Launch Interview Transcript of Kristi Gorinas with Kristi G Company
A few weeks ago Jim DeBetta and Ron Reardon interviewed Kristi Gorinas from the Kristi G Company on their show Launch. Kristi created and is marketing a wonderful designer diaper bag. And on the show she took the listener through the trials and tribulations of getting her product and company off the ground. Once again, a big thank you to Karen Galambos with Right Type Pro for this transcription.
The Launch Hour
On Business RadioX
Jim DeBetta
Ron Reardon
Interview with Kristi Gorinas
Kristi G Co.
July 9, 2009
Jim DeBetta: Welcome to Launch where we explore the world of invention and entrepreneurship. I’m Jim DeBetta, here with my co-host Ron Reardon and our producer, Lee Kantor. Good morning guys.
Ron Reardon: Hello, Jim.
Lee Kantor: Mr. Jim, how are things going?
Jim DeBetta: Things are going.
Lee Kantor: Big day?
Jim DeBetta: Big day! Great guest today too. I know I am excited. I think she is excited. Kristi, are you there?
Kristi Gorinas: Yes, very excited.
Jim DeBetta: Alright. We Have Kristi Gorinas. We have been going around here making sure we get her last name right, I think I nailed it.
Ron Reardon: Yes, you did.
Jim DeBetta: Kristi is with us today to talk about her journey, about her products, her company and we are going to go through all that and hopefully she will have some good stuff for us here today for other inventors to learn from.
Let’s start it off. I met Kristi through Lee here, she was a past guest on…who’s guest was she?
Lee Kantor: Erik Wolf’s show, it is called Gravity Free Radio.
Jim DeBetta: Cool. Kristi has a great line. Her company is called the Kristi G Company. Kristi, tell us a little bit about some of the products you are working on and then we will hit you with tons of questions.
Kristi Gorinas: Thank you for having me today. My first product that we launched is actually a handbag, or a purse, that is made to function like a diaper bag. We designed them to look like regular everyday purses. However, the lining is such that if you have spills in it is water resistant. Most importantly, the bags have what we call the “Easy Wipe System”, which is a stylish zipper on the back of the bag. You open the zipper and you pull out your baby wipe. It is that easy. The cool thing that I’ve learned over the last couple of months is that many women that don’t have kids or that are past the diapering days, they are buying the purses because they like the fabric, they like the style and they are actually putting antibacterial wipes in there or even tissues. It is so easy to access, you are not digging through the bag of the bottom of the stroller when you need it. You pull it out the back of the bag and you’re done.
Jim DeBetta: I can tell you as a father of three little ones…first of all, if you see these bags you don’t know that they are for kids or that the purpose is to carry wipes and other things in them. When you see them they look like something you’d see in a department store. That’s really cool for moms. My wife, she doesn’t want to always be known walking around with a big old diaper bag, they are usually not very fashionable. But, the fact that you have the wipes accessible through a side zipper is huge. First of all, half the time my wife forgets the wipes. Then what to you do? Tissues don’t work. The wipes do come in handy for other than using on the baby. Sometimes your kids have a lollipop or have ice cream…or spills in the car, that is even worse. Having that feature, to me, is what caught my attention and I think it is a home run in terms of convenience for moms.
Ron Reardon: Kristi, what you talked about happens a lot with inventors. You invent something for one particular use and one particular device. Then all of a sudden when it gets out there and consumers are using it, then they start using it for other things that you never even conceived.
Kristi Gorinas: Yeah, I never thought about putting the antibacterial wipes or Kleenex in there. We’ve got several newspapers, the travel section that are going to be featuring the bags for on-the-go and having easy access. I am learning and we are starting to pitch it differently than just a diaper bag. They are designed not to look like diaper bags.
Jim DeBetta: I could see my wife, us going to dinner, having that and nobody would really know, other than it just looks like a bag that is very cool looking and stylish.
Ron Reardon: She doesn’t have to switch.
Kristi Gorinas: That’s great. Just this morning I was walking up here for the show and one of the gals in the building said, “I love your handbag.”
