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How One Designer Started an Online Business in Her Spare Time

Lauren Barless created her online business, Covver, because she saw a need for a new product and decided to fill it. By Format Team 2

he was on the hunt for a webcam cover, but all the options she found were bulky and awkwardlooking. “I had a friend who apparently had her webcam hacked, and someone was recording videos of her,” says Barless. “It was the first time I had heard about this happening to anyone. I got a little paranoid about my webcam, knowing that was possible.” Unable to find a webcam cover she liked, Barless decided to try creating her own. She figured she probably wasn’t the only person out there who was put off by the existing options. Barless set out to find a manufacturer that offered covers in the sleeker style she was looking for. “From there, it was sort of a fun branding side project,” she says. “I have lots of freelance design clients in addition to my day job, but I’ve never really had the opportunity to brand a business for myself. So that was a really cool experience; figuring out the business name, the logo, the packaging, and then getting the packaging made, ordering the supplies that I needed, and putting together the sale. “

Barless, who works as a product designer here at Format, found that it was surprisingly easy to maintain an online business in her free time. Once she got her product made, packaging designed, and online store set up, managing orders turned out to be simpler than she’d expected. We sat down with her to find out what she’s learned from building Covver as a side project. These are her tips for how to create your own online brand, no matter what kind of product you’re selling.

Choose a memorable name for your online business The first place where I started, because I knew I wanted to sell these online, was to try and figure out a URL. My first idea was to spell it “Coverr”, but there were no URLs available. Then I tried spelling it differently, like “Covver”, and I saw that the .ca was available. I thought, “That’s great. That’s memorable, easy to spell, and a short URL.”

looked on Instagram @covver was taken. Then I put the underscore in between the two “v”s, and I realized, “Oh, it also makes it a little emoji in the middle of the word, and the emoji kind of works thematically because it’s like a little guy with his eyes closed. It’s a perfect analogy.” That that little typographic detail of the underscore informed the logo design, where I basically drew a circle around the “v”s and the underscore to make the face more prominent, and that became my icon. With a client I might have gone back and forth and done 25 different concepts for something like this. But because I was just doing it for myself, I wanted to make a point to not spend too much time on it. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t too obsessive about getting every little thing right.

So that’s where I started. Once I had that name, I wanted to set up an Instagram handle. But when I

Consider why people need or want what you’re selling When I was thinking about what I wanted this to be, I was thinking that it would be really easy to tap into a fearful paranoid tone. Some other people who make these webcam covers, that’s kind of how they position it. Like, “You should be scared of hackers and the government.” I really didn’t want that to use that tone. I wanted Covver to just be an accessory, in the same way that you have a cellphone case—just something that you add to your device that has a function. I figured I’ve seen enough people with a Post-It over the webcam that the understanding of why you should have one is already there. I don’t need to dwell on people’s fears; people are already covering their webcams. In my time as a product designer at Format, something that I’ve noticed is that when people are coming up with their own workarounds or hacks, it usually means that there’s a design job. For example, if people using Format to build websites are coming up with a way to hack the way that we have things planned out, or the way that we have a theme

designed. Like Format’s store feature, for example. People had done all these clever things where they would add a PayPal link under an image in a gallery to say, “Do you want to buy a print to this image? Click here.” So clearly there was an opportunity to have some kind of built-in store on people’s sites, because they were coming up with their own workaround solution. Applying that same idea to the real world, seeing so many people I know with either a Post-It or a little sticker or a piece of tape on their webcam indicated to me there was obviously a need for a product like this. For that reason, I made a conscious decision to not focus on the creepy aspect of why you should have a webcam cover, and focus more on, “It’s just smart.” On my FAQ page, I have an allusion to the fact that, yes, your webcam is vulnerable to being hacked, so you should cover it up, and I have a couple of examples. Like the fact that Mark Zuckerberg has a piece of tape on his webcam, and I’ve also included a quote from FBI director James Comey, who says that covering your webcam similar to locking your door at night.

Making the site was super easy because I used format and I had a vision for the styling that I wanted to do: kind of lighthearted and fun and trendy and something that I would find appealing myself. When it came to the website, it was pretty easy to just keep it nice and clean. On my first try at building it, what I found out was that I really needed better photos of the product itself. I discovered that it’s really, really hard to take good photos of something that’s tiny and black on a black surface. It was tricky. I had to use a little Photoshop wizardry to make sure you could actually see the product. I ended up putting a Covver on my white iPhone, just so that there was enough focus that you could actually see it. In a lot of the photos, I’ll have it on the laptop, where you can barely see it. And then you have an image of it on the phone in the foreground so that you can see, “Oh, okay, this is what this for.”

