Christine Valenti Of FORM LEATHER: How I Am Redefining Success Now

An Interview with Karen Mangia

Success means you’re continuing to grow. As far as my craft goes, I’m constantly working to make each piece better and have truly fallen in love with that process. As soon as I’m getting to the end of a piece, I’m thinking of ways to make the next one better. In that way, I’m sort of perpetually propelled forward. Not everyone wants to grow as a craftsperson, but if you are in a career in which you aren’t growing as a person in some way, I can bet that you don’t feel successful.

Have you ever noticed how often we equate success with more? Whether that’s more products, more profits, more activities or more accomplishments, we buy into the belief that we have to do more to have more to be more. And that will sum up to success. And then along comes The Great Resignation. Where employees are signaling that the “more” that’s being offered — even more pay, more perks, and more PTO — isn’t summing up to success for them. We visited with leaders who are redefining what success means now. Their answers might surprise you.

As a part of this series I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Christine Valenti.

Christine Valenti is a luxury leather goods designer and maker. She has been an entrepreneur since 2003 and is passionate about social responsibility. She makes small batch and one of kind leather goods from her Bedford Hills studio, Form Leather, using leathers sourced from tanneries carefully vetted for their environmental practices.

Thank you for making time to visit with us about the topic of our time. Our readers would like to get to know you a bit better. Can you please tell us about one or two life experiences that most shaped who you are today?

I’ll tell you about two failures and how rebuilding after those lows helped me put myself back together in new and better ways.

In 2003, I started my first business, Give. It was sold in about 100 stores, including Bergdorf Goodman and Fred Segal. It was a mission-driven business, donating 10% of net profits to charity, hence the name. I was only a few years out of college when I started it and knew nothing. I ran full-steam ahead: finding factories, getting sales and press and scraping together loans and money from family. I didn’t know it then, but my body was in survival mode the entire time. I worked all the time, even sleeping with my phone next to the bed many nights so that if I got messages from the factory in China in the middle of the night, I could get up and respond. Everything was fast — we lived in New York City and I walked fast and expected lines to move quickly and did more things in a day than were healthy for my mind and spirit. I didn’t eat well and was generally impatient. After it took off, I switched from actively working on the business to constantly reacting — to the factories and the buyers and sales reps. I bounced from elation at the latest press request to anxiety about whether the next shipment would be delivered on time. I juggled cash between credit cards and the factor. As it grew, I became less in control and less creative.

It’s funny that I am sharing this for the first time on Thrive Global, because an interview between Arianna Huffington and Bozoma St John years later helped me process the next pivotal event in my life — I lost the very wanted pregnancy of a baby girl at 6 months. I just remember crying for months after that. As sad as that was, it softened me. If running at the frenetic pace hadn’t fully quashed my creativity, losing the pregnancy and not knowing how to deal with those emotions was the nail in the coffin. I realized that I couldn’t have kids and live at that pace. I couldn’t be a patient mom when I was impatient in every other area of my life. I decided I couldn’t keep it up and have kids.

In 2011, I gave birth to my daughter and in 2012, my son. By then we were living in San Francisco and I immersed myself in life as a mom there. In 2014, I landed in a pre-school class where the parents attended with the kids. Andy Janowski, one of the other dads, became a friend. I knew that he’d taken a sabbatical from his job to raise his twins, but it wasn’t until later that I realized that he’d been COO of Burberry and CEO of Smythson. By then, he and his partner had become important parent friends — two emotionally intelligent people working toward this really honest quest to be a good parent. Later in that year, Andy got the idea that he’d work with a factory in Southern California and create a new line of men’s accessories and he wanted me to design it. I felt so flattered and totally out of my league. It was a really exciting time in my life — I got to design without all the pressures of running a business and I adored having Andy as a boss. While my kids were in preschool, I worked part-time and I continued the hard work of being a calm and patient mom during the rest of my time, which did not come naturally to me.

