Episode 01: Diarra Bousso

Diarra Bousso is the Founder, CEO, and visionary force behind Diarrablu, a revolutionary brand that’s reinventing sustainable fashion. In this episode, she talks to us about preserving and scaling her Senegalese artisan heritage, turning down $1m deals to stay true to her values, and building an entirely new identity from a hospital bed after a life-threatening accident. You don’t want to miss this incredible story.

Episode 1: Show Notes (TRANSCRIPT BELOW)

 In the notoriously unsustainable world of fashion, daring to do things differently is no easy feat. Yet, it is something today's guest, Diarra Bousso's conscious lifestyle brand, DIARRABLU, has managed to excel at. Divided between her home country of Senegal and the U.S., DIARRABLU draws on Senegalese artisanal skills and clothes-making principles. These are the clothes you will have for life. Along with being a serial entrepreneur, Diarra is also a creative mathematician and multidisciplinary artist. In this episode, Diarra shares her journey with us, from growing up in Dakar to working on Wall Street and everything in between. We hear about the accident that changed her life and how she had the confidence to step out and try something new even when she did not have a clear idea of what she wanted to do. Diarra talks about the instrumental role her family has played and still plays in her success, and she reflects on the benefits of having a constant and consistent hype team. Our conversation also touches on how DIARRABLU stays true to its ethos, why Diarra loves teaching, and what's on the horizon for the company. 

Key Points From This Episode: 

·   Get to know today's guest, Diarra Boudsso.

·   What Diarra's upbringing in Senegal was like and the philosophy of excellence that was instilled in her.

·   Diarra's winding career journey and how she came to combine her range of skills.

·   Why Diarra decided to be an entrepreneur despite not knowing what she was going to do.

·   The event that led Diarra to quit her job in finance and pursue a creative path.

·   How Diarra started her business in Senegal.

·   The challenge Diarra had teaching high school math and what she learned from it.

·   Growth diarrablu has seen since it started and how it remains true to its roots

·   How many people work at diarrablu currently.

·   An example of how diarrablu has stayed true to its ethos while reaching a broader market.

·   The community that diarrablu has built and the level of consciousness they have.

·   Something Diarra has recently learned.

·   The role that Diarra's parents played in instilling confidence in her.

·   A recent time Diarra needed to be hyped up.

·   What the future has in store for diarrablu's company structure.

·   How teaching inspires Diarra and the role it has played in helping her be a better leader.

Tweetables:

“I feel very proud that from being lost at 23 and not knowing what to do, I was able to create something that kind of merges who I am in terms of my blood and ancestry but also who I am in terms of being a nerd and liking numbers and those kinds of things.” — @dbdiarrabousso [0:17:13]

“If I have to make 10 million dollars but then it requires to waste 60% off, I’m not going to do it. I want to build something that scales in an industry that’s like so much known for waste.” — @dbdiarrabousso [0:19:03]

“Teaching and being a teacher and what it means has been really positive for me because it has kind of reminded me of what it means to be a CEO and I honestly think I became a good CEO when I became a teacher.” — @dbdiarrabousso [0:43:52]

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Diarra Bousso on Instagram

Diarra Bousso on Twitter

diarrablu

Jeremy Utley

TRANSCRIPT EPISODE 01

[0:00:00.8] JEREMY: Anyway, our hope as just as I said via email, just have a casual conversation with you and learn about you and your practice as an entrepreneur, as a creative professional, as a woman, et cetera. We’re excited to dive in. One of the things I wanted to know just right off the bat, I was reading the Vogue article, the profile on you and you mentioned that you spent a few weeks back in Senegal, watching production techniques and I just wondered if you could take us back there and tell us, what were you thinking, what were you trying to learn and what role did that kind of, inspiration ship so to speak play in how you built your business?

[0:00:42.7] DB: Yeah, Senegal is where I was born, I was born there and I was born in an artisan family so back in the day, before colonialization and everything, every last name had a job it was associated to. My last name was from the artisan category and back in the day during the kingdom times like my family would be around the king and anything that has to do with the leather work for his horse or the metal works for his horses feet or the jewelry that they wear, we were the artisans who move around with him.

That’s what my extended, my grandma, great grandma and stuff did. My dad is the first person in the lineage to actually go to school. The only reason he went to school is because he was kind of like a nuisance in the farm in the artisan, my grandma got him at 41 and she was too old to take care of him and he was just running around messing things so they gave him to the school as like babysitting.

Yeah, that opened a lot of doors because then from him, came us and all the generations after him followed suit. He went to elementary school and the goal was to just keep him there and babysit him but he was so good that he got transferred into the middle school in the next village and fast forward, he got a full ride to get his MBA and one of the top business school in Paris, in France.

Came back to Senegal to be one of the leaders at Citibank. When I was born, I was born into that. I was born in a family that upper middle-class rising but dad was extremely proud of his origins and he made sure that every summer we’d go see my grandma, we go to the artisanal village, we’d see the practice that if you didn’t go to school that’s what we would be doing, all of us.

He always made sure that we were aware of the opportunity and privilege we had, that we don’t forget who we are. It’s like yeah, you go to this bougie French school and you hang out with daughters and sons of ministers and stuff but that’s not who you are.

All the money was invested in our education but on the summer, when our friends would go to Paris and Milan and whatnot, we would go to the village and that’s what we did. We have no money to do all of those things, we have money to get you to school and that’s what matters. That’s what we did and education is a big deal in my family. My mom was one of the top students in the country when she was young in terms of high school and she was also an athlete.

