Adriana Carrig: Founder & CEO of Little Words Project

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be I want to be, you just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked down knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control control control. Hi, everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi, everyone, it’s Kara Goldin from the Kara Goldin show, and I’m so excited to have my next guest had been fangirling over her company and products for a while. Adriana Carrig who is the founder and CEO of Little Words Project, and I happen to be wearing one of her bracelets today that says believe on it, if you can see it. But if you can’t see it, then you’ll just have to go online and purchase it or go into one of their locations as well. But the company is founded on a mission to inject the world with more kindness. I mean, what is not to love about that? It’s so, so awesome. And what started in our parents basement has now grown to be a recognized brand, with amazing collaborations with companies like Nike Barbie, the WNBA. And I can’t wait to hear more about what made her start this amazing company, plus more about the lessons learned along the way building little words, projects. So let’s get started. Welcome, Adriana.

Adriana Carrig 1:47
Thank you, Kara. Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

Kara Goldin 1:51
Very, very excited to have you here. So your story and deciding to start little words project is very personal. Would you mind sharing what the inspiration was behind starting little words project? Sure.

Adriana Carrig 2:05
So I had grown up dealing with a lot of negativity my entire life, I was bullied from a very young age. And I can recall always feeling like I didn’t belong and that I wanted to find community really, you know, from a very, very young age, I was always seeking that friendship connection with others, especially other girls, other women as I got older, and I had ended up finding that it was very difficult to achieve. And it was difficult for me all the way through college, I was still going through experiencing that negativity, that cruelty from other women specifically. And it wasn’t until I joined my sorority in college, which I know it sounds crazy, like a girl who is always, you know, struggling with other girls to want to join a sorority seems so left field. But I actually found that sisterhood and community amongst women was possible through that organization. I finally, it was by proof that it did exist. And I had an incredible, incredible sisterhood. And it was there that I decided to make my first batch of bracelets we had as a group, we felt almost like we weren’t like we didn’t belong on the campus. And we were always targeted as a group. It seemed for whatever the reason, you know, the catty stuff that happens amongst sororities on college campuses. And so I created bracelets to bring us together and to keep the love circulating amongst us and to keep us all, you know, our heads high. And it really helped us to be bonded through this unique communal symbol, this symbol of sisterhood that lived right on our wrists. And that was kind of the beginning of the beginning of the end, as they say. And the bracelets really became that iconic symbol of sisterhood for us. And when I graduated, I saw the girls were still making them for themselves. And they were still passing them amongst one another, which was the entire intention to wear them and then share them and pass them on. And you know, let that positive power be you passed person to person. And I saw they were still doing it. So I decided why if this couldn’t be a symbol of sisterhood and a connector of sisterhood for this group of 60 women on this small college campus. Why couldn’t it be that for the masses? Why couldn’t it be this vehicle of connection and kindness and self love, frankly, for women people everywhere? And that’s what led me to thinking I could make this a full blown business and I was 23 years old. So I had just been a year out of college when I first started. That’s

Kara Goldin 4:52
wild. So when you were in school, did you have letters as you do now to create these words? Yes.

Adriana Carrig 4:59
Yeah, so the bracelets were a version of these, they were not as cute, I will say, and we call them warm fuzzies. And so luckily, that name was taken when I went to check the the trademarks. And we landed on little words. Yeah. But yeah, warm fuzzies The intention was to spread positive positivity, positivity and kindness through these warm, fuzzy feelings of passing on a bracelet. But yeah, they had words on them. And they didn’t have the unique tracking code. So right now, every bracelet has a unique code on the back of its tag. I don’t know if you can see that there. But that cat is unique to the bracelet. Yep. And you use that to connect the bracelet to our website, where you put in your story, why you chose your word, maybe how it’s helped you. And then when you pass it along, the next person does the same so on and so forth. You can actually see where your bracelet goes and how it impacts people down the line. We were the first jewelry brand to do something like this. And frankly, it was it’s the piece that makes it so unique. And it’s our X Factor, if you will, because it’s very rare that you can see how your single act of kindness can impact people down the line. And yeah, in in in that way. It really felt like it could be a real business and not just a hobby. Yeah,

