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Known among her friends as the person to call for design tips, Ariel Kaye realized that she had an opportunity to use passion for interior design to start a home goods company.
But instead of creating just another brand that sells bed sheets, towels and other products for the home, Ariel wanted to create a company that prioritizes its relationship with customers — in a way she wasn’t seeing in the industry.
When she launched Parachute Home, Ariel focused mainly on bedding, emphasizing the value of quality sheets when it comes to getting restful sleep at night.
“Sleep is so important. [Bedding] impacts your life in such a phenomenal way,” Ariel says on this episode of The Empowered Challenger. “I knew that bedding was such an opportunity to build a connection and trust within the customer base to literally get in bed with them every night.”
Though Ariel was new to entrepreneurship, her background in advertising has helped her see an opportunity to be a guiding light in this industry. She knows how to put customers first, cultivating the kinds of consumer-company relationships that are unique and make her company stand out amongst the rest.
Tune in to this episode to hear how she changed career paths to fulfill her dream of challenging the home goods industry from the inside, as well as how she’s positioned Parachute Home to help people create their dream homes.
Featured Challenger
👩 Name: Ariel Kaye
⚙️ How she challenges: With Parachute Home, Ariel aims to challenge the home goods industry by encouraging a deeper relationship with consumers.
🛏️ Company: Parachute Home
💎 Noteworthy: Ariel published her first book, “How to Make a House a Home,” in 2020.
🔍 Where to find Ariel: Twitter | LinkedIn
Challenger Wisdom
Highlights from the conversation appear below.
💡 The courage to make a change“I was sort of realizing that I was hitting my head in the ad world at this big agency, and I wanted to do something different. It was one of those aha moments where I realized that I wanted to do something more entrepreneurial where I could have real control over the process.”
💡 Leveraging the professional skills you have“[Advertising] was a really great background for me to start my own consumer-first business because I had this experience thinking about how to motivate and inspire the customer. It’s considered rather untraditional to have my background and then move and to become an entrepreneur and CEO, but I think it’s part of my secret sauce.”
💡 Turning a passion into a career“When I was in graduate school, I started an interior design blog, and I was always helping friends decorate their apartments in New York and changing my own spaces and was really passionate about it. I saw this opportunity in the home space because I was really passionate about design and comfort and sleep and all of these things.”
💡 Starting from scratch and getting capital“Getting capital to fund this thing was definitely a hard one. I didn’t have savings for this; I didn't have family members who were going to provide me with capital to get the business off the ground, so I had to find outside capital to support. I didn't know anything really, except the types of products I wanted to sell and what they wanted them to feel like. I had some intuition around how to build a website that was going to be functional, but pretty much everything else was a challenge.”
💡 On how she sees the competition“We pay attention [to competition] because it's important to understand what's happening in the industry and the market. But we’re really focused on being uniquely Parachute and focusing on our quality and our design aesthetic and the products that we're introducing.”
💡 Balancing the hustle“I appreciate the hustle and the grind, but I think there's a way to have that excitement and enthusiasm and hustle, and also go have an evening to see your friends, on a bike ride, do whatever you want to do that is your hobby and brings you joy.”
💡 Quality as a product differentiator“Our products are designed to last. We don't use any toxic chemicals or artificial dyes. They're really, really well-made, and we're designing and manufacturing our products in factories that have been around for over a hundred years. It’s not stuffy, it's just comfortable.”
💡 Building a balanced team“I was doing this on my own up until about three weeks after I launched. I hired my first employee who had a financial background because I needed someone that could help think about our budget and placing orders early on, so I could focus more on the marketing and branding, and customer service. In any business, you're looking for people that can do just about anything and everything. By the end of the first year we had about eight employees, and really it was important to get that support.”
💡 Disrupters aren’t afraid to push the limits“We're constantly pushing ourselves. We make sure that we have a budget set aside for testing purposes and experimental spend. And some ideas might be busts and that's okay too. That's part of growing.”
Top quotes from the episode:
“I wanted to make a bigger impact. I had some friends join early stage startups and start their own companies, and I saw this passion and this impact and this excitement and it just clicked that I wanted to do something that I could have more control over.”
“We hear from our customers, ‘Oh, I love [your products] because they feel so Parachute!’ You can’t really pinpoint what that means, but you feel it. That brings me more joy than anything.”
“During the first few years [of starting a company], it's like you're on a rollercoaster. You get up and have these incredible highs, and then 20 seconds later you’re crashing. There was a lot of fear and self-doubt that came along with those early days.”
