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✨ A Vision & Naivete
When I launched Sukoon Active, the modest activewear brand I poured my life into from 2015 - 2020, I had a dream, a tailor I trusted, and absolutely no idea what I was actually signing up for.
I thought starting a DTC brand meant designing product and watching it sell. That was maybe 10% of it. The other 90% was things nobody puts in the founder origin story: the supplier relationship that could make or break a season, the version of myself that got genuinely sick of looking at my own product, the people who showed up for me from completely unexpected corners.
Then COVID hit, and I had no choice but to sunset the brand and find a 'real' job. My suppliers had to press pause on production because of Covid regulations, and I ran out of product to sell.
I've coached over 100 founders since then, and I see the same gap over and over: people prepare for the part of founding that's visible (the launch, the brand, the first sale) and get blindsided by the part that's invisible until you're inside it.
Here are 10 lessons I never anticipated learning as a DTC founder.
🧵 10 Lessons I Learned As A DTC Founder
1️⃣ You will make so much content. Everywhere! Including your parents' garage, the subway, a storage unit, a factory bathroom...the list goes on. Nobody warns you that being a founder means becoming a content machine whether or not you've ever done it before, want to do it, or hire anyone else.
2️⃣ Your supply chain is your lifeline. I learned this the hard way during COVID. You need your suppliers more than they need you, and that asymmetry will define how much control you actually have over your own timeline.
3️⃣ You will get sick of the product you once loved. Not in a "I don't believe in this anymore" way, but in a "why is this thing haunting my dreams" way. You can love something and be completely exhausted by it at the same time.
4️⃣ Your supporters come from the most unlikely places. My friends and family were in my corner, but there's a special place in my heart forever for the unlikely cheerleaders who came out of the woodwork to support, promote, buy, and cheer me on. Some of these people stay in your life no matter what happens to the business.
5️⃣ It may not all go as planned. Tomorrow, and in five years. Plan anyway...but expect it all to look a little different and to end up somewhere...new.
6️⃣ You will bear your soul on the internet, sometimes against your will. Building in public means the hard parts get witnessed too, not just the wins.
7️⃣ You will need a lot of extra closet space. This one really caught me and my tiny NYC apartment off guard! Boxes of fabric, trims, samples, prototypes...the list goes on. You'll need a place to keep it. Or rather, several places.
8️⃣ You'll do weird math. One dinner with the girls will become "that could pay for a sample." That splurge outfit will become "that pays for shipping from Portugal." That latte becomes "that's 100 pieces of trim I'm negotiating down." Money becomes a lot and nothing at all, all at once.
9️⃣ The range of outcomes is enormous. You could cry on the subway, or get sued, or do a photoshoot that makes your product really feel alive...sometimes all in the same week.
🔟 No matter what happens, the experience changes you. I remember when I went full time on my brand, people around me always said "you could go back to your old job." What that didn't account for is that I was a completely different person by the time I closed my brand down. Some of it will be harder than you dreamed. Some of it will be better than you ever let yourself imagine.
📌 The Takeaway
Founding a company isn't really a test of whether you can build a good product, it's a test of whether you can stay standing while the ground underneath you keeps moving, and what you can do with what you've learnt and built, regardless of how it turns out.
My brand didn't make it. But almost everything I do now, the coaching, the facilitation, and the way I work with underrepresented founders, is built on what building a DTC brand taught me.
Whether you're a founder reading this, or if you're sitting in a job right now wondering whether the ground under you is as stable as it looks, the same question applies: what are you learning that won't expire when the job does?
🥨 Snacks
🏢 FYI: Things that don't give you job security.
🎤 Public Speaking: The embarrassing story I told when I spoke at TechStars.
💡 The Anti-CEO Playbook: Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya calls for an end to the business playbook of the past, and shares his vision for a prioritizing people over profits.
See you in next week's mess,
Arshiya