Kara Goldin 6:18
if so interesting. So where did the name come from? Then you switch names since what you were referring to it as in college. But where did the name come from? Yeah,

Adriana Carrig 6:29
so it’s funny. My my then boyfriend, now husband and COO and president of little West project bill is actually the one who named it. We were sitting on my my childhood bedroom and my childhood bed in my childhood bedroom, about a year out of college. And I was thinking about launching it. And we were saying, you know, what, what is this? You know, what, what? How do we want to refer people to refer to these bracelets? And he said, What about just little words, and it just hit me that there’s so much big power and little words. And I was the one who added the project, which to this day, he and I go back and forth on whether we whether or not we should have added it. But for me, it felt like that inspired movement. And it’s what made it feel like something more than just a brand, but really a cause and a movement, we really wanted to create something special and make a difference in the world. And in putting the word project, it really felt like that’s what we could achieve.

Kara Goldin 7:30
I love it. So when you got you talked a little bit about getting the trademark, we’ve run into so many founders that have had stories about that, where they’re like, Oh, I’m just going to launch the company and call it whatever. And I’ll deal with filing later. And they’re, you know, that’s goes up on the top of their list as one of the biggest mistakes. So I’m glad to hear that you guys got the trademark and for this so you registered, did you guys actually get the trademark immediately? Or did you have to go through processes where you were kind of going back and forth with the agency?

Adriana Carrig 8:08
Yeah, no, we registered, we got the trademark pretty immediately for little words project. And it’s def, it’s been ours for the past 10 years. This is our 10th year in business. What I didn’t do was get the trademark for just little words. So now as we’re referring to the bracelets, as little words, we have the trademark out there in that we are trying to essentially get the registered trademark. But I didn’t get it then and I wish I had though it was one of the harder ones to do because little words, it’s too descriptive for what it is. And it’s also too standard, right? Like it’s very hard to just own that word. And I think the trademarking of it all, like at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter because people are going to leverage your name in the knockoff experience that I’m experiencing very much so lately. They can do whatever they want with that name unless I’m willing to kind of be litigious and go and ask them to not you know, which I do here and there. But the point being like, I’ve found that no matter how many hoops you go through, like you can still find yourself in a position of having to you know, fight someone out of using your IP in many ways. But yeah, you know, it’s it’s that that whole business side of the stuff the brand building has been a thorn in my side since the very beginning. I’m a true like, entrepreneur, founder entrepreneur who loves the idea of building brand and and community and thankfully, my husband comes from a world of finance and I was able to steal him from private equity and have him be my I call him my coo on sale because I really got some firepower in him and he He’s been able to help really kind of carry the business flame, if you will, through the last two years since he joined. And he’s I’m like when I see things out there and like our eyes sick, my husband on it, and I’m like, You go deal with that I’m having more fun over in the marketing world.

Kara Goldin 10:15
Ya know, that’s awesome. But it is something that you really have to take seriously the company I founded hint, we’ve had tons of knock offs, primarily outside of the US. And we’ve had to take that very, very seriously. So it’s, Oh, yeah. And then I had the, the woman who is the co founder of elf on the shelf, and she had so many stories to tell on that podcast, it was about a year ago. And she’s got a team of attorneys, as you can imagine. Because, you know, some of the videos that people, sick videos that people will do, and, you know, they’ve really, they’ve gone after a lot of those, and shut them down. And so it’s been fascinating. So how serious this stuff is, yeah,

