What it really means to be the founding designer
From blank slate to $7B company, designing every step of the way.
When I decided to leave print design and move to a UX agency, my former boss warned me that I was “making one of the biggest mistakes of my life.”
Before Faire, I worked as a print and packaging designer in San Francisco. I love designing tangible things that people can actually take home with them. From boutique olive oils to candle packaging, my designs were the face of hundreds of products (many that still exist today!). In that role, no detail was too minor, and design refinement and craft were the scales that separated good designers from great ones.
My long term dream was to start a small boutique design firm. Beautiful goods would be sold in the front, and a small team of designers would work in a studio in the back.
But instead, I jumped.
From picas to pixels
Despite having “design” in my title at the UX agency, I felt like I couldn’t apply any of what I’d learned as a print designer to this new role. I missed the physicality of print, and the minutia of visual craft. Assigned to work for companies from banking to automotive, I found my projects challenging to get attached to, and lacking a mission I found inspiring.
I was more lost than ever.
Finding that thing.
I heard about Max Rhodes, the founder and CEO of what would later be named Faire, from a mutual friend. She mentioned that Max had just left his job as a Product Director at Square to start his own company. It was something to do with boutiques.
From the minute she explained the idea of Faire to me, I realized it was exactly what I was looking for. The mission was dedicated to enriching the lives of independent makers and small business owners. It was aspirational, challenging, and spoke to my love of designing for retail.
I met with Max at a coffee shop in the Mission District of San Francisco in December of 2016. After what was maybe a 20 minute interview, Max asked if I could start the next day. Before I had a chance to respond, we were speed walking down the street, him about five feet ahead of me, yelling behind him about “all the amazing things we were going to do!” Looking back, that should have been a sign that I was going to be running nonstop for the next three years.
From 4 to 240
Joining a startup as the first employee, and first designer, was a risk. And I learned quickly that, despite all of the design jobs popping up around the Bay Area and beyond, there were very few, if any, founding designers that I could seek out for advice.
From conducting our first user interview, to setting up our first symbol library, a lot of what I learned was from frantic searches on the internet. Trying something, trying another thing, and trying again until something worked.
Our small kitchen office rapidly outgrew one, two, three headquarter spaces, in two countries. Fast forward three years, Faire has grown to a company of 240 people. I’m proud of how deeply integrated design thinking and good design is in everything we do–from our product itself, to our office spaces, even to our holiday parties.
I took a chance on a blank-canvas job and helped make something. And I’m so glad I did.
My hope is that, by sharing what I’ve learned, I can show the possibilities in the blank canvas, and inspire others considering a similar adventure.
Lesson 1: Trust your gut
Imagine it’s your first day. You’re up at 6:30 in the morning, running to a stranger’s apartment, plugging your laptop in at his kitchen table, and starting to design a company’s entire product from scratch. That was my first day at Daniele Perito’s house, aka our first Faire office.
Starting with nothing can be one of the most inspiring — and terrifying — things in the world. What should this product look like? What should it do? How does it do it? All these questions can send designers down a spiral of doubt and self criticism. Here’s a secret weapon that many designers don’t realize that they have: Intuition. Go with it.
Local Nomad in Phoenix Arizona (Faire Retailer since July 2017)
Lesson 2: Use your experience
Without anything to go off of, I believed from the start that Faire was going to be a marketplace for female entrepreneurs. When I went shopping down Union Street in San Francisco, women were the store owners greeting me in the door, making the sale, teaching me about the amazing independent makers (also women) whose products they proudly sold in their shops. These shops were curated, thoughtful, and distinctly different from one another — and mission aligned. These entrepreneurs were proud of their craft and their work.
Designing a marketplace that was aspirational and distinctly feminine in typography, logo, and brand identity was about more than building something different from the sans serif, rounded cornered, cold tech scene. It was about building for the women I knew were out there — for the future customers who didn’t know about us yet.
Today, women-run businesses make up 85% of Faire’s retailer customer base and over 50% of Faire’s maker base.
Lesson 3: Be comfortable with the uncomfortable
Almost two years into the company, we were rebranding our company from “Indigo Fair” to Faire. Our small team had about a week of bandwidth to update everything across the product, including our logo, brand fonts, and homepage. What most designers would have loved to spend months building, we had merely hours, and I was quickly growing impatient by the lack of perfection and insane rush.
Max’s advice to me in a moment of peak panic, which I will never forget, was “be comfortable with the uncomfortable.”
Designers are great at finding flaws and wanting more than anything to fix the problems they uncover. Sometimes that desire runs rampant, and the laundry list of imperfections and flaws can be suffocating. It’s a fantastic design skill to acknowledge your shortcomings and misses, but you can’t fix everything at once. Admitting that you are one person, with two hands, doing the very best you can, has to be enough. Take back your sanity.
Lesson 4: You are not your work
After pouring a ton of time and effort into your work, it’s tempting to get attached and think, look at all these precious things I made! I can’t wait to show it to others! When sometimes that work falls flat, or even just plain fails, it can be devastating.
The important distinction to make in your mind is that you are not the work that is being critiqued. Your value as a person is not up for review. When you’re in a company without a single designer in the room, it can feel like you’re your only defender. But the sooner I was able to detangle myself from my work, the easier it was to actually digest feedback and defend the work objectively.
Lesson 5: Believe in the brand
From the very beginning, I made Max put in my contract that I would help design every office space that Faire would occupy. He looked at me puzzled, then laughed it off and said “no problem.”
What he saw as a random request, I saw as an incredible brand opportunity. Design extends way beyond pixels and user flows. Brand identity, company strategy, and team culture are all intertwined with design.
I believe that all great companies are built on great brands. When brand experiences are undeniably compelling, and undeniably well-designed, they become central to a company’s value. And spaces are a huge part of that.
We’ve moved four times in San Francisco alone, each office larger and more complex than the last. I’ve gotten to creative direct each one from the beginning, from naming our meeting rooms to customizing furniture partnerships with small independent craftspeople.
Keeping the spaces that we work in on-brand serves as a reminder to every person walking through our doors what our purpose is, and what it all measures up to at the end of the day. Our spaces instill a sense of pride in our team, a sense of belonging, and an overwhelming sense of mission. One of our recent internal culture polls across the company reported that, although we have areas to improve, 100% of all 240 employees at Faire feel aligned to our mission.
Designers can impact so much more than the pixels on a screen. They can grow companies and foster belonging and culture in a way that no one else can.
