Quantity begets quality.
#7 • Stories & Lessons of Founding Baron Fig
The sun was barely up. It was 5:28 in the morning, and I had just opened my eyes. I never used an alarm clock, I just got up when my body was ready. Since starting Baron Fig I’d been waking up earlier than ever with the excitement of a thousand galloping horses.
I gathered my things in silence, and was sitting on the N train riding into Manhattan less than ten minutes from waking. Our tiny studio (aka the closet) was in Midtown on 36th.
On the way I grabbed a breakfast wrap from the local corner store. The guys behind the counter started making it when they saw me walk in, and they helped me brush up on my Spanish while I waited.
That was my daily morning routine. The journey from my apartment in Queens to our studio in the city allowed me to go over the coming day and review what needed to be done. By the time I arrived I was ready to attack the tasks at hand.
Long days felt short when I was working there. Without any distractions I could lose myself in work for hours. It was in that little room that Baron Fig grew from a seed to a bud — it just took a lot of planting and replanting.
We hear it all the time — “Quality over quantity” — but that phrase does little to help us figure out how to actually create something of quality. It’s like saying, “You should be very good at what you do,” without any suggestion as to how to go about it.
I’m going to offer up a thought on how to achieve quality. You guessed it: quantity. Think about it. We get better with practice, that’s pretty much an accepted belief in craft work, sports, etc. — fields that require precision movement and a vast bank of experience.
Same goes for ideation. We can’t expect every idea to be good (especially not the first one), so the best way to increase our odds is to play a numbers game: come up with a lot of ideas and there’s a higher chance one will work.
All of our creative endeavors here at Baron Fig start with a list. We make lists of 5o to 100 ideas whenever we’re trying to solve a problem or start something new. The idea is not to come up with 100 great ideas, just 100 ideas period. They can be terrible, silly — whatever. There’s no judgment on the inherent quality of each idea.
Once they’re down on paper we go back and review them all together. Usually a good idea pops up, and often the ideas inspire new ones. If it turns out that none work, that’s fine, we just go back and do another set.
The same strategy applies when we’re making things. We designed 81 versions of the Confidant packaging before finding one we connected with. There were over two dozen iterations of the Confidant notebook between my initial hand-made prototype and the one that sits in the hands of thousands of customers in over fifty countries around the world.
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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