Transcription of Andrea King for the show Creative Entrepreneurship #148
Lisa: Today on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour, we have the great pleasure to have with us Andrea King who is the owner of Aristelle in Portland, Maine and Burlington, Vermont. Andrea is also the subject of a profile that we wrote for Old Port Magazine, the initial Old Port Magazine which came out in June. I hope everybody who’s sitting takes a moment to read it. This is Andrea King from Aristelle. Thanks so much for coming in.
Andrea: Thanks for having me Lisa.
Lisa: Andrea, you have a really interesting story. First tell us, what is Aristelle?
Andrea: It was obviously a bra-fitting and fine lingerie store. I really see it more as a service store. The whole point is to provide women with an opportunity to get fitted to find the right bra size in a really welcoming environment. Our goal is to just be able to serve women of all ages, sizes, shapes by offering a lot of different bra sizes.
Lisa: You did not start out in the bra field. You started out pretty far away from the bra field actually.
Andrea: Yeah, quite. It’s been a long journey to retail. Yeah, I’ve worked in international development with the World Bank. I spent time working in, almost 50 countries, Asia and South America. The last group of countries was Eastern Europe and Central Asia working in London but always knew I wanted to have my own business. When I move to Vermont, I looked to a couple of different things, nothing really grabbed me. Yeah, after talking to a couple of people including my mom who was working at a lingerie store in Canada and she was just telling me this amazing stories about just changing women’s lives, really.
Fundamentally having women say, wow, I can’t believe that I’m actually comfortable in my body or this is changing the way I feel about myself, those kinds of stories. I said, well, that sounds like really fun, yeah, I jumped in there with two feet.
Lisa: Andrea, you’re originally from Newfoundland and gone, went all over the world and ended up with a store in Portland but tell me about growing up in Newfoundland and what that was like?
Andrea: It’s pretty remote. It’s the most eastern point in Canada. It’s, just to give you a perspective, it’s a four-hour flight to London, England. It’s really way out there in the ocean. It’s pretty unique in the way that you’re right on the ocean. You’re very isolated from a lot of other things. It’s not like you could drive to the next big city because to get to Halifax would be a two-day drive including a big long boat ride. Pretty out there, a lot of nature, hiking, fishing, we had a cabin an hour from the city where we would go do great hikes and fishing and canoeing and camping and that kind of stuff.
What’s nice about it too, because you’re so far away, it has to have its own city feel, it has a great music scene and interesting theatre because nobody can go to the closest big city. It has its own vibe that way. Interestingly though, they have a really great French-immersion program. I actually did school up until grade eight all in French. I guess that’s been rooted because it’s in Canada that it have that offering. Yeah, I live there until I was 21 and I haven’t live there since. Id’ love to go back. We go back often but I still can’t move to live in there.
Lisa: Your father is a university, teaches courses at university in Newfoundland but also does a lot of work in the entrepreneurial field. Does this influence the decisions that you’ve made in your education and now what you’re doing for work?
Andrea: Yeah. When you and I spoke, I joked about how whenever I would ask for money growing up, he would say, well, I got this great business idea. As a teenager, you’re thinking, I just want the $50 now. I want a pair of jeans or I just want to go out for the weekend but he would always come up with his ideas that, some of them were good, some of them were bad but just the thought and the concept of you can easily make money or you should try to think of interesting ideas as ways to make money. It was always there in our relationship with him.
Lisa: How’s the idea of selling this concept, whatever it was. I think you told me that one of these ideas was bike tours for people who came to New Finland, another one was baby food made out of fish?
Andrea: Mm-hmm.
Lisa: Not only do you come up with these ideas but somehow you have to convince other people that they are worth investing in, I guess.
Andrea: Yeah, absolutely, then I probably should have been what I’d said to him was, okay, well give me the $50 to start the business.
