Underneath Ban.do's Pink, Sparkly Exterior, Jen Gotch Builds A Serious Business

Coffee With Jen Gotch, Founder Of Ban.do

"Coffee With..." is an ongoing series that features stories and advice from female founders. The interviews are conversations we actually had over lattes and are edited for length and clarity.

She answered the door to Ban.do's L.A. office on roller skates, because that’s how founder Jen Gotch rolls.

Gotch and her 40-member team are “serious about fun,” as Ban.do's motto states, but they are building a powerful brand: The company, which designs girly gifts and office supplies sold online and in 2,500 stores around the globe, has doubled its revenue for the last four years straight (Gotch declined to give specific numbers) and recently opened its first UK office with hubs already in Kentucky, Hong Kong and Los Angeles.

But perhaps where Ban.do really shines is with its enviable social cache, including 365K Instagram followers and growing. That's largely due to to Gotch herself, who co-founded the brand eight years ago (then creating one-of-a-kind hair accessories) before selling the business to Lifeguard Press in 2012. With a personal following of 157K on Instagram and a larger-than-life Snapchat personality, Gotch is still the creative force behind the company and its branding — she lives in an impeccably curated, pink-drenched, fun-filled, dream world yet she's not afraid to say when she's feeling depressed or anxious, which has endeared her to customers and social media followers, alike.

I sat down with Gotch over coffee to chat at the "Ban.do Penthouse," the company's creative headquarters in L.A. We talked about everything from being real to not liking drive-throughs to selling the company.

Julie Sygiel: Let me just say that the moment I fell in love with you was when I watched a video of your team making lunch — years ago — and you were stirring a margarita with a butcher knife. I was like, "This girl is crazy."

Jen Gotch: It’s so true that I’m not a person of pretense. There are a lot of other business owners that I follow [on social media] and everything looks so perfect, and I feel like sh*t about myself after I look at it. At Ban.do, our brand personality is to not feel competitive with other people — to actually support people who are where we were not that long ago, and to talk about our issues. And just be real.

There’s a test you can run online, where you measure how likely someone is to refer your brand to a friend, called Net Promoter Score, and our VP of E-commerce said, “I’ve never seen scores like this, ever.” Only now do we understand the strength of this, but the reason we’re winning is because it’s not a calculated strategy. We just got lucky that we followed our gut to be authentic and transparent from the moment we created Ban.do.

Sygiel: What were you like as a child? Were you always this expressive?

Gotch: I was very quiet and shy. When I was 16, I got my license but I didn’t want to go through the drive-through because I didn’t want to speak loud enough for the person to hear my order. Sometimes I look back and I think I’m not the same person. For me the thing when I really changed was when I was in college and joined a sorority. Growing up I didn’t have a lot of girl friends. But by the time I was a senior, I was running for president of the sorority and all these girls were like, “Who are you?” At the time I didn’t see it as business experience but looking back that’s where I became comfortable presiding over meetings with 150 people there.

Sygiel:  I’ve met several female founders in L.A. and several of them mentioned that you've given them good advice recently.

Gotch: I do love to give advice. At Ban.do especially, we’re a welcoming group and people pick up on that. We used to do this thing called, “Honor Roll,” where we would give free advice. Anyone could make appointments to meet with me or one of the girls on the team. It was so fun. It got really popular and our team in Kentucky was like, “You guys need to do some work and not give out free advice all day.” But it was so fulfilling and that was part of the motivation of getting a bigger space so we’ll be able to do things like that in a group setting here.

Sygiel: I've been a fan of the brand for years and it's been amazing to see the evolution of products from vintage hair accessories to printed agenda books and yoga mats. Can you tell us anything about the numbers?

Gotch: They're pretty impressive, at least to me. When we're reviewing sales numbers, I'm always like, "Wait...these are in millions?"

Sygiel: I read that you sold the company a couple years ago and that is so intriguing. How did that come about?

Gotch: We starting thinking about it around our third year of sales. The business was growing but we were really two creatives running the business. It was my old co-founder, Jamie Coulter, and myself, and between the two of us, we just didn't have a lot of business experience, especially in wholesale products. We were keeping it alive, we had a great relationship with Anthropologie and were getting great press, but we really needed to take on a huge investor or do something to really grow the business for it to be sustainable.

Sygiel: At that point, what was your product assortment?

Gotch: Mostly hair accessories. We had started out with the vintage one-of-a-kind $95-$400 hair pieces. The recession had hit and editors [who wanted to feature the accessories] were like, “What’s your under $50 story?” And we didn’t have one. So we started dabbling in lower priced options — we tried a tote bag and a really simple phone case with a heart on it. At that time, Jamie's husband had a business opportunity in Dallas. She decided to move and it was clear she wasn’t going to be able to support the business from another state, but I wasn’t sure that I could do it on my own. We didn't want to close it because at that point we had both put so much into it and I personally was all in — I had stopped my other career and I had lost my house. Even when it didn't make sense, I was like, "I'm not giving up."

Sygiel: You lost your house? Because you invested so much in the company?

Gotch: Yes. I had stopped working as a freelance stylist and photographer so I could spend time on Ban.do and then we weren't taking a salary because we had hired a couple girls, so obviously we wanted to pay them. I was very invested in an emotional way and so we got the idea to try and sell it.

Sygiel: I always thought that you and Jamie must have had a big fight or something and that’s why you two separated.

Gotch: No, I mean there were times when we wanted to kill each other but…. Looking back, at the time that Jamie and I separated, it really was the right move for her and for me.

Sygiel: What type of revenue were you doing then?

Gotch: We really just had Anthro from the wholesale perspective and maybe a handful of other wholesalers, plus our retail site. Our sales were probably around $200,000 then, but it wasn't anything from a profit standpoint. The thing is, because Jamie was a wardrobe stylist and I had just gotten into commercial photography after being a set designer and prop stylist for many years, we knew a lot about photography. So from the outside, we looked like a big company.

Sygiel: What was it like when you were putting up the company for sale? Did anyone help you with that process?

Gotch: It seems like a whole other lifetime ago, but we put together an offering book, where we catalogued every aspect of the business. The information inside included an executive summary, company overview and information on our industry. We identified our competitors and our customers, marketing strategy, business opportunities, operations and management risks, a financial plan, and an asset list. Being such a visual company we filled it with photographs. At that time we weren't an established business like we are now, so we relied on friends and friends of friends and friends of friends of friends to help us at every turn. We had an angel investor who helped a bit. We have a lot of people to thank for the success we've seen.

Jamie had a friend who was in the Young Presidents Organization (YPO) group here and every member of the group gets to email the entire Los Angeles YPO group three times a year with a request. So she talked to him and he let one of his emails be the pitch of our company. That’s how we ended up finding a buyer and we sold to the owners of Lifeguard Press, Todd and Kim Ferrier. They make licensed stationery and gifts for brands like Kate Spade and Lilly Pulitzer. I think what they saw in us, well, I know what they saw in us, was this strong brand voice that could be applied to any product they were making.

Sygiel: So what’s next for Ban.do?

Gotch: We’re excited to do more events at the Ban.do penthouse now that we have more space. What always thrills me about our customer is how diverse she is. There’s something about Ban.do events that makes me really happy when I look at everyone who comes.

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