rachel hochhauser is the co-founder of piecework puzzles, the art-forward puzzle brand she and jena wolfe started in 2019 as a side project while she was running her creative agency, major studio. she joins sean to trace how a rained-in cabin full of old jigsaw puzzles turned into a design-led business that rode the pandemic puzzle boom and then grew well beyond puzzles into cocktail napkins, matches, and textiles. rachel gets into bootstrapping through tight cash cycles, bringing on a president so the founders could stay on the creative side, and acquiring the iconic design house areaware while keeping it its own brand. it's an honest look at running two brands at once, doing many creative things in parallel, and publishing a debut novel, lady tremaine, on the side.
In this episode of Read Receipt, Sean sits down with Rachel Hochhauser, co-founder of Piecework Puzzles, the art-forward puzzle brand whose puzzles look more like coffee table books than anything you'd find in a toy aisle.
Rachel started Piecework in 2019 with her co-founder Jena Wolfe as a creative side project while she was running her agency, Major Studio. It started with a rained-in cabin full of old jigsaw puzzles and four puzzles made with no shot list and no business plan. Then the pandemic puzzle boom hit, and Piecework had to grow up fast.
She gets into what came next: bringing on a president as co-owner to run the operations side, bootstrapping through tight cash cycles, and acquiring Areaware, the iconic design house Piecework had admired and stocked for years, while keeping it its own brand. She also shares why cocktail napkins, matches, and textiles now carry real weight next to puzzles, and her two pieces of advice for any brand going into wholesale: get to the right trade show, and get on Faire.
Tune in for an honest look at running two brands at once, writing a debut novel on the side, and why every small business is held together with tape and bubblegum.
Rachel: I think all small businesses are dysfunctional behind the scenes, every single one. And they're all, you know, holding things together with tape and bubblegum in some ways.
Sean: I am super excited to have you back for another episode of Read Receipt. It's a deep dive into the how and why of the brands we love and the creatives behind them, from blueprints to launch day, customers as community, and the detours in between.
Big lessons and easy listening. Read Receipt is hosted by Antidote, the email and SMS marketing agency by people who hate boring email.
Rachel: I stayed in that world for a while and ended up co-founding my own creative agency called Major Studio. And our puzzles don't look like typical puzzles. They look like coffee table books or like premium design products.
Piecework is very much associated with puzzles, but we've had so much growth in some of our other product lines. We recently acquired Areaware design company, and their entire model is about creativity, you know, partnering with designers, bringing ideas, concepts, products to the masses that they wouldn't have access to otherwise.
Sean: Where are you, where are you based out of?
Rachel: I live in Portland, in Oregon. How about you?
Sean: It looks beautiful in the background. It looks like a, a nice day.
Rachel: We actually can't go outside 'cause there's smoke from wildfires.
Sean: Oh, gosh.
Rachel: Not, not close to here, but it's amazing how far the smoke can travel.
Sean: Oh, wow.
Rachel: So it's a nice day, but not one we can actually enjoy.
Sean: Almost worse then.
Rachel: Yeah.
Sean: Well, I'm excited to connect. I am super interested in both brands that you are now running, interested to learn a bit more about your background. And what were you doing before launching any brand?
Rachel: I was working in marketing at an advertising agency, or I started at an advertising agency and I was a, an account planner, which is sort of a niche term, but you can think of it kind of like a strategist, campaign strategist, brand strategist.
And I stayed in that world for a while and ended up co-founding my own creative agency called Major Studio. And so I was doing that when I got the idea for Piecework, and Piecework was never meant to become the focus. I thought it would be like a fun creative side project. Maybe it would be alive for a few months, maybe a year.
So, and here we are many years later, so it's, it's been a big surprise for me.
Sean: How long ago did you launch Piecework?
Rachel: In 2019.
Sean: Okay. And how long, how long did you work on the idea? What was like the initial idea for the brand or for the side project, I guess?
Rachel: So I was doing a lot of puzzles in, in my free time, and I kinda came...
I would-- I didn't grow up in a puzzle family or, you know, some people do puzzles every year over the holidays. And I was on vacation and I got rained into a cabin and had nothing to do, and the rental cabin we were in was filled with old jigsaw puzzles, so I had this kind of rediscovery moment. This was probably in 2017-ish, and I started doing puzzles all the time in, in my free time.