Ron Reardon: It is…but it isn’t.
Kristi Gorinas: It looks like a handbag, it didn’t look like a diaper bag. I am carrying it and I don’t have any kids with me.
Jim DeBetta: It is smart. I love it. I’ve been shopping around since we met and looking, whether it is Babies R Us, Target or even some of the department stores; you do see a few fashionable diaper bags but you know they are diaper bags. They scream “Mommy – Baby” kind of a thing. They are usually huge and very bulky.
Kristi Gorinas: Can I comment on that? When I was doing research for the bags, I actually had my husband at Neiman-Marcus picking up several bags, designer bags, that are the $300 and $400 bags. He brought them home, we had about $2,000 worth of bags sitting in my living room, I think there were only four bags there. Looking at them, they were huge and heavy. I am thinking, “How do you put anything in there?” You would have to have a nanny to carry your diaper bag. They were so big and bulky. They were beautiful and expensive. One of the things we wanted to do was to make sure that the bags were very light weight. Because, once you stuff them full of things they really start wearing on your shoulder. That is why we chose to go with a fabric so that it is lightweight, even when you stuff it full it is not heavy.
Jim DeBetta: The clutch is a great piece. I know you have different styles but that you just never would know.
Kristi Gorinas: You can fit three diapers in there. You can fit a small bottle. You can fit little toys and snacks. It is amazing how it expands to fit what you need.
Jim DeBetta: Ron, you look at products every day, we know the lesson. Somebody emailed me the other day about this. They said that they wanted to bring a product to market. They went to the stores, they didn’t see anything like their idea on the shelves and so they just assumed that they were free and clear. As you know, that is a dangerous road to go down.
Ron Reardon: Yeah, just because you don’t see it in the marketplace doesn’t mean that patent applications have not been filed for or maybe even patents have been issued for it. It is one thing to actually file a patent or get a patent and another thing to take it to the marketplace. It is a one-two punch.
Jim DeBetta: That is a mistake that people will continue to make because they sometimes want to find their way around hiring a patent agent or an attorney to do the proper search. Doing a search is much more than just going on Google and looking for your product. If you are going to build a business around your product, you better make sure that this is the foundation of the house. If that is not right, and I have seen t his, two or three or four years down the road they get a nice big fat Cease and Desist letter in the mail and it is lights out, so to speak.
Ron Reardon: When I was in high school we learned a poem, the punch line in the poem was, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” Because of the pervasiveness of the Internet and the Google patent search and things like that, a lot of people think that they can do their own search and that it is comprehensive. It is just not true. One time I did a search on mousetraps and I discovered that of the 4,000 patents on mousetraps, some of them never mention the word ‘mouse’ or ‘trap’. So if you are doing a word search, through Google or the USPTO, because they don’t have the word mousetrap in there even though it is for a mousetrap.
Jim DeBetta: Like the ‘Rat Catcher’…
Ron Reardon: They will call them vermin, they will call them rodents, small animals, they will call them bait stations. Here is a patent for a mousetrap that the word ‘mouse’ and ‘trap’ is nowhere in there so you would miss that one.
Jim DeBetta: Tricky stuff.
Ron Reardon: Yes, it is.
Jim DeBetta: Kristi, I don’t want to say it is obvious what your inspiration was, so I am going to ask anyway. What made you come up with this idea?
