Kavi Ahuja Moltz: D.S. & Durga Creative Director and CEO

Hi everyone, I'm Hillary Kerr, the co-founder and chief contact officer of Who What Wear, and this is Second Life, a podcast spotlighting women who have truly inspiring careers. We're talking about their work journeys, what they've learned from the process of setting aside their doubts or fears, and what happens when they embark on their second life. Today, I'm speaking with the creative director and CEO of DS and Durga, Kavi Ahuja Moltz. In 2007, Kavi and her now husband, David, launched their fragrance company DS and Durga out of their apartment in Brooklyn. Today, you can shop the brand's beautiful perfumes, candles, and body care products in one of their gorgeously designed brick-and-mortars, in retailers like Berkdorf Goodman and Neumann Marcus, and also on their website. While David is the nose of the brand, creating signature fragrances like, I don't know what, and Rose Atlantic, Kavi leads all design aspects of the company, and if you've seen the brand in your favorite local boutique, you know just how impeccable the visuals are. But it's no surprise that Kavi has an incredible eye for design, in fact. She spent the early part of her career studying and working in architecture, and though she eventually realized the field wasn't for her, she continues to use the skills she learned in her first career, daily, at DS and Durga. Kavi's story is such a testament to how the skills from our first lives can transfer to our second lives, and I can't wait for you to hear from her today. Now, on Second Life, it's Kavi Ahuja Moltz. Okay, Kavi, you ready to do this? Yes. Okay, so on this podcast, we like to start at the beginning. So what did you study in school, and much more importantly, what did you think you were going to be when you grew up? Throughout high school and college, I studied art and art history. I mean, high school is high school, but my high school did offer like a lot of art history classes. We even took a trip abroad during my senior year in high school to Italy. And, you know, you're really lucky if you got to go on that trip. It was a fully like art immersive trip. We went all around Italy by bus and, you know, really developed my interest in art history and specifically architectural history. We visited a lot of churches, old ruins, and I really fell in love with that. I went to college, majored in art history, again, with a focus on architectural history, and really started to develop a love of architecture specifically. And I decided some time in college that architecture is what I wanted to do with my life, and that I was going to be serious about applying for going to architecture school after college. I took a little bit of a break between college and grad school to gain some experience in architecture, so I would have something, mostly something to fill a portfolio with so you could get into architecture school. So tell me about that time in between undergrad and then your graduate degree when you were working. How do you even figure out what sort of architect you want to work for or apply for that and is it meant to be like a full-time job? Yeah, I mean, luckily my college was in the Hudson Valley, not far from New York, and I grew up in New Jersey. So there's endless firms to choose from there, really, if they'll have you. I ended up going to the alumni office in my college and said, tell me any architects who have graduated from here who are currently working in New York. And they gave me a list and I just started calling them or emailing and not many replied, you know what I mean? They get solicited for like, can you give me a job all the time? But someone replied and he turned out to be my mentor for the next several years. He gave me a job in this high-end residential firm that he was working at in New York City. The firm is called Alan Wansonberg. And he was a bit of a minor in New York celebrity himself. Alan was his husband who had passed away years before. Used to be Andy Warhol's boyfriend. Oh, so Alan had really cool connections. And later in his life he just made these really beautiful, high-end, exquisite, detailed homes for a very wealthy set of people. And so I got a job there. What was the work like? It was basically being a drafts person and just doing architectural files and then a little bit of interiors. We had the chance because it was all residential to just make sure everything is perfect. And that's something I really learned early on in my career. I credit working at this residential firm with giving me the idea of perfection because there was the time, there was the money. That's what the clients all wanted was like everything in its place and every detail tended to as opposed to when you're working as an architect when you're working on larger public spaces and larger buildings. You don't get to do that much, you know? And every creative wants the chance to work on something forever. And you know, how do you know when it's done? It's never done, it's never perfect. But I feel like there, I got as close as I would ever come to having the time and the resources and actually being told, nope, do it again, do it again, do it again, do it until it's totally perfect. And you know, you don't get that much. So that was really nice. That's all kinds of incredible. But I have to confess, I don't know what drafting plans really entails or what that looks like. Can you walk me through that part of it because I am just in a sea of ignorance over here? Oh no, no, you're just, you know, drawing floor plans, you're drawing elevations like of each wall in the room in the house in the building. I actually was one of the last few classes in my grad school to learn to draft