Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones

Cotton muslin baby blankets are commonplace in Australia, where Raegan Moya-Jones grew up. But when she started a new life and family in NYC, she couldn't find them anywhere. She was sure Americans would love muslin blankets as much as Australians. So in 2006, she started the baby blanket company Aden + Anais, which now makes more than $100 million in annual revenue. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," how Sam Boyd created Guided Imports, a middleman business to help entrepreneurs find manufacturing and production solutions ... in China. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Hey, everyone. Just a quick thing before we start the show. I want to let you know that we are heading to the West Coast this summer to do two live shows, which I'm super excited about. The first one is in San Francisco on August 2. I'll be talking with the co-founders of Reddit, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Hoffman. And if you're in Seattle on September 14, save the date because I'll be talking with Starbucks founder Howard Schultz. If you want to find out more about How I Built This live events, go to nprpresents.org. OK, here's the show.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  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 $1 million revenue.

• 0:51Guy Raz?

  Is that true?

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Yes. Isn't that frightening?

• 0:53Guy Raz?

  That's shocking, yeah.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  But I'd set myself that goal. So I just said, right, once I get to $1 million in revenue, I've done something that most women entrepreneurs aren't able to do.

• 1:14Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 1:26Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz. And on today's show, how one Australian mother searched for the right blankie for her newborn. And when she couldn't find it, she built a baby blanket company, now making $100 million a year.

• 1:41Guy Raz?

  So back in 2013, you might remember the birth of a brand-new royal baby, the heir to the British throne. The Duchess of Cambridge has been delivered of a son.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  Eight pounds, six ounces to the duke. That's the latest that we're hearing as we're looking at these pictures from Buckingham Palace.

• 1:58Guy Raz?

  The day after he was born, mom and dad stood outside St. Mary's Hospital in Paddington and introduced Prince George to the world.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  He's got a good pair of lungs on him, that's for sure. He's a big boy. He's quite heavy. But we're still working on a

• 2:13Guy Raz?

  And as the camera zoomed in on Baby George, you could just make out that he was wrapped up in a white cotton swaddle, printed with tiny cartoon birds. And after a little internet sleuthing, people tracked down the maker of that swaddle, Aiden N. Anais. It's a baby product company that sells swaddle blankets for about 15 bucks apiece. And of course, the effect was instantaneous. Within four hours, the company's website crashed, and then it crashed again the next day. And for Aiden N. Anais's co-founder Reagan Moya-Jones, it was a pretty big shock because the company was barely seven years old. And over that seven-year period,

• 2:56Guy Raz?

  Aiden N. Anais had been through a lot of ups and downs, starting with the recession in 2008, and then eventually, a traumatic breakup between Reagan and her business partner that threatened to dissolve the entire company. A company, by the way, with yearly revenue now of over $100 million. So how did she create this company, Aden N. Anais? Well, the story begins when Reagan and her husband Marcos moved from Sydney, Australia, to New York in 1997 after he got a job. And Reagan, at the time, she didn't really have any plans.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  I came here without a job, without a working visa. And I thought, you know what? I'll do some volunteer stuff. I'll learn to speak Spanish because my husband's Chilean. And I'll fill my time that way for two years and sort of treat it as just a, you know, a new and different journey rather than being, you know, 100 miles an hour with my work and my studies. And that didn't kind of work out for me because about four months in, my husband initially was working from home because, you know, they were really setting things up from the ground here in New York. And he walked into the living room, and I was laying on the couch at 11 o'clock in my pajamas, you know.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  And he just said to me, what the hell are you doing? Come on, you gotta, you gotta get up and shake this off and... Find something to do.

• 4:24Guy Raz?

  Were you, were you getting depressed because you were bored?

• 4:27Speaker 01

  I don't know that I was depressed. I just, I didn't know anybody in New York and I just sort of fell into a rut, I think, and I underestimated how much I needed to be the person that, you know, had a very full schedule. So rather than using the downtime productively, I just used the downtime to lay on the couch and watch morning talk shows.

• 4:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah, that does sound depressing.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  It was. It was horrible.

• 5:00Guy Raz?