Adriana Carrig 11:04
no, that’s so timely. Yeah, we have Yeah, we’ve had, I have a brand right now, that is totally knocking us off with like, even using our style names for these bracelets, like down to using the style name, and they are putting paid advertising against it. And you know that they’re using our name as a keyword, because I’m getting targeted and everyone in my community is getting targeted. And I have friends sending me the same photo in my DMs all day long. And I’m livid like, you guys, I’ve seen this, please stop sending it to me because it just depresses me. But at the same time, I know, they’re just looking out. And we’ve got our lawyers working on it. And you know, the problem comes into play when it’s like, it becomes a game of chicken, like who’s going to willing to spend more to knock the other one out. And, you know, my philosophy when it comes to knock offs, and I have a very knockoff Apple product, right. At the end of the day, I didn’t, you know, reinvent the wheel when I designed the little word. This has been something women and young girls have been doing for generations. But we were the first back to market, we were the first to really figure out how to do it on a massive scale. And when I see other people knocking us off in the industry, it’s very disheartening, but I really just try to focus on brand, the, for me, the way to avoid it really affecting business is to just have a brand that is so impenetrable, and has this moat built around it have incredible fans who want to buy from us and help us and sell for us, right, as I heard recently, it’s really made all the difference is that community building aspect, so we really try to keep our nose to the grindstone on building that brand. And, and that’s why I say like, Honey, you go out there, and you try to knock them down, I’m gonna focus on building us up. And in doing so, hopefully, build, you know, create a wider and wider moat around the brand that we have built. Yeah,

Kara Goldin 13:09
and you’re always going to find people that are going to come in and do it. I mean, we’ve had in design is so hard, like, even if you’ve got trademarks on your brand, like design is really hard. I mean, we had so many people over the years, that, you know, would take our, the brand going down, and, you know, they would change the word to like, instead of hint, it would be meant, you know, and it would look just like it and I’d be like, you know, come on, insane. And they would put sugar in our product and our product doesn’t have any sweeteners. And so it was really interfering with the message that we were trying to get out there and confusing to consumers. But it’s very, very tough. So yeah, underbelly

Adriana Carrig 13:54
of business that no one talks about, right? Like you don’t see that sexy to talk about the amount of times that you’re sitting in a meeting and you have to bring up, you know, what are we going to do about this, this, you know, player over here to the left, that’s just completely going against the book, and it’s just, it’s grimy. And you just, it’s, it’s the it’s the ugly part of this that nobody wants to talk about.

Kara Goldin 14:19
And your mission is founded, or the company is founded on a mission to inject the world with more kindness and that’s not very kind for sure. So right so it’s, it’s probably very, very disturbing, but but I love what you guys have done and so what what is success to you like, what do you hope to do? i You’ve obviously got a stickiness with consumers that when they’re registering and you know, you’re hearing I’m sure all these stories about how the bracelets make them feel and the connections that they’re able to have with the friends or or maybe they’re sorority sisters or, you know, I would imagine there’s like a huge range of people that are sending you amazing messages. But what is success to you? You

Adriana Carrig 15:13
know, for me, I think it’s about the impact ultimately, that we’re able to make as a brand. You know, I think when you hear brand, there are so many incredible players out there that are really, you know, doing a great job building community around who they are. And I want us to be the largest community of kind individuals who are not only practicing kindness towards others, but also practicing kindness towards themselves. I think what, there’s so much power in the bracelets, ability to ground you and center you and remind you who you are, and get you through difficulty. And, you know, it’s not uncommon for us to hear stories of people who have worn their bracelets, through chemo treatments, and through infertility battles, and through, you know, just the daily difficulties of motherhood, right. But also, you know, that have found an experienced real IRL connection with others because of their bracelets. I mean, I get stories all the time of I saw someone wearing little words at Starbucks, and I went up to her. And we had a really great friendship connection through that. And, you know, we’re gonna get coffee tomorrow. And it’s just, it gives me chills to even say, because that, I think is the true goal is to treat or teach people enable people empower people to treat themselves with so much kindness that they treat themselves to buy a product, you know, and they look down and it gets them through difficulty and it it helps them to feel like they have the power to be themselves and in being themselves, they suddenly have the the Kahunas the gun, as we say, in Spanish, to walk to a stranger, right, go up to a stranger and have a, an, an interpersonal connection with them. And the next thing, you know, they’ve created connection. And that, I think, is truly what the world needs more of. And I know the who recently designated the true pandemic currently, are they there’s an epidemic of loneliness happening right now. And I really want little words practice to help combat that. And I think that it’s working in our community that we’ve built thus far. And that moat, as I called it, we see that day in and day in and day out. And Success to me is seeing that community grow larger and larger and larger, and having these bracelets be so ubiquitous that you know, just to see someone in a little little word is to see someone that appears to be a safe space and someone that you can connect with. And, you know, you’ll have genuine authentic connection and conversation with if you were to just kind of take that leap of faith and introduce yourself.