I even had like a lower back injury 'cause I was crouched over my coffee table so much. For me, it was just working in client services is so, can be so overwhelming and exhausting, especially when you're running your own business. It's around the clock and it was... I've always been very unsuccessful with meditation, but it was such a nice way for me to unplug my brain or signal, signal to myself that I was entering something akin to leisure time.
And they were also really social, so I was bringing them on trips and to friends' houses. And so my light bulb moment was that I should make them myself, was late 2018, I believe. I'm, I'm thinking about the, the timeline here. Or, or that was really where, you know, the initial conversations were happening between Jena Wolfe, my co-founder, and I about, you know, whether this was an interesting idea, something fun to play around with.
Once we decided to, to go for it, it, it all happened fairly quickly.
Sean: How did you initially launch? Did you guys launch with one puzzle, one product to start with?
Rachel: We launched with four, but you would be-- I am shocked in hindsight, and anyone who runs any kind of business would be shocked at how disorganized it was.
Like, our first photo shoot, I was, you know, initially looking at my own Instagram photos and thinking, "Is there something here I could turn into a puzzle?" Then I was like, "Probably need to create something from scratch." I didn't understand the world of licensing or public domain or anything like that. So we had a photo shoot.
I didn't have a shot list. They just showed up with, like, two giant tubs of props and played around for a day, and we netted out with probably, like, nine or 10 photos, four of which I selected to, to be the first four Piecework puzzles. So it was just kind of like working backwards from this throwing spaghetti at the wall creative process, and we netted out with four we thought would work, and we turned them into puzzles, which was the, the hardest part of the whole thing, was not launching a website or designing the brand.
It was figuring out how to physically make a puzzle, because I had never done anything in manufacturing before. So we were cold-calling manufacturers and trying to find someone who would talk to a couple girls who were just like, "Yeah, we kinda wanna make a puzzle." And they're like, "Do you have a business?
What's the plan?" We're like, "Just make our puzzles for us, please." So we really figured it out as we went along.
Sean: How-- where did you guys find manufacturers for the puzzles?
Rachel: So we worked backwards with puzzles, from puzzles that we really liked their quality, and we found a domestic manufacturer in the States who we worked with for the first year or so of our business.
Um, we did not sample with them or, you know, have negotiate or talk to a bunch of different manufacturers. We just were like, "Okay, you can make our puzzles. What does it cost? We'll do that." Um, things look very different now in terms of our h- how we go about creating a, a new product or, you know, reprinting older ones.
That relationship didn't pan out in the long run, was when the pandemic happened. Everyone was making puzzles. All of the puzzle manufacturers were suddenly, you know, making as many as they possibly could because so many puzzles were selling. And so we didn't quite get dropped by our manufacturer, but we got pushed to the very bottom of their priority list to the, to the point where it was one of those things where, like, they weren't like, "We're breaking up with you," but, "We're gonna make things so bad that you're forced to, to break up with us."
Sean: That's crazy that you started a puzzle brand and then there's like a world event that makes puzzles just explode.
Rachel: Yeah. It wa- it was crazy because I think this for me was, again, it was meant to be more of like a studio side project. It was really more focused on my own interests and playing around. And unlike most businesses, I didn't have a business plan.
I wasn't planning on growing it or turning it into a profitable entity for the long run. It w- it was just something I wanted to explore. But the pandemic changed that really quickly because suddenly we had so much attention and more orders than we could keep up with, and it, it was-- it forced us to grow up really quickly, which, which I don't...
It was a very challenging time as a business owner, but I, it, it was great for the business in the long run because it did force us to kinda put on our big grown-up pants, so to speak.
Sean: Before the pandemic was the-- I guess how long before the pandemic did you guys even launch? Like a year?
Rachel: It was less than that.
We launched in summer of 2019, and we had a pretty good-
Sean: It was insane timing.
Rachel: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. But, but we had-- we were successful off the bat. We had incredible press coverage in that first holiday season from, you know, all of the, the big names. We took ourself to a trade show, Shoppe Object, which we still go to twice a year and, you know, we had great pickup from the, the design, you know, indie stores as well as interest from key accounts, and that only expanded.