As the kids were graduating preschool, that project fell apart — the partner factory wasn’t producing the kind of quality we wanted and cash was drying up. I was really depressed about it and had a bit of a mid-life crisis — the kids didn’t need me as much and this role that I really enjoyed outside the house evaporated. In searching for myself, I found the Lewis Howes podcast and signed up for his online School of Greatness course. One of the exercises was to do an inventory of my life and describe my perfect day and I had the thought: “What if I start another business, but take what I’ve learned about slowing down and run it like that? What if I make the real goal continuing on this journey of being a kinder, more thoughtful person and infuse it with that energy? What kind of creativity would that cultivate?”

I allowed that idea to marinate and morph over the next several years. I went back to my old sample maker, but felt like I wasn’t getting back what I envisioned. In my search for the quality I wanted, I found Hark Hanks, who had been trained at Amblard Leather School. He exposed me to a level of leather craft I’d never considered before and I saw it less as a commodity and more of an art and a craft. He taught me how to make the product myself and I became obsessed with learning everything I could. That lens of creating myself fueled my creativity and I just continued to the follow the journey down twists and turns, each fork in the road answered by the question of whether I’d be able to show up as my best self in all areas of life by taking that route.

Form Leather was born with samples I’d made entirely with my own hands — a feat I never could have anticipated and certainly one I couldn’t have accomplished if I wasn’t trying to slow down and think about how to build something really sustainable.

We all have myths and misconceptions about success. What are some myths or misconceptions that you used to believe?

You may have a beautiful home or wear beautiful clothes, but you live inside your feelings. Nothing is going to make you feel truly happy if you’re not being true to yourself and attending to your mental and spiritual health.

How has your definition of success changed?

I was pre-med in college and my parents are both college professors. I was raised with a very high importance placed on intellectual intelligence. I held an unexamined belief that the things that could be measured mattered: grades, titles, external achievements and productivity. After I had kids and started to get more in touch with my feelings, it was like I’d been flying this spaceship all my life and realized there was an entire control panel I hadn’t been using. Success is so unique and internal and comes from using all my intelligences, most of which can’t be measured and sometimes can’t be seen. In school, I defined success by looking outside at what roles other people valued and tried to steer the spaceship toward one of those. Now I try to spend more time looking inside the ship, so to speak, and trying to constantly understand myself better as the primary means to steer the ship.

The pandemic, in many ways, was a time of collective self-reflection. What changes do you believe we need to make as a society to access success post pandemic?

I think we all need more healing. We’re at this fascinating point in history where we have so many advancements in science that we’ve used to extend our lifespans and make ourselves more comfortable. Yet, I don’t think there’s another species that threatens its own kind the way that humans do — through gun violence, war and suicide. During the pandemic, we saw a lot of people who struggled more with mental health and I think we are still seeing the fallout from the emotional toll of the pandemic. Simultaneously, we have had major advancements in the mental health field, such as greater understanding of medicines that cross the blood brain barrier and advances with ultrasound. Issues that were once considered spiritual are now being treated by mental health professionals and we’re starting to understand more about the gut and how that affects our brain. I think the more we are each able to optimize our personal mental health, the more we are able to positively contribute to society. However, as I experienced with a family member recently, there are not enough mental health professionals and it is very difficult in certain areas to find ones that take insurance. Getting comprehensive diagnoses can be very difficult. As a society, placing importance on free and quality mental health services would be so beneficial.

What do you see as the unexpected positives in the pandemic? We would love to hear a few of your stories or examples.

For me and my family, my husband is now able to work from home, which opened a lot of doors in terms of where we could live and quite honestly enabled me to work more. Now he’s home when the kids get home and I’m in my studio. It’s turned the tables for us somewhat.

For him in the tech industry, working from home frees up valuable energy — time and resources that were once spent commuting can now be used for outside projects, exercise, and connecting with family. In industries like mine, where I’m making a physical product, I need to get people into the office. I think the hybrid and work-from-home models are forcing more leaders to examine their office environment and culture because it’s harder to get people to come to a workplace every day and there’s more discussion and openness about toxicity in work cultures.

