Female Founders: Kristen Lambert of Third Piece On The Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder

An Interview With Doug Noll

Doug Noll
Authority Magazine
Published in
11 min readMar 14, 2024

--

Put it out into the universe. Nothing gets done in a vacuum, and the only way to get your ideas going and into reality is to start speaking them — whether to yourself or to others — and sharing them with people who you respect and are creating equally exciting things as you are.

As a part of our series about Women Founders, we had the pleasure of interviewing Kristen Lambert.

Kristen Lambert is a businesswoman, creative entrepreneur and founder of Third Piece, a community-centered fashion brand bridging sustainability and craft through knitting. As an entrepreneur, she spent the last decade pursuing her vision of building a fashion brand that is powered with people, prosperity and the planet in mind.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?

One of the more interesting moments since founding my company, Third Piece, was in 2016 when a picture of supermodel Gisele Bundchen was seen wearing one of my company’s scarves. It was a surreal moment when she was photographed by paparazzi and the photos were later seen online, with Third Piece mentioned. At the time, she was still married to Tom Brady and living in Boston, which is where my company is located, so it was very exciting and helped put our little brand on the map!

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I’m not sure how funny it was at the time, but it was a huge mistake that almost made me give up before ever really starting. The mistake resulted in an entire area of the business model being developed.

A few months after launching, my company had secured orders from boutiques, including a renowned department store. Everything felt like it was falling into place beautifully as the first few months of start-up life were happening, but that was short-lived when our key vendor that was suppling our yarn reached out to share that the factory changed the dye and the yarn smelled like chemicals and could not be salvaged. It meant that we would potentially have to cancel all of the orders that we worked so hard to secure. This was my first big “what the X#$@!” moment.

Once the dust settled, and after a lot of sourcing and scouring the globe for yarn producers, I was able to find half of the materials needed to keep our key orders and take the hit on cancelling the others. It was very painful, but a huge lightbulb went off that if you do not have control over your supply chain and oversight of your manufacturing processes, the mistakes of others could take out your business entirely. It was from there that I set out to create a line of yarn that would allow me to have an integrated supply chain model.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

While in graduate school, I took an entrepreneurship class that changed the trajectory of my career. It opened up my eyes to the world of venture creation and start-ups that eventually led to me changing my focus from finance to entrepreneurial studies. I walked out of graduate school knowing that I wanted to start my own business, but I still hadn’t exactly figured out what the business was going to be. I always held the professor of this course in such a high regard and she was someone who helped me reframe what I thought my career was going to be.

A few years later, I went on to start Third Piece after falling in love with a hand-knit scarf. I had always kept this professor in the back of my mind and had been wanting to reach out to share that I founded a company. Then, one day, while doing a trunk show at a Pure Barre Studio, she walked out of the class and my heart stopped!

It was the first time I had seen her since taking her class two years prior, and as someone with red hair who is hard to forget, she recalled me being a student of hers. I went on to share the details of the company I had started, and she offered an invitation to stop by her office to learn more.

Long story short, she has since gone on to become one of the most impactful mentors to me as a founder and she has served as an advisor and sounding board for me for the past 10 years.

Through all the hardest moments, she was the person who has talked me through really challenging situations, negotiations and some difficult conversations that I had to learn how to maneuver through.

Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. According to this EY report, only about 20 percent of funded companies have women founders. This reflects great historical progress, but it also shows that more work still has to be done to empower women to create companies. In your opinion and experience what is currently holding back women from founding companies?

I would counter this by stating that more women than ever are founding companies, and it’s a trend that I believe will continue exponentially. To the point of what’s holding them back, and as someone who worked in the financial services industry for ten years, it’s my observation that current structures in place within the world of capital and the ecosystem of funding of small businesses significantly limits the opportunities that women have to create larger scale investable businesses.

Over the past few decades, our society and the role of women in it has changed drastically. For decades, the role of the CEOs, executives, investors and essentially the decisionmakers have been men.

I have also observed that women often think in a more siloed approach to the type of business they want to create. Many times, this is rooted in providing the talents and services and working from a place of alignment rather than strictly profit.

Women are creating businesses — they’re just creating different types than the ones that are typically deemed “investable” by the traditional standards of venture capital and angel investors.

Can you help articulate a few things that can be done as individuals, as a society, or by the government, to help overcome those obstacles?

The obstacles are two-fold. The first obstacle is the bigger picture and the way the world of banking, investing and funding come into play. Our current economic and financial markets are driven off a form of capitalism that rewards profits and growth at all costs. The last decade has shown us how the gaps between the extremely wealthy and the working, lower-wage employees continue to create a huge divide.

The days of praising positive returns from companies that operate at a grow-at-all-costs model, based on excessive consumption and waste, must stop. I believe the future and financial system need to reward and support impact-driven businesses.

The other obstacle is that women who are starting, or are interested in starting companies, need to have an unwavering belief in themselves and what they’re doing to push beyond some of the hurdles they will experience along the way. The truth is that it is harder being a woman. Especially if you’re a mother, caretaker, or breadwinner, the load that women have to balance between their personal and professional pursuits is tenfold harder.

This might be intuitive to you as a woman founder but I think it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you share a few reasons why more women should become founders?

Life cannot exist without polarity. When the weight of one energy type significantly outweighs the others, balance can never be achieved. The perspective of a woman is often one that is empathetic, collaborative and from a more nurturing place.

When I think about the future state of the economy, workforce, and overall state of the world as my children get older, I hope that they live in a world that equally values and holds the work and input of women on an equal playing field.

