You Got This!

by Maya S Penn

  Orders weren’t exactly flying in after that—business was pretty slow over the course of those first few months—but whenever I did sell an item, I immediately sat down to conceive and create a new one. That’s partly because it hadn’t occurred to me that I could create multiples of any one item, and it definitely hadn’t occurred to me that more than one person might be interested in purchasing the same thing. (I didn’t even realize that I could make multiples without hiring a whole bunch of help. I figured I’d have to design something and then hand the pattern over to a big fancy factory for them to crank out!) On top of that, I didn’t have much extra material. It’s not like I had yards of zebra-print ribbon lying around; I probably only ever had a couple of butterfly or flower appliqués at a time. When I sold Zebrafly, I certainly didn’t have ten more like it just sitting in inventory. So any time an item sold, I’d sit down to think of a totally new design.

  Slowly, I started to branch out. My headbands evolved from all-ribbon versions (meant to be tied at the back of your head) to headbands made on a harder, less flexible band. I started working with a wider variety of materials, searching out new types of accents and appliqués to use. Eventually, I moved beyond headbands and began making all types of items: hats, then scarves, and before long, bags and blouses. Whatever popped into my head, I made.

  And things continued like that for a while. Over the course of the next year or so, I treated my business more like a hobby, and I mostly made items to sell in my spare time. Sure, I was making money—just not very much. (We’re talking twenty dollars here, thirty dollars there. It’s not like I was going to be retiring anytime soon.) And, sure, the orders were coming in—but they were spotty. I’d get an order about as often as a tumbleweed rolls through a deserted town in the Old West. Which is to say, not all that often.

  Somewhere around the time I turned ten, though, everything changed.

  When I first created my Etsy store, I didn’t disclose very much about myself, including my age. I’m not sure if that was due to some concern for my privacy or safety, or if it just hadn’t occurred to me that my very young age—eight—could be any kind of a selling point. (In fact, I might have considered my age a hindrance. Who knew if people would be more or less inclined to purchase my headbands if they knew I was only eight years old?) As I gained confidence and experience, however, I suddenly felt like revealing a bit more about myself on my seller’s page. Since Etsy didn’t have a place to include your professional bio back then, I just updated the description of my online store to include some personal information. I mean, I thought what I was doing was pretty cool. Maybe other people would think it was cool, too. So I outed myself as a ten-year-old entrepreneur.

  Nowadays, I’m aware that this sort of thing would be deemed self-promotion, but back when I was ten, I knew absolutely nothing about that. I knew nothing about advertising (how would I ever afford that anyway?), and I had no idea that you could drum up publicity via social media. I don’t even think I had any social media accounts! Anyone who wound up browsing the items available at Maya’s Ideas, then, arrived there purely by chance. With a little luck, a potential customer might occasionally discover my Etsy page. So had revealing my age been the only thing that happened, perhaps my business would’ve never taken off (or perhaps it would have taken longer to take off than it did). But it just so happens that I was on the verge of another development, too.

  You see, my mom and I had both become fans of a blog called Gotham Gal, written by a New York–based businesswoman named Joanne Wilson. Joanne writes about everything from current events to nonprofit organizations to music and theater, and every Monday she profiles a female entrepreneur. The column is called—wait for it—Women Entrepreneur Mondays. Each and every week, I would read about these amazing and powerful women making their way in the business world, and I was fascinated. Until one day I realized that I was sort of like the women I had been reading about. Of course, at ten I didn’t necessarily qualify as a woman quite yet, but I decided to email Joanne anyway. I wanted to tell her just how much I loved Women Entrepreneur Mondays and to say how awesome it would be if I could be featured. To my delight, Joanne agreed. We arranged a Skype interview, which ended up covering all sorts of random topics, from my company and how I got started, to my favorite Pixar movies, to Taylor Swift, to how much I loved my mom’s egg salad sandwiches. (None of those things have changed, by the way. I still love Taylor Swift, and my mom’s egg salad sandwiches are still amazing. In fact, I’d like an egg salad sandwich right now. Hold on . . .