One thing that I see starting to fade a bit that I would like to keep around is this appreciation for “essential workers.” We really do need each other and appreciation for the UPS driver, the nurses, the person who checks you out at the grocery store — that matters.

We’re all looking for answers about how to be successful now. Could you please share “5 Ways To Redefine Success Now?”

#1. Success means you’re continuing to grow. As far as my craft goes, I’m constantly working to make each piece better and have truly fallen in love with that process. As soon as I’m getting to the end of a piece, I’m thinking of ways to make the next one better. In that way, I’m sort of perpetually propelled forward. Not everyone wants to grow as a craftsperson, but if you are in a career in which you aren’t growing as a person in some way, I can bet that you don’t feel successful.

#2. Success means running your own race. I have this theory that if we all had the same ingredients — same neurobiology, same parents, same talents, same resources, maybe our choices wouldn’t be all that different. My mom told me she attended a dinner last month and was seated next to a woman who told her that her son had been in jail, but had recently been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was able to stabilize it with medication and had been working at a stable job. (My mom co-wrote the book “Serving Time Too” about a mother’s journey with a son in jail, so people tend to open up about these things.) Her response was, “Oh, so your son is a success story.” I love that and I’d hope that more people can look over at someone else’s journey and find the success in it.

#3. Success is peaceful. I feel like I’m old enough and have seen enough that I’ve realized there’s not much worth losing your peace over. The very first time I imported a production run from China, I worked with a customs agent who got the customs tariff wrong. I had taken orders at a price that was based on my costs, which wound up being thousands of dollars more. I was outraged! This was her job, how could she get it wrong? I frantically paced around outside smoking cigarettes and called my lawyer. At 26, without a lot of start-up money, was this a big deal? Yes. Was freaking out, spending more money on legal fees and losing sleep worth it? Nope. You do that enough times and hopefully you realize, things are going to go wrong. Part of your job is to handle it. And to me, being a successful leader means handling it without losing your cool.

I still run the freakout scenario through my head. But there’s a wiser voice in there that says, “I bet if you look at this calmly, you can find a solution.” Most of the time, I do. Even if it’s not possible and I have to face a disappointment, it’s easier when I’m calm.

#4. Success is sturdy. In my first business, I was very focused on milestones that were considered markers of success — getting onto Oprah’s O list, getting into Bergdorf Goodman, getting an order from Intermix for all their stores nationwide. But behind the scenes, it always felt like things could fall apart at any minute. Now the goal is to feel like “I’ve got this.” So instead of saying yes to large orders and then running around like a crazy person trying to figure out how to make it happen, it’s about building a foundation and knowing what the capacity is. Then instead of worrying about sell-through, it’s about knowing the customer well enough to have a pretty good idea of what will sell well in which stores and strategically taking risks when there are grey areas. In my approach to my business, I’ve gone from running after those external indicators to learning how to figure out the internal indicators that build a sturdy foundation.

#5. Success comes from knowing yourself. This has been my greatest challenge in adulthood. I was a great student, which generally just required understanding what someone was asking me to do and doing that well. My decision to aim toward medical school in college didn’t come from any passion, but was a path that many top students at the time were taking. After taking higher level science classes and realizing that I didn’t have a true desire to delve deeper into the subject, I had a hard time deciding what that meant for the rest of my life. Transitioning from being able to follow a clear path to one where I had to look inside myself and create the path was both terrifying and confusing. I wasn’t able to look at someone else’s path and follow that. I could see glimpses of what I wanted to be in many people, but had to do a lot of self-reflection to piece that together and forge my own way. Looking back, I think it’s less about finding that one thing than it is about a continual process of finding your compass.

How would our lives improve if we changed our definition of success?

In order to solve the problems we face as human beings, we need to create more than follow.