Kara Goldin 17:53
So you have the already made bracelets with you can get the custom words and all of those things, but you also give consumers an opportunity to do it themselves. Like figure out, you know, what they what they want to do. So I heard you say in a podcast that to take on any tough project, you just need to start beating. I loved that. And then because I think it’s it’s, you know, you keep yourself busy, but also you’re having a conversation often with people and I think that’s super, super cool. I love that. Yeah,

Adriana Carrig 18:26
yeah, that was really kind of a nod to just taking on anything in life, right? Like, you have to just put one step forward, and then put one foot in front of the next. And so for me, it’s kind of how I started the business. Like I literally just started beating. Somebody asked me, okay, what was your process, like? Well, I just started beating. And I really love how that can relate to how we live our lives as people, especially as women, and as mothers, you don’t necessarily know what the step after next is, right? You don’t you can’t see too far down the line. But if you just start somewhere, oftentimes you’ll find out, you’ll find that you end up exactly where you were meant to be. So for me, that’s really what just start beating signifies. And when it comes to what we offer our customers yeah, there’s the standard words that we always say you can find a word in our selection. There’s, there’s a word for everyone. When no matter what you’re going through, no matter what you need, you will find a word by just scrolling the website and sometimes we like that the universe almost has like has your back right and they it will show you what were you need without you even realizing it. They’re putting it in right in front of your face. So we love that angle. But if there’s a special word that means something to you, or you call you know, what do you you know, the word you call your grandma or the word that your dad used to call you before he passed or you know, any number of things that could bring you a feeling of sentimentality or joy. We’re just connectedness I think we try to offer through our personalization and the custom opportunities that we give our customers. So you can make any bracelet you want on our website, any word under the sun as long as it’s kind, and under 13 letters, so that it fits the styles. And we really find that those are some of our best selling and our best, our Yeah, just the thing that our customer is the most drawn to. And we see that in our retail stores, too. We have 11 stores now. And in those stores, you’re able to sit down at the beating table and make your own bracelet. And that’s physically just beating right. And you we do that intentionally in each of our stores, not only so that you can have the opportunity to make something that means something to you with your own two hands. But also because other people sit down with you. And now we’ve got this communal experience of beating with one another that not only makes you feel good, because you get to walk away with something you love. But you also just got to have connection. And again, that brings us back to the intention of bringing people together. How

Kara Goldin 21:06
did you decide to open stores? So I read that that you guys have recently opened fairly recently opened love, yes, 11 stores? How did you decide like, it’s time to do that?

Adriana Carrig 21:19
Yeah, you know, we our first store reopened in 2021. So the world was just kind of coming back to life after the pandemic. And we, you know, if I’m honest, I never in a million years would have thought that we could stand up our own retails like, in fact, I thought we couldn’t, because our product is $25. And it just made no sense. In my head. I will credit my husband with this one, when he joined. It was right, shortly after he joined, he kind of looked at me and was like, I think we should go into brick and mortar and just give it a shot. And we kind of went back and forth on it a little bit. And my gut was telling me like, I don’t know if this is the right time or just the right move. But he really was able to see the forest through the trees on that one. And luckily, it was the right move, we opened our first store November of 2021, which was just two years ago now. And that was our first store was on Bleecker Street in Manhattan. And that store is still one of our number one best performing. And then from there, it was kind of just this snowball effect and opportunities kept coming. And we kept finding locations that would would almost we’re wanting for this kind of in person experience, this experiential store. That little words project so naturally is and it’s just taken off from there. But yeah, it was just feeling like we needed that in person experience for the customer, to meet us and for us to meet them where they were. And that’s what led us into retail.