  Eventually Reagan's visa did come through so she could start working and within about a year she landed a job as a sales rep for The Economist magazine.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  And this sounds obnoxious, but I was really good at it. You know, the wonderful thing with sales is you live and die by the number that you're told to hit. And I was very fortunate that I never didn't hit the numbers.

• 5:22Guy Raz?

  Did you like it? Did you have fun?

• 5:25Speaker 01

  I did have fun. I, did I love it? Was it, was it my passion? Absolutely not. And I was very frustrated that I wasn't really taken seriously in terms of being able to be promoted and everything. I was very much sort of kept in my box of what I had always done, albeit in different areas of the business over 10 years. But that was, that was a huge frustration to me that it was obvious I was never really going to go anywhere within The Economist.

• 6:01Guy Raz?

  Did you, like, were you dreaming of leaving and, and starting your own thing?

• 6:05Speaker 01

  I wasn't going to leave it for another job. I think I have always been an entrepreneur. I never defined myself as that, but there was always a desire for me to do something on my own. I just never had, had an idea. I'd had lots of ideas, but none that I felt. Were worth sort of, you know, diving in the deep end for.

• 6:28Guy Raz?

  But I mean, at some point, I mean, you got an idea, the idea that would become Aidan and Anais. So what happened?

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Well, I had my first of my four daughters. That's what happened. I was pregnant with Anais and I was, you know, getting ready, as we all do when we're having our first baby with all the paraphernalia that you think you need. And I went out looking for these muslin blankets that were extremely common back home in Australia, so common that you could buy them in, you know, supermarkets. It was mind blowing to me when I went looking for them in the US that they didn't actually exist.

• 7:06Guy Raz?

  You couldn't find them. And I guess just to explain to somebody who doesn't know what a muslin blanket is, it's sort of like a really soft cheesecloth, kind of, right?

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Yes, it's like a gauze. And not only was it, in my opinion, and still in my opinion, the only thing you should wrap your baby in because it's lightweight and breathable and big enough to be able to securely swaddle the babies. It was the fact that this one blanket did multiple things. So you could use it as a burp cloth, you could use it as a portable crib sheet, could use it as a nursing cover, you could use it as a stroller cover, you could, you know, you just use it to mop up the messes that are, you know, inevitable when you have newborn babies, that sort of thing. So, and the thing with muslin is the more you wash it, the softer it gets.

• 7:56Guy Raz?

  So in Australia, this is just normal, like all babies were wrapped in these

• 8:00Speaker 01

  All babies.

• 8:01Guy Raz?

  These cotton muslin wraps.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Yes. So that was, you know, and I just thought, every, every Australian can't have this wrong. And if I introduced this product to American parents, I was just absolutely 100% certain that they would respond to it the same way as us Aussies had.

• 8:23Guy Raz?

  So you presumably took leave after Anais was born and then went back to The Economist?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Yes, I had three months off.

• 8:33Guy Raz?

  And, and did you go back to The Economist with this idea churning in your head yet?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:38Guy Raz?

  And how do you then start to make this a reality? What's the first thing you do?

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Well, I had no supply chain or operational, you know, experience or knowledge, you know, I'm a salesperson, you know. So I had to find out how I would even go about making this stuff. And that took a long time. So you had the idea in 2003 when Ane was born. And it took, it took till 2006 to actually work out how to make it and, and get it to market.

• 9:17Guy Raz?

  So did you start this process all by yourself?

• 9:21Speaker 01

  No, I had a, I had a partner. The one person that my husband knew from Australia. His best friend's ex-girlfriend Claudia, who ended up marrying an American guy. And that was the first person I met here. And Claudia is Aiden's mum. She was the other co-founder of Aiden and Danae.

• 9:41Guy Raz?

  Wow. So you guys got together and she agreed. She said, this is crazy that you can't get these in America.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Well, she had Aiden about seven or eight months after I had Ane. 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, 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 out of Australia?

• 10:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah, which was seems like a reasonable suggestion.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  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, I remember saying, and we can call the company Aden and Danae after the babies. And that was sort of how it all got started.

• 10:47Guy Raz?

  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, and the shapes on them?