Back to my spaceship analogy above: the goal is to understand the inner working of the ship and let that guide decisions. My kids are in middle school and instead of approaching high school with the goal of playing D1 sports at an Ivy League, I try to focus on curiosity and openness and then help them to reflect on what interests they want to cultivate and how that’s helping them know themselves better. I try and expose them to as many jobs and ideas as possible. Before Thanksgiving, I took them to this awesome sustainable farm by my office. I did it mainly to give them an appreciation for how much work goes into producing food, but I was surprised that they both came away from it saying “I want to be a farmer.” The idea never occurred to me at that age. Then we had this whole conversation in the car on the way home about the fact that we face a global problem of being able to feed a growing population and that we will need creative minds to potentially combine a love of science with a love of farming to figure out new ways to produce food. I think an end goal is good, but being open and curious and following your intuition could lead to creating paths that never existed before.

What’s the biggest obstacle that stands in the way of our redefined success? And what advice would you offer about overcoming those obstacles?

Well, look, I wish I could I say it’s all about the process and just enjoy it and don’t focus on the outcome, but in business, you gotta stay afloat. So while I find I need to do the internal work of knowing myself well to be creative, I have to do all the external things to actually make the business happen. I always think of Newtons Law: What is in motion, stays in motion. When I’m really focused on DOING all the stuff — the emails, the sales, getting the product out the door, ticking the things off the to-do list, I can get in the groove and things get done. Then momentum builds and it’s easy to stay in that lane. But the internal work requires a different type of focus. It’s a constant recalibration that for me requires a shift in the energy. I have to be the one to stop the motion of the doing and change gears. If I don’t, I get depleted and veer off course. It feels like I’ve lost the magic of me.

I have some guard rails up so that this doesn’t happen, but it’s a work in progress. My weekly dance class is non-negotiable and I listen to We Can Do Hard Things on the drive there and back, which really helps expand my internal conversation. I notice a cognitive shift when I set limits for myself on screen-time. This year, I have a household rule that no one can have a device on the weekends until we’ve read an actual book for an hour. I don’t go on a screen during the week until after I’ve had my coffee and looked at my paper planner to think through my day. Lately I’ve been finding that defining goals for the day, scheduling as much as possible and breaking it up into time blocks helps. I try to have really clear intentions about what I’m going to get done during the day and leaving it all on the field so that I can turn off in the evenings and truly rest.

In terms of our collective ability to redefine success, I think the hard part about working toward these internal goals is that when we go out in the world, it is increasingly difficult just to have a job that sustains you. The pressure to provide for a family is at odds with our ability to slow down and take time for ourselves.

Where do you go to look for inspiration and information about how to redefine success?

My number one inspiration is my weekly dance class from Paul Herman (@pressplaymotivation on Instagram). First of all, he lives all the things I’ve been talking about here — he’s running his own race and doing what he loves with such grace and thoughtfulness. He keeps his creative engine running — it’s never the same choreography or music. I get to just show up and be artistically challenged in this way that’s purely just for fun and I’m so grateful for it. Dance gets me out of my head and into my feelings and just brings so much joy to my life.

A lot of what I do in my work is very technical and I like to nerd out on Youtube or Instagram watching how other leather workers work out little details.

I find inspiration in people doing somewhat ordinary jobs with a lot of attention and care. I honestly find more inspiration in people that don’t get a lot of praise for their job because you can just tell that the motivation is intrinsic.

I also find a lot of inspiration by listening to interviews with women who are honest about their relationship with themselves: Elise Loehnen, Abby, Glennon and Amanda of We Can Do Hard Things, Bozoma St. John and Arianna Huffington.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He, she or they might just see this if we tag them.

Brad Pitt, but not for the reason most women would say that. I love what he’s done with God’s True Cashmere and would love to do a collaboration with that brand. I also think he would appreciate Form Leather because of how I’ve heard him talk about design.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

The website is www.formleather.com and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/form_leather/

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this. We wish you continued success and good health.

About The Interviewer: Karen Mangia is one of the most sought-after keynote speakers in the world, sharing her thought leadership with over 10,000 organizations during the course of her career. As Vice President of Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce, she helps individuals and organizations define, design and deliver the future. Discover her proven strategies to access your own success in her fourth book Success from Anywhere and by connecting with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.