Lisa: Now that you’ve done Aristelle and you have these two stores and I know that you have plans for many more stores. I think you said you wanted to have 10 stores by the time you are 40?
Andrea: Yup, that’s the idea.
Lisa: Yeah, and you have five years left.
Andrea: Five years, yeah, and I don’t think I’m going to open any this year with the new baby. That would put some pressure on the later years but that’s easier.
Lisa: Tell me what your father thinks about the path, where your path has gone?
Andrea: I would say, before opening the store, he would ask really good business questions of whether it made business sense and would the concept would work and it was nice and challenging in that way to, they helped me work at any kinks in the first store. As soon as that was open, he’s so on board, we’re brainstorming how to make it grow, different marketing ideas. He’s a really great sounding board to bounce ideas off of and discuss the best way to expand.
Lisa: Your brother also has some entrepreneurial instincts as well from what you’ve told me.
Andrea: I have two brothers. My younger brother, actually, he’s the president of Enactus for Memorial University in Newfoundland. This is a group that does social entrepreneurship projects. They just, actually last week, won the national competition. They’re going to the international competition in Beijing in October. Yeah, he’s really very active on this kind of project, working with disadvantage people in Haiti, on making ties and then they’re actually importing them to Canada and selling them. It’s some really interesting projects but very focused on actually making them sustainable business models.
Lisa: I love talking with people who are entrepreneurs because it is a very different way of looking at the world, I think, than has been my training. As a doctor, we tend to be in a very sequential way. Entrepreneurs have to have that sequential way of dealing with things because there’s certainly numbers involved in the whole business aspect with. You also have to maintain this creativity. You have to be able to look outside of what currently exists and you have to have the passion to keep moving in that direction. How do you maintain both of thinking business, logical, sequential mind but also have the openness to be expansive and have to passion to keep on doing these things?
Andrea: I love that question. Interestingly, when I studied entrepreneurship at London Business School, we would always talk about what makes a good entrepreneur and until you just asked me that question, I don’t think I’d ever actually seen myself, I’m an entrepreneur. Obviously, I am. I’ve started this company but I’ve never actually thought about it in that way. I love number crunching. I’m a bit of an Excel geek so I can get a lot of pleasure of going into the cash flow and looking at, if you change this number, what happens to the bottom line and to the sales projections and looking at inventory and open to buy six months later. I can get into that and I really enjoy it.
My past experience with being involved in strategic direction of a bank, that may sound boring that has a lot of creativity because you can go, in three years, where do we want to be and figuring out how to get there with the day to day, that’s really, really exciting to see how that can actually happen. I guess most of the creativity comes from the advertising. That’s where it gets to be really fun and come up with interesting ideas and the part that makes me excited I guess on the creativity side is doing something different. Most underwear stores, I guess most retail stores is actually just use their very attractive 20-year-old models.
I do that sometimes but I really want to break out of that whole stereotypes and use different women, older women, career women, pregnant women. We just did last month, a woman who had had a double mastectomy and it was just amazing and to do a whole story about her in one of our ad. Really, just bringing the creativity that way of how can we show our customers that the store really is for everybody. That’s really exciting. I guess it’s that combo that works.
Lisa: I see, you must have had some interesting brain training when you were younger because you were originally a Russian studies and philosophy major as an undergraduate. It seems like your brain, you’ve trained your brain in different ways to do a variety of different tasks all simultaneously.
Andrea: Yeah. I think a woman who works in the Vermont store is really in to astrology and she would just say that’s typical [inaudible 00:41:13]. I have no idea if it’s what I studied. Yeah, I had a broad range of study. International development as well is very different than arts and literature and then having that business combination.
Lisa: All of this you were doing while you were also having a personal life. You met your husband, Hue, when I believe you were working in Ottawa, is that right?
Andrea: Mm-hmm.
Lisa: You had a overseas relationship. You went to school in London while you’re getting your masters and he was still here.