Kristi Gorinas: Well, this wasn’t the first idea that I had. I was actually working on a different product about 2 ½ years ago after my fourth child was born, she was 2-years-old and I happened to be watching a TV show and another ‘Mompreneur’ had inspired me. She had three girls at home, I have four girls, she had them doing craft day and she was the one who came up with the Jibbitz, those little jewels that go into the Crocs. I thought, “You know I have lots of great product ideas and I have four kids at home. I can follow through with some of my ideas.” Honestly, that day I started sketching out my first product, which has been in development for about 2 ½ years. It is a frustrating process being in development that long. So during that process I wanted to have a coordinating, something to go with the one product I was working on. That is when I thought that I would do a bag. I started researching bags and I then thought I wouldn’t do bags because there are a thousand diaper bags out there. But, after thinking about it some more, I came up with pulling a baby wipe out of the bag. I tried to find a diaper bag that was like that out there, I personally couldn’t find it. That is when I decided it was something a little bit different and I’m going to start working on designing a diaper bag that is functional, but looks more like a purse and that you could pull your baby wipe out of it. That’s the only reason I went forward with a diaper bag, because of the “Easy Wipe System”. If it was just a plain diaper bag, I wouldn’t have done it. It had to be different. I had to do something that was not currently out on the market.
Jim DeBetta: That is your unique selling proposition. You are right, more and more today I am seeing more fashionable things. Companies are waking up and saying that women don’t want to always look like they are mommies all the time. They do just want to run out for lunch with their girlfriends or wherever and they don’t want to carry a 50 lb. suitcase. My wife has the same problem. She has this one huge bag and she doesn’t take the time to switch it out and then she forgets her credit cards and all that stuff. It is a problem for her. “Honey, you got to get it organized.” This is really the solution for that. You could actually even keep that thing loaded, keep a couple of diapers, some wipes; all she has to do is grab her keys and just toss them in there and she’s set.
Ron Reardon: One of the things you need to look for is that whenever there is a longstanding problem, like needing a baby wipe with a diaper, you can count on the fact that there has been a lot of time and energy put into finding a solution for that. You might not know that Jamie Lee Curtis, the movie star, she is now the Activia lady, she has a patent on a diaper that has a pocket for putting a baby wipe in. The diapers already come with a baby wipe already in there. I have never seen it commercialized…
Jim DeBetta: How many wipes are in there? I have never used just one wipe, sometimes it is one, two, three, four, five, six…(laughing)
Ron Reardon: I would have to look more closely at the patent. I collect trivia as far as patents are concerned, especially when it is involving movie stars. But, she did have a diaper that had a pocket where the baby wipe would be in there. I have never seen it on the marketplace but she did get a patent for it.
Jim DeBetta: Ron Reardon, patent agent to the stars! The other thing too is that when they have the perforated and you pull one out and seven come out. That is something that really bothers me, not that this show is about the problem with wipes…
Kristi Gorinas: Mine doesn’t do that! One at a time.
Jim DeBetta: One at a time like a good box of tissues. That is important because that happens a lot. You buy wipes enough…when having kids we always told people when they asked us, “What do you want us to get for the baby?” We never said clothes or toys, we said, “Buy us diapers and wipes.” You constantly are buying them. It is a money pit. I think we spend more money on that than anything. In-laws and family, they always buy clothes and all that stuff; that is easy. But, going through wipes many times I just wanted one and then you would hold the baby down and if they go to the bathroom and are wiggling and you have to try to keep them pinned down and then you are pulling wipes and ten come out! All of a sudden you use a whole bag of wipes in three days. They are not cheap. It is one of those things when they come out of your bag, Kristi, and they come out one at a time, it may be a little stretch in a sense but it is a money saver too. It will save you from just wasting all those extra wipes too.
Kristi Gorinas: The next thing I’d like to do is to come up with a baby wipe that is also an antibacterial wipe that doesn’t sting. I know there is liquid out there because I have it at home that is antibacterial liquid. How can they put that on a baby wipe. That way you’ve got it both. You can use it for both the bottom and your hands and you don’t have to switch it out. I’d love to get an antibacterial wipe that is also a baby wipe. I have been searching but I haven’t found one.
Jim DeBetta: We must know a couple of chemical engineers out there that can formulate that.
Ron Reardon: I know that when I helped with m y son, Eric, with the grandchildren…you sit there and clean them up with the wipe and everything and you get the diaper on and then there is the container with the antibacterial and then you clean your hands. It is a two-stage process. You are on the right track. You look for people struggling with something or something that is not really convenient or efficient and come up with a better solution.