The trickiest part was actually the product photography. I did it all myself in my kitchen one Saturday morning. It was important to me to just get it out the door and see how it goes and then come back to it and tweak things later if I want to. That’s the nice thing about a website platform that’s as easy to update as Format. It’s easy to just put your project up and get it out there, and then go back and continue to tweak it. I still make tweaks every now and again.

Share your side project I was a little nervous. I hadn’t sold to anyone yet, and I thought I would just share Covver with a few friends first. I got orders from a couple of people at work and then I felt confident. I thought, “Okay, I’m going to put this on my Facebook.” A friend of mine happens to have a ton of Instagram followers, and he saw the post on my Facebook and shared Covver on his Instagram story. So for 24 hours I just had this flood of orders from all over the world, just for the 24 hours that he had the story online.

I was totally overwhelmed. It actually happened the day before my birthday, so I ended up spending my entire birthday filling orders, frantically trying to track everything because I had 70 orders in one day. I was just blown away. I had to figure out really quickly the most efficient way to get things packed, because before that the orders were coming in really slowly. Before, I would take out the packaging, take out the envelopes, write it out by hand, put the Covvers in the package, seal it all up, package it in the envelope, and then walk over to the mailbox. So when I had all of these orders, I was like, “Oh my god, this is taking forever,” and I had to make a big assembly line on my kitchen table.

Make planning spreadsheets your new hobby

I’ve gotten very into Excel as a result of this project, because I’m making a point to keep track of everything very closely—and obviously you have to do that if you’re going to report income for tax purposes. You need to make sure you’re keeping good records of all your expenses. The Orders tab on my Format store makes that very easy, because you can export a CSV file, and so I just have that CSV as one tab in my document. I update it whenever I get any sales, and I have my total sales all totalled up, and then I have my expenses sheet and I total that all up. I’m always keeping track to make sure I’m making money and not spending more than I’m making. *Learn more about Covver at www.covver.ca, built using Format

I definitely recommend if you have a cool idea and you can figure it out and the math makes sense, then it’s worth trying on the side. This little side business of mine has been surprisingly low impact in my life. Literally all of the supplies and everything fit inside a shoebox in my bedroom.

Refinery29 Creative Director Piera Gelardi is Keeping It Messy

Talking with the Refinery29 co-founder about the importance of diversity and her tips for pitching your creative work. By Jill Blackmore Evans 16

As a co-founder of Refinery29, creative director Piera Gelardi has spent the past thirteen years building the brand from the ground up. Founded in 2005, Refinery began as a New York-focused design and fashion magazine. With their audience expanding, Refinery29 shifted gears to focus on their growing number of female readers, eventually adding news coverage in addition to beauty and wellness. “Growing up I was really inspired by Sassy* magazine, which I loved because I felt like a group of smart, interesting, cool, young women were speaking directly to me. I never really resonated with more mainstream publications,” Gelardi says. *Sassy* was an early-90s teen girl publication with an indie tilt; its founding editor Jane Pratt went on to create *xoJane.* What set *Sassy* apart from the pack was its refusal to lay out fashion rules, and Refinery29 also aims at that we’re-not-like-other-magazines feel. “We wanted to be smart, but also relatable,” Gelardi says. According to Refinery, the brand now reaches an audience of over 500 million people. They’ve recently opened international offices, in London and Berlin, and their yearly live event 29Rooms draws increasingly large audiences in New York and LA.

The feeling that mainstream fashion magazines aren’t really for you is a familiar one for many women, maybe even most women, and especially those who are not wealthy or white or thin. Refinery29’s brand has come to be defined by an opposition to that sense of exclusion, representing as many different female perspectives as possible. When Refinery began covering politics with a female focus, they were initially met with criticism. It was “probably a form of sexism,” Gelardi says. “Some people were like, ‘What right do you have, or what credibility do you have, to do these things?’ But I don’t know. We just keep it messy and mix it all together.” At Refinery29, diverse representation can mean anything from op-eds challenging Muslim stereotypes to listicles on the best lipsticks for dark skin. Their ongoing 67% Project, named for the percentage of American women considered to be plus-size, explores a range of topics from a size-inclusive perspective. Their widely-read Money Diaries explore how women across a range of income brackets spend their cash.

