Founder@ Interview
With Courtney Glasser & Lindsey Glasser
“Don’t start a business because you want money. You need to be passionate about what your business entails and how it will help people or fill a gap in the market. Money will never be as fulfilling as something you’re excited to wake up in the morning and do. Think about why you’re starting. Know your customer and understand who they are.” – Courtney Glasser
Today we feature Courtney Glasser & Lindsey Glasser, the founders at Grey Bandit . We hear their story in their own words, their successes, their challenges and their insights.
Let’s start by getting to know you. Can you please tell us a little bit about you and what you do?
We’re Courtney and Lindsey Glasser, co-founders of Grey Bandit, an online clothing boutique, with our brother and triplet Robert Glasser. We’re currently 27 years old and began our business right after graduating college. While we wear many hats in the business every day, we divide the work amongst us, based on our strengths.
A great introduction and start to this interview. Can you please tell us, how did you start, from what age, and what made you decide to change direction and start?
Courtney – Back when I was 12, I began my understanding of the internet and the need to create something unique. My friend and I used to offer MySpace designs to our friends where we would code and create graphics for others to use on their page. I think this really allowed me to understand social media as a whole. Fast forward to when I was 14, I created a Justin Bieber fan page and grew it to over 100K followers. I learned a lot about what people wanted on social media because I was catering towards viewers that were like myself. From there, a friend and I worked with two artists to help grow their profiles and get their names out in the music industry.
When I was in college, Instagram had just gained traction and I was shopping online all the time. I noticed that on my explore page, I would find other businesses by looking at what other people like me would wear. That’s how I knew early on that marketing to your consumers is so key. I didn’t feel like there were many online boutiques in the US that had on-trend clothing. As kids, we were always finding ways to create businesses together. Whether it was selling starbursts at camp, helping our mom at her warehouse, studding shorts and phone cases for our friends, we were always looking for ways to be our own boss and choose our own path. Senior year of college, Lindsey created a business plan for Grey Bandit, I created the website and when we graduated, we knew we were onto something, so we dove into it. While I didn’t have a set plan originally of what I wanted to do exactly, looking back, there were so many things that led me to this point.
Thank you for that insight. So can you tell us…What does your business do and where is your company based?
Based in New York, Grey Bandit is an e-commerce company that offers on-trend clothing while emphasizing a lifestyle of mental health, wellness, confidence and positive vibes. They want everyone to look good and feel good when wearing their clothes. Grey Bandit has been taking TikTok by storm as well, so you may have seen them there.
What’s the story behind your success? What led to your aha moment? how did you get to where you are now?
The main part of success is failing. If you don’t fail you can’t learn. Honestly, today we don’t even view something as a “failure” it’s more making mistakes. When we first started, we knew we needed to market early. The first month we did about 30 orders to just friends and family, but we knew that we wanted to target the people that were like us in college. We decided to send clothes to college girls that had strong engagement on their content in exchange for posts and that’s when we started to build our following, and in turn our sales. In November of 2017, we decided to try working with a bigger influencer. While this didn’t convert in terms of a return on investment financially, it did grow our following which provided credibility and increased awareness. We invested a ton of money into marketing from there and worked with smaller creators while also trying to work with larger creators with over 500K followers. We tested this for a while and we wouldn’t say it was a failure, but we didn’t make any money that year as founders.
However, we realized what worked and what didn’t so we could learn from this and adapt our strategy. The smaller influencers were working really well so we rolled with that success. We also realized we could build our brand via word of mouth from our customers by including promos for them posting and using smaller creators as well. Our parents were a huge help in getting to where we are now. Once we were able to prove to our parents we could bring in sales, they invested a bit to help us get off the ground, which has now been entirely paid back. Because they believed in us, we were motivated.
Every year has been different though. We’ve had to pivot and be creative as technology and trends change. As we look at the future, we’re continuing to do so, for example thinking about how to even further leverage TikTok. Every person that has been part of our growth has helped us get to where we are now, so we wouldn’t say there’s anyone that didn’t help specifically. Working together has been most key though. The three of us play into each other’s strengths and weaknesses to better the company. We’ve also made sure to hire for our weaknesses and couldn’t be more grateful for our team. We’ve sacrificed a lot of our time to get here and we have taken a lot of risks. Building the team around us has helped us get to where we are today.
Thank you for sharing that. What’s been your life’s biggest lesson so far?
