Make it real, no matter how rough.
#5 • Stories & Lessons of Founding Baron Fig
I was in my underwear surrounded by glue and sharp objects. I know it sounds like a good time (or a really bad one), but it’s not quite what you’re thinking.
Adam, Scott, and myself decided on making a notebook the week before this underwear situation went down. I knew there was a finite amount of time in which enthusiasm would be high, and I needed to capture that. If I waited too long before showing results my guess was that they would both lose interest. Without their complementary skill sets Baron Fig would be dead in the water. Hence the supreme rush.
I had been preparing all week, running around Manhattan gathering supplies. If you know New York, you know there’s a store here for everything, so you can imagine me riding up and down on the subway carrying all sorts of bags and semi-medieval-looking tools.
There was a two-floor store dedicated to cloth samples, with rolls stacked to the ceiling that totally overloaded my senses . I found a paper store that had shades of white, off-white, and semi-white sheets (I’m still confused on that one). My favorite place was the giant shop filled solely with bookmark ribbons — they had every color of the rainbow, in all sorts of thicknesses, with textures I didn’t even know existed.
So there I was sitting at the kitchen table. I had an archaic bone folder in hand (a tool for manipulating paper creases) and materials to build a notebook scattered about, with my laptop at the center of it all. Amidst the chaos a YouTube video was teaching me the finer points of binding a book from scratch, helping me along my way in a glorious display of chemicals, paper cuts, and frustratingly misaligned pages.
I was carefully piecing together the first prototype of our Confidant notebook. As it took form my idea went from an intangible thought to a physical example that we could touch and feel.
The following week I brought my creation to Adam and Scott. They passed it back and forth. Their reactions were a mix of , “Wow, this is awesome!” and, “Man, this thing is terrible!” But it worked as intended.
They understood, if only a bit better, what I was trying to make. The handmade book was rough, partially falling apart, and the cloth covers were stuffed with the front and back of a Cheerio box— but it was real.
Joey Cofone is Co-Founder & CEO at Baron Fig. The Founding of Baron Fig shares the stories and lessons learned on the journey of creating our startup.
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