Jim DeBetta: Or we could just have babies change themselves, that would be the ultimate solution. Then all these companies wouldn’t have a business, but you know it would make our life easier.
Kristi, you have this idea, you have these bags. The idea is in your mind. You say that there is nothing like this out there. You send out your husband to Neiman-Marcus, he looks like a hero in the store because he is buying all these expensive bags. You were not returning those, you were going to keep them! How long did it take you from the moment the light bulb went off and you said this is something that has to be solved or you had to do something about it until you really saw the first prototype and it came to life for you?
Kristi Gorinas: It was last April2008 when I thought of the idea for pulling out the baby wipe. I had an engineer already working in China on my chair so we sourced some handbag companies and I drew some sketches of some handbags with pulling the wipe out, a little flap that you lift up and a big old hole to pull the wipe out and that took a couple of months to get a prototype from China. I worked with China factories for 7 ½-8 months, having two guys that don’t have any kids try to help design a diaper bag; and that did not work.
Jim DeBetta: You said something that was really important that I want everybody to hear which is that it took months…there is a big misconception in the world of manufacturing. A lot of inventors feel that, “Hey, I got an idea and within a few weeks I will have prototypes. I will have everything solved for me.” Here you are. You’ve seen what it is like. You know that it takes time and it can be frustrating and it can be slow and sometimes you don’t get the right fit. It is good to have somebody that has experience in a particular area help you design your product.
Kristi Gorinas: It was very frustrating and it took much longer than I thought. Quite honestly, I am not a real patient person, because I have a lot of energy and I like to see things happen. But, I’ve learned patience in the last 2 ½ months. I learned to wait a month to hear something back about getting a sample or a prototype from China.
Ron Reardon: It takes quite a few versions to get it right. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of anybody that their very first prototype was what they went to market with.
Jim DeBetta: Never.
Ron Reardon: They go through five, six, ten, twenty different versions. Even Edison went through thousands of possibilities for the light bulb before he came up with the little coiled carbon filament.
Jim DeBetta: That’s a little long though, 2000 times, that’s a little much. We’ll let him slide, it is Thomas Edison…
Lee Kantor: What was it like calling China? That must have been weird. Did you do it yourself or did you hire a company to do that?
Kristi Gorinas: Initially I wanted to do the bags here in the United States. I was already in China trying to make the chair and being long distance like that I wanted to be more hands on, especially with the bags. It wasn’t as technically involved. I did search for while to find a handbag company in the United States. Nobody wanted to do business with me because I wasn’t big enough. They didn’t want to manage 50 bags at a time. They just couldn’t shut down a line in order to do that. So, I ended up going online and looking to source my own handbag company over in certain parts of China where I had already the engineer over there. I said, “I found two, go visit with them, meet with them and see if they can make this bag.” Well, after eight months and fabric was upside down and it looked like you would pay $3 for the bag, I wasn’t working with the right factories. I know there are factories over there that can do the work. But if you are not over there physically, standing next to them, working with them it is not going to get done right. So after eight months of trying to be patient and a lot of money with prototypes I said, “That’s enough. I’m done with working with China.” I went back to looking in the United States and found a company and went out and met with the company and in three days I came back with samples that were almost perfect.
Jim DeBetta: It is kind of like a good and a bad thing. It is a shame because the reality is that, although it would be great if we could continue to make products in the United States and support our own economy in that respect, there are a lot of people that still love the Made in America thing. You had somebody over there. You had an engineer over there and still you couldn’t get what you wanted. That just is a testament to knowing that when you have a relationship, like we were talking about last week about networking, how Ron and I know so many factory brokers. They are your eyes, ears and your mind. They know the factories, they know the right places to go and they remove all that doubt. They do all the work for you. The reality is that Asian factories, and any factory overseas, are very capable of making great quality but you have the language barrier, you have the distance barrier. You can’t stand there unless you have a factory broker by your side, you are kind of shooting in the dark and that is a tough thing.