Andrea: Right. I think I live in four places while we were seeing each other. I was in India and then Washington and the last place was London. Luckily, he has a job that allows him to work from wherever he is. He was able to have the flexibility to come back and forth. I would visit there every few months as well. Yeah, it worked. Luckily, now, we’re able to live in the same city and we really like it so that’s, it’s perfect. Yeah, I think having done all of that travel and he had done a lot of travel as well, makes it a lot easier to settle and not have that travel bug. That’s all which is nice.
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Lisa: One of the reasons you came back to the United States is that you were pregnant. Well, you’re married. Obviously, you wanted to come back and be with your husband but you also were pregnant with your first child. You’re thinking about running a business which you soon would in a few years, you’re getting your master’s degree, you’re married and you’re pregnant. That’s a lot of balls in the air and somehow from my conversations with you, you seem to feel pretty good about all of that and you’ve done well.
Andrea: Yeah, I get really bored very easily. I don’t do well with quiet vacations where I’m not doing anything. I wouldn’t enjoy that. This is the personality thing. I like having a lot of things going on. Yeah, I opened the first store on my daughter’s second birthday. The first year, I didn’t do too much. I really just relaxed into being a mom because the first child is a bit scary. You need to be able to focus.
Lisa: I would argue that the first year you are also acclimating to being living in Burlington and just being, I guess back on firm ground. There’s that and then the pregnancy of course leading up to the birth, the first year, you’re right but always in your mind, you were doing things. You were always thinking about what the next thing is going to be. For a while you have this interesting bank idea that was related to, which is funny because this seems to be your passion but it’s still interesting.
Andrea: It’s very interesting. Business-wise, it actually makes so much sense to help companies find local business partners in emerging markets because if you are an engineering firm and you needed to build a water dam in Ethiopia, for example, you need all these environmental consultant and all these local groups and businesses in the country to be able to have, they’re qualified and find good companies to work with, that’s really, really important but goodness, it was so boring. I still have the website and I still have this huge database of qualified firms but I won’t do anything with it. This is not, you have to be passionate. If you’re going to start your own business, if you aren’t passionate about it in the beginning, you don’t stand a chance for five years later.
Lisa: You got married, you finished your degree. You had to move back to Burlington, had a baby and then you opened your first store last year when you were 34. This was when your daughter, your first daughter was two and then you opened a second store in Portland also last year but that was six months later or so. By this time, you were very pregnant with your second daughter who was then born not so very long ago.
Andrea: Right, it’s February 2nd, yeah, I was seven months pregnant I guess when the store in Portland opened and our plan was to open in the spring but we kept coming here, looking around its bases and found this perfect place on Upper Exchange and just pushed everything forward six months since we really wanted that space. Also, now that I think about it, it’s much easier opening a store seven months pregnant than with a three month old. That was very wise. She’s very easy to bring to the store now but I think there’s a lot involved of those first, the first month before you open and the first month of being open that, yeah it’s better to do pregnant.
Lisa: There’s still a lot of, it’s just a lot of juggling.
Andrea: Yeah, it definitely is. It makes the waking up at 3AM and 5AM really easy because I can nurse and do ordering and think about marketing ideas. The only problem is I might fall asleep midway through an email and I hit send, people get confused. Yeah, it’s a lot of juggling but I have a really supportive husband and I have great staff. I think that’s a huge part of it. I would never be able to do this by myself especially being in two places. I’m having really good employees. I do things in chunks. I do my marketing three months at a time. One day, I’ll just spend the whole day thinking of what I’ll do and then that’s done and you get very efficient.
I think there’s a saying if you want something done give it to someone who’s busy which is true. The busier you are, the more you just going to get things done quickly rather than thinking about them.
Lisa: You also combine being a mother with being a business owner. The only times I’ve ever seen you, you had your baby with you and she’s perfectly happy and you seem very happy in the photos of the Old Port Magazine, for the Old Port Magazine article, you had both of your little girls with you. That seems to work well for you.