This philosophy of excellence and pushing and working hard in us. I just followed suit and I was like, I want to also be like them. I just looked up to them and you know, at 16 I moved out. I wanted something challenging so I left and decided I wanted to go to Norway on my own and I went and got a scholarship. Then from there, I came to the US for college, I worked in Wall Street for a few years, I hated it.

Then I moved back to Senegal, I was like, I’m feeling very lost, I had already know who I am or I belong and had been away from home for like seven years. I decided I’m going to go back to Senegal and see what happens. When I was 23, I moved back there, I started the company and under the company description, I wasn’t really sure what it was going to do, I know you had to do creative stuff so I just put creative stuff there.

Then they were there, you’re not an artist and you don’t know, you didn’t study these things and I was like yeah, but I kind of do banking anymore. I don’t like it anymore and I really like arts and so that’s what I’m going to do and Dad was like, “Well, if you want to do art, in terms of an artisan side of things, I can help you because that’s what the family does. You can go and visit your cousins and your uncle and you can buy some of their products to support them and maybe you can sell their things for them.”

I was like, “No, I don’t want to sell their things, I want to co-create with them, I want to go watch how they operate and I want to make it better.” Yes, I would go to the artisanal village and just sit there and watch and chat with them and we’d talk about all these amazing topics about their childhood, about sustainability, which at home days, no word for it, the word for sustainability is life because everything is just like, if you waste resources, you have no more life.

Sustainability is just the norm that you don’t waste anything. That’s why all my ideas of design and sustainability and conscious design and zero waste came from and after being there for a few years and just watching and taking notes. I’ll be there watching like a student and then every time there was a fashion week somewhere in the world or an art exhibition, I had saved enough money from finance that I would just fly and watch and see. I started piecing together these two words, I’m like, “Yeah. I’m in the world where things get made by hand and all of that but I’m also in a world that’s all about magic and events and all the birds and how can I put it together?”

I also really missed math and the idea of using numbers because that’s what I studied. How can I put these things together, they don’t seem to match. I wasn’t sure, then I decided I wanted to be a teacher because I was going to my millennial 20s crisis where I really don’t want to do everything, “This is not working, I’m not making any money” this is – I’m just going to go and find something to do and sign up to be a substitute teacher in a school in my neighborhood and I loved it so much that I stayed and they ask me to stay for the following year and I was like, “No, if I’m going to do this teacher job, I want to do it properly.”

I just went online and I typed math education masters and Stanford came up and I applied. The year before, I had actually applied to business school at Stanford because all my friends were going to business school, all my friends were mostly and I just wanted to be like them – I’ll go to business school too, apply to Stanford and they had this like, full ride opportunity for entrepreneurs and I wonder, the opportunity but then I decided I didn’t want to go.

At the last minute, I declined the offer and I was like, “I don’t really want to go back to school to study business because I don’t think it’s going to teach me how to be innovative and what I’m trying to do is not traditional. I’m not going to do that.” My parents were like, “We’re over you right now. You’re annoying us. You need to find something to do” and that’s when I got the teacher job.

[0:06:18.4] JEREMY: I got to pause, first of all, there’s first of all, there’s like 10,000 directions on where you’re going. One thing that I’m really curious about is you mentioned that you named your company and you didn’t know what you wanted to do but you said it was going to be something about art. Where did the impulse to start a company come from?

How did you, you left banking, you come back to Senegal and you said, I’m going to start a company but I have no idea what it’s going to be about, why was entrepreneurship a path that seemed like a direction you wanted to take and how did you start something without knowing what you were going to do? I think there’s a lot of folks who, I think they have to have the idea and they have to – there’s like a divine calling to be an entrepreneur. How did it work for you?

[0:07:02.6] DB: To be honest, I just knew that – I wasn’t fitting into the corporate world and I was really bored at my job and really depressed and dislike. My first salary, I bought myself a fancy DSLR camera and on the weekends, I would just walk around New York and take photos of people who are well-dressed and I had a blog about it. I would just ask them about the outfit and I document it and delve in Instagram, hadn’t started yet or was barely starting so there was no other way to share your work and to that avenue, I realized that I really like being independent.

I really liked just being on my own and creating my own rules and when I left finance and went back home, I went for a summer break. It was like, I’m going to be there for two months, two weeks, sorry. I got into a really bad accident and left me in a coma for two weeks and I was in medical leave and bed rest for six months.

In that period, I had a lot of, I had lost my memory so I honestly didn’t remember anything. One of the things that the doctor would make me do was you have to draw because I couldn’t remember things. Just have to draw things that come to you and every day, we’d go to the psychologist and I’ll tell them about my drawings.

Drawing just became second nature and for six months, all I did was draw nonstop and when I could work on crutches, I started taking photos. I would take photos of people in the house, doctors at the hospital, I just took photos of anything but then I would romanticize the images, like a basic photo of my mom was not my mom. It was like an art photo of my mom’s edits and a whole caption that goes with it.

I opened a Tumblr blog because it’s the only thing that I had access to and I would just post the photos in there, it was all the beautiful, romantic storylines with it. The blog gained 19,000 followers in three months and some of the images got shared on the New York Times and Vogue Italia and while I was still on bed rest, I’m unable to walk, I have no teeth, I have surgery every other week and I’m seeing my name in all these places and I also had lost my memory and it started to come back but it was just very confusing because it felt like I was famous or something.

I had this illusion that I was famous or that I was skilled at something creative even though it wasn’t true. I kind of believed it and everyone played along. My mom, my dad, all of them would just play along with it. I’m like, “Oh Dad, I’m in Vogue” he’s like, “Yeah, we know. That’s where you belong” they did say stuff like that to just boost me a little and we kind of played that game for six months and by the time my memory got fully back and I was able to start walking again, I was like, “I am not going back to anything other than that. I like this world, I like this famousness and this creative thing and I’m kind of taken seriously.”