Ron Reardon: There is really no substitute for face-to-face. You are actually with them and they say, “What about this?” and you say, “No, turn it this way.” From an efficiency standpoint you can get so much done in a shorter period of time if you are right there with the person working with the device.
Kristi Gorinas: Not being a designer by trade, I didn’t know the steps and your product specifications. I should have had a 20-page product spec done for each bag on exactly the details of every piece of that bag. I didn’t know that. I lost a lot of time not being properly prepared to deal with the factory. I was hoping that they could just take my hand sketches and they would make something up. It didn’t work.
Lee Kantor: Is that common, Jim? That the inventor thinks they have enough data to give the people who produce it, but the invariably don’t?
Jim DeBetta: Yeah, that is common. It is only simply because they just don’t know. They are not expected to know.
Ron Reardon: And when you don’t know, you don’t know that you don’t know!
Kristi Gorinas: Exactly!
Jim DeBetta: But you try and you know what, I always give credit to people like you, Kristi, who went out they wanted to do it, they had an idea and they said, “You know what, I’m going to go out there and try it.” I’m sure you’ve made in your mind your own mistakes and wish you could have done things differently and quicker. But, it makes you stronger, it makes you move forward. At least now you know that you’ve been in the trenches yourself. You’ve done it and you know what you won’t do the next time. Going forward you will have a better sense of the path you have to take for this stuff.
Ron Reardon: That’s true. It is just like when people do a sketch, they think they can engineer and manufacture it from the sketch. No, you need engineering CAD drawings. Then when they have the engineering CAD drawings you think you can use those for the patent drawings. No, there are different requirements for formal patent drawings. There are sketches. There are renderings and then there are engineering drawings and then there are patent drawings. When you don’t know, you don’t know.
Kristi Gorinas: And you need money.
Jim DeBetta: Good. See it is not us prompting that one! I am not going to ask you how much you spent, but if I asked you if you spent in the thousands, I think your answer is probably going to be “Yes”. I’m afraid to ask further how much because this is a common issue with inventors. You are going to spend money and Kristi will say that again, I’m sure if we asked, but at the end of the day it is spending your money wisely and choosing the right vendors. Time is money. So when you wait eight months along the way is that lost money in lost potential sales, is it re-designs, who knows. Along the way though, it is about being efficient.
Ron Reardon: It does take longer than you think and it is going to take more money than you think. It is very common. What you encountered with people not wanting to do short runs is also very common. Sara Blakely, the inventor of Spanks, she went to something like 17 manufacturers and they all turned her down because it was just here, she didn’t have a company or anything like that.
Kristi Gorinas: Can I comment on Sara? She has two of my bags. She just had a baby a week or two ago, or something or that. I met some people that were friends with her at a networking seminar. I said, “I’ve been trying to get her some of my bags.” They said, “We’ll get her a bag.” I am hoping she’ll use it. I’m hoping somebody will take a picture of her with my bag.
Jim DeBetta: Just show up at her door and introduce yourself.
Ron Reardon: She is in town, right?
Lee Kantor: Yeah, she is here in Atlanta.
Jim DeBetta: Talk about once you had the bag in your hand, what were the challenges that happened after that?
Kristi Gorinas: I was tired.
Jim DeBetta: Because you thought that was it, “I’m done now. I’ve made the bag!”
Kristi Gorinas: I was so excited that I finally found a factory to make the bags and I got the prototypes and then all of a sudden we are in production with inventory. Then I have a thousand bags in my basement and I was like, “Now what?” It was anticlimactic a little bit for me. It is a whole other ballgame. You get the product done and now I had to do something with it. So, it was scary. It was overwhelming. We had the website. Just because you have a website, doesn’t mean anybody is going to go there. That is a whole other…a lot of money to take and try to market it.
Lee Kantor: These are all different mountains you have to climb along this journey.
Jim DeBetta: Ultimately, like Kristi, like most inventors, they want to make money with their invention. My dad always said, “Nothing happens until somebody sells something.” You have all this product and now you have it and it is here in the United States and you have a thousand bags. A lot of people, unfortunately, don’t think past the excitement. “Now I have them. They are here.” You then take a couple of breaths and, “Oh, Oh. What do I do with them?”