So we, we had kind of enough of a foot in the door that when the pandemic happened, I, I felt like we had been validated. It wasn't just the COVID situation, that people liked us specifically, that it wasn't just, you know, we'll take any puzzle. So it felt worth continuing to put my time into, even though it was taking way more from me than I had been prepared to give when we launched the business.
Sean: How long were you doing the brand and running the service business?
Rachel: Up until recently. I'm just thinking about the timelines. Up until 2025, I wanna say. Might've been late '24, but early-- late '24, early '25.
Sean: Okay. What was it like for you building the business while, I guess, like building two businesses?
Rachel: It was hard.
It was a lot of work. It was a lot of squeezing work into hours that are not traditionally work hours. There was a lot of triangulation with me and the team. I, I was very lucky because-- or I should say we were lucky because there was overlap between the creative agency and the Piecework team. You know, the four of us founders at the agency all worked on Piecework in different ways, shapes, and forms, so that there was synthesis between the two enabled us to kind of treat Piecework like it was a client of the agency, and then Piecework had a lot of its own employees that were focused on Piecework alone.
But it, it wasn't sustainable for the long run at all.
Sean: How did you know... Did you always, I guess after launching the brand and seeing the trajectory, did you know that at some point you were gonna go all in on the brand?
Rachel: No, I didn't. And it took another outside thing happening in my life for me to decide to leave Major Studio, which was that I have also always been a writer, and I got a big two-book deal with a Macmillan imprint, St.
Martin's Press. And as soon as that was happening also, and I had a book coming out and I had to write another one, I said, "This is just too much on the table for me and something has to go." And it wasn't really an option for me to stop doing my own writing or, you know, and I was too synthesized at Piecework, so it felt like the natural time to say goodbye to doing branding and marketing.
That said, it took me about eight months longer to make that decision than it probably should have. I think the people around me saw the writing on the wall a lot earlier than I did, but I wasn't-- I had to come to that goodbye slowly.
Sean: Were you just attached to doing that type of work? Were you nervous about letting go of it?
Rachel: I think I was ready to say goodbye to that type of work, but I was attached to my colleagues and co-founders at the agency. You know, we had a sisterhood of sorts, and I felt like we had built something and we're in it together. And I was also attached to the income. Not that what we did was super predictable, you know, in, in the way that client services, things have their ups and, and downs, but I felt like I was in it with another group of people, and we were kind of collectively supporting each other and figuring it out, and I was stepping more out into the unknown on my own, so that was intimidating as well.
Sean: How did the book deal come about?
Rachel: Totally separately. I went to grad school for fiction. It's something I've wanted to do for years. I had a novel that I worked on all throughout my 20s that I ultimately couldn't sell and ended up shelving. And when I sat down to write my book that just came out this past March, I took a little bit of time off work to do that, and it was sort of like a separate area of my life.
Similar to how Piecework started, I was just like, this is a creative project that's kind of siloed in my brain, and I'm gonna put some energy into it when I can. And then it came together seamlessly, so to speak, unlike my first experience trying to publish.
Sean: So d- did you write the book and work on the book before getting the book deal?
Rachel: Yes. Yeah. With fiction, with debuts, you almost... I would say 99.9% of the time you have to finish the book before you can sell it. Unlike nonfiction, you can sell off of a proposal.
Sean: So interesting. Most people do, like, one thing.
Rachel: I've- And so all of this- ... I've had some of these conversations and, and a, a couple people I've talked to in conversations like this have been like, "Are you in therapy?"
Like, "What's, what's going on there?" It's, it's, it's only through conversations like these that I have a little distance from it and I'm, I can see, like, what it, it looks like on the outside.
Sean: I mean, I don't think like that. I feel like, wow, it's so good. Uh, it's great that you have an idea and you independently invest the time with really no expectation of, like, what might come out of it, and then do that multiple times on different paths simultaneously is pretty...
I think that's pretty rare.
Rachel: I wish I could act on all the ideas I have. It feels like so many are just sitting there gathering dust. Yeah.
Sean: Yeah. It sounds like you don't really ever have, like... It's more about getting the idea built versus creating, like, a business out of that thing.
Rachel: Yeah. I mean, there are aspects of having a business and running it that I really enjoy, but my greatest pleasure in Piecework is continuing to create and coming up with ideas for new products, ideas for new puzzles.
