214: How Tracey Pickett Went From Lawyer to Founder of Hairbrella
Side Hustle Pro
Nicaila Matthews Okome | Side Hustle Pro Media
4.8 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 20 August 2020
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tracey Pickett wants to make sure that you don’t get caught slippin’ in the rain. She is the founder of Hairbrella, an innovative rain hat combining fashion and function to protect women's hair from the rain. Not only is she an entrepreneur, but an attorney, inventor, and speaker.
Tracey’s original plan was to “get law school out of the way,” then get a job, and she did just that. While working in intellectual property as a lawyer, the entrepreneurial bug started tapping on her shoulder. It reminded her of the promise she made to herself prior to beginning law school. Tracey vowed to not spend more than five years in a legal career without pursuing the business ideas she had for her life: that included her first entrepreneurial endeavor, Eboticon.
Although, along with some colleagues, she’d been working on Eboticon, an emoji app to represent Black culture on nights and weekends. While still working full time as a lawyer, Tracey managed to meet her deadline, pace herself, save up a year’s worth of income, and complete the first test version of Hairbrella. And on her fifth work anniversary, she quit! After leaving her job, Tracey launched a Kickstarter campaign with a prototype in hand, and the rest is history.
Take a listen, and learn:
- All about the financial investments Tracey made to patent and prototype Hairbrella
- How she used early user feedback to continue to develop and improve her product
- How she pushed past the earliest challenges in her business to make a product that is stylish and works
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Guest Social Media Info
Tracey Pickett (Instagram) — @traceypickettesq
Tracey Pickett (Twitter) — @traceypickett__
Hairbrella (Instagram) — @hairbrella
Hairbrealla (Twitter) — @hairbrella
Eboticon (Instagram) — @eboticons
Side Hustle Pro — @sidehustlepro
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Almost breaking even and in some we were losing money but it was an investment because we needed to get it on the heads of all of these women. |
| 0:15.0 | You're listening to Side Hustle Pro, |
| 0:17.0 | the podcast that teaches you to build and grow your Side Hustle, |
| 0:21.0 | from Passion Project to Profitable profitable business and I'm your host |
| 0:24.3 | Michaela Matthew Zocome. So let's get started. Today in the guys chair we have |
| 0:30.9 | Tracy Pickett founder of Hairbrella. Hairbrella is an innovative |
| 0:35.5 | Rain hat combining fashion and function to protect women's hair from the rain. |
| 0:40.9 | Hairbrella was launched on Kickstarter and was successfully funded in December 2016. |
| 0:46.8 | Since then, this passionate entrepreneur, attorney, inventor, and speaker has invested her money, time, blood sweat and tears into bringing |
| 0:55.8 | hairbrela from an idea and prototype to fully develop product on the market. |
| 1:01.1 | In today's episode, you will hear how Tracy began her legal career at a |
| 1:05.6 | Fortune 5 technology company working in the areas of corporate and |
| 1:09.5 | intellectual property law and you'll also hear that she was an attorney by day and spent |
| 1:14.2 | nights and weekends developing her passion for entrepreneurship. In 2014, she |
| 1:19.0 | launched her first entrepreneurial venture, a Botakon, a media design company with a mission to create dynamic and culturally relevant |
| 1:26.5 | emoj for niche social groups. Then in November 2016, Tracy left her job to lead a |
| 1:33.3 | Botakan full-time and to launch her second |
| 1:36.1 | entrepreneurial venture, which was Hair Brela. |
| 1:39.0 | In today's episode, Tracy breaks down the financial |
| 1:42.0 | investments she made to patent and prototype hair |
| 1:45.0 | umbrella, how she used early user feedback to continue to develop and improve her |
| 1:49.7 | product and how she pushed past the earliest challenges in her business to make a product that is stylish and also works. |
... |
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