by hands, like with the old-fashioned like table that tilts in a T-square to like do things straight and everything by hands, which I loved. It was meditative and interesting to do. But it's not really practiced much anymore. It's all in the computer. There's a program called AutoCAD, which I did not know because I guess like you learn it when you're on the job or you learn it in a class or a lot of people learn it in architecture school. And because I was working before I went to architecture school, I did just tell the job to get the job that I knew how to do it. And then I just quickly learned it. But I faced it a little bit. Was it super complicated to learn? It took some time, but I just like read a book at night and practiced I bought a pirated copy of AutoCAD because it's very expensive because it's really for like architecture firms, like big companies to use. But yeah, I figured it out. It all ended up all right. I love that. And also like by the way, I think there's something so refreshing and wonderful about just jumping in and saying like, I'll figure it out because ultimately you do. You did. So it worked out. So at what point did you start to think, okay, I have enough experience to go to grad school. And what made you think that was the next step that you needed as opposed to doing something else or existing as you were? I knew I kind of had my eye on the prize, the prize being masters in architecture. I figured I needed a year or two or three of experience. I had never wanted to like wait that long. I just like I'm the kind of person when I know I want to do something. I just want to do it. But the time in New York, it was like right after I graduated college, tried to enjoy it because it was a really awesome time, except for September 11th happened just at the time I started this job. And from that job, we all went to the roof to watch the towers falling downtown. This job was midtown. So it was a, I don't know, that time in New York was very memorable. And I was trying to enjoy this young 20s time in New York. I didn't know where grad school would take me, you know, where I would get in. It's not easy. It was not easy for me to get into grad school. But I got into a great school in Los Angeles and I did my master's degree there. So I went to grad school in about 2003. Got it. So you went to LA. You went to get your master's. What was that process like for you? And was grad school everything that you thought it was going to be? It had been this prize for so long and now you actually got it. And sometimes it doesn't always live up to it. Sometimes it surpasses. Sometimes it's just the same. I'm wondering what your experience was. Yeah, architecture school is notorious for being like long, long, grueling hours, a lot of work up all night in the studio. There's like a whole culture around it. I don't know if exists this way anymore because things have definitely changed. But many years ago was like a badge of honor to be up all night working on your project, just kind of like being a martyr and sacrificing like your whole self for your dumb little project was just kind of the norm. But I definitely bought into it. You were in it together. You were up all night in the studio together. It was a fun little encapsulated life where you were just existing in this little bubble together, all doing the same thing, like tediously working on these models and projects. But they were fun and they were meaningful to us. And I spent three and a half years doing it. I made amazing friends. I got to live in another state. And I enjoyed the work I was doing. My architecture school was very artsy and conceptual. And it felt indulgent in a way because it was just very detached from reality. And it was a bit like going to art school. And it was just making fun things. And if you have an idea, you can totally explore that idea. Whatever wacky idea you had, you could make that into a building. That was the MO of my particular architecture school. And there was something fantastical about it that you can make something out of this weird idea you had. I love that. So at what point did you think, OK, I need to start thinking about my next step after I graduate. And how do you even pick where you want to work at that moment? Because it sounds like the work that you were doing in grad school was quite different than the work experience that you had. Were you thinking ahead going, OK, well, I want to present this kind of work because I want to work for this type of firm or work with these types of clients? How does the thought process work in that? Yeah, I mean, I wanted to work for someone pretty high profile in New York, someone famous, like a stark attack, do you call it? Yeah, because I thought that was what I wanted. I wanted to be a famous architect with my own firm, doing high profile public buildings. And I thought this was the path that I would just do really well in architecture school. And then apply to some amazing architecture offices in New York, get a job, and then be fed through this pipeline to be a famous architect myself one day. I felt mildly prepared for it just because I had the master's degree, did well in school. But I knew that my school was kind of notorious for being a little ungrounded and more conceptual, more artistic, and other schools have a more technical focus. And that's what firms want a little bit more. But found a great job at 10 architectos in New York. I was working on some high profile buildings. I did that for two years. And towards the end of those two years, I met David, who's my husband and partner in perfume, partner in everything. And he and I met during this summer of 2007, like a few months after I graduated from architecture