We've expanded into new product lines. We recently acquired Areaware, a design company, and their entire model is about creativity, you know, partnering with designers, bringing ideas, concepts, products to the masses that they wouldn't have access to otherwise. So I'm, I'm very excited by that, by that idea of just the idea generation, but also, like, how to, to share that with more people.
So that's the- So- ... I would say the aspect of the business that, that I enjoy the most. I'm, I'm not a-- We have a saying in Piecework, there's, like, spreadsheets people and not spreadsheets people. I, I know my way around a spreadsheet, but I'm not a spreadsheet person.
Sean: Walk me through Piecework a bit. So you left the, the client service space How many, how many co-founders or partners do you have involved in Piecework?
Did you end up, like, growing a, a team dedicated to Piecework over time, I'm assuming?
Rachel: Yeah, we do. We-- So Jena, my co-founder, and I still own a pretty... The entire company's bootstrapped. She and I still own a pretty good chunk of it, not the majority, though. When Piecework grew beyond our capabilities, both from a bandwidth perspective and just an experience perspective, we brought on a president as a co-owner who runs the, quote-unquote, "spreadsheet side of the business," focuses on operations and sales and technology, and all of the things that allow us to really focus on the creative side of the business, which covers brand and marketing and product development, social media, all of that.
Is not in the business day-to-day. She runs marketing at Goop Kitchen. She's sort of now involved as more of a consultant and advisor. I oversee the brand, so to speak, creative, marketing, product development. Tristan, our president, sort of runs the other half of the business, and we have a team under each of us, people focused on digital marketing, product development, designers, salespeople, et cetera.
Sean: How did you-- Did you know the president that you guys brought in? Did you know them before this? Did you have an idea for doing that previously?
Rachel: It was a consultant of ours, so we had worked together for about a year. He was helping us think through international expansion and international sales specifically.
So we knew what it was like to work together. I knew what his experience was. It was a bit of a gamble, but Jena and I were really at a breaking point with the business, so it kind of felt like we either needed to bring on that type of partnership or consider what it looked like to just take a step back altogether.
Sean: In terms of acquiring another brand, how did that start to come about? I'm interested in that whole process because that's also an interesting next step or next move
Rachel: Yeah. It, like all things Piecework, came about a little unconventionally. We have all been fans of Areaware for a long time. Like, I was in New York when it first launched.
I kind of feel like me and, you know, my colleagues that work on the design at Piecework came up with Areaware in a way. Like, it's, it's very iconic amongst the design community. And we also were stockist of Areaware at Piecework, so we have a marketplace on our website, and we were ... You know, so we knew a little bit of the team and what the products were like more recently because of that relationship.
And so when we heard they were shutting down, we didn't know in advance. We found out at the same time as everyone else. It felt like a huge bummer, you know, what it signaled for, for retail, for, you know, smaller brands like them and ourselves. And so we reached out more just to connect and chat, not, not with an ulterior motive, but I, I think just to kind of see what was going on and offer support, and it really organically led to an acquisition conversation.
So I ... You know, it makes good business sense for us because we're gaining access to more wholesale doors, to more manufacturer relationships, to a product library and IP. But also there ... I would say genuinely that it's motivated by just, you know, interest in keeping Areaware and what it stands for alive.
So there's a really nice synthesis there of, you know, the business story and, and something that's more personally meaningful to us. So our intent is the brands are gonna stay separate. Areaware is not getting rolled up into Piecework. This is not part of a broader roll-up strategy. We don't have our eyes on more brands or anything like that at this moment in time.
We just kind of wanna see what we can do with Areaware, staying true to what it's always been but, you know, looking at maybe the reasons why things weren't working and optimizing those specifically.
Sean: What has it been like for you getting involved in another brand? It looks ... I, I was looking at the site.
It looks like you guys are kind of taking a pause and, and relooking at the whole business before you do, like, a relaunch of it.
Rachel: Yeah. It ... That was in part because of necessity. When we acquired the business, it had no... They'd already laid off their employees. They had no inventory left. So there was no way to just keep the doors open.
