for the new SOJO L’atelier! 🇫🇷
—
➠ Starter wisdom
Nina Cheng is the founder of The Eastern Philosophy, an e-commerce shop focused on Traditional Chinese Medicine which started as a passion project on Instagram in 2019. Below, Nina shares three hard-won tips for starters.
Tip 1 → “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are”
This quote popularized by Theodore Roosevelt has been a guiding light in my career ever since my early attempt to bring a tech startup idea to life back in 2014, but not having the technical background to execute it by myself.
I spent a full year trying to develop a network from scratch in order to find a technical co-founder, and ended up with two additional co-founders who I didn’t have a strong relationship with. The team soon crashed and burned.
I’ve since learned that the best way to grow a business is to focus on an idea that can grow directly based on how much work you yourself put into it, not one which can only move forward depending on others.
With The Eastern Philosophy, I worked on content for a year by myself and built a dedicated following, then started selling a very small collection of products including homemade medicinals.
You are the best person to nurture an early-stage company, so choose a business where that is possible instead of one which requires finding a certain type of co-founder or receiving a large round of fundraising to even get out of the idea stage.
Tip 2 → Create the highest quality content in your niche
I’ve only ever used organic content to drive sales for The Eastern Philosophy – we’ve never done ads, paid posts, or PR – and our social accounts have grown to almost 600k followers and 170+ million video views. This has been possible due to my singular focus on creating the highest quality content in the niche of traditional Asian medicine.
We bridge scholarly research with a strong narrative story-telling angle, and as a result, the content we publish becomes an educational experience not just for laypeople, but also for doctors of Chinese medicine, most of whom are unfamiliar with the more esoteric history of certain herbal medicine or how certain conditions were treated in the past. So, we gain tons of followers who are here to learn about Eastern medicine, not just those who are interested in our products.
Most brands don’t take organic content seriously, and as a result, their social media is flimsy, surface-level, and uninteresting. Truly compelling content stands out.
Tip 3 → Offer free gifts with purchase
This is quite common in the Asian DTC market, but relatively rare for online shops in the US, UK, etc. From the start, we gave away gifts with orders which delighted our customers – like traditional Chinese fruit snacks made with Chinese herbal ingredients such as ginger or hawthorn berry.
Many of the items we gave away were fun, unique, and difficult to find elsewhere. We gifted a couple thousand Pee-Pee Boys, a humorous clay ‘tea pet’ which may have been the earliest thermometer, and gifts like these seemed to be a good way to get some people over the hurdle of making their first purchase or having a more emotional connection with our online shop.
When herbal medicines are near expiry, we also run buy 1, get 1 free promotions which move inventory very quickly.
We now have a tiered system on our site where customers can unlock additional unique gifts based on their order value, and I’ve definitely noticed a trend of customers increasing their order size in order to receive more free gifts!
✨ Follow The Eastern Philosophy on IG, on TikTok, and read Nina’s book, Chinese Medicine for the Mind.
—
➠ Good idea!
Not a CD
1. Tiny Vinyl → A Nashville-based company is creating adorable, miniature (4-inch), functional, vinyl records (above) — and they’ve just signed an exclusive deal with Target to sell them.
2. Stock images → Oshun co-founder Joe Welstead with a brilliant idea: "If you're not listing your brand images on stock sites, you're missing out on millions of free views.”
3. Farmer-in-residence → New hospitality dream job unlocked: “Leading this movement is a new type of creative director: a ‘farmer-in-residence,’ who often manages both the farm’s operations and designs the guest-facing experiences, helping visitors find their zen knee-deep in soil before heading to the spa.” [thanks Karis for the tip]
4. Pass it on → Furniture that would otherwise end up in landfill (used pieces from hotels, surplus from furniture firms etc) goes into the ReLove showroom in Sydney, where people going through tough times can shop for it, for free. → Does your city have something like this?
—
➠ Toolbox
🛠️ Resources
Ditto — “your life in lists” [spotted by Luke Beard]
📚️ Reads
Are Greek Pharmacies the new French pharmacies? Russh
Why You Should Still Build Your Raft of Art in the Sea of Slop. Countercraft
The female suitmakers leading the women's tailoring revival. HTSI
Slow Ventures cuts first check from $60M creator fund into woodworking founder. TechCrunch
The “Most Days” theory. The Hyphen
Max Lamb transforms hotel waste into one-of-a-kind furniture. Dezeen
This VC Is Betting $100M on AI That Serves 30M Neglected Small Businesses. Yahoo Finance
Why you can’t get a job. Business Casual
At the Six Bells Inn, Audrey Gelman Made the Dollhouse of Her Millennial Dreams. Interview
How Warby Parker Has Kept the Price of Glasses at $95 for 15 Years. WSJ [$]
🧠 Findings
54% → The percentage of US adults who say they consume alcohol, the lowest recorded since Gallup began tracking it in 1939.
10% → And the percentage who are now taking GLP-1s, a class of drugs that reduce appetite (Ozempic, etc). The result? Restaurants are serving smaller meals.
🙃 Fun
Vote for the 2025 Tiny Awards Winner! Big fan of this initiative which celebrates "the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web”. Check out the shortlisted projects, they’re all amazing.
—
➠ Our community
1. Brooklyn-based subscriber Katrina Dalao has launched a weekly newsletter for food founders called Grow to Market. Kat tells us why she’s doing it:
“Coming from an editorial background, interviewing founders was always my favorite part of the job. I started Grow to Market to share how today’s food brands are built. Not so much media for consumers, but for the founders and makers shaping what we eat next. Food‘s always been an exciting space for me because it’s one of the few things we still experience offline, and a barometer of changing consumer tastes and lifestyles.”
2. Canada-born, London-based subscriber Christian Mackie – who works for Shopify by day and who I first met at a photography workshop in Paris – has just launched a photography critique group called Good Shot Club. Christian:
“Critique and review sessions are an incredible way to improve an art practice, but not everyone always has access or the means to consistently participate in them - especially if travel is involved. What goodshotclub hopes to do is provide a repeatable, friendly, and accessible way to gather feedback from peers to progress a project, or just get some new ideas if you're feeling a little uninspired.”
3. And Monstera Books, a fantastic bookstore in Kansas featured in For Starters Issue 11 back in April, recently experienced smoke and water damage from a fire next door. Why not help them out by buying some books?!?