Despite this expansive scope, Refinery29 maintains an instantly recognizable aesthetic. As Gelardi tells it, this consistency is the product of a team that’s always collaborating to surface inspiration in new places. We got in touch with her to find out more about her work as a creative director, the challenges of being a female founder, and why she always makes time for breakfast in the morning. Format Magazine: I always notice that your content is super diverse. How do you go about prioritizing diversity when it comes to creative? Piera Gelardi: For me, it’s been about reinforcing diversity in our content over and over and over again. Sometimes I feel like a broken record, but they say people sometimes need to hear things seven times for it to register. I try to say it in different ways, and highlight reader comments where they talk about how meaningful it is for them to be represented in the content—what it means for them.

As we started to grow and do such a high volume of content, we had to start relying on stock photography to a certain extent. But the stock landscape didn’t have the diversity that we were looking for. And it also didn’t have the art direction that reflected our brand. So about eight years ago, we started our own stock photography archive. We’ve been building that for the last eight years. We started it with actually shooting staffers and then doing street casting. We had cards that we’d pass out, in the subways, in the streets or concerts or wherever people are at, that were calls for models. We saw that our audience really liked seeing women who aren’t traditional models in our content. So we cast a wide variety of places, and we do a lot of Instagram casting as well.

Using that casting database has been a big thing, and continuing to educate ourselves about what inclusivity looks like. We think a lot too about not just who’s represented in the images, but who’s creating the images, the content, the storytelling. That’s been a huge focus for us too. 78% of our photographers are women. We really try to hire diverse women— with everything from 29Rooms to photoshoots to illustrators—and are always thinking about who is getting the opportunities to tell their stories. Because talent is equally distributed, but opportunities aren’t. We just did this RIOT writer’s lab. RIOT is our women’s comedy platform, and we reached out to different comedy schools and comedy establishments and got a call for submissions for women comedy writers. Then we paired them with established writers from SNL and other places and did this comedy workshop. One of the finalists is getting a show on TBS. Seeing these audition tapes—it was so amazing. It made me realize, so viscerally, this huge opportunity that we had. So often you hear these depressing stats about “4% of creative directors are women” or “The number for women directors has gone up to 11%

from 7%,” so that’s an improvement. You hear those things, and it feels like, “Oh, are we ever going to make progress?” But looking at these audition tapes, it was kind of the opposite. There’s this abundance of creativity and talent out there and these stories that aren’t being told. There’s such a huge opportunity to tell them. As a female founder, do you feel like you’ve faced different challenges? I think it’s similar to the difference between seeing the deficit when you realize the lack, versus seeing the amazing opportunity and abundance waiting to be surfaced. That’s sort of my experience too, of founding the company and growing in my career. I used to focus more on the deficit. It’s tough to be a woman and starting a company, working in the professional environment, existing within patriarchal structures, because those structures are not meant for us. I think that when I was first starting my career I was trying to conform to those structures and conform to leadership examples that didn’t fit me and who I am uniquely, or what I am as a woman.

Obviously there’s so much range in who we are as women. For me the most powerful lesson has been to learn how to value and build on my own style, my own skills, and my own intuition and how I think, how I think the culture of the company should be. When we were fundraising for the company, when we were in all stages even, I think we saw a huge amount of discrimination because of our focus on women. Fundraising, saying that you’re a company focused on women, was something that people did not get. It definitely makes it more difficult. Could you tell me about your typical day-to-day at work? What’s your schedule like? I get up in the morning and I have coffee at home and breakfast at home, which is very intentional because I used to be the type of person who would get up and get dressed and run out the door and get a Starbucks coffee and whatever, eat a shitty muffin at my desk or something. There was this time period where I was going too hard with work, and I had this realization that I was not doing myself any favors. I wasn’t doing the company any favors working in this way. I started making coffee at home and it basically changed my life. 26

So I start my day with coffee and breakfast at home. It’s my time to get my head in the game and think about what it is that I want to get done—how I want to approach the day. Then I come in and usually my day is split between meetings with the team that are focused on inspiration, education, or conversations that are going to guide us creatively. That can be anything from brainstorming new ways to design meme content, or we do brand huddles where we have facilitative conversations around our brand values.

might want to collaborate with. The rest of my day tends to be broken into more executive or operational type meetings and administrative email stuff, things like that.

It’s been interesting to shift my focus as a leader from a time when I was so hands-on and part of everything and approving everything. As we grew, it just became clear that that wasn’t scalable, and it wasn’t the best for the team and their creativity. I’ve shifted my focus to thinking about how, as a leader, do I infuse the company with inspiration—how do I share the vision?

We have a clear mission and values and all of that stuff. And we have the basic brand guidelines—but then we’re constantly getting together. I do these quarterly reference shares where everyone in the creative team brings in things that they’re inspired by.