I’m not going back to finance. I flew to New York to physically go to the office just to show them that I was well because they were all worried when they heard what happened and I resigned in person and the following week, I went to New York fashion week and then I left home and went back to Senegal and started the company.

I said something creative, art, fashion… whatever. It was like a leap of faith but it was honestly triggered or accelerated by what have happened accident wise. I think losing your memory and not knowing that what you're doing is risky is awesome because you don’t really have any basis for what’s realistic so it meant, having a family that’s so supportive, that they thought it was a phase so we’re going to support her if this will help her heal.

I’m literally supposed to be dying and struggling but I wake up every day super excited to check Tumblr and see how many new followers I got and which new painting I’m going to make and they kind of were just like, “Oh, we love this, let’s just keep pushing her” and then it went too far when I said I was going to quit and they were like, “No, no, no. This was just a joke, you need to go back to your real life.” I’m like, “No-no-no, this is reality now” That was a bit tough because they were not very happy but now they fully support it like my whole family works for the business and yeah.

[0:10:42.2] JEREMY: That is incredible.

[0:10:46.0] MAR: How do you start that business in Senegal? What’s that – I assume it’s very different from starting a business in Silicon Valley, which is where we came from. I’m guessing it launched a bit, some form of bootstrap.

[0:10:59.8] DB: Yeah, totally. I bootstrapped the whole business. I didn’t really know how a business is started to be honest, I was just like, I want to do – I kind of just want to do my own thing and we’ll see what happens. I didn’t really know what the norm is, which was kind of nice because I was just kind of doing my own thing and there was no one around me that would tell me it’s right or it’s wrong and my parents, once they realized that I wasn’t going to let go of this idea, they just –

It’s like, we either support her or – there is no – there is like, we have no choice but to support her basically. That’s what they did, they fully supported me. What I did, because I said I was going to do art, at first, I was like okay, the art thing is a bit complicated because I don’t know if I’m going to be like an artist or like, fashion is easier because I already have this blog that people are following and I’m just going to move it to Instagram and I’m just going to design things and take pictures because I was good at taking photos.

I started with photography and I would just make – I had an artisan person in the family that my mom basically said, you could use your room and the living room for him to come and work so we bought a sewing machine and he came there and every day, he would just make clothes and I had like pages from Vogue that I would just rip out and be like, “Okay, we want to make this dress form the last fashion week but we’re going to change the sleeves and make it bigger” or “We’re going to make this one but we’re going to change it.”

I didn’t know what the fashion names where things were and I actually still don’t but that’s how I started. I would just design things that looked very nice in photos but the finishing and the actual light work wasn’t great to sell but then I was getting orders like people were DMing me on Instagram like, “We want to buy this” and I would just make up prices like, “Oh yeah, this one is…” I would say a very high price so that noone actually buys it because I couldn’t really sell it and then I would say the high price and people will say, “Yeah, okay, we want it” and I’m like, “Oh snap, okay” We’re just selling things that didn’t exist and then I was like, I didn’t understand how business actually works so whether it’s supply chain, demand and production, all of that I didn’t get.

That’s when it hit me that okay, maybe you need to stop making all these noises and you need to actually go and learn how the business side of fashion works. I travelled to China and Turkey and just went to visit factories there. I was just very persistent, I would go on Alibaba and message people in China and say, “Hey, can I come visit your factory?”

They’d get excited because they think I’m going to make a big order and I went. I come here, I took five years and I just would kind of, anytime I saw someone who seems like they were going to be willing to have time for me or give me advice, I would just ask them and I did the same when I met Jeremy. At that time, it was when I took my hiatus of, “Okay, this fashion thing is maybe not working. I’m going to be a teacher.”

I turned on business school and I would go to Stanford to study math education to be a math teacher and I was really loving it and that’s what changed everything because teaching math to students, teenager, it’s like impossible, they hate it. Trying to find a way to make it exciting forced me to be creative and I was like, “Okay, what if I had merge it to like art, what if I make math, some of the ideas I had about designing patterns using equations and stuff.”

I started doing that in the classroom and it worked, the students were paying attention, they cared about art and math together and I was like, “What if I reverse it, what if I use this art, this math to create my patterns?” Now that I’m so busy teaching, I don’t have time to sit and design, go to the artisanal village and like, maybe that’s my whole thing. I’m going to sit down and create equations that make the patterns for me and I’ll make a lot of noise about it and we see what happens.

I started doing that and before that year, I was doing a startup, the launch pad focus hours and just getting a lot of product market fit testing with Jeremy and you just, you know, every weekend I would go to a popup in Oakland, would come back, they’d be like, “Okay, what did you learn?” I’m like, “Well I learned that black people like my products more.” All right, good, you’re not doing your next popup is not happening in Union Square, it’s happening in Oakland. Okay, cool.

For whole semester, we just kept doing those things and I started making some sales and they were pushing me for online, they were like, your product does so well and there is no reason if you only sell in popups. You need to master and learn the online stuff but I was just scared of it and I didn’t want to try. I kept pursuing the popups and the following year, I started teaching full-time in a public school in San Mateo and got really busy, there was no time for popups. There was no time for design and I just went to the math idea. “You know what, I’m going to do this math thing and use equations and algorithms and see what happen” and this is when everything took off like the press loved it.

I got contacted by Forbes and CNN and Vogue and Reuters and they all want to do I interviews and write about it and Kendall Jenner, one of the Kardashian sisters wore the swimsuit, things started going very fast and I was like, “Oh, so this is what I needed to – I just needed to have idea that’s different” From a supply chain and business model, it completely changed how fashion is done because traditional fashion requires producing inventory, holding stock, then selling 70% of it, full price and then selling everything else discounted because you need to sell the stock.