Diversify how you market. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. We’ve grown our Instagram following tremendously over the years. However, with the growth of TikTok and the changes to the Instagram algorithm, we can’t reach all of our followers all the time. Even more so now, we need to think outside the box to other platforms for marketing to build those lists and reach all of our customers. Now, we’re focused on using our team to grow the brand rather than just relying on creators despite that being successful in the past. We wouldn’t change how we got here, as everything that has happened has led us to where we are now and taught us lessons.
We now know that there’s going to be highs and lows. It’s not exponential growth all the time. It’s always hard coming out of Q4 each year and heading into January and February when people aren’t shopping as much, but we always figure it out because we think outside the box and think about how to do better for our customers and brand. It’s about working through the lows to get to the highs.
If you were to go back in time, what piece of advice would you give to your younger self?
Courtney – I struggled immensely with anxiety in high school. I never thought I would make it to college, let alone make it to where I am now. My advice would be to keep going and trust that everything will work out. Do things that scare you and make you uncomfortable but know that there is light at the end of the tunnel and you’ll get through the hard times. Lindsey- I would say that you’re capable of more than you know. Trust your gut and know your worth. I used to be so scared to speak up and share my ideas in school because I thought they weren’t good enough or that I wasn’t smart enough. As I started believing in myself more, I realized that anything is possible. Continue to work hard, focus on your own path, and when the going gets tough keep going. Follow what you’re passionate about, not what will make someone else happy. Say yes to opportunities even if they’re scary.
We’re nearly halfway through our interview so it’s a great time to ask how does your business run. What three tools make your business run better?
Shopify – Every single e-commerce business should run through shopify. We all have some sort of use for shopify on the team. It’s where we host our website, see analytics, reports on customers and products and so much more. Shopify makes everything easy and straightforward. Notion – Platform used to keep everything organized rather than a bunch of google docs. We have different boards for buying, marketing, quarterly meetings etc. All of our processes are listed in Notion.
If someone is out of the office or changes roles we have all the processes listed on there. We always say before coming to us, if you can figure it out yourself from notion, check there first to do your own research. There are so many functions within Notion – active calendar, checklists, who is checking things off to do lists, etc. You can give employees their to do list without micro managing and can see what they completed. Grin – Grin is an amazing tool that we’ve started using to help us stay organized with all of our creator partnerships. It helps us reach out to new influencers, send contracts, and overall, keeps everything in one place.
Beyond this, Grin tracks ROI and makes sending proposals and organizing content super easy. It helps us streamline the process for content creation and influencer marketing which is a huge part of our growth. For example, when a team member is out of office, it even has the entire cadence of communication within Grin, while still connecting to your email inbox. As we continue to expand and work with new creators, Grin allows us to see stats on their audience, engagement, follower details and authenticity.
What do you know now that you wished you had known before?
We now know that there’s going to be highs and lows. It’s not exponential growth all the time. It’s always hard coming out of Q4 each year and heading into January and February when people aren’t shopping as much, but we always figure it out because we think outside the box and think about how to do better for our customers and brand. It’s about working through the lows to get to the highs. 
What has been your greatest or proudest achievement or moment?
Working with the whole team to put together our first collaboration line with an influencer, our Ana x GB collection. This was a really proud moment because we never imagined we could design a line with a creator and bring it to life. The three of us put our own money into this collaboration and believed in it so much to invest and hope for the best. At the end of April, when we went on a trip to celebrate this launch, we never anticipated the amazing reception to this launch from her followers and our customers. We learned so much from this, it was such a successful launch. The feeling in that moment when it launched was incredible and to see the time and effort we put in pay off was amazing.
What future life goals do you want to achieve and why?
We want to be happy and have the ability to give to others. Continuing to grow the mental health side of our business with Ride The Wave is something we are turning more of our focus to. Being able to help other people makes us happy. We hope to continue to find what makes us happy and advocate for mental health, spread our stories and build a community around breaking the stigma around mental health so we can make a difference.
To finish our inspire questions…”We believe that sharing inspiring words can inspire others.” If there was one positive thing you would say to someone to inspire and empower them what would it be and why?
Don’t start a business because you want money. You need to be passionate about what your business entails and how it will help people or fill a gap in the market. Money will never be as fulfilling as something you’re excited to wake up in the morning and do. Think about why you’re starting. Know your customer and understand who they are. You have to be able to get into their head to know how to reach them and connect with them. We love asking our customers and followers questions to see what they are interested in and what they want to see more of from us. Their feedback is so crucial.
“Thank you it has been great learning more about your founder story and Grey Bandit “
To learn more about Grey Bandit Visit https://greybandit.com
Find on social media @
https://www.linkedin.com/company/grey-bandit/about/
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