  . . . and we don’t have the ingredients at the moment. Shoot.)

  Anyway, Joanne ran the piece, and to this day it remains one of my favorites. That’s right—one of my favorites. Because, as it turns out, there would be many more articles to come.

  One of those was a write-up on the official Etsy blog, written by a woman named Vanessa Bertozzi. We met when she was serving on a panel at the Atlanta campus of Savannah College of Art and Design, and after talking, she said she wanted to feature me! That article actually gave me a chance to debut my first digital animation. (That would be Ninja Kooky, which I uploaded to YouTube so the Etsy reporter could embed the video in the post she’d written about me. Who knew that by promoting my business, I’d get a chance to debut my animation projects, too?) Not too much later, I got an email—actually, it was an Etsy direct message—from a reporter at Forbes magazine.

  I’d heard of Forbes—it’s a pretty major business publication, if you’re wondering—but I didn’t know all that much about it. Truthfully, the only magazine I was really familiar with at the time was National Geographic Kids. As with any interview request, I discussed this one with my parents, and we decided the piece might be a great way to get the word out about my company and me. The finished product wasn’t anything major, just a super-short write-up about a number of “grade school entrepreneurs,” but it’s the Forbes article that I generally credit for helping me make my mark, the one that ultimately changed my life.

  Because after that, the floodgates opened.

  Suddenly, I was fielding requests from Fox 5 Atlanta, a local news channel, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, my hometown newspaper. With each new article or press appearance, the traffic to my website would go crazy, then die back down a little, then go nuts again. Each time, the ripple effect grew wider. Before I knew it, I was being invited to make national television appearances, first on the Steve Harvey show, which tapes in Chicago—it was my first ride in an airplane!

  Now I have an urge to tell you all about that plane trip. Gather around, children, it’s story time. So there I was, awoken by my phone alarm at five a.m. I did a weird scramble-type thing out of my butterfly-print bedsheets that I had been under peacefully in an origami fold for about seven hours. I washed up and my mom made me wear a bundle in three layers or so (keep in mind the chill of winter had overstayed its welcome, plus we had to wake up before the sun). From there, I fell asleep in the car to prepare for a grueling three hours of sleeping on the plane. My parents and I arrived at the airport and after going through all of the necessary procedures I went to get a croissant, of course. At that point, the main things that were on my mind were food and wondering how much farther I would have to carry my purple suitcase. There was a smaller bag looped around the handle that occasionally swung from side to side, making it a little bit of a balancing act.

  Later, after we’d boarded the plane, I went over ideas about how the ride would feel. Maybe like a spaceship? I was a little bit nervous but mostly excited. Just then, the engines roared to life. I checked to make sure that my seat belt was tight and I braced myself just in case the plane was going to take off like a slingshot or something. Even though I knew that wasn’t the case, you can never be too sure.

  By the time we were up in the air, I looked out the window as my currently rainy city of Atlanta ever so slowly shrunk. Huge buildings looked like a top view of the peas and carrots that I used to eat when I was five. Roads bec
ame just abstract yet organized crisscrosses, and then they all vanished beneath the beautiful and somewhat interrupting clouds.

  In between fiddling around with the apps on my iPad, I would glance out the window and kind of space out. Honestly, if you look past the engineering side, planes are so weird. They pretty much are giant tin cans. Sure, it accelerates, but then by some magic force it ascends into the sky. For fun I like to think that a bunch of pegasi help carry the plane all the way to its destination and back, and that the pilot’s controls are actually reins to guide them on their way. They don’t get tired easily, because they are magic, okay? For Pete’s sake, we’re talking about horses with wings. Then again, you need a lot of pegasi. Maybe just a giant bird? Or maybe a dragon! Even cooler. A friendly dragon, though. Friendly dragons are super-cool.