school. And the rest of my life began when I met him. That is so wild on so many levels, especially because I'm curious about the moment when you started to think, I've done all of this work. I've gone to school. I've sacrificed things in pursuit of this career. But maybe this is not the career for me. And then also from having that thought to actually starting to put things in place to move on it, I'm curious about how long that took. But when did you start having initial doubts? Yeah, it really was such a huge investment. I mean, there's college, and then there's the two years working, and then the grad school after that. It's a lot of time. It's a lot of money. It was a lot of financial backing on the part of my parents who then I did one day tell them that I was going to stop working in architecture and start making perfume with my boyfriend. So it was a big jump. But I have always, and David has been the same way, just made really big life decisions very quickly. The smaller things that we labor over and come and haul over, but the major things like quitting careers, getting married, having children, these are like the things that have always come easily to me. Changing careers, I don't even know if I thought I was changing careers. It just, everything seemed like it was on this path. That was my path. And it all made sense to me at the time. I met David when I was working at this architecture firm. And he was working at a restaurant, a few blocks away from my firm. And architects work really late hours. I'd be working till like 10, 11, sometimes 12. And he'd be just getting off his shift. So I would go to where he was working. He was working at this restaurant called Pure Food and Wine. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I would go meet him, wait for him to get off his shift. And then we would go to my apartment and we would work on DS and Durga. He'd be filling bottles in the kitchen. I would like print labels at the printer at work, cutting them with like an exacto blade. And we'd be making these small handmade bottles. And with like boxes that we bought stock on the internet, if the minimum was like 100 pieces, we'd be like, how can we do this? This is 100 pieces, this is so much. We were not used to like business or minimums or like supply or anything. We did not know what we were doing at all. But we were stamping things and slicing things. We started going away on weekends to do like thrifting in antique stores and we were going upstate and going to old bookstores. We were buying these kind of Victorian beauty manuals and how to make your handmade beauty tonics, these really old DIY books. So we just bought some of those and it was just had to take your home kitchen ingredients and put them together to make things. We started making shaving tonics and scented waters. We bought a distiller, which is like you put a bunch of natural materials in the top and then it uses steam to get the essential oil out of it. Like you'll put in a pound of orange peels and you'll get out five or six drops of orange oil. So we were taking peels from pure food and wine from the juice bar there, like all organically best quality orange peels you could get and distilling them and making our own orange oil and lemon oil. And we would take pine needles from like David's parents backyard and distill pine oil. It was this time in Brooklyn of DIY everything. Everyone was making their own everything from scratch. Our friends were making jewelry and making leather goods and making clothes and everyone was like making these things and selling them and having these little businesses. So we were doing it together and it was a fun creative project for us. So we were doing this at night on weekends and our friends liked it, you know, whatever we would show it to someone. They were like, oh, this is something. I have a question. Were you always sort of a fundamentally, I don't want to say crafty because that is not it and also feels reductive in a way. But were you always a sort of person who was like hands on, like were you that kid who was like making potions and stuff? For sure, I was always that kid. David was also that kid and you know, we both still do what we did back then. Like we both are making things all the time and that's like the best thing that we do in our current careers. That's so wild and so cool. Okay, so you have your orange oil, you have your pine oil. What were you doing with that? Were you making, you said tonics and who were you selling it to and what were you calling it like? Yeah, we quickly separated the work. You know, he really had this knack for sense and he started to know what he was doing very quickly with that side of it. I probably spent one or two weeks trying to make some perfumes like by mixing oils and things like that and that ended after like a week or two. That was not the way that was not the path. But David would buy different essential oils and different perfume materials. We started getting them from health food stores. You know, you go and you get the essential oils and you mix them together and then perfume alcohol is just alcohol. So really like in the beginning, we were using pipe proof vodka and then eventually you can buy like small amounts of alcohol from perfume websites. We were making like a pine shaving tonic which was a few drops of pine oil in like a bunch of very high proof vodka, you know, in a little bottle with like a little label on it. You know, we took Persian limes and distilled them and then we took a bunch of dried rose petals and soaked them in alcohol and got like the essence out of them and mixing these things together. That's how that started and I would just make these labels at home. And you