Whereas in my model, first of all, I use algorithm to design so it’s endless possibilities and I can generate designs whenever I want. Second, I use social media to get pulls, I’ll be risking the whole demand approach because before we print the patterns, we already know what people like and then lastly, it’s made to order in Senegal and we drop ship. If you go to the website right now and order a kimono, that doesn’t actually exist. It will probably get made on Monday and shipped on Monday afternoon or Tuesday straight to you.

We were able to build a business model around that when the industry, the fashion industry is the second most polluting in the world and sustainability is the biggest issue that everyone talks about and all of a sudden, there’s this small company that out of nowhere and we’re getting a lot of attention and a lot of press and support and that’s the kind of way we are now. Last year, we grew revenue 25X.

This year, we are turning down so many. We just got a million-dollar order and I had to turn it down because we possibly cannot produce it yet so we have to space it out in between different deliveries but we’re getting a lot of support from the industry and most of them are just very excited about this business model that I don’t know, for them it’s innovative.

For me, that’s how things were always are in my family. You have a wedding on Sunday, you go to the uncle and he makes you the dress on demand, there was never stock or inventory, there was never waste. I feel very proud that from being lost at 23 and not knowing what to do, I was able to create something that kind of merges who I am in terms of my blood and ancestry but also who I am in terms of being a nerd and liking numbers and those kinds of things. It’s kind of where we are. That was a very long introduction so I apologize for rambling.

[0:17:34.2] MAR: I’m curious how many folks work for you in Senegal. How big? How have you – you know, actually sustained those? That was probably changing lives.

[0:17:44.2] DB: Yeah, we have six fulltime artisans and five part time and then my mom is the director, she’s the one who runs the production and then we have five other fulltime employees. I can totally have about 12 or 13 people in there and then in the US, I have – I just hired in November, the former head of women’s wear at Calvin Klein, he’s the one who runs our operations out of New York.

Then I have myself and the marketing person who does our social media and marketing and we’ll probably need more people for the summer because things are moving really fast and we all kind of out of steam.

[0:18:18.8] MAR: My wheels are turning, it’s like, how do you, this is such a good model, how do you get that million-order fulfilled, you know?

[0:18:27.6] DB: Yeah, I mean the problem wasn’t getting it fulfilled because it’s great that we get that order because we could hire more artisans and stuff. It was more the terms, like the industry is always full that when they do wholesale order, they buy it 50% off retail which is fine, we still have room for margins but whatever they don’t sell in the season, they return it to you at the end.

That’s how brands like Burberry, like last year, they burn like six million dollars of inventory because it’s like clothes that came back. They’d rather start with a small order and truly understand the person to have returns because our business model is only one non-negotiable in my business model is waste.

If I have to make 10 million dollars but then it requires to waste 60% off, I’m not going to do it. I want to build something that scales in an industry that’s like so much known for waste. Every partner that talks to us and we give them back they’re like, “Wow, you’re bold.” I’m like, “Yeah, I’m very small but that’s the one thing that this whole business is built on and I’m not going to turn my model and turn into a supplier of inventory” that then at the end of the season is returned to you and you have to discount it or we don’t have, our products are lifetime products, everything we have is size inclusive.

We don’t use zippers or buttons, everything we use an elastic or some sort of way where it’s adjustable and you can wear it for 10 years. We don’t have this thing of like, “Oh, it’s six month ago, the season is over the clothes that expired, we need to throw them” we don’t have that. It was something that I just want to make sure, if there are more small players like me, I feel like the industry hopefully will move in that direction when we get bigger but I want to get big with that in mind all the time.

[0:20:00.8] JEREMY: It’s incredible. I wondered Diarra because as you’re saying, you're such a stark difference from the rest of the industry. How do you think about collaboration or how do you think about solving problems as you think about growing, you have a very rigid, beautifully rigid by the way, but a very rigid set of values.

Can you talk about how you’ve kind of problem solve your way through these negotiations? How does your – maybe tell us a story and a recent experience where you were actually having to creatively solve a problem to stay true to your values and also, reach a broader market.

[0:20:41.3] DB: Yeah, recently, it was that order where – they were like, “We want 5,000 units” it was literally two weeks ago, “We want 5,000 units” and I got super excited and like, “Oh my god, our average price is $200, that’s a million dollars” I got super excited in my head and I’m literally at school in my classroom giving like a test and all that came up and was like, “Oh my god, I’m rich now, this is amazing” like that’s the first idea.

Then I sat down and looked at the terms and then our business manager who is really much like, you know, aware and supportive of this business model and we started looking at the numbers and everything and I was like, “Wait, this doesn’t make sense, they’re going to return probably a big percentage of it and I kind of just don’t feel comfortable with where this is going and also, if I have to supply 5,000 units by September 1st, it means, I’m hiring like 10 to 12 new artisans, which is great but what if it doesn’t work out? Then I have to fire them all and I don’t want to play with people’s livelihoods like that.”

I would rather hire slowly and scale slowly when we understand the demand than do this abrupt jumps and then afterwards it’s like, they don’t see the consequences on their end. Most brands, they don’t produce and manufacture their products so they don’t get to see that side of it but I know what happen when an artisan is fired. I know what happens when they are hired too.

I know how much their lives changes; I know how much their kids go to school and all the good things happen. I was like, “Do I want to take this order and all the risk?” My first negotiation question was, “What is the cadence of these order? Is this like a one-time thing? Is it like an ongoing?” and they were like, “You know, the goal is to do this and see how it goes and if it goes well then, we would do this every season” and there are four season in the fashion calendar.