Ron Reardon: Now what do I do?
Jim DeBetta: “What do I do with them?” Build a website, they may not come. It is about marketing. It is about branding and it is about having those contacts and being able to reach the buyers that can buy them. These designs are great. If I saw this, if I was with my wife and we were in a department store, a high end department store, and she said, “Look honey, that bag is $300.” I would say, “Alright, it looks like that is what it should cost.” Perception, branding, looks, style…it still means so much and where it is. If you put that bag in Odd Lot and people are going to expect to pay $10 for it. If you put it in Neiman-Marcus they will expect to pay $300. It is interesting how having a good look, especially for women with fashionable products for babies or have kids is a tremendous asset.
How did you come up with the designs? Of all the designs in the world, how did you pick them?
Kristi Gorinas: That was very, very difficult. I probably looked at 20, I swear this is true, probably 10,000-20,000 fabrics, thousands upon thousands of fabrics. But, I looked at the same fabrics over and over again. I swear, 20,000-30,000 and then having to narrow that down and narrow it down and narrow it down to six. It was really hard. What I did was that I really looked at what bags were out there and what was missing. There were no purple bags out there and there are a lot of people that love purple. There were a few purple bags. It is a bag that can go with a girl or a boy. There are hardly any olive green bags. I also looked at what are the fashion trends for spring and fall, it was purple and yellow. I just tried to really find fabrics that weren’t already out on the market, that they weren’t too loud and obnoxious but were real elegant, sophisticated and smart. I asked a lot of people, they didn’t agree with me and my choices and I changed some of them. You can’t just use your own ideas.
Jim DeBetta: That’s it, getting objective opinions. We talk about that all the time. If you friends and family weigh in they are often going to be a little slighted in your favor. But, if you ask a stranger and they say, “That’s an ugly pattern”, and you get five people that say that pattern is not a good pattern you would want to think about changing it.
Ron Reardon: That’s right.
Kristi Gorinas: Our soccer club has about 1200 families and I literally would take out fabric samples out to the soccer field and walk around and look for women that had babies and toddlers and I would ask them, “Would you choose your top six?” I would go around and ask their opinion and do my own little focus group just off-handedly. “What fabrics do you like?”
Ron Reardon: Looking back, the initial concept was actually the easiest part of this whole journey.
Jim DeBetta: The idea.
Ron Reardon: The idea. Because, like you said you had to make choices of fabrics and design and manufacturing…
Kristi Gorinas: If I could also say the little plastic pouch we call the “Easy Wipe Pouch”, it looks like a pencil case, that took me eight months to get right. Eight months! The first 5,000 I got from China were all defective. I had to throw them out. They had to send me a whole new group.
Jim DeBetta: This is just common stuff. I am not surprised here. I am not surprised here, it happens every day.
Ron Reardon: It happens. I’ve heard this story over and over again.
Lee Kantor: Was there something that she could have done to prevent 5,000 being thrown away?
Jim DeBetta: When you work with factories that you know, or you work with a factory broker that knows the factories that are reputable you typically don’t have those types of problems. It is not that they can’t have a defective run of product but, when you are investing your own money and you are not a big company to get that first run and they are defective is crushing. Sometimes if it is not a good factory they may not want to work with you to take the product back or give you a credit or redo them. They may give you a hard time and then you have to wait another couple of months. Waiting is sometimes tougher than the actual mistake itself.
Kristi Gorinas: They replaced them for free.
Jim DeBetta: That’s good.
Kristi Gorinas: It did cost $700 to ship it, though. My quality engineer, they were given five little sample bags to test and they felt they were fine. Well, five isn’t enough out of 5,000 bags. So the testing wasn’t done correctly on my groups end. So, they paid for the shipping and the factory replaced the pouches. It was more of a time and disappointment to me.
Ron Reardon: How much time did it cost you?