know, we made our first products. We started selling them to a few friends that I mentioned. They had stores in New York. We started selling it to, in God, we trust and earnest zone. And we sold them at Brooklyn Flea, which was like this flea market. I think it's also in LA now. And that's how we got our start. That is amazing. Wait, who came up with the name? How did you come up with the name? Oh, David was a musician at the time. His name is David Seth Moltz and his stage name was DS. That's what he would call himself on stage. And then Durga was the nickname that he gave me based on a character in a, but they're Panchali movie called the Upu Trilogy. So it's an independent Indian filmmaker because David was a film student and he thought I'll resemble this character Durga in this film. So he started calling me Durga. Love it. So what was the next step from like, okay, you have a product, you are selling it, people are interested. I'm wondering at what point did you start thinking like this is really a thing? Yeah, by people's reactions. I mean, no one was really making handmade perfume at the time. I'm not going to say no one, probably a few, but not many. And it was this very interesting and mysterious space. No one's really telling you how to do it. There's no real guide how to make it. If you ask anyone, it's just a very top down European led industry where you kind of born into it and you learn it from your family or you have to go to a proper perfume school and that's how you learn to become a perfumer. So our path was different. David taught himself. And I think the story has always resonated with people and you know, it was a really kind of amazing time in New York for us. It's going to say that sounds like the actual dream. And also I just want to point out it is really exciting because there is a lot of nepotism in the industry and it's really like family tradition. It's like if you're not born in this specific area of France, if you don't come from a family of noses, like good luck. So the fact that you were disrupting is really cool and exciting. At what point did you start thinking, OK, I want to leave my extremely busy, extremely time consuming day job and focus on this full time and how I'm going to make this work financially. So we got this offer from anthropology. They had this amazing team of buyers who sought out the newest, coolest things. So they contacted us and we were so tiny. And they asked us if we would make a line of perfume for them if we would make four different cents for them. And I can't remember how many they were asking for, but the check they were going to give us was something like $90,000, $100,000, which was more money than God at that point. It was intense as we could not even believe it. And we had started to think that if we take this seriously, I wanted it to be a high end brand. We wanted it to be premium, beautiful packaging, like an exquisite little bottle. And we kind of worried about what it would do if we were in anthropology, which is an amazing place, but it wasn't exactly where we wanted to be. Brand fit, yeah, exactly. So there was this offer on the table. We really could not turn it down. And it enabled us to quit our jobs. So because that amount of money was dollar signs in our eyes. We were like, we could do this. We could take this project seriously. It was very exciting to take it seriously because it was a lot more fun than the architecture job. So it wasn't the hardest decision. Someone was giving us the money to get it off the ground. I mean, obviously a lot of that money was going to the anthropology product, but it was still quite enough to make us feel comfortable that we could hardly this into something else. And we just had a lot of confidence about what we were doing. I think we knew we had something special going on. And we quit our jobs. And we started doing it full time. At this point, how many signature sense would you say that you had? And then also, what were you thinking for the anthropology piece of it? Was it going to be like an iteration on something that you had already done? Were you going to create something wholly new for them? What was that plan? Yeah, we had probably five or six sense of our own in very simple stock bottles with small labels. It looks nothing like what we are now. But anthropology wanted a set of four custom fragrances. And it was branded D.S. and Durga and anthropology. And we made it for them. And it did really well. They asked us to do it again the next year. And we did it again the next year. All handmade, still. All handmade. Hand made by David. Hand poured by David. And then we would have friends over for anthropology packing parties. But we'd pay them in pizza and beer. And they would help us, because it was thousands and thousands of bottles. And they would help us box them and label them in our apartment. So yeah, very DIY handmade at that point. And in terms of the branding and the look and feel, that was you, I'm assuming? Yes, the branding and look and feel was me, is me. And at that point, it looked a lot different. I was, like I said, just these small stock bottles of folding carton, really simple brown inside, white outside, stamped it, put a piece of designed tape around it that I made this custom design for. And it was a far cry from how it looks today. So the anthropology thing went well. So well, that to your point, they came back again. What were you thinking in the interim? What was the grand plan? How did you think through the financial piece of it? And how were you growing the brand itself during that time? Just very naturally, we didn't take any investment. Everything that we got went right back into buying more products, upgrading the