Kara Goldin 22:52
I love it. So you started just over 10 years ago. Did you? Did you have a business plan? I mean, were you just kind of putting some bracelets together and making a website? I mean, that what what was the process? Yeah, Kara, I

Adriana Carrig 23:08
will tell you the business plan. And I do not intersect. The whole concept of planning, if I will, if I may, is just it’s so I’m awful about that. But I that’s where the just start beating came into play, right? Like I literally just started beating. And remember, I had taken this idea from my college, you know, what I had built in my college sorority. And I had proof of concept there. So I felt like empowered to sit down. And it was a relatively affordable product to start making, right. And it was something I could make. So it was really not much more than let me just start with what I know, start with what I can do, and see how it evolves and lean into what the customer is saying. And from the very beginning, I was very customers centric. What does my customer want? What is she asking for? Where can I meet her? How can I serve her and we’ve stayed a very customer centric customer focused business ever since. And in that way that was maybe the only plan was to let the customer was to give the customer something they didn’t know they wanted necessarily, right. Like I had a little bit of pushback in the beginning on design and look and feel like nobody else was doing this outside of maybe a few Etsy makers. But at the real at the brand level, really no one and so I kind of like that’s where I just kind of went rogue and said I’m gonna do what I know and I got his right. And then from there, I’ll let the customer tell me how to iterate and we have successfully built a brand over 10 years on the back of one hero product right now we are starting to branch out and add more product innovation and come up with new things in new ways to keep the customer intrigued but from the very start it was creating this very simple thing that for whatever reason filled a hole in so many jewelry boxes and so many hearts and Um, people look at them as collector’s items now. So I think we did a pretty good job without much of a plan at first. But it all started to unfold. And I, I failed forward. As I like to say I learned as I went as an English major in college, I was not expecting to be able to, you know, no at all at the very beginning, but I gave myself that grace and that self love that is so necessary.

Kara Goldin 25:26
I love it. So you have done a bunch of collaborations with some very big brands, much larger brands than you, Nike and the WNBA. And many others. Barbie was a more recent one. But how did those all come about?

Adriana Carrig 25:49
Yeah, so some of the, the, you know, Nike women, and for example, that was one of the first ones. And they it was a lot of it was reverse inquiry, believe it or not Nike, Nike, specifically, they reached out to us via our contact form on our website. So you can imagine, I’m like plugging away at work. And all of a sudden, I get one of those contact form submissions, and I’m looking at it it says Nike and like, what, like I actually do a double pay get like, What do you mean Nikes, like sliding in our contact form. And we talked about that with them to this day as we become really close friends with a lot of the women that we worked with on that project. But yeah, I was the Nike women la team. And they just they saw our value, they saw what we were doing, and they wanted to inject that and infuse that kindness community and the community building that we had innately in our product into their community. And I think that’s the beauty of little words project. And it’s really enabled us to be in a way a canvas for a lot of these brands where they can infuse their community into ours and vice versa. But we also really do value like add value to their experiences, because everybody wants to walk away with a token right from their experience with whatever their favorite brand is, whether it was Nike or you know, Dunkin which was recent and really exciting. They wanted to give their customer their consumer something special. And we have that in our that’s our bread and butter. So it makes for a really seamless and, and a really seamless way to integrate our brand into others. So yeah, what

Kara Goldin 27:36
did you do for dairy fun?

Adriana Carrig 27:39
Duncan was awesome. Duncan. This is another organic opportunity that came about someone had done a picture I posted a picture of them holding their Dunkin coffee with a bracelet on they had a little word on that said like coffee please or something and Dunkin reposted it like it was a social moment, right? And we freaked out. And we took that opportunity to freak out on social, which is a great way to build community and build, build brand. And that’s really social has been probably the pinnacle of our brand building from the very beginning. And we did a bunch of posts and we started a dialogue on social media with Dunkin Donuts. And it was so cool to see it unfold IRL or in real time rather. And it turned out that a bunch of customers were wanting a bracelet collaboration Long story short, we launched a co created collection with Dunkin Donuts that said iced coffee and eat the donut and coffee Seto time to not to art my Spanish or my Mexican heritage. And yeah, it was just it was such an incredible moment, we had a big event to launch the collaboration, the collaboration dropped on our website, this past September on National Coffee Day, which was awesome, perfect timing for you know, that play. And it sold out within a few hours. So that’s amazing. Thank you. It was just such an organic growth. And that’s what I love. I love the organic type of of collabs. Like I don’t want everything to feel like a license deal, which we’ve done and they’re great. But I really love those organic moments where the community comes together. And the customer says hey, this is what we want. And we can then provide I think that’s what I mean by customer centric and really focusing on the community building of it all.

