The New Beginning

We are coming to the World Wide Web on September 18th, 2018.

Hello! It’s been a long time coming, and we can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on with all of you. But first (and hopefully for the last time), I want to share my personal story of how I started The Sloth.

The Sloth first began as a winning idea from the United Nations’ Hackathon for Sustainable Development Goals in New York in 2017. We were solving for Goal #12 which is Responsible Consumption and Production. At this point, I was already swimming in the sea of sustainable fashion, so the idea of creating a platform that inherently changed the way people shopped and disposed of clothing sounded pretty ingenious.

Fast forward two months – the team disintegrated but the idea survived with me, and I began to hatch this idea into an actual business. 

“Ideas, my dear, are a dime a dozen. Execution is not. Execution is the thing—it is rare and it is revered. The idea is not. There are many ideas and far fewer successful executions.”

If past year has taught me anything, it is this. I was previously a distressed credit valuation analyst with a major in finance. I was eager, driven, and ready to get my hands dirty, sure, but my professional experience was built behind a computer screen making projections on excel spreadsheets. I knew I was quitting a relatively comfortable corporate job, but I had no idea what I was signing myself up for. 

To give you an idea below is a short list:  

• Production: an $$$ photo shoot with not a single product of my own to sell 
• Hiring: a web developer/designer when I thought Shopify was a typo of Spotify,
• Teambuilding, or lack thereof: going to 50+ events and meetings to find a co-founder
• Business Development: cold-emailing brands with significant followers and revenues to work with us 
• Community Building: starting a sustainable fashion meet-up group in NYC to organically build a community 
• Social Media Marketing: building Instagram presence (thanks, Cassandra!) 
• UX research: stalking every direct-to-consumer, brand, and e-commerce I know and looking into their codes, sitemaps, copies, types
• Graphic Design: editing photos for landing and product pages & newsletters 

…and the list goes on. The point of this list is not to complain that I had so many things to do, but to illustrate how little-to-zero experience I had in each and every field. I faltered. I cried. I despaired. But I didn’t quit. When people ask how my start-up life is going, I would half-jokingly answer that “I haven’t miserably failed yet” not because I am waiting for it to happen, but because I haven’t launched anything yet.

And I couldn’t fail if I didn't launch anything, right?

Wrong.

I was trying to delay facing failure but realized quickly that I will face failure no matter what. After all, I signed up to start a company in the competitive e-commerce space for sustainable fashion with zero experience in fashion and clothing to call my own. Failure is bound to happen. But the biggest failure of all, and the shameful one too, is failing from inaction because I am afraid. It's like I refuse to fly because I am afraid of turbulence, but turbulence is inevitable when one dares to fly. 

I realize how oxymoronic this sounds given our name is The Sloth, but here it comes - The Sloth - launching in one month - the first of many failures to come, paving my way to success, slowly but surely. 

Thank you for reading!