packaging. At this point, the way the product looks now is probably the fourth or fifth iteration of how it has looked since the beginning. It really has been a journey. And it's been a bit messy along the way with things changing the way they look. And every chance that we had more money to do an upgrade, we did it. The juice inside has always been amazing. We've never cut corners with costs for the juice. But the packaging we definitely had to in the beginning. There's no way we could afford what the package costs right now. But every time that we were able to upgrade it, we did. And then you took on the role of CEO and Creative Director and David is the nose. It seems like you sorted yourselves naturally early on, but partnerships, they can be extremely tricky. I can't even imagine doing it with an actual love partner as well. How did that work out? I mean, obviously it is. But I'm wondering if there were difficulties or if it was just seamless? It was not seamless. In the beginning, it was just us doing everything. There were no divided roles. It was both of us handling everything. And we had to agree on all decisions. We quickly separated things into everything that is scent-related and word-related. David makes all the perfume. He writes all the copy. He names the sense. And then everything visual is me. We just decided that it's best if we have our own domains. And I really let him have it. And he does the same vice versa for the most part. Unless you really want to speak up about something and you really feel like that's your cross to bear. You really want to bring up that you're not happy with something. We will do that. But we try to keep it separate and respect each other's domains. I think that's very wise. I would say the overlap between skill sets for myself and my business partner with very, very minor. It's very tiny overlap. And I think that's why it works so well for such a long time because we had our own areas of expertise. I think that's one of the key things. It's just respect that someone else's world. And it's fine. I think it is. I mean, I still consider myself highly collaborative. And I do love to get other people's opinions and feedback. And for the most part, it makes the outcome better. And that's probably a lesson that I'm learning more so now. It was probably stubborn. I mean, we started this nearly 15 years ago. And I imagine I was a lot more stubborn about it then. And now it really is a team effort and the brand is supporting so many more people. And we have them because we respect their opinions. So I do think that generally my work now is all the better for it for taking other people's opinions and being pushed a little bit, even if I bristle in the beginning when I get some feedback that's not totally glowing. If I work on it a little bit, I will see that. Yeah, they were right. They saw something I didn't see. And I'm always grateful to be pushed because it's pretty much always better in the end. So how did the early days, or even today, how does it compare to working in architecture? And more specifically, are there any skills that you feel like you've brought over from those days other than certainly being able to use that exacto and cut a straight line better than pretty much anyone else possibly could have? Yeah, I mean, I think that what I've got most from architecture is this work ethic and this diligence that I don't think I would have without it. I mean, I also have my very hard working immigrant parents to thank for instilling that in me early on. I got this one piece of advice in architecture school that has always stuck with me. And this one teacher who kind of noticed that as young architecture students, we were a little bit restless and always going for coffees and going for bathroom breaks and this and that. And he said, sit at your desk, finish the thing you're working on, and don't get up until you finish that one drawing. If you're reading a book, the one page, or the one chapter, and he's like, just tell yourself, you're not just going to get up and wander off at any moment. You're just going to finish the task that you're doing. So I've just always taken that and run with it. And when I've got something to do, I just won't wait until later to do it. I'll just do it now. I'll just knock it out. And it's so simple, but it's such a valuable piece of advice because you just accomplish a lot more this way. Instead of waiting for all the pieces to come together or waiting for maybe someone else's input on it and they're not available right now, I just get it done. It makes me very efficient in my work. And that's something that is really important as you're leading a company, just getting things done. And that kind of goes back to what I was saying before about this pursuit of perfection that I was able to work on early on. You just don't really get that chance that much anymore. It's a balance between getting it to be right and beautiful and also just getting it done. And it's always going to be a struggle as a creative, as an artistic person, you want it to be perfect. You want it to be as you envisioned it. You want to be able to do a million iterations. But the real world has tons of deadlines. And if deadlines aren't met, it affects the rest of the business. And my work as a creative director of DS and Durga, if some piece of creative doesn't get made on time, it affects sales, it affects marketing, it affects international distribution. And you cannot afford things like that. The whole business will fall apart. So you just really have to stick with your deadlines and get things done. So every business goes through a series of sort of inflection points and key moments where you either pivot or level up or