We had to kind of take a minute to really assess the product lines and, you know, what we wanted to bring back, what we're able to bring back, what we could bet on. So we just brought... We're bringing back a very select curated group of Areaware products. They just debuted at Shoppe Object this past weekend, and they'll be launching for sale to the general public Probably next month sometime.
And so it's, it's looking like a little bit more of a slow rollout, entirely necessitated by inventory constraints. That said, it's also given us a chance to get our, our sea legs and footing as we step into an entirely new business with not-- with just a skeleton, skeleton team left. You know, we weren't, like, fully onboarded or, or anything during the transition.
I also-- I wanna share that the prior owners, Noel and Lisa, have been so wonderful and supportive and helpful, and it's a really warm, mutually beneficial relationship. Like, it's not a hostile takeover. It's just been really nice to... It feels like a handing of the baton, which has given me the warm and fuzzies.
Sean: That's awesome. Are they still going to be involved in the long run, or will you guys take over and run it fully?
Rachel: They'll be involved in the sense of they're available to us if things come up, we have questions, we want them to weigh in, but they're not gonna be part of the day-to-day team.
Sean: You... Is the plan to have the same piecework team work on that business in the long term as well?
Rachel: Right now, that's what we have going on, but we did essentially double our business size overnight and, you know, the team has doubled their workload. So we're trying to figure out where we need to expand and have some dedicated team members. But behind the scenes, there's a lot of synthesis between who's working on, on what, a lot of overlap.
It's one of the reasons we thought we could make this work, because we already have the team set up in place and it's, you know, we're not increasing our overhead considerably with the acquisition.
Sean: So interesting. So now you're running two brands, two wholesale brands, two direct-to-consumer brands. What's been, like, the biggest surprise for you getting involved in another business?
Is it easier for you to, like, have a fresh take or perspective on what they were doing that you like and, and what you felt like wasn't adding to the business versus when it's something that you're so close to, it's harder maybe to make bigger changes? I don't know if that's true.
Rachel: You know
I'm wanting to, to look up all-- There's that famous quote in literature, "All happy families are alike," or s- or something like that. And they're, in some ways they're very buttoned up, and in some ways things are a total mess. And this is, you know, working in client services, you get to look under the hood with a lot of different clients, and you can see the dysfunction that is just part of running a business on a small team.
But that dysfunction is gonna look different depending on what the business is, and they're buttoned up in different ways. So acquiring this other company, we've actually learned a lot about things we didn't know, you know, ev- even something as simple as file organization. And one hyper-specific example that comes to mind in product development, Areaware was incredible about how they are saving each round and each back and forth with the manufacturers, with internal designers, having sort of a paper trail that can be so helpful in hindsight, and we weren't doing anything like that.
So the s- hyper-specific like things like that have taught us a lot. And then in turn, I think our own capabilities have, have brought some streamlining to the table to help make things cost less money or take less time. And I, I like to think both brands will benefit. You know, we're, we're benefiting from what we're learning from how they worked, and I think applying some of our separate knowledge to Areaware is also beneficial to that brand.
Sean: What did, what did you guys see as the biggest opportunity with- with the brand as you got involved? Was it the fact that you're getting a, a brand and products that you love on top of the distribution that they already have in order to plug Piecework into that? Or, or was it expanding their, their business beyond where it was?
Rachel: A little bit of both. So we have a lot of expertise in international expansion, so Areaware had a pretty strong international footprint, but I think we can take things even further. We've invested in a warehouse in China and, and Australia, an Asia-focused sales team. We were already working on that for Piecework, so being able to also use those same team members on Areaware is a big opportunity.
And we saw a lot of places that we could add operational efficiency at Areaware to, to both expand what they were offering, but also make, make the margins a little bit friendlier. They had two offices. We don't have any office. We're fully remote. Lots of little things like that that can help considerably.
Another thing is Areaware's entire model was, you know, really focusing on hero products, you know, developing them carefully with a designer and then working with a manufacturer. But it's very expensive to work in that way when you're working with a manufacturer to just make one thing in a small run, and then you're shipping things piecemeal from abroad.
We're gonna be streamlining manufacturing more. We're gonna be, I think, expanding our product library, making more with designers, not just single products, but multiple, so that we can get more a little bit, a little bit more out of those relationships, not have to create things quite so expensively. It's not like one clear, easy solve or Band-Aid.