I would say my day is a third brainstorming, problem solving with the team, educating people; and then probably a third of my day tends to be having different meetings and calls with creative people or entrepreneurs, people that are potential partners, whether that’s talking through active projects that we’re working on or meeting new people that we 28

I think sometimes for people outside of digital media, these kind of roles, like creative director or art director, can be a bit mysterious. If you’re not within the industry, you wonder, “What goes into that? How do you actually ensure that the brand looks consistent?”

It is an interesting challenge—when you have a big team and when there’s so much work going out the door every day—maintaining that consistency without it getting stale. Some brands are so consistent that it just becomes boring.

Even if I just see one of your articles on Facebook, I always know that it’s Refinery29 right away. There’s a look to it. And yet it doesn’t feel like you’re just seeing the same content. It’s basically education, sharing inspiration with everyone, then having these focus brainstorms on different places where we can improve the work. We do these Friday e-mails about the best work of the week, and we also do a monthly meeting where we get together and celebrate and educate and talk about what’s awesome, what we tried and what we learned, and then anything that we really need to focus on, and friendly reminders about the things that people need to be keeping in consideration. It’s an ever-evolving web of keeping it loosely together. You mentioned that sometimes you cast people through Instagram. How do you usually go about finding new creators to work with? It happens all different kinds of ways, but we do find a lot of talent on Instagram. Similar to the reference shares that we do for inspiration, the other day everyone in our photo team came and we had them bring different photographers that they were inspired by. 30

Part of it is just sharing inspiration with each other, and I think everyone on our team is individually looking at things. And then we get a lot of people reaching out to us and sending us their work. It’s just constant museums and galleries and being out in the city as well. If somebody is looking to work with or be featured by you, what kind of pitches do you like to see? We’re always on the lookout. I know this might sound like a generic answer, but we always tend to look for people that have a really unique point of view, that are truly embodying themselves. Sometimes I see portfolios where the person is clearly trying to appeal to a lot of different aesthetics, and that might work for some clients. Whether I’m hiring someone onto the team or whether we’re looking for someone to collaborate with, I want to see a strong, singular point of view, and something that feels true to that person— like they have something they’re trying to express to the world.

Outside of that, it’s just keeping pitches short and personalizing them to the person or the brand that you’re pitching to. I always tell people this when they go to interviews too. It’s better to go to fewer interviews, or pitch to fewer people, and make it more focused and do a bit more research to the effect that you can specifically call something out. If you start a pitch to the client or the publication with something that you like, appreciate, or are inspired by—whether it’s a specific thing that they did or just their ethos—that’s going to get someone’s attention more than just saying, “Here are all of my accomplishments, and you should hire me.” It’s better to say, “Here’s what resonates with me about what you’re doing, and here’s how I can collaborate with you.” That’s something I look for.

Refinery29 has this great combination of current events, political coverage, but then also fashion and beauty. When you started you weren’t doing that topical content, were you? How did it come to be part of the brand? We didn’t have that in the beginning. We started really, really focused. I feel like when you start small you have to be focused. As we developed the brand, we incorporated more of what we were interested in into it, and also what our audience wanted from us. Even just taking the original leap, which now doesn’t seem like a leap at all, from being fashion to adding beauty. I remember Christene [Barberich, Refinery29 editor-in-chief] and I worked on a story and we tested it out. We put it in the newsletter and it was our most successful story of the month, so that helped. When we went into wellness and sex it was the same thing. It was like, “What do we feel is missing in the approach?” At the time we felt there wasn’t a lot of content about wellness that approached it in an informative way, but wasn’t sterile, that was accessible. With sex it was similar. We thought, “Well, all the sex

content that’s out there is either super medical, or everything is ‘wink, wink, nudge, nudge’. It’s super heteronormative. It’s super focused on pleasing a man, versus women’s pleasure.” We did a couple of experiments with sex and we saw that those were by far our most successful stories. So often with women’s publications, you’re either someone that reads a celebrity tabloid or you read *The New Yorker*, you read *The New York Times*, and we wanted to challenge that. As we started opening up the aperture and growing and having the flexibility to add these new categories, we thought, well, we want to really address 360 degrees of a woman’s life. The fact that you can really care about the midterm elections and also want to buy a pair of sparkly boots. We contain multitudes. We’re complex. We’re multifaceted. We have all these different interests, and there’s no reason why those things have to be put in these neat and tidy boxes that are far away from each other. All portraits of Piera photographed by Erin Yamagata.