change focus in one way or another. And it feels like in the history of your company that 2015 was one of those big moments in part because you relaunched the brand and also that's around the time that you secured a merchandising partnership with Bernie's, right? Yes. So I'm curious about what the thought process was like behind thinking through a relaunch. And also if you could give some context to how big the business was at that time, how many different sense were there, how many people were on the team. I'm curious about sort of where you were in the grand scheme of things because at that point you had been working on it either full-time or part-time for seven years, right? Yes, so in 2015 we started to work with Bernie's which was always the dream. We were still very tiny then. We were probably three full-time people, including David and I and maybe someone part-time. Super small but we finally had enough money to put into making the package look the way it does now which is a lot if you're ordering components of anything that you want to make that's custom. There have minimums of if you're lucky 10,000 but 25,000, yeah, it costs a lot. So it wasn't until 2015 that we could really do that and we designed this box and bottled the way it looks now and we took it to Barneys and finally got into Barneys. We had tried unsuccessfully before that to get into Barneys and they had told us that the price point wasn't high enough and the product didn't look high-end enough. We were like, what the price point isn't high enough? What kind of metric is this? But they had to maintain their certain level and they thought it didn't look high-end enough and they were right, it did not look how it does right now. So we took this advice and when we were able to finally upgrade everything partially for the sake of Barneys because that was always a dream, we did. We did in 2015 and the team was still very small but we really took every penny we had and put it into making it look the way it did because that is the first touch point that people will experience that people will see. The packaging, like I said, the juice inside has always been the highest quality it can be but for the packaging, it's such an important thing and such an expensive part of a luxury beauty product. So it took that many years to get to the point where we could afford a package like this. And at that point in time, aside from Barneys, where were you selling primarily? Like what was the main point of retail? Yeah, several independent stores, we would sell in that one cool boutique that's in your town. You go into a kind of smaller town in America and that one place that was also selling ASAP hand soap, we were selling in a lot of places like that. We were not selling in any other department stores. That was the first department store we were ever in and it was so nice to work with the small boutiques and you have this personal relationship with them and department stores kind of always scared us. So we waited to go into department stores until we had a little more guidance and a little more help. So I know that there are lots of different revenue models with department stores but one of the things I learned early on, I think I was interviewing Jen Meyer about Barneys and she said, oh, well, when I started there, they didn't take things on consignment which is the way that it was doing it towards the end which was you would sort of place your product with them and then if something didn't sell, they sent it back to you which is a pretty common situation. Is that how the fragrance world worked? Was that part of the concern with being in a department store or was it just like the fact that this project which was so personal and bespoke would be out of your control in some way? Well, I guess a bit of all of that and to be successful in department stores, someone needs to sell the product there. People go into department store, they're confronted with a million different products and they're gonna generally choose the one that someone's selling to them and those people are employed by the brands. So unless you're able to have someone in Barneys or in any department store selling your product and talking to a customer and who's trained by the brand to educate the customer on what this brand is, it's just gonna get lost in the shuffle of so many other products. We did have a space at Barneys and we were able to staff it with someone from our team and that was the start of our department store life and now we have spaces and sacks and neemons and burgdorfs and you have to staff these places and the people who are working there on our team, they need to be trained by us. David trains them all very personally on each fragrance and we immerse them in the brand completely. Storytelling is such an important part of our brand and we have so much story to tell. If you aren't able to communicate that to the client, then the brand gets lost. I mean, the bottle that's on the shelf looks like a lot of other perfume bottles because one of the hallmarks of niche fragrances to have all the bottles look the same and just kind of be very understated and focus on the juice inside. And our bottle also is really simple, it's minimal and then we go crazy with our other visuals. We have a lot of wacky photography and videos and playlists and we have a lot of fun expressing what's in the bottle in other ways, but we keep the bottle really simple. So if your bottle is on a department store shelf with many others and no one's telling the story, it's absolutely gonna get lost. There's no one who's gonna be able to point it out and talk about how special it is. That makes sense. I also know that having one's own space is the dream in a