Nina Faulhaber and Meg He, co-founders of ADAY
Nina Faulhaber and Meg He are the co-founders (and co-CEOs) of ADAY, an e-commerce brand creating technical apparel for everyday life. ADAY believes that the clothing of the future is technical and seasonless and is reimagining everyday staples with intelligent fabrics, construction and design to create smart apparel that simplifies life. ADAY launched in June 2015 and its co-founders were named to Forbes 30 under 30 in Retail & E-commerce. ADAY was started in London and is now headquartered in SoHo, NYC.
Prior to founding ADAY, Nina worked at Index Ventures, was a Guest Lecturer at the London College of Fashion and worked at Goldman Sachs in the Natural Resources M&A team in London. Nina was born in Frankfurt (where she was a competitive gymnast) and has lived in Montreal, Singapore, London and New York. She has a BSc from EBS Oestrich-Winkel and turned down an MBA offer from Harvard Business School to start ADAY.
Prior to founding ADAY, Meg was a Senior Product Manager at Poshmark (Series C mobile fashion app in Menlo Park, CA), worked throughout business school with Aileen Lee as part of the initial Cowboy Ventures team (that published Welcome to the Unicorn Club) and also interned at billion dollar startup CloudFlare. Before business school, she worked with Atomico in venture capital in London and at Goldman Sachs in the UK M&A team in the Investment Banking Division. She also occasionally teaches yoga. Meg was born in Beijing and raised between China and the UK. She holds a BA from the University of Oxford Merton College in Economics and Management and a MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.
How has your life experiences made you the leaders you are today?
Neither of us had traditional fashion backgrounds so when we started ADAY we probably lacked a lot of the life experience we needed to create ADAY. We spent the past couple of years in the technology world at venture capital funds (Index Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, Atomico) and tech startups (Poshmark), and saw a lot of friends doing really cool things, but no one was really innovative in the industry we were most passionate about: the clothes we wear every day. Nina grew up as a competitive gymnast and Meg completed her yoga teacher training in California, so both of us knew how comfortable active wear felt, but we wanted more from our wardrobes. We wanted our wardrobe to be working for us, not against us, so we started researching intelligent, technologically advanced fabrics and construction. We also wanted our clothing to last longer than our everyday staples - we needed them to be technical, beautiful, and sustainable. Ultimately, we got really passionate about what we think of now as “clothing of the future.” We’re reimagining everyday seasonless staples with intelligent fabrics, construction, and design to create apparel that simplifies life.
We both have lived in a ton of different places: Nina was born in Germany and also lived in Singapore, Montreal, London and New York. Meg was born in Beijing, grew up in the UK and also lived in San Francisco and New York. She loves solo backpacking and has travelled to 70+ countries (and taken great Instagram pictures in ~50+). Nina has travelled all of South East Asia and feels happiest on a lake in Cambodia, on a busy market in Marrakech or on a farm Tanzania. We think it’s those experiences that shaped us to be empathetic leaders and mission-driven entrepreneurs.
How has your previous employment experience aided your tenure at ADAY?
ADAY is the first company we founded ourselves and it’s definitely unlike anything we’ve done before. Certainly there were aspects of what we’ve previously done that are helpful now. Meg most recently was a Senior Product Manager at Poshmark so naturally, she learned a lot about digital marketing, customer lifetime values, engagement and growth marketing. These skills come in handy as we are building out customer experience and digital marketing plans at ADAY. Nina worked for years as a Venture Capitalist and was on the board of various consumer internet businesses where she experienced the power of good product, brand, and strategy, so currently works on the long term product strategy and creative direction of ADAY.
However, it’s almost more important to talk about the things we didn’t have a clue about. We both didn’t have a formal creative education so the ADAY brand was really born from a place of passion in our hearts. We also didn’t know much about fashion design and product, so we questioned everything from the very beginning. We don’t believe in making clothes specific to seasons, we work with the best factories in the world, we invest a lot more time in product development and we think garments should do more and work for us.