I was like, “Okay, this is exciting, this a recurring thing, people are going to keep their jobs.” I share with them, this is what you order is going to do in terms of new jobs and new opportunities and I just told them, “It’s going to create this many jobs, it’s going to make each person that we hire, affects at least five people in their community or more.”

“You’re already affecting like 500 plus people who are really poor and leave in a dollar a day and their lives are going to change. But now, I don’t want to just change their life and then take them back to where they came from.” We need to make sure we’re being sensible and in the call, you could see this comfort of this is a big company like six-billion-dollar market cap and I’m like challenging them with this tiny thing and everybody in the call is like, “Oh of course, we believe in sustainability, it’s one of our core values, this is something we are actually working towards.”

Everybody started kind of being defensive. I was like, “Okay, good. What about the drop ship month? Are you guys ever interested in a drop ship model?” which is how we operate right now, where people order and we just ship it and within two days they get it because we have a global partnership with DHL and that’s a low-risk model because as long as there is demand, there is work and literally on a weekly basis, we can see the trends and really be able to plan our business and they were like, “Oh I’m so glad you said this. One of the guys in our team is actually going to have a talk with management for the next year.”

“We want to explore that and if we do, you’d be our first person to test it on. We’re so happy you like that idea.” I’m like, “Yeah, that is our business, we do drop ship and on demand manufacturing” and I was like, “Okay, so this order is really awesome.” This is more than we have ever seen, it’s so unbelievable and awesome, however I just – first of all, is it possible to break it down into two deliveries? Instead of having it all done at once in September, meaning I am hiring tons of people in the short period of time and I am not going to be sure what happen.

Well, how about we do a delivery in mid-September and another one in November and we can see selling information and really better understand what’s going to happen and then what is the deal with returns, how do you guys process returns and stuff or like unwanted inventory? They’re like, “Yeah, so in the industry, the way it works there are people called jobbers, it is like drug dealers. You just give them the clothes and they can make it disappear.”

That’s what brands, that’s what retailers do. It’s like okay, let’s make it disappear and what those jobbers do is they’ll buy it at 10 cents on the dollar and then they’ll go and sell it in the Costco of Brazil or something, some international location where there is little control and your brand, there goes your brand equity. I’m like, I will this whole brand so it is going to go sold in the Costco of Brazil. I don’t want that and also you have no control on pricing because they are going to make it disappear.

They were like, “Well, it is either that or we can do a return to vendor where we return it back to you at cost and again, it puts us in this place where we invested all of these money, we hired all of these people and if you return to a big percentage or the order, we basically did all of this for nothing. All of us are on that million-dollar retail order. It doesn’t seem very exciting anymore, this is a waste of energy and it is going to be a lot of stress and I don’t know if this matches our business model.

I just say to your guys, let us sleep on it and we’ll come back to you. I think they were surprised because most people would jump on the opportunity but I am so aware of what I am trying to do that it was like, no way and then we came back to them early this week. I kind of sliced the order in half and did it in two deliveries and changed it enough so instead of having so many different options, which makes more risk, there is a few options and then they have a lot of data.

This is a fashion tech company that’s pretty known and they have a lot of data and analytics that back up all the things, so I looked at the data and figured let’s focus on the five top things from the data predictions they did. We’re going to offer you that but we are going to have – so we’re not going to do – we are not doing 5,000 units, we are going to do 2,500 units. We are going to split it into two deliveries of 1,200 each so we have learning time in between.

Then by December or January, I would have gone through the whole cycle and I can say, “Okay, how did you do? Did they only return to us 10% or 5%” because they were like, “Oh, in general about 10%” and the operator who used to work at Calvin Klein is like, “No, in general it’s more like 30, 35%. They are just saying that.” We need to see what is going to happen, what plan, what are we going to do with those returns.

In my head, I am already like, “Okay, I will probably do a pop-up title around sustainability,” like a pop-up in Oakland with all the return stuff or something about communicating the brand values with it and I can handle that on 30% of 2,500 units. I can’t handle it on 30% of 5,000 units but I was like, “We’re going to do this as a learning thing and see.” But aside from them, all the other partners we work with are on very small orders and 80% or like 85% of our retails are direct to consumer.

That is really what we want to focus on because our consumer is so conscious and aware of what we’re doing. They are like look on the website, when you place an order you put your height and the dress or pants you receive are going to be tailored to how tall you are for free. Everybody knows that so our customers will run an ad on Instagram and people are having full-blown conversations on the ads comments, on Facebook.

I step in and watch in, we’re like, “Yeah, I ordered this last week and wear it for my sister’s wedding. Here is a photo” and somebody else will comment and this is an ad that’s running –

[0:27:21.9] JEREMY: Wow.

[0:27:23.2] DB: There is 127 comments and like, “Oh so how was the wedding last week? Have you gotten it?” “Oh yeah, the dress was beautiful. Here is another picture” “Oh, I got the matching…” I’m like, “Wow, okay.”

[0:27:32.7] JEREMY: Then you just take a screenshot and then you post that as an ad.

[0:27:36.1] DB: Exactly, so yeah, we have a community that is super supportive and aware of who we are and what we stand for and that is something that I don’t want to jeopardize and we honestly built this brand on Instagram literally and I mean, Tumblr first to be honest and being able to just see having this supportive community and what they mean. I’m like I don’t want to jeopardize that for anything.

[0:28:04.4] FEMALE 2: I’d like to ask you a question related to Instagram. It seems like you’re a super learner and not afraid of anything.