Andrea: It really does. I think that’s one of the reasons I wanted to have my own businesses because you’re allowed to bring your children to work as often as you want to where as if I was working for somebody, I wouldn’t be able to do that as easily. I love that part that it’s really up to me. I got very lucky with my new baby. She’s really easy going. If she wasn’t, then it wouldn’t be as easy to have her at the store all the time. I think it’s a nice business. It’s mostly women. I just feel it’s a nice environment actually to have children in as well.
Lisa: This is important on a bigger level for you as well because you have two stepdaughters and two daughters and you’ve done a lot of work in the past gender-related issues and it’s really important to you that women feel good about themselves because even having the confidence of wearing a well-fitting bra enables them to go out in the world and be, and have a better sense of themselves. This is why your advertisements really reflect the broad range of women because you can be whoever you were born to be, if there’s a bra that fits you, you’re going to feel good about yourself and that’s going to enable you to approach life in a more confident way.
Andrea: Absolutely. That’s really important to me. That’s why I see it more as, it’s obviously a retail store but the fact that we can empower women on that kind of level of letting them come in to the store where there’s absolutely no judgment, we’re able to find bras that fit them rather than trying to fit them into something that isn’t the right size or shape. Yeah, trying to really promote the idea of let’s just love who you are even if you might want to change the way you are but just love who you are in that moment and go from there is a really hard thing, I think, sometimes because we’ve got all these messages from society telling us all these different things.
Being having two step daughters and two daughters that are more impressionable if you’re younger and they’re going to have to grow up in the society, I’d love to have as many positive messages out there for young women as possible. If I can influence that way that women view themselves, that would make me really happy.
Lisa: In the meantime, your store is doing very well. You’re turning a profit. You’ve been nominated for a bit international, I believe, award. It’s exciting.
Andrea: Yeah, beside the fact that it’s a very welcoming environment, I think what makes the business work is that there’s so many women in the wrong bra size and when they come into the store, the amount of times that we hear people say, my god, it never been this comfortable or wow, I can’t believe that this actually fits like this. I think it blows people away so much that it’s almost impossible to not be successful because people realize, wow, I can actually be this comfortable in a bra. It sells itself really.
Lisa: My guess is that you’re maybe downplaying the effort that you put into this business but despite that, I really do encourage people to read the article in the Old Port Magazine and spend some time in your store here in Portland or people who are listening are in Burlington to go to the Burlington store as well. It is a very welcoming place. It’s also very colorful. It’s very fun. It definitely makes you feel like finding something interesting and putting on your high heels and going out and hitting the town or you can, you have nursing bras, you have standard, I guess you have a lot of white bras, you have a lot of nude bras, you have everyday bras. I think there’s really something for everyone in your store. I encourage people to go explore.
Andrea: Yeah, I think you’re right. The color brings everybody in but for the most part, people end up buying nudes and blacks because that’s what you want to wear everyday but there’s a lot of color in there for all those fun interests.
Lisa: Andrea, how do people learn more about your store? What’s your website?
Andrea: Aristelle.com.
Lisa: Well, I appreciate you coming in and talking to us today and also bringing your little one. She’s the youngest on our audio engineer, so this is the youngest interview we’ve ever had. She’s been completely silent this whole time so people don’t even know that she’s here but we really appreciate you coming in and being part of our show and really appreciate the work that you’re doing in bringing well-fitting bras to the world and happiness to the women of Portland and Burlington.
Andrea: Thank you. It’s been my pleasure.
Lisa: You have been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, show number 148, Creative Entrepreneurship. Our guests have included Ben Shaw and Andrea King. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit themainemag.com/radio or view their profiles in Maine Magazine and Old Port Magazine. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page, follow me on Twitter and as Bountiful1 on Instagram. We love to hear from you so please let us know what you think of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour. We welcome your suggestions for future show.
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