  Moving on, soon after I made my appearance on Steve Harvey, I made an appearance on the ABC morning show The View.

  I’ve been watching The View since I was little (and by “watching,” I really mean playing on the floor of the living room while my mom watched), so to get an email from one of the producers inviting me to appear on an episode about “cool kids” was surreal. Within a matter of days, I was on a plane to New York, arriving at the ABC soundstage, and shaking hands with the amazing and awesome Whoopi Goldberg. (She was very gracious and down-to-earth—I just loved her!) Of course, all this attention for my business was not just a lot of fun, it also resulted in a lot of sales. I was able to hire a few full-time employees, as well as start a college fund. In the space of just a few short years, Maya’s Ideas had grown beyond even my wildest dreams.

  The success of my company, however, has been about so much more than getting press or selling stuff. It’s opened up doors for me to meet various inspiring and influential people who have become not just my heroes, but also my friends. For example, I met Eve Ensler, the wonderful author, playwright, and women and girls’ rights activist (best known for writing The Vagina Monologues), at an event in Atlanta for her book In the Body of the World. I instantly felt like we were kindred spirits. You could see the rainbow of her aura. The energy I got from her was warm and electric. I’ve never seen or felt anything like it on anyone I’ve met before, and it was only strengthened when she gave me a big bear hug shortly after I introduced myself. Meeting her was like reuniting with an old friend. Since then, she’s become a big supporter of mine. It was at Eve’s event that I met the great Pat Mitchell, the CEO of the Paley Center for Media and the former president and CEO of PBS, as well as the founder of the TEDWomen events. The work she has done to empower and inspire women—including me!—is truly amazing. Pat is actually the one who invited me to speak on the global TED stage. I met the wonderful Laura Turner Seydel a few years ago, at an Eco-Fashion and Accessories Trunk Show she happened to be attending in my hometown. Laura is chairperson of the Captain Planet Foundation, an organization that supports environmental stewardship by awarding grants to youth-driven projects. She travels all over the world encouraging youth to be environmentally conscious, and I’m super-proud to have donated to her organization. I’ve also met the amazing Dr. Bernice King, daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; she and I met at the King Center’s annual Salute to Greatness Awards dinner. Later, she invited me to speak at an event to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of her father being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I can feel her strength in her presence; it touches and inspires everyone who meets her. Each of these relationships led to another introduction; each opportunity led to another open door.

  And that’s what happens when you trust yourself enough to follow your instincts and your passions: you’ll find new possibilities that you probably never imagined opening up to you. My passions certainly took me in a new direction. Partly based on those relationships, I’ve been able to launch a thriving career as a public speaker. I never thought I’d have the chance to stand in front of groups of people all over the United States and the world to talk about myself and my ideas. (And I really never imagined that I’d love doing it!) I’ve also had ample opportunity to give back—through environmental activism, outreach, and donations to nonprofit organizations and charities (but we’ll talk more about that in part III). In ways I couldn’t have imagined when I was first starting out, my business has had deeply personal significance, too.

  My grandmother Marguerite was the centerpiece of my family. She was a strong, amazing, independent woman (she had to raise seven kids all on her own after my grandfather passed, back when my mom was just three). My parents and I used to love making surprise visits to Charlotte, North Carolina, to see her. She used to tell me that I was “all sweetness and goodness.” I remember sitting in her chair by the china cabinet, talking to her while admiring all her beautiful glass figurines.

  She passed away in 2013, and in her memory I designed an item of clothing called Marguerite’s Garden. Anyone who knew her knew that she loved her flowers, so the design, a sort of scarf meets necklace, features lots of crocheted flowers and leaves. I wore it during my TEDWomen talk to give me strength. All of the proceeds from the sale of the item go to women’s organizations, which I know would have made her proud. I feel like Marguerite’s Garden is a garden in heaven, flourishing with everlasting love for her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Dewdrops reflecting her strength, birds singing songs of her kindness, the sun’s rays shining on her legacy. Her garden is full of beauty and life. To have created something in her honor, something that could actually affect the lives of others in a positive way, is one of the most important and profound experiences I’ve ever had.

