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Inspiration August 24, 2018
Laura Byrnes proves that women really can have it all.
Sometimes success doesn’t come from one “Aha” moment. You don’t always just wake up one day and decide to follow your heart.
For Laura Byrnes, founder of Pinup Girl Clothing, her path was a series of trial and errors. She always knew she wanted to be an artist, and veering away from that dream never worked out.
But if those unsuccessful attempts taught her anything, they made her realize that sometimes failures are a reminder that you’re on the wrong course.
“Whenever I’ve tried to do anything in life that isn’t creative, I’ve been unsuccessful,” Byrnes said. “I used to beat myself up for any ‘failures’ I experienced. Now, I welcome failures as they are always lessons.”
But this doesn’t mean that the rest of her life was smooth sailing. Like any woman rising to the top, she still deals with hurdles.
Luckily, we had the opportunity to talk to her about how she listened to the universe and got right back on track.
ENTITY: What is the greatest challenge you faced and how did you overcome?
LB: I used to be very much a perfectionist, and overly critical of myself. I needed to be good or great at anything and everything I tried to do. This ties into the first question – when I wasn’t good at something I used to blame myself and be angry at myself for it. The greatest challenge I faced was myself, and the impossible standards I was holding myself to. Now I understand that my need to be good at everything was a form of self-defeating behavior. Now I worry about doing the things I love doing very well, and if I’m not so good at something, I hire someone who can do it better than I can. And I’ve become better at everything I love to do because I’ve learned to enjoy those things and not worry about doing things perfectly.
ENTITY: What is the best piece of advice you ever received from someone else?
LB: I met someone at a party and after five minutes he said to me “You’re a runner.” I took him literally and told him I used to run track in high school and then he said, “No, you’re a runner like this: Imagine a group of people walking along. You’re in that group but this is boring to you so you take off running! Everyone in the group laughs at you as you run off, but you don’t care. Soon, you start to notice people running to join you, and before you know it, you’re back in a group. You slow down for a bit and you walk along for a little while – until you get bored and start running again. Never stop doing this.” I understood what he meant then. And I will never stop running.
ENTITY: What is your secret to work-life balance? Is there one?
LB: I don’t think there is a secret! Something is always sacrificed. I had my two daughters 17 years apart, in part because I felt with my first daughter, I never spent as much time with her as I would have liked because I had just started the business and was working long hours each day. With my youngest, I had a nanny and that helped, but I had the same guilt about not being able to spend more time with her. My oldest daughter works for Pinup Girl now as our photo coordinator and in-house photographer. It’s so great being able to work with her.
ENTITY: What are some challenges that come with running your own business?
LB: The work/life balance, of course. Also, in my case, the problem of me being a highly creative type, who is also trying to run Pinup Girl as a business. I recently replaced myself as CEO, and I couldn’t be happier. When I started the company in 1997, I did literally everything, from designing to sewing to managing the website, to shipping. I realized that 20 years on, even though I had a full staff, I was still doing many of those things, as a manager of employees who were doing those things. I was spending six to eight hours a day managing projects and people at the office, then going home and trying to design and sketch and plan out the next season’s collections.
It wasn’t working. I started having panic attacks and not understanding that it was because I was completely overwhelmed and that most artists don’t also run the companies that are started to support the artist. I had never before thought of it that way – that Pinup Girl was launched to sell my designs, and that the entire point of the company was to support me as an artist. After I made that realization, I was able to let my company support me, instead of the other way around.
Laura Byrnes’ story is proof that mistakes are only an opportunity to grow because she knows that #WomenThatDo “can and will do anything.”