What have the highlights and challenges been during your tenure at ADAY?
Everything was a challenge in the beginning! It was our first time doing anything like this, so that was expected. Our backgrounds are in technology and venture capital (with bits of finance as well), which is a long way from creating and designing active apparel, forming and marketing a brand aesthetic and voice, and hiring a multitalented team. The initial step was seeking advice from some of the best people in the world, including people who had built billion dollar brands and learning from them. Luckily, we have never been afraid to cold email or call which have resulted in us gaining mentors and investors. We complemented this with picking up our own skills — Nina completed a (very) short course in sportswear design at Central Saint Martins, and Meg applied her travel photography background to art directing our first photoshoot. So there was, and still is, a lot of learning, growing and being spontaneous in applying quasi-transferable skills to new purposes!
What advice can you offer to women who want a career in your industry?
There’s a lot of different pieces — it’s important to have vision, purpose, determination, optimism and timing. We’re very lucky to have an awesome team of creative women who come to work because they’re passionate about what they do and are driven by a desire to help people live a healthier life. Every brand also needs to know its market, specifically its customers. If you don’t understand what your customers want or are targeting a group that’s too diverse, this can result in ineffective marketing that can often break a brand that’s just starting. It’s important that the customer can identify with your product, which in our case, has an emphasis on making life easier and living an active and healthy lifestyle.
What is the most important lesson you’ve learned in your career to date?
It’s important to be realistic with your expectations. The most frequent answer you will receive to any question in business is “No.” We’ve learned to take any other response as a pleasant surprise and are grateful for the opportunity. Reality minus expectations = happiness.
How do you maintain a work/life balance?
We both really, really like to work hard (we met in investment banking after all) so it's also very important for us to find balance which replenishes our energy and creativity.
Nina is a 50/50 extrovert and introvert, so as a result she gets her energy from a combination of spending time with people who inspire her, in addition to solo morning runs, meditating, reading (currently Meditations), writing and drawing. She energetically recharges by the water. Venice Beach, Maderas, Zanzibar, and El Nido in the Philippines are some of her favorite places as she loves to surf. She replenishes her creativity by not putting many plans on the schedule and spending “me time.”
In Meg’s ideal world, she never has to recharge so she think’s a lot about optimizing her body and mind so she has as much energy and creativity as possible. The Ketogenic diet has done wonders for her energy. She gets inspiration through meditating (WOOM Center’s sound experience is great), reading (fiction & non-fiction), walking her rescue pup Forrest, climbing at the Cliffs, painting, playing the piano and riding a Citibike everywhere.
What do you think is the biggest issue for women in the workplace?
Unconscious bias is a huge issue since it is precisely that — subconscious and we are unaware of how it affects our decisions. This doesn't just affect women, but also race and class. At ADAY, we make it a priority to recruit equality and diversity, and our main goal is to build a team who is passionate about the work we are doing.
How has mentorship made a difference in your professional and personal life?
We like to think of a mentor as someone who cares about one’s career and gives guidance to help them achieve their goals. Specifically for us, both of our mentors are actually investors in ADAY, Aileen Lee from Cowboy Ventures and Ben Holmes from Index Ventures, so they really played a big part in our success. As such, we think a lot about mentorship and paying it forward, especially spending time teaching and investing in our team, because we really believe in the multiplier effect.
Which other female leaders do you admire and why?
Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel are two awesome leaders who led their countries in times when politics, business and pretty much every sector was still so male dominated. We believe leadership needs to happen at the top for it to permeate every industry and role, so that was incredibly inspiring to see and we are excited to see more women as head of states in our lifetime.
What do you want ADAY to accomplish in the next year?
We just launched our Technical Tailored collection, which was a step closer to our mission of creating the wardrobe of the future: one that’s beautiful, technical and sustainable. So this year we’re going a lot deeper into your “normal wardrobe” and will be hosting pop ups for our community to touch and feel ADAY. We’re also working on our first product collaboration, more on this soon!