It's, it's making... It's improving 10% across the board in everything we look at
Sean: You mentioned that Piecework has been bootstrapped the whole time, right?
Rachel: Yes.
Sean: And then a- acquiring a business and having the operational cash in order to do so.
Is Piecework a very profitable business model that allowed you guys to scale and then purchase this other brand and have the cash in order to scale that as well?
Rachel: It's a totally fair question. It is an ongoing thorn in our side. We-- Piecework is doing well. We continue to grow year on year considerably.
We are really happy with how our sales are going. That said, cash is a constant problem. We borrow a lot, and we pay a lot for that money. It's something-- It's a cycle we're kind of in that we would love to get out of ultimately.
Sean: Okay. How did the acquisition or How did you guys think about making such a big bet, even just in, like, the cost of inventory?
Because Areaware is also an expensive category, right?
Rachel: Yes. It is an expensive category. We are just being really exact. We spent so much time looking at historic sales data, reorders, how these products that we brought back to market had done. So there's a little bit of data information that goes into it.
Then it's our own gut, our creative team, what we really believe in, and then just looking at essentially how much money we have to work with and working back from there. But again, we're in a really careful cycle of managing cash flow, of borrowing money. Q4 for us is our-- like many product-based businesses, our biggest, but specifically with puzzles, it's like Q4 out-earns the other three quarters combined.
So we, we've, we're kind of used to working this way, and we used those cycles and our ability to manage sales flows and, and demand plan, so to speak, in the same way we do at Piecework. We just applied that to Areaware.
Sean: Where, for Piecework, where has the biggest growth been? Has it-- or, or has direct-to-consumer and online grown considerably while you guys have expanded through retail and international?
Rachel: Wholesale is a huge part of our business. It, it is a meaningful part of our business. But it's been interesting, too, as both direct-to-consumer and wholesale grow, we're still thought of as puzzles, but it's not... Puzzles don't make up the... Let me restate that. We're-- Piecework is very much associated with puzzles, but we've had so much growth in some of our other product lines.
Like, we launched cocktail napkins. This is another organic, you know, random thing that Piecework did as a result of one little side project that took on a life of its own, and now they're a big part of our business. We are launching textiles and soft goods this month. We launched matches late last year.
So we continue to expand into new categories, and they're, they're doing really well. And it, it allows, you know, m- from a wholesale perspective, all of our relationships there have only grown because a, a stockist might only carry so many puzzles, but they're happy to add on other items that merch well with, you know, the, the core product.
Sean: I l- love the, the idea of buying or acquiring a brand that you love the products from. I was looking through all their products too, and they have iconic, I feel like iconic products that I've seen in design retail stores. It's cool to be able to like get into a different space that's kind of similar to what you're doing and play around with a different world that you guys have watched be built over time?
Rachel: It, it's a total playground and, and it's a dream come true in a lot of ways. I totally agree about these iconic designs. I think a lot of general consumers might not have heard of Areaware, but they'd certainly recognize some of the products. And I, you know, it's a big responsibility too, but one we're excited to, to kind of shoulder and figure out what the next steps look like.
It, it's gonna be a careful balance of really honoring that legacy and heritage, and also just making sure that we evolve just enough that we can continue doing it.
Sean: Are, is the model for Areaware still going to be designer partnership type situations where you design a collection with them?
Rachel: Yes, absolutely.
I mean, that- that's their core business. They, they did start doing their own in-house designs and they have their own Areaware designed product lines, and we'll be continuing that as well, but our, our focus is gonna be on those designer relationships.
Sean: Such a fun way for you to get l- to do, like, collaborations with other creatives and kind of, like, learn from that for, for Piecework too.
Rachel: Yeah. It's so cool. I mean, it's, it's... Again, there's a business case for it, but personally I'm just like, "Why, how could we not, you know, play around with this and, and explore it?" It, it, what, what could go wrong?
Sean: How do you balance your time right now between brands and also between the books and brands?
Rachel: And I have two young kids, and yeah, no, I don't know.
I would just describe myself as a very unbalanced person. I, I have to make it work. I have to make it work every day. It's, it's a juggling act and, you know, people ask about what's your schedule or, you know. And, and it's just, it's different. It's, you know, whatever needs me or needs my attention comes first.