[0:28:13.5] DB: Yeah.

[0:28:13.9] MAR: You were in your hospital bed in Tumblr and you build this brand, Instagram, I want to ask you if you are doing TikTok or what’s next?

[0:28:22.7] DB: I’m on TikTok right now but I don’t find it as easy because the algorithm on TikTok I honestly don’t get it yet but I just reached a thousand followers. I hopefully get viral like most people do but we are on TikTok and I think that video is really awesome and it’s an – basically, I go on TikTok to create content and I repurpose it on Instagram for real and we do get a positive engagement that way.

[0:28:47.9] MAR: Let me ask you a question, what is the last thing you’ve learned in the last three months or six months, this year, what’s that? I feel like you’re ahead of us.

[0:28:58.1] DB: I would say, so I did a photo shoot recently and I am going to send you a video. It’s on TikTok but I posted it as an Instagram reel so you can watch, and I am going to actually ask you to guess where the location was and then what I’ll tell you what I learned from that.

[0:29:10.5] MAR: Yeah, amazing. It is like a blue desert.

[0:29:16.6] DB: Yeah. Where do you think that is?

[0:29:23.4] MAR: You went to a photo shoot, you’re in Hillsborough so I’m going to say California.

[0:29:27.1] DB: No.

[0:29:28.6] MAR: Well Jeremy you go.

[0:29:30.9] JEREMY: I mean is it back home? Is it in Senegal? I give up.

[0:29:36.4] DB: All right, so it is in Salt Lake City at the Salt Flats in Utah and the story is very interesting. I was like, I want to do a photo shoot that is very different and make people wonder just we went through and I went on Instagram and started stalking random photographers, models, editors and I put together this shoot from this Instagram DMing people and when they all agreed including the budget, I flew to Utah two weeks ago and begin the shoot and it was really beautiful.

Then after the shoot, the photographer decided to not be reliable because he didn’t want to edit the photos and it was very stressful because fashion photography editing is a whole different animal and it is not something you can just give random people. The person who took the images generally has the vision and can do the editing but she was like, “I am not editing this. It is too much work. It’s not what we agreed” whatever.

What I learned in the past two weeks is how to edit high quality fashion images, so I am the one editing everything from the shoot and it is going to be dropping tomorrow so that’s what I’ve been up to in terms of new learnings.

[0:30:37.2] JEREMY: That’s incredible.

[0:30:38.2] MAR: It’s like Renaissance woman.

[0:30:40.8] JEREMY: You are a Renaissance woman. You know, part of the reason that we want to be having this conversations or part of the reason I am particularly interested is I want to create an environment in my home where creative enterprising young women can thrive and I know that as a man, I am not even aware of what my blind spots are.

I’d be curious to hear from a Renaissance woman like yourself, do you have any thoughts or reflections around cultivating, the curiosity and creativity and entrepreneurial bent and what are things that you have observed that have been impactful to you in your own practice. It could be in your home or in behavior you’ve seen or your own experience, I’d love to get advice from you.

[0:31:25.0] DB: I would say first in my home, I would say like supportive parents. In growing up, I was kind of this awkward kid that people found me weird at school because I like math but I also like art but I also like bands. I just like all the contradictory things and it was just weird because I was a nerd but I wasn’t like the usual nerd with the glasses. I was like the cool nerd who also was involved in the parties and everything and because of – and so I had a lot of confidence in myself.

I grew up with this thinking that I could do anything and that’s because of my parents. When I was like four or five, anything that I would draw my dad would take it to the framer, frame it and put it up. I would never forget that experience because I just grew up thinking I was somebody. My art work was all over the house walls until now. All the house covered in my art work and my –

[0:32:14.4] JEREMY: Now it’s you’re a fashion photography.

[0:32:16.4] DB: Now, it’s my fashion photography but you know I would draw something, he would put it up. I would have a photo of something, he would blow up the photo and put it up and my mom would always tell me that I am amazing that I can do so much better, anything I did too like, “Yeah, you’re so amazing” but she’d be like, “You know, you got it from us. We are amazing too” so this is a positive reinforcement in terms of like any and we have a family group chat until now as adults.

It is called the hype group chat and it’s like a very vain thing but if you dress up, you just drop a picture in there in the morning and everyone kind of come up with the best way to tell you how beautiful you are. My mom would be like, “Oh you are killing it” she’d make it sound like poetic description of how I’m matching my hair to my shoes or if I wrote an essay that I am proud of I’ll dump it in there and somebody would review and be like, “Oh are you associated with this author because you are on fire” and we do this to each other.

[0:33:09.9] JEREMY: That is awesome.

[0:33:10.5] DB: It is so much fun. It’s very obnoxious but we just do this to each other all day everyday all the time. Like yesterday, it was end of Ramadan, a Muslim celebration called Eid and I wake up to 79 messages on Wattsapp and it is just the whole family blasting photos and now I have to pick my top three of everybody and this was to tell them how amazing they look and I’m like, “What spices did you use on that cooking? I could smell it from here, it’s delicious” and my mom was like, “Yeah that’s my secret” and so this is positive vibe around complimenting each other that we’ve built in how we grow up.

It was weird because when I moved, so when I moved to Norway and I moved here, I didn’t see that. My close friends know that [inaudible 0:33:53.5] and I am just complimenting everybody and everything but it was hard to see it at first because it is not how culture – here you are supposed to be not be too conceited and if you give yourself compliment it is too much but at home, in our culture to be that way. Being brought up in that way really helped me and as a teacher, I can see it also on students.