number of ways, though it can be quite expensive. I know that you opened a flagship in New York in 2019. What made you decide that 2019 was the right time to do it? Why a store? Stores are the best. I love retail stores. To me, it had always seemed like the kind of culmination of everything I've been doing with my architectural background. I called it an old architect friend of mine, Christa from K&CO and we worked on it together. So she worked on this store, then the two that came after that and also the fourth that we're gonna be opening in New York soon later this fall. But yes, it got to flex that muscle again and I'd always wanted to do it. I was like one day I'll revisit architecture in the form of having a DS and Durga retail store that had always been a dream. And yeah, we finally got to do that in 2019 when we opened the first store in Nolita on Mulberry Street in New York. That's amazing on so many levels. What were you trying to convey with the store? So if our listeners haven't been there, what is it like, what were you going for and then what did you get right and is there anything that you did not get right? So the store is sort of a representation of my aesthetic choices. It's a bit brutalist, which is like a style of architecture that I really love. I knew I wanted it to have a lot of concrete. I love concrete as a building material. I love Lake Uruguay. The main island of the store is clad in board form concrete done by this really amazing Brooklyn concrete artist named Eric of Oso Industries that I love working with. There's a lot of texture in the store, which is just something that I love in interiors in general. There's some spikes on the walls because it's a little bit punky. It's a little bit edgy. There's black metal shelves. But overall it's clean and it's modern and it has an edge. It's got a very restrained palette. There's a lot of black in there. And so it feels like me. It was a chance to put my personality into a store but it makes sense for the brand because it's done by the same designer, me, who's done the whole kind of visual identity and the retail identity. And so it just kind of works seamlessly together, I feel. That's pretty amazing. Thank you. So that was another inflection point. You guys also took investment and hired a president too. So walk me through the decision making process after all of this time bringing in some outside money, outside help. Yeah. I'm really glad that we waited as long as we did to get funding. I think a lot of founders I talked to will say to kind of bootstrap as long as you can. But it seems now that people are getting funding before they start. But again, this is just the difference of someone from outside the business world, me, who was just growing things in an organic way and would never even have thought to take money because that's borrowing money. When we started, we didn't know if we wanted to do that at all. But we had no idea of how things would grow. And we had no idea that that's pretty much what you do in business to get your brand to grow. It's just kind of part of how it gets done. So we did eventually meet with some investors and the one that we are working with now, it just kind of happened very nationally, met them. We really enjoyed them. We felt they would do everything they could to respect the brand and not force us to make creative decisions that we didn't want to make, which is always the fear, especially when your founders are the creatives and we're fiercely protective of how the brand looks and feels. So we met someone that we thought would respect that. And we've had a great partnership with them for years since then. We haven't raised tons at a time because, like I said, just being from outside the business world, we go into it very slowly and we're happy with our slow growth because we feel like we're building a brand that's going to last for generations. And we're not in this just kind of like speed growing situation. A little more sustainable too. I feel it is, yeah. Because you're building a foundation and like lifelong customers. Exactly. That's the way we're doing it. So, okay, you have the two stores in New York. You have a store in LA in Venice on Abbott, Kenny. You mentioned that you have another New York store coming up. Is there anything else that you can share that's coming from your universe to us in the upcoming year or so? Yeah, we always want more ways for people to discover the brand. We're always very conscious of the price point of the brand and how not everyone can buy into this brand. Not everyone can afford to try it out. So we're always thinking of new ways that people can discover the brand. So we have something coming out this fall that is exactly that. Just something where you can try a little bit of several cents. It's gonna be beautiful and I think a great thing for the holiday season. We always have more cents coming up. David at any point has like 15 to 20 things that are like near completion, that are like when the marketing team tells him, okay, we need another thing. He's like, here you go. I mean, he's always ready with something new. And more stores, like I said, I love retail. I love doing the stores. I love the chance that we get when a person walks into the store to tell the whole story, the way that we want to tell it. Like with our team who has been trained by us and know me and David personally and can convey all that there is to tell about our brand. So yeah, more stores, more cents and more ways to discover the brand. We also just recently launched our hand and body products in aluminum bottles, which we're really happy about and really proud about because it's not easy to work with aluminum. It's a tricky vessel to work with