• 11:04Speaker 01

  That's a great question because I am not the most artistic person. Actually, I, you know, my artistic skills don't go beyond stick people. You know, I really can't draw to save my life. But I am very opinionated and I have a very 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.

• 11:49Guy Raz?

  So where did you find the manufacturing facility? How did you find somebody who, who could make these muslin cotton blankets?

• 11:57Speaker 01

  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 and I walked 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.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:07Guy Raz?

  So it was literally the last? Booth you went to.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Absolutely. True story. I was out the door, bar one booth, and they ended up becoming my manufacturer for 10 years.

• 13:20Guy Raz?

  Unbelievable. So, so when they, they sent you the first sample, did they, did they get it right, right away?

• 13:25Speaker 01

  No.

• 13:26Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  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

• 14:08Speaker 01

  to use formaldehyde in dyes on baby, but that, that stuff just blew my mind. So obviously, that was very important to me, that there was none of that in any Aiden and N A products. And it was a long and laborious process with a, 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 that, you know, there's so many stories about the trials and tribulations of actually perfecting the fabrication.

• 14:43Guy Raz?

  Were you still working at The Economist at this point?

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Yes. I stayed working at The Economist until May of 2009. So.

• 14:53Guy Raz?

  Did you tell your colleagues about it? Did they find out?

• 14:56Speaker 01

  No. Nobody knew.

• 14:58Guy Raz?

  Were you keeping it secret because you just didn't?

• 15:00Speaker 01

  I didn't want anybody looking or questioning me. And again, I, I go back to, I was a salesperson. I never, ever didn't make my budget. I, 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.

• 15:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah, right. At this point, I guess, 2006, Anais is three. And then, did you have another child by that point?

• 15:31Speaker 01

  I actually had three of my four daughters by that point.

• 15:34Guy Raz?

  Okay, so you were still working full time at The Economist and presumably flying back and forth to LA to work with Claudia on the side business, and you were also raising three kids. I mean, how did you make all of this work?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  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. 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 Aidan and Anais, 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.

• 16:29Guy Raz?

  So it's 2006, you have your fir-, you make your first big order. How many, what was that order like? What do you remember?

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Well, we started, we both started just putting $15,000 in for our first inventory. And that we, 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, I picked up the phone, I called Bye Bye Baby. I, you know, that, 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, you know, six SKUs, thinking they might take one or two.

• 17:23Guy Raz?

  What's a, how much is a SKU?

• 17:25Speaker 01

  A SKU 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.

• 17:35Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  And rolled it out into all Target stores from day one.

• 17:41Guy Raz?

  Once you got orders from these big companies, I mean, you had to then make the order with a factory in China and, I guess, pay them money. How did you fund that?

• 17:53Speaker 01

  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 the partner thing is always, well, often a story with entrepreneurs, right?

• 18:15Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  So Claudia and Mark were very wealthy. Marcos and I, not so much. We were doing fine, but we didn't have millions of dollars.

• 18:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  So Marcos and I kept up for as long as we could. 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 we couldn't keep up anymore. There was no access to capital. We started the business at the beginning of the worst recession since the Great Depression. So Claudia said, we just need to borrow money off Mark and his family, which I absolutely did not want to do. It was last resort. But it had got to the point, I think we'd borrowed 100,000 off Claudia and Mark, and then we borrowed another 250,000 off Mark's dad.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:20Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:41Guy Raz?

  When we come back in a moment, how Reagan's company and friendship with Claudia changed forever. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 20:06Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So when Reagan's friend and business partner Claudia told her she wanted out of Aiden and the May, Reagan had to figure out how to hold on to the company.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  When Claudia exited the business in 2000, very early 2008, it was me. It was just me alone doing all the work. I was sales, customer service, manufacturing, you know, 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

• 21:04Speaker 01

  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, you know, wanted for, you know, the work that she'd put into the business so far.

• 21:28Guy Raz?

  To buy her out.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  To buy her out. So three other people came into the business and bought 49% of the business for like $500,000.

• 21:39Guy Raz?

  Wow. This is a really important story because we don't get to hear these stories too often about the reality of starting a business with a partner, where at the beginning, it's there's this vision of a kind of a utopian business, and there are partnerships that really work. But often, oftentimes, a case is more like this, where Money gets involved and tension builds and people get nervous about the investment. And you can kind of understand where Claudia and Mark were coming from.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 22:11Guy Raz?