I have a lot of students, I have a whole range. I have students who get straight A’s, no problem whatever and I don’t really focus on those because I’m like, “They’re going to be fine without me” but the students who are struggling like the D-F students, they are the ones I spent time with. When I have office hours, I actually have office hours, sometimes only those could come because I want to work with them on private and I do this, the hype master thing.

It’s like, “Oh you’re killing it. Oh my god, you’re on fire. You solved that problem so fast. Oh, you took forever but guess what? You got the best answer than everyone else” and then, “I’m smart miss D” I’m like, “Yeah, you’re so smart. You’re killing it” and honestly, you can see their confidence. As their confidence go up like the work they produce get better and then taking risk. I wasn’t anything I wanted to do. If I woke up today and said I want to be an astronaut, they’d be like, “Okay.”

They’ll all Google how it is and they’ll send me suggestions on where to start. They always welcome that and I think as parents or professors, that is one thing I think can really impact especially young people because the mind is so malleable at that time that anything you put in there that’s what they believe, so just feed it with your amazing, you rock it but also like my dad was always hard work. You don’t get anything from this luck, you have to work hard.

When you did something good, he would never said that, “You’re so smart” he would say, “Oh you work so hard.” He never said things like, “You’re so smart, you’re so gifted.” He didn’t like those terms and as a teacher, it is very negative to use those languages with kids because it’s like a fixed mindset. Anything you did he made you feel like it is a result of your effort and then if you did more effort, you have more [inaudible 0:35:55.2] I really love them.

[0:35:59.1] MAR: I think for a lot of founders, I sort of feel like as I’m an investor I had to do this and it is great but it is just telling them it’s okay, you’re doing okay, it gives them enough energy to go. Was it your family and your company or who was your kind of like you can do what no matter what? Was there somebody else?

[0:36:19.7] DB: It was parents. You mean in my company or?

[0:36:22.9] MAR: In your company, yeah.

[0:36:24.4] DB: In my company, because the company was born from my bedroom and stuff, it’s my parents. My parents and my siblings to this day like even before I post something on Instagram, we have a group chat called mom and us. My dad is not in there because he would just find it annoying because we just message too much and that he likes his quiet time so we have the family one and we have that one and even before posting something on Instagram, we just dump the photo in there to see if they have anything to say.

Then someone will say, “At eight seconds that’s a bad angle, edit” and I’m like, “Okay, cool” everyone is like the police of each other and everybody wants what’s best for you or like, “I’m going to have a call with Jeremy and Mar, I mean I didn’t tell you their number. You know, I’m nervous, I don’t know what it’s going to be about” and then everybody would send a voice note, “Emphasize on this thing because that’s what you are very good at. Tell them the story about XYZ.”

Then after the call, everyone would be on the group like, “How did it go? Send us a screenshot” and it is everybody involved.

[0:37:18.2] MAR: Every founder needs a family like yours. I have to come at on this hype chats.

[0:37:24.4] DB: Yeah, I mean really the hype chats honestly no matter how now and they can tell when you’re down because when you’re, “I am not feeling great” I know there is good things there to get hyped, so after three days of me not putting there, my mom would like, “So Diara, what’s going on? I haven’t gotten anything to hype you on.” I’m like, “Yeah, I am not feeling great” “Okay” and then they will kind of lift you up and some.

[0:37:44.1] JEREMY: Wow. Can you tell me about the last time you needed to be lifted up?

[0:37:50.1] DB: Yeah, it was when this photographer cancelled on the shoot, I mean on the edits and he’s like it was 10 days ago and the collection comes out tomorrow and I had made all these commitments and all these contrasts and everything about this collection and she kind of cancelled and I don’t really know what to do at this point because I have never done this level of editing so I know I couldn’t do it and I kind of started crying and it was on a weekday.

I was in school and I got into my seventh period and I am literally in tears on Zoom and the kids message me in the chat like, “Miss Diarra it’s okay. If you need to turn off your camera, whatever is happening we care about you.” Oh my god yes and they were like, “We can work on our homework if you want if you don’t want to teach today.” It was just like, “Oh my God, you guys” I’m like, “Yeah, sure” so I actually didn’t. I was just there crying and then I shared it with my sisters and my mom and everybody in the group chat and right away they started sending me links.

They went on Upwork, decided to sending me links to editors, then they found the hourly rate of how much it would cost to be like, if you want to find someone you can pay this much or you can do it yourself. I also live in a community of entrepreneurs here and one of them is like, “Oh there is an app called Luminar and it’s like an AI version of illustrator like Photoshop, so go ahead and use that. It is going to make it so much easier.”

By the end of the day, I had solved the problem so yeah, this is a support system of people who genuinely care and want to see you grow.

[0:39:10.1] JEREMY: That’s truly remarkable. That’s truly remarkable.

[0:39:14.3] DB: Thank you.

[0:39:15.7] JEREMY: I wish I was – can I be an honorary member of your family?

[0:39:20.2] DB: Of course, we have a lot of honorary members.

[0:39:23.6] JEREMY: Oh, you do?

[0:39:24.6] MAR: I think you should have a hype chat for once [inaudible 0:39:26.6]

[0:39:28.4] JEREMY: I was going to say, launch pad could use a hype chat, you know?

[0:39:31.1] MAR: I think you can have a hype chat. I am going to steal that idea but I’ll give you credit for them.

[0:39:36.8] DB: Yeah, definitely have it, 100%. I mean it’s culture if you like, it’s very much hyping is part of Senegalese culture, right? Yeah.

[0:39:44.9] MAR: I have a question, I have too many questions but one is about collaboration. I think you brought this out several times. It is fear that [inaudible 0:39:53.4] or work with others and I think your model is so innovative, how great. I am a really short person and I can just you know, go to your website and I can tell you it can’t hurt 57 years that I know that I am going to get the right thing. Have you thought about licensing this to more people?