  Ryan Lash / TED

  These days, I’m working to take Maya’s Ideas to the next level. I’ve been approached by several retailers (including some local boutiques and a national chain) that are interested in carrying my designs—and while those deals are still very much works in progress, they mean I’m one step closer to eventually selling my creations in an actual brick-and-mortar store (no building-buying or construction crew required!). I’ve already brought in some outside help in the form of full-time employees; slowly, I’m building up my inventory, and I’m preparing to scale up the company to deal with increased demand.

  I still sometimes have to pinch myself when I think of all that’s happened in the last seven years. There’s no way I could ever have predicted that the business I started as an eight-year-old would propel me to the national, even global stage—and before my sixteenth birthday, no less. And while there are no guarantees in life, if you’re looking for a secret to my success, it would be this: My creativity and curiosity started me down a path. I chose to follow it.

  Who knows where your path might lead?

  SO YOU’VE GOT AN IDEA . . . NOW WHAT?

  Maya’s Ideas came about when, after receiving compliments on my homemade headbands and discovering the website Etsy, I was suddenly struck with that Big Idea. If you follow your creativity and curiosity, you’ll undoubtedly be struck with a Big Idea, too (or maybe you’ll have lots of little ideas—don’t discount those; I was serious when I said they could be just as influential and meaningful as the big ones). But what comes after that Big Idea? What are the next steps you should take? How do you really get started?

  Prospective business owners, in the earliest stages of launching their companies, usually put together something called a “business plan”—basically just a written report that outlines the company’s goals, and provides a kind of road map for achieving those goals. A typical business plan might include a market analysis (a way to identify potential customers), a sales strategy (a plan to reach those customers), financial projections (how much revenue the company should make), and management structure (a breakdown of who’s in charge). The simple act of writing a business plan can help a wannabe entrepreneur learn more about the company she intends to build.

  Similarly, you’ll want to come up with a plan, too. Think of it as your Big Idea Strategy. True, you probably won’t need to prepare a market analysis (especially
if your Big Idea has nothing to do with business), but it’s always a good idea to have a clear sense of what you want to achieve. Here are some tips to help you get started:

  Arm Yourself with Information

  It’s true that launching my business didn’t exactly require months of planning—the Etsy site itself features lots of tutorials and tips to help potential sellers open their stores. Even after reading through all those articles, though, there were still some things I needed to figure out before I could really get started. One of those things was pricing. Since I was only eight, I had no real concept of how much (or how little) my items should cost. It’s not like I had a checking account, and the only time I ever bought anything was with my mom. (Either I’d pick something out for her to purchase, or walk up to the counter and buy something with her money.) In order to determine the right price point for my items, then, I had to do some research. First, I needed to factor in the cost of my materials (for example, if the ribbons and appliqués I needed cost $5, but I sold each finished headband for only $4, I’d quickly go broke). I also poked around other Etsy stores and e-commerce sites to get a sense of what other vendors were charging.

  There’s an old saying that applies to anyone who’s trying to do something he or she has never done before: you don’t know what you don’t know. So the first thing you’ll need when you get ready to launch your Big Idea is information. For example, if you’re interested in starting an official club at your school, you’ll need to figure out what, if any, rules you must follow. Must you host a certain number of meetings? Boast a certain number of members? Do you need sponsorship from a teacher or guidance counselor? Where will you hold your meetings, and will you need permission to use the facilities during after-school hours? To find the answers to those questions, you might want to swing by the administration office to ask about paperwork and protocol. You might want to speak with the heads of other on-campus clubs, too. Ask about their experiences. What worked for them? What might they have done differently if they could start over?