  I mean, they were getting nervous. They were. They had a lot of money on the line. But I mean, I have to imagine that it took a toll on your friendship.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Oh, well, she never spoke to me again because I just responded and said, Claude's, 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, and 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.

• 22:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  It was just heartbreaking that it did.

• 22:58Guy Raz?

  Did you think that the business was going to collapse?

• 23:02Speaker 01

  No, I never thought that. I thought I might collapse.

• 23:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  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 Danae.

• 23:20Guy Raz?

  Was there any tension in your marriage?

• 23:23Speaker 01

  None.

• 23:23Guy Raz?

  Was Marcos fully supportive?

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Fully. He was the one who actually, when I started to get a bit shaky through the whole, you know, drama with Claudia, and I said to him, look, I don't know if I can do this, you know? 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.

• 23:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  You know, don't give up. Fight for it.

• 23:52Guy Raz?

  Have you ever had any contact with Claudia since the breakup?

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely none. Unfortunately, the friendship was very much a casualty of the business. But she must know where the company has gone.

• 24:10Guy Raz?

  Her child's name is on it.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  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 for forever.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:32Guy Raz?

  So you buy out Claudia's share?

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Well, I don't.

• 24:35Guy Raz?

  Your partners do. 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?

• 24:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 25:08Guy Raz?

  Is that true?

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Yes. Isn't that frightening?

• 25:10Guy Raz?

  That's shocking, yeah.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  So 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 Ane full time.

• 25:31Guy Raz?

  All right, so finally, when you leave The Economist, I'm assuming you told them why?

• 25:36Speaker 01

  No.

• 25:37Guy Raz?

  You didn't?

• 25:37Speaker 01

  No, 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 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.

• 26:12Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  And we have won multiple awards with Cranes as the fastest, one of the fastest 50 growing entrepreneurial businesses in New York.

• 26:23Guy Raz?

  I mean, do experiences like that with your boss, do they like add fuel to your fire? Are they powerful motivators for you?

• 26:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:59Guy Raz?

  Hmm. Okay, so by 2009, you leave The Economist. And then I guess you're profitable. But by the way, what is your revenue that year?

• 27:07Speaker 01

  We closed 2009 at just over 4 million. So as soon as I focused on it, you know, 100%, it changed the game. And then we more than doubled every year for the five years after that.

• 27:24Guy Raz?

  I guess I guess it was around 2010 where you took on some outside investment?

• 27:29Speaker 01

  That's correct. I took on my first private equity firm in 2010.

• 27:33Guy Raz?

  Why did you do that? I mean, up until this point, you are the majority owner. You know, you're doing well, 4 million revenue. What did that enable you guys to do?

• 27:43Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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 need, we 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 just allowed us to be able to get, look. Even today, I can't keep up with the demand. But it's, it enabled us to get closer to it, at least, back then.

• 28:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I, I know that, like, at a certain point, celebrities started to be like, you know, Us Weekly, like, they're just like us. They swaddle their babies, except the swaddle was like your swaddle blankets. When did you start to see celebrities using the blankets?

• 28:41Speaker 01

  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'd 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.

• 29:11Guy Raz?

  Did anybody know what the blanket was, though?

• 29:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:25Guy Raz?

  Back in, in 2013, Prince William and Kate Middleton, I guess we should call them the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, they had a baby, Prince George. They leave the hospital and, and what did you, what did you see?

• 29:40Speaker 01

  They left the hospital in an Aiden and an A 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 an A, and the world goes wild.

• 30:09Guy Raz?

  And, and so, did sales just go crazy?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:24Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  It was insane. I was like, guys, we've got other patents over here of the same, but they all just wanted what the royal baby had.

• 30:33Guy Raz?

  What was the pattern that he had, by the way?

• 30:35Speaker 01

  It was, interestingly, it was from a pack called 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.

• 30:51Guy Raz?

  I mean, just to be clear, these are not like super crazy expensive, right? I mean, how much is a four pack?