Sean: Where do you spend most of your time in the business? Are you, are you working on new products or, like, product development on top of the brand and marketing? Are you focused mostly on brand and marketing?
Rachel: Yeah. Yeah. Well, for Area, for Areaware, we brought in Annie Lennon, who has been a designer on Piecework since day one, but it wasn't her full-time focus.
But she's gonna be leading all creative at Areaware, overseeing the designer relationships, the product development, and all that. So I've been working with her very closely. In constant conversation. She's based here in Portland with me, which is great because she's also- That's cool ... a dear friend of mine.
So we're, we're, you know, nose deep in product development for Areaware and just thinking about relaunching the brand, which is coming up in a matter of weeks. And Piecework, I'm in the same, you know, we're across the product lines. I'm in a constant cycle of some product development, launching products, overseeing marketing, trying to, to figure out how to make it all work.
A- again, it's a lot of putting out fires and, and doing things last minute, but I, I think in our own way we've figured out some systems within that context that make sense.
Sean: Do you guys have like a typical new product cycle that you're working on that you're trying to launch new products consistently, or do product ideas for Piecework come to you through different avenues and you're only exploring or going after them when the, the timing makes sense?
Rachel: The ideas and the opportunities come, pay no mind to the calendars, sort of a constant pipeline. But we have two main deadlines every year that we need to hit, which is the trade show deadlines. So for before holiday, that trade show happens now, it was this past weekend in early August, and then there'll be another one in February, which is more for summer/spring focused.
And if we're gonna launch a new product, I- in that period that follows, we need to have samples at that trade show. So we end up with this, you know, biannual kind of deadline where we're, we're rushing to meet it with anything we possibly could get to that trade show. It needs to be there, and then anything that comes after gets pushed to the next one.
Sean: What, what are the names of those trade shows again?
Rachel: The main one that we go to is Shoppe Object. It's in New York.
Sean: Okay. D- how did you guys find out about that while you were building Piecework? Was that just from talking to other brands?
Rachel: I'm trying to remember who told me about it. We went when we were like a baby.
No one had heard of us. It was just Jena and I. We showed up with boxes under our arms, and we didn't even get a booth. We, we didn't even get a booth. We had this little, like, rectangle table, and we didn't have any plans for display. We got, like, a nice floral bouquet and put out the puzzles, and so people were just coming by saying, "What are those?"
You know, they hadn't... They didn't know what they were, and we'd start a conversation, and it was great. It went really well. In hindsight now, I can... People were asking me questions like, "What's your show special?" And I remember saying, "What's a show special?" I had no idea what I was doing. Now we have a sh-
Sean: You're like, "My show special is being here. That's what it is."
Rachel: Yeah. You're like, "I am the show special." Yeah. "I got myself here." So we've been doing Shoppe Object since very early, and it was a new show back then. It hadn't been around for very long. People were doing New York now, but Shoppe Object was establishing itself as more of, like, a design indie brand kind of marketplace.
And ugh, I wish I could remember who told us it would be a good place to go, but we figured it out. We've been there ever since. It's a great home for us. And we've done some other shows here and there, and we'll probably consider some more abroad over time. But that's really our trade show home, so to speak.
Sean: Is that how you guys initially grew the wholesale business? Did you meet a lot of retailers there?
Rachel: Yeah. I have two pieces of advice for anyone considering launching or in the early stages of launching a brand that they wanna sell wholesale, and the first is to go to the appropriate trade show, and the second is to get on Faire, which is a wholesale mar- a digital wholesale marketplace.
I think both Shoppe Object and Faire have really changed the genetic makeup of the wholesale scene. At the show, you get key accounts walk the floor, media walks the floor. You also have a lot of smaller regional design stores that come. So it's an opportunity for exposure, to meet people, obviously to make sales, but a lot of times those opportunities aren't from a sale that's happening at the show.
It's just awareness or a conversation that starts there. And then Faire is just, it's sort of like, I hate to compare, to cheapen it by comparing it to like an Amazon for wholesale, but it just, it really synthesizes and streamlines the whole wholesale process. So it's a way to be discovered. It's a way to manage your wholesale relationships, and it's just something worth checking out if a brand isn't on it already.