What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a founder? Can you explain what you mean?

The biggest myth is that you will be making a ton of money and will be on your path to wealth. This is not always true, and most founders fail a few times before they find a viable financial path in their businesses. It is one that often comes with many hard losses and financial sacrifice as nothing in business is guaranteed. There will be good months followed by absolutely horrible months. There will be exciting store orders followed by overdraft bank accounts. Every day is feast or famine and that is the hardest thing to get used to.

Is everyone cut out to be a founder? In your opinion, which specific traits increase the likelihood that a person will be a successful founder and what type of person should perhaps seek a “regular job” as an employee? Can you explain what you mean?

No, I do not believe being a founder is for everyone.

The first trait would be a strong comfort level with being uncomfortable. Nothing can prepare you for the stress, financial pressure and endless amounts of tasks you will need to stay on top of. When you are your own boss, it’s both a blessing and a curse.

If uncertainty and the thought of not being able to pay your rent at the end of the day is not something you are able to get comfortable with, becoming a founder may not be aligned with your risk tolerance. And that’s okay. The world does not need millions of people starting businesses. I need talented people building businesses that matter and make a positive impact on the world around them.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?

1. Understand your ‘why’ and come back to it all the time. There are going to be a lot of days where you want to quit. Until you get crystal clear on ‘why’ you are starting this company, you’ll be quick to give in to the pressures from fear and failure.

2. There are sales in everything, so get comfortable with it. Selling comes in lots of shapes and forms. From selling yourself, selling your products and sharing what you’re building, learning how to communicate all this both written and verbally will be your biggest asset.

3. People come into your life for a reason, season or a lifetime. For me, it has often not been the work that caused the greatest amount of stress and strain, but managing the people. As a leader, you are the one orchestrating the team and what role they play. It’s important to know that some people will be there for a short time, while others will be by your side for a long time. Managing the people you have around you will have one of the greatest impacts on your energy and performance.

4. Ask for help but know that no one is here to save you. I always had to have all of the answers. I had to be the one solving the problems. I would never let people know things were not ‘okay.’ This was a lesson I had to learn the hard way as I realized that keeping everything to myself was the quickest way to feel burnt out as well as lonely, and was a form of self-sabotage.

5. Put it out into the universe. Nothing gets done in a vacuum, and the only way to get your ideas going and into reality is to start speaking them — whether to yourself or to others — and sharing them with people who you respect and are creating equally exciting things as you are.

How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

On a micro level, I like to hope that the people I have worked with over the years had a positive experience and that I positively impacted their career trajectory. This is especially true for the earlier teammates who helped get Third Piece off the ground.

I hope that my knitwear designs have helped bring happiness to women who have experienced making them and wearing them.

I hope that my knitting classes, workshops and kits have provided a fun and creative outlet and have helped people practice more creative and therapeutic outlets that help brighten their day.

On a bigger scale, I hope that the work I am doing to create the first-of-its-kind circular knitwear company, as well as developments in the textile waste and recycling space, will have a net-positive impact on the planet as I work to create a fashion brand that aims to create solutions for the excessive amount of waste within the fashion industry.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

A movement I would love to inspire would be creativity for everyone, particularly in a world where we are inundated with messaging, news, and information from the palm of our hand hundreds of times throughout the day. Our brains need a break. The act of creating and making something with your hands — whether it be art, knitting, drawing or anything that allows you to tune out and be where you are with a focus on making something — has been proven to improve your state of well-being. It helps to calm your nerves and find a rhythm to calm your nervous system. I think the world needs more of that.

We are very blessed that some very prominent 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 with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

Kirsten Green is a leading female investor and founder of Forerunner Ventures. She’s helped build some of the most prominent brands in the consumer product space over the past decade. She also operates in a very male-dominated industry and has helped pave the way for more female-led funds and investing.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

About the Interviewer: Douglas E. Noll, JD, MA was born nearly blind, crippled with club feet, partially deaf, and left-handed. He overcame all of these obstacles to become a successful civil trial lawyer. In 2000, he abandoned his law practice to become a peacemaker. His calling is to serve humanity, and he executes his calling at many levels. He is an award-winning author, teacher, and trainer. He is a highly experienced mediator. Doug’s work carries him from international work to helping people resolve deep interpersonal and ideological conflicts. Doug teaches his innovative de-escalation skill that calms any angry person in 90 seconds or less. With Laurel Kaufer, Doug founded Prison of Peace in 2009. The Prison of Peace project trains life and long terms incarcerated people to be powerful peacemakers and mediators. He has been deeply moved by inmates who have learned and applied deep, empathic listening skills, leadership skills, and problem-solving skills to reduce violence in their prison communities. Their dedication to learning, improving, and serving their communities motivates him to expand the principles of Prison of Peace so that every human wanting to learn the skills of peace may do so. Doug’s awards include California Lawyer Magazine Lawyer of the Year, Best Lawyers in America Lawyer of the Year, Purpose Prize Fellow, International Academy of Mediators Syd Leezak Award of Excellence, National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals Neutral of the Year. His four books have won a number of awards and commendations. Doug’s podcast, Listen With Leaders, is now accepting guests. Click on this link to learn more and apply.

--

--

Authority Magazine
Authority Magazine

Published in Authority Magazine

In-depth Interviews with Authorities in Business, Pop Culture, Wellness, Social Impact, and Tech. We use interviews to draw out stories that are both empowering and actionable.

Doug Noll
Doug Noll

Written by Doug Noll

Award-winning author, teacher, trainer, and now podcaster.

No responses yet