as opposed to plastic. And we're really happy that we were able to get it done. This just launched a few days ago after a couple of years of development because it's not easy, but we feel really good about reducing the plastic that we have in our products. That's amazing. So one of the things that we like to talk about on this podcast is mistakes because everyone makes mistakes, but we don't always talk about it. So I'm hoping you can tell me about a mistake that you've made in your career at any point and what you learned from it. I would have opened stores sooner and you can do it on much less of a budget than we did. I would have opened a small thing, a little hole in the wall and just get your brand's name out there because they feel having a store is like the best calling card you could have. And I would have done it sooner. I think talking about mistakes, I know that everything has led me to this point. So I don't know how many mistakes we've made because everything that we have now, I'm very happy with and I feel blessed to have made it to this point. But I would have not let go of our control at any point. We've had different distributors that maybe we didn't have to work with. We've had different people kind of take over smaller parts of the business because we didn't have the bandwidth and we weren't able to do it ourselves and we weren't able to hire someone full time to do it ourselves at certain points during the brand's life. And if I could have avoided that, I would. I would just always keep the control right with us until we are able to employ someone to manage that part of the business because once you've signed contracts to have someone take this part away and manage that, they make decisions that you wouldn't make and reversing those is really difficult. So I would just never let go of any control until we're ready to have it be by someone on our team. So a lot of the folks who listen to this podcast are in their first lives and maybe they want to start something else, but they haven't done it quite yet. Maybe they feel overly committed to their first career or maybe they're just nervous about making some sort of pivot. You did so quite fearlessly, but I'm wondering if you have any advice for the folks who are a bit nervous about going into their second life. Yeah, be confident about it. I feel that if you're an architect, you know how to design things and that's something that you love to do. I feel you can design anything. I mean, I feel like I could with a little time, so a little learning curve go into any creative pursuit where I'm designing something because I know the language of design and I know it had a critique things and I know what I think looks good and I know what I think doesn't look good and I think being confident in your opinions about those things goes a really long way because it really is all just about making the right decisions. And if you know what you like, you'll have brand consistency or you'll have consistency throughout your, whatever it is that you're making and it's gonna look good, you know? If you can design one thing, I feel like you could design most things. That's how I feel about creative pursuits and David feels the same way about, you know, he wrote music and now he's making perfumes that are also compositions just like music is and you can write poetry and he has his own set of creative pursuits that he does and I feel that you can always extend the thing that you're comfortable with into another pursuit if you feel confident about the style that you're going for. My last question, it's also my favorite, which is if you could go back in time and speak with your younger self and give younger you a little career advice at any point in time, what would you say? To be kind to everyone, think being kind goes a long way. I've definitely listened to this advice along the way but I do feel like it's really, really important because everyone has like their own hard path and it's never necessary to take out anything on another person, just be kind will only help you along the way and it's really the best way to make relationships with people and we're very loyal as people and just in our work, you know, different vendors and companies we work with, we like to stay with them and just like to be kind to everyone I'm working with and that's the way you build up a nice relationship and build up good trust. So be kind. I love it. I love it. Well, thank you so much for sitting down with me. This was such a pleasure. It's been a joy watching your company from afar for all of these years and I'm just so excited to see what you guys continue to do. So congratulations and thank you again so much for your time. Thanks so much, Hillary. So nice talking to you. Thank you for having me. That was Creative Director and CEO of DS and Durga. Coffee, Ahuja, Moz. For more inspiring interviews with women like coffee, head on over to SecondLivePod.com where we have so many more for you to peruse. If you like today's show, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to rate and review us. We love seeing you spread the word on social and now you can tag us in your posts. We are at SecondLivePod on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. We always want to know who you're interested in hearing from on the show. So send in your requests to hello at SecondLivePod.com or you can DM us on Instagram. I'm at Hillary Curr. The show is at SecondLivePod. Our DMs are always open. I'm Hillary Curr and you've been listening to SecondLive. This episode was produced by Hillary Curr, Summer Hammeres, and Natalie Thurman. Our audio engineers are at Treehouse Recording in Los Angeles, California. And our music is by Jonathan Leahy.