• 30:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 31:21Guy Raz?

  When you, around, I guess, around 2013, you guys, you guys got a big investment, right?

• 31:30Speaker 01

  That's correct. Swander Pace Capital entered in and they became the majority shareholders now in A and A. However, I still remain the single largest individual shareholder in the company.

• 31:44Guy Raz?

  So explain how this works. They, they bought a big share of the company, but that allowed you to cash out some of, some of the value of the company?

• 31:51Speaker 01

  That's correct. They bought, they bought the whole company. What I did was bought back in as a major shareholder in the company.

• 31:59Guy Raz?

  I mean, so in a sense, that, I guess, that made you sat financially for the rest of your life.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  Yes. Baby blankets have afforded my family an incredibly wonderful life.

• 32:10Guy Raz?

  And you're still the CEO.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  I am.

• 32:12Guy Raz?

  So. A pretty incredible result.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Yes, it is. Although what I will tell you, Guy, is I much prefer and I believe I'm much better at the entrepreneurial building of a company now that we're over a hundred million dollars. It's just very different, you know, obviously, the way you run a hundred million dollar company to the way you run a, you know, a twenty or even a thirty, forty million dollar company. You know, you can get by with running your business on Excel spreadsheets at thirty million. It doesn't cut it at a hundred. Like at thirty million, I was still very much involved, you know, in a lot of the day to day.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:17Guy Raz?

  That's interesting.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  And I, you know, I miss that.

• 33:22Guy Raz?

  Given that you got this big payout, do you ever think, I don't know, maybe I'll just like stop working and just take up a hobby or do something completely different for a while?

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Well, it's, I could never be the lady that lunches. It's just not, you know, remember back to the story of me on the couch in my pajamas? You know, so too much time is not a good thing for me. Interestingly, I was talking to my eldest daughter, Anais, the other night and I said to her, what do you think, baby, if, you know, mum stopped being the CEO of Aiden and Anais and, you know, I could spend more time and do more? And she's like, please don't, mum. Like, I'm, I'm good. We're good with the amount of time that we have you around. So I laughed hard at that. 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

• 34:18Speaker 01

  a business of this size and has scaled from a hundred to

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Three hundred, because I, 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, but I would do it making a hell of a lot more mistakes than somebody who is seasoned, who had done it before. I'm a, I'm a self-taught CEO. I'm, I've never run a hundred million dollar business before till this year when we're a hundred million dollars, you know? So there are people out there though, who have done that for many, many years and have a proven track record that, you know, that would probably do a much better job of it than, than I do. And, and selfishly, being the mum of four little girls, my worst nightmare would be

• 35:08Speaker 01

  in fifteen years' time, when I am sitting at a bar with my four girls as, as adult women, not being able to turn to Aidan and Anais 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, you know, a half a billion dollar global brand. So that's my, that's my ultimate goal for, for how this, this story's going to play out.

• 35:40Guy Raz?

  Reagan Moya-Jones, she's the CEO and co-founder of Aidan and Anais. By the way, a few months ago, the Huffington Post ran a story called Fifty Two Things I Learned in Fifty Two Weeks of Parenting.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  And number one on the list was that nobody can pronounce Aidan and Anais. So you kind of know you've made it a brand when you're number one on a list in a Huffington Post, you know, article on motherhood.

• 36:21Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks for sticking around because it's time now for How You Built That. And this next story comes to us from Shenzhen, China.

• 36:29Speaker 04

  My name is Sam Boyd, and I'm the founder of Guided Imports.

• 36:33Guy Raz?

  And Sam's story jumped out at us because, you know, a lot of times we do interviews with people on this show who invent something and then build a prototype, and then they find a factory in China to make it. And Sam, he is the guy in China who finds the factory. And all this started about five years ago when he was in college and studying Chinese in China. And one day at a restaurant, two locals walked up to him.

• 36:59Speaker 04

  We started talking. You know, they see a foreigner in this small city, and they want to know what's going on. What is he doing here? And I asked what they do. And, you know, it sort of led to them talking about their factory and them asking me, do you know anyone who's interested in purchasing our products? And I said, yeah, sure. I don't really know anyone, but I'm going to find someone for you.