Kristi Gorinas: Probably an extra month.
Ron Reardon: A month here, a month there…
Jim DeBetta: She is lucky she didn’t send them to a retailer and they were defective!
Lee Kantor: That could have been Game Over.
Ron Reardon: Good factories will have good quality control procedures. They will not test every bag but they will do random samplings, it is definitely more than 5/5000. They will pull every other master cart and they will pull a bag and they will do very specific tests. They will not just go, “Yeah, this looks good.” They will do stress testing and drop testing and fabric spill testing, all the specific things they will do for fabrics and they will check them. Color fastness, things like that.
Kristi Gorinas: I’m learning this process as I go, through my mistakes. You are right, every time I’ve said something you’ve come back with the factories in Asia are good. You are right, they are good and I plan to do future business with them because they do make good quality products. It is just that you have to learn.
Jim DeBetta: A lot of people are worried. I think one of the big fears people have with working with Asian factories is that they say, “Well, I really want to support a US effort.” But when you are in business and you’re successful by importing products, when you sell products you may hire people and you put people to work no matter what.
Lee Kantor: What’s the difference in pricing?
Jim DeBetta: It could be huge. Sometimes it is only 10-20%, but I’ve seen products 60-70-80% less expensive for the equal quality. When I ran my own companies I used to source things, I couldn’t believe how inexpensive but how well made they could be. This is what they do. These factories overseas…we support these countries in a way by all the goods we consume here.
Lee Kantor: So the lesson is to have somebody on the ground there in China that is a good quality control person that is going to make sure you are choosing the right manufacturer.
Jim DeBetta: Absolutely. I think in Kristi’s case, which is common, I think the handful of take-aways are that you have to have some money to get behind your project. If you know that you are only going to have a few bucks and then you are going to run out when it comes to sales and marketing you probably shouldn’t really jump in. You may just lose your money. The next thing is that it takes time. Here’s Kristi, typical example, six months, eight months, a year; it takes a long time to go through the process. You have to try to have the best connections you can. You want to find people that know factories. You want to know people that are great with branding and patent work. When you have those you pay more up front but you will save a lot of money later. It is so typical in this business.
Now Kristi, real quick before we wrap up…I know you were interviewed by The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, that’s a huge paper for anybody that doesn’t live in Atlanta, I guess that is the New York Times equivalent of a paper down here. It is a huge thing. So quickly, tell us about how that went and when we can expect to see the article.
Kristi Gorinas: Actually, the article came out this morning. I haven’t seen it in print. I did see the online version about ‘Mompreneurs’. Myself and another gal in Alpharetta were featured. They actually came out to the house and took pictures of me in my own environment with the inventory in the basement and just asked about the journey a little bit and the struggles and pretty much the same thing we talked about today. Also, the benefit of being a ‘Mompreneur’, being able to work from home and go to the doctor appointments and be with the kids and also the struggles of trying to have four kids at home and do work.
Ron Reardon: Well, now that you are published you are somebody. You are important. You’re a star.
Jim DeBetta: You’ve made it through the hard parts which is, unfortunately is not what happens to everybody. We will be posting the link for Kristi’s interview on our websites and our radio show so that everybody can take a peek and get to know Kristi a little bit better.
Kristi, we really appreciate you coming out. I’m excited. I love your products. I know you are working on others.
Lee Kantor: What is your website, Kristi?
Kristi Gorinas: It is www.kristig.com. They didn’t put it in the newspaper.
Ron Reardon: What is interesting is that when I was in the AJC many years ago is that people will track you down, even though the website is not there, they will still find you.
Jim DeBetta: Yeah, they do. Five years ago it would be more difficult. They’ll just Google you and find your website. It is not as tragic as it used to be.
Ron Reardon: Kristi, thanks for coming out and sharing your journey with us. I think our listeners really picked up some great, great tips of what it is like to go from start to finish.
This has been another episode of Launch with Jim DeBetta and our producer, Lee Kantor. I’m Ron Reardon. Thanks very much.
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