Sean: How often do you travel for work? Yeah. I've, uh, it's-- I'm curious for inspiration, but also like being in such a manufacturing-heavy brand.
Rachel: Not as much as I should. I, I, as I mentioned, I have two young children, so it's hard for me. I, ideally, if, if I had my druthers and I, I didn't have a per-personal life, I would be going to Asia to visit the manufacturers.
I would be going to more trade shows abroad in Japan and, and Paris, and there's a couple others that, that I've... I've been to the Paris one. It's great. Wanna go back more often. Obviously, our trade show, New York, a couple times a year. There's some others. I would like to do more visiting of our bigger accounts.
Photo shoots don't always happen where I'm based. I used to go to more of those, but had to, to outsource that a bit more. So I'm just really choosy about where I can go, and sometimes it's the wrong choice. I wasn't at our trade show this past weekend, and I, I should've been there. And then I also have my, my book promotion travel, so I'm, I'm just carefully- My God
calibrating and manage everything.
Sean: How, how often are you launching new books?
Rachel: I just have the one under my belt. It came out in March, but I had my book tour. I go to conferences. I'm going to a conference this weekend in Kansas City. I have book events. There's festivals, liter- literary festivals that you get invited to.
And then my next book will come out, I don't have a pub date yet, but the paperback for my first, Lady Tremaine comes out in this next March, and then probably the next one will be about a year after that.
Sean: Have you started working on the, the next book?
Rachel: It's done. It's almost ready. Wow. They just... Yeah, publishing timelines just take a long time.
Sean: Okay. Wow. So awesome. Such a crazy mix of different worlds that you have going on.
Rachel: It, it really is
Sean: How-
Rachel: I, I don't have a lot of downtime if you c- if you can't tell.
Sean: Yes, I can only imagine. I feel like traveling for the brand with traveling for the books is definitely challenging. I always loved the idea. I used to travel to, to China and Asia for work to go visit factories, and I...
Everyone I worked with always complained about going, but I always loved, I loved going. I just think, like, the manufacturing is so interesting. I feel like you get, like, a ton of ideas from being around making st-
Rachel: I, I think it's really, really valuable. Same with going to trade shows that you don't even-- that you're not displaying at.
I think that's really valuable. Or even just having a day in a city you don't live in, going into the retail environment, seeing what people are buying, what's for sale. Our, our president, Tristan, just spent a week in China going to some of our manufacturers and had all kinds of ideas and insights coming back from it.
So I'm, I'm really hoping to be able to go, but I haven't done that yet.
Sean: How-- Hopefully I'm wrapping it up at this point, but I also am curious, how do you think about growing the brands, like, on social and content? How much time are you spending on that side of things?
Rachel: It's, it's the, what's the expression, the stepchild of the business in a way, which you, you wouldn't expect.
I, I think it's so important, and yet it's not something... When you're trying to solve larger problems, like making sure that an entire cargo container of your product arrives when it was promised to versus, like, getting an Instagram post live, one of those always takes priority. We have an incredible individual on our team who does social for us, but I, I would like to put more resources there over time.
It's something that I, I feel like we should be investing in more than we do.
Sean: I feel like the travel stuff is so connected to the brand or, like, inspiration-based stuff. It's almost like you could do a lot of the content through, like, the stuff that you already have to do to work on the, the product.
Rachel: Yeah.
Yeah, you could. One challenge is I'm not a natural content creator. Like, I j- Yeah ... I'm not someone who loves being in front of the camera or that, or ideas come to me naturally. Classic millennial in that way. And I could probably work on that myself a bit, or maybe we just find people who, who can do that better than me that are part of the team.
Sean: Yeah. I mean, the wholesale side of things too, like I feel like your space is so design-focused and oriented that the wholesale relationships and people shopping in design-based spaces helps the brand grow through like just seeing the brand in those retail environments. Well, thank you so much for hanging out.
I love the, the brands that you are building now together, and really respect the creative projects that you've launched and then built into longstanding brands.
Rachel: Well, thank you. Thank you for having me and being interested in the brands.
Sean: Yeah. I would love to stay in touch and see how things evolve as you, you guys get further down the line with Areaware and kind of like relaunching that brand too.
Rachel: Yeah, I'd love to.
Sean: Awesome. Well, thank you again.