You know, other brands and how did you make it plausible for folks that me that didn’t know, can’t finish up?

[0:40:21.6] DB: Basically what I want to do, when I was at Stanford, I remember I only had the company at Senegal and I was bringing it to the US and Jeremy and Perry will give me advice and find a lawyer and register the LLC here and now is a pretty install company. I have the US company that is basically that Ecom fashion brand and then the Senegal company is the manufacturing company. The goal is now that they are completely separate and they work independently, I mean the only thing they have in common is me on them both.

The teams are separated and everything, the end goal because the issue of sustainability and ethical manufacturing is a huge problem in fashion and on demand is like the future of everything. Every forum, every talk, every place that I go to, the future of fashion is on demand manufacturing and customized clothing. The goal is to take the Senegal company and beside just right now it’s producing for me and as we scale to become like a turnkey solution for these fashion brands who want to have on demand manufacturing and the whole business model to use that for their business.

Where Senegal is like instead of calling up a factoring channel who could produce a thousand units, we signed an agreement with the Senegal company and we use our own model. We submit your designs, every order is shipped there and basically create a whole operation on structure and I think that has actually even more potential than the US company because the US company is a brand that if you like it, you like it. If you don’t, you don’t but Senegal would be like a solution to the entire fashion industry.

Then you could train people and here you have an opportunity to really make the difference, training people at scale and create opportunities and all of that so that’s the goal in terms of the next space and I am going to teaching year as I took the year off next year because I really wanted like we said to myself and things are growing really fast and is really hard. I wake up every day at 4 AM to get everything done and I am always on the go and I think I will be able to just sit and have a more balanced way of living.

Where I could have more time for collaboration, I can come to Stanford and you know, sit at launch pad for a whole semester and I brainstorm what I want to do and just scale things in a very well taught way but also just have time to process and watch this grow and be there for it, so that’s what in two weeks I am going to be fully done with school and –

[0:42:27.8] MAR: I love that, I mean I do think you’re right that fashion is going through a transformation [inaudible 0:42:33.0] the whole pollution and there is a lot of risk, fashion recycling now. We use maybe one of your Kimonos one day and you could recycle it to somebody else, which is so interesting as well. Well, call me when you’re doing that you know? [inaudible 0:42:46.3]

[0:42:48.7] DB: Yeah, totally. So, Mar, you are an investor that’s what you do?

[0:42:51.4] MAR: Yes.

[0:42:52.6] JEREMY: I was going to say Diarra I can’t help but observe as I look across your history, which I can’t thank you enough for sharing your story with us and sharing these experiences. It is so inspiring and rich. I can’t help but notice as I look across your history that most of your innovations have been born of tight places, the hospital bed, you know the job that is not working, the tough contract and I wonder if space is actually what you need. I wonder whether this constraints are actually forcing you to think creatively.

I’m all for it by the way, breaks and then a 100% supportive but that was just an observation. The last question that I have for you is what do you do to stay inspired now?

[0:43:36.5] DB: In terms of now, teaching has been and that’s one part that I am worried about in terms of next year because I am going to be taking the year off but teaching has been very inspiring, not this year, teaching on Zoom is not inspiring at all but teaching and being a teacher and what it means has been really positive for me because it has kind of reminded me of what it means to be a CEO and I honestly think I became a good CEO when I became a teacher.

I think when you start thinking in that your success is only valued when other people are successful, so when I teach, I only feel successful when my kids who had Ds and Fs are actually finishing and passing and seeing the smile on their face. You can tangibly see the impact you’ve had in a short period of time but you can see it on people and you don’t get – it is not like in finance where you get a bonus or you get commissions.

There is nothing that changes in your salary or in your anything but you get this intrinsic motivation from really affecting others and that kept me very inspired in terms of just teaching and then when I think about my own work and where I come from, I am very inspired by the impact that I can have on my family not just financially and like the work but in terms of the pride.

Growing up, dad’s biggest fear was that we were going to be like, forgetting who we are and he was – his mom was scared of him going to school because you either go to school and you become westernized or you don’t go to school and you are rooted, right?

Being able to be like, I am rooted but with technology, and I’m scaling that heritage with technology and it makes me proud. When I see the workshop and seeing artisans working like – it’s such a nice period of they are singing and chanting and having fun but also it’s honestly the pride of who you are, it’s like, who I am is being worn by some person in LA that I would have never known before and that’s who I am, that’s my last name, it’s my heritage.

That keeps me very inspired and that gives the work meaning beyond revenues and partnership, instead of just seeing that a small part of the world, a small identity and heritage that people were kind of losing sight of is now being scaled up and valued. That really keeps me going.

[0:45:49.1] JEREMY: Incredible. Diarra, if folks who want to find you on the Internet, on Instagram, et cetera, where can they find you?

[0:45:59.4] DB: All right, my Instagram is @diarrablu.

[0:46:01.4] MAR: I should go online tomorrow and watch that video, it’s amazing.

[0:46:07.5] DB: Okay.

[0:46:07.3] JEREMY: Definitely.

[0:46:10.2] DB: Yeah, that’s my Twitter.

[0:46:12.3] JEREMY: All right. On Instagram @thediarrablu and Twitter is @dbdiarrabousso. We’ll put a link to that, that’s awesome.

[0:46:20.6] DB: Yeah.

[0:46:21.7] JEREMY: Diarra, we can’t thank you enough for making the time to chat with us, we wish you all the very best and we’re excited to get to see your video on Instagram tomorrow.

[0:46:29.5] DB: Yeah, no problem.

[END]