• 37:18Guy Raz?

  OK, but the product these two guys were talking about? Pretty specific. They were talking about sterilized packaging, like the kind of thing you might use for medical equipment. And Sam didn't have a clue how to find buyers for something like that. But it didn't really matter, because after that conversation in the restaurant, he saw an opportunity.

• 37:39Speaker 04

  China is incredible in terms of it being such an entrepreneurial location. And being fortunate enough to have a Western education, having grown up in America, I said, I can be doing this.

• 37:53Guy Raz?

  And by this, he was thinking, I could be the middleman. I could be the person between people in the West who want to sell consumer goods and Chinese factories that want to make them. So to learn more about how all this worked, Sam got a job at a company in Shenzhen that makes electronic gadgets.

• 38:11Speaker 04

  And when I saw how things work, and I really just explained it as I opened my eyes and saw, you know, this is how business is done. So that was the experience that I had where I said, why do I have a boss right now? I don't want a boss. I want to be the boss because I can make something big.

• 38:27Guy Raz?

  At the time, Sam was 22 years old. And that day, he quit his job at the gadget company and set out to become an American middleman in China.

• 38:36Speaker 04

  I was on the other side of the world from friends, from family, from every type of safety net that I've ever had in my life. And the Monday of me going to work and going to work was leaving my bedroom and going to my kitchen table in my shared apartment in Shenzhen. It was just, oh, my goodness, what do I do?

• 38:53Guy Raz?

  So Sam started scrolling through Reddit pages and blogs, looking for English-speaking entrepreneurs who wanted their products made in China.

• 39:01Speaker 04

  And I started just saying, hey, I'm an American. If you're looking for products, let me know, and I can try to help you find them.

• 39:09Guy Raz?

  And in his first year, Sam signed up about 15 clients who wanted to make stuff in China.

• 39:14Speaker 04

  Like watch boxes and jewelry boxes, wallets, toothbrush replacement heads.

• 39:20Guy Raz?

  Now, at the time, it was just Sam and his assistant. And the two of them would call places all over China to find factories to make the products.

• 39:28Speaker 04

  And it's funny, because I remember my roommate, he wasn't too happy with all of the boxes that were just coming in and filling up the apartment. And we were stacking boxes of just products that we were getting ready to ship out of product.

• 39:40Guy Raz?

  That was during the first few months. Now, Sam's been in business for three years. He has an office with 15 employees in Shenzhen. And the company helps clients find a factory, they do quality control, they handle all the shipping, and they do all this for a flat fee, about $1,000. And last year, Sam says guided imports made almost half a million dollars.

• 40:02Speaker 04

  Once I started building this company, I said, I'm going to stay here for five years. Well, now I look at it, and I already said I'm going to stay here five years. I'm overstaying that. So I don't necessarily know what the future is. It could be another five years. It could be 50 more years.

• 40:19Guy Raz?

  That's Sam Boyd. He lives in Shenzhen, China. You can read more about his company, Guided Imports, on our Facebook page. Just search How I Built This on Facebook. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, please go to build.npr.org. We love, love, love hearing your stories. And thanks for listening to the show this week. If you want to find out more or if you want to hear previous episodes, you can go to howibuiltthis.npr.org. You can write us, h i b t at npr.org. And if you want to send us a tweet, it's at howibuiltthis. Our show is produced this week by Rachel Faulkner, with original music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Thanks also to Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, Claire Breen, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Lawrence Wu.

• 41:04Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 41:38Guy Raz?

  If you're looking for a new podcast to try, how about Planet Money? Give it a fresh listen. One thing people say about Planet Money is how much they love listening to it, even though they don't care about business or economics. It's just a smart show with great stories that help explain our world. It's explanatory journalism at its best for a time that really needs some sane reporting about the big questions. Find Planet Money on NPR1 or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 42:05Speaker 05

  I listen to Bullseye because Jesse always has really good questions.

• 42:09Speaker 06

  What did John Malkovich wear when he was 20?

• 42:12Speaker 05

  Duh. I don't know how to describe it.

• 42:15Speaker 06

  Bullseye, interviews with creators you love and creators you need to know from maximumfun.org and NPR.