Kara Goldin 29:29
So you’re a successful entrepreneur who has grown a company from zero from an idea and 10 years old. What advice would you give to individuals who are interested knowing what you know about building a brand somebody comes to you they have an idea. It’s not competitive with yours. It’s, you know, what would you say to them? That sort of comes to mind when you think of, of those early days. is maybe those hard days over the last 10 years? Yeah.

Adriana Carrig 30:06
Honestly, I’d say what my mother told me from a very young age, which is get out as per that, which in Spanish means if you want it, you can achieve it. And you just have to be willing to work, you have to be willing to work your butt off. Obviously, you know, in hindsight, I would have loved to have a little bit more self care practice along my journey and not run myself so ragged in those early days. But sometimes that’s what it takes, right? Just if you’ve got to be savage about your desire to create this thing. And there will be countless naysayers and you’re you yourself, will may say, right, you can talk yourself out of anything, right? We all can. But you have to have the belief, the belief in yourself, and that desire has to take center center stage, and has to outweigh all of the negative thoughts that will inevitably come. And if you can do that, you will continue moving the needle forward, even if you’re failing forward. As I said earlier, even if you’re struggling along the way, which you will, you will keep going because the positive belief in yourself outweighs the negative self talk and the negatives, the negative opinions of others, and they will, there will be many, because nobody really understands entrepreneurs, right? Like, so many people want us to just kind of stop and take a normal path because it makes them feel better about maybe their more normal path, which everyone is on their own correct path, right? Like, everyone should feel good about the path they’re on because that’s their path. But we so often will find as entrepreneurs that other people don’t really want us to kind of go beat to our own drum, because it makes they look at us as a reflection of them, if that makes sense. But you got to fight that you just got to keep going and believe in yourself, or no one else will. And I don’t know, I’m that’s my, that’s my savage take on it. I’m just like, I just so blindly have faith in what I believe this can be. And if you have that same level of just like hutzpah, I think you can get there. Or yeah, at the very least, you’ll find yourself somewhere along the way that you were always meant to be. So it’s just like, just believe in that thing that’s calling you and lean into it whenever you possibly can and give yourself grace. If it doesn’t come to you so easily. Just learn as you go, Oh, my God, it was so many. No, I love it. And they’re aggressive. But I’m really passionate about entrepreneurship and about people just trying just just to start meeting as I say, yeah,

Kara Goldin 32:47
no, it’s it’s such great words of wisdom for sure. So Adriana, Carrick founder and CEO of little words project. Thank you so much. We’ll have all the info in the show notes too. But best of luck with everything and everybody needs to get their bracelet, go on to the website, go into the stores, but so inspiring for sure. So thank you so much. Thank you, Kara. Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would, please give us a review. And feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit and of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Goldin. And if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen. Or pick up a copy of my book on daunted which I share my journey, including founding and building hint. We are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And thanks everyone for listening. Have a great rest of the week, and 2023 and goodbye for now. Before we sign off, I want to talk to you about fear. People like to talk about fearless leaders. But achieving big goals isn’t about fearlessness. Successful leaders recognize their fears and decide to deal with them head on in order to move forward. This is where my new book undaunted comes in. This book is designed for anyone who wants to succeed in the face of fear, overcome doubts and live a little undaunted. Order your copy today at undaunted, the book.com and learn how to look your doubts and doubters in the eye and achieve your dreams. For a limited time. You’ll also receive a free case of hint water. Do you have a question for me or want to nominate an innovator to spotlight send me a tweet at Kara Goldin and let me know. And if you liked what you heard, please leave me a review on Apple podcasts. You can also follow along with me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn at Kerrigan. Hold in thanks for listening