Episode 258: Making knitting & crochet fun & accessible with Cat Bloxsom and Morgan Collins, the founders of Cardigang
Are you starting with the long term in mind? In today's episode, Fiona talks to Cat Bloxsom and Morgan Collins, the founders of Cardigang, about their journey in filling a gap in the market, working with a friend and so much more. They also talk about momentum over perfection. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
About Cardigang
On working full-time
Coming from a knitting background
Choosing what types of needles to include
On working with a friend
Cardigang's biggest mistake
On marketing
Cardigang's advice for starting a business
On Branding
Tools, apps, or platforms
Cardigang's biggest accomplishment
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
“We've got an interesting challenge. The people that we're trying to bring to the brand may not have ever thought about knitting. They're probably creative people and they've probably tried all the hobbies and things but they've never thought about learning to knit. We need to reach them in ways that are a little bit more creative because they're not going, “I want to learn how to knit. I'm going to search that in Google.” I might be looking for a mindfulness activity or I might be interested in clothing and slow fashion but never thought about the actual skill or craft of knitting. Even more so for us, there's a lot of trial and error in who we try and market with or to and the channels that we use.”
Welcome to episode 258 of the My Daily Business Coach Podcast. This episode is another interview with two small business owners. It’s a colorful, interesting, and chatty chat. I'm excited to be bringing you this episode because it'll inspire and give people the confidence to go forward with an idea that they may have for their business. Whether it's an existing business and you're going in a new direction with a new category or product launch or different types of service offer or if it's an idea that you have and you're still employed and you're like, “Could we do this?” In this episode, you'll find a lot of inspiration to get going with that.
Before we get stuck into that great interview episode, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians on the land on which I record this podcast where I get to meet all these different types of small business owners and that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. I also welcome any other aboriginal indigenous First Nations or Torres Strait Islander people and any other indigenous people from around the world who might be reading this episode, welcome. Let's get stuck in our small business interview.
We get a lot of people emailing us and a lot of PR agencies also emailing us to get people onto this podcast, which is lovely. We've hit 500,000 downloads so it is huge and exciting for us. For some people, that may not be a big number. For us, it is huge considering I had an ambition of 150 downloads per episode. We get a lot of requests to be on this podcast.
We received a request from this duo that I'm about to introduce and it was a lovely, heartfelt, and real request. It was helpful. They had a bullet-point list of the things that they could talk about but they also talked about the fact that they've been listening to this podcast for a long time. They referenced an episode that was early on with Phoebe Bell from Sage X Clare, one of my good friends. She was one of the first people that I interviewed.
They talked about Phoebe in there, talking about what she was doing in lockdown. It was a lovely email to receive from them. It showed familiarity and flattery. I always tell people that if you're going to contact anyone, show familiarity and show flattery because that's going to get you a long way. It was also useful, heartfelt, and real.
It was my assistant, Yricka, who read through it and said, “That'd be a good fit.” I was like, “I agree.” We brought them on to the podcast. Who are they? My guests are Cat Bloxsom and Morgan Collins, otherwise known as the founders behind Cardigang. It’s such a cool name. We talked about how they came up with that name. For those who don't know, Cardigang is this amazing and new-ish craft company for beginner knitters.
Throughout the pandemic, you may have taken up a hobby. I know lots of people did do that, whether it was baking sourdough, making kombucha, or knitting. A lot of people did take up knitting, including Cat and Morgan. They not only took it up but they created a business for other beginners. They are the first to say that they are not these expert knitters that have been knitting for decades. They are beginners and they couldn't find what they were looking for as beginners and so they created it.
I love when you hear about people that saw a gap in the market and then went through with, “We're going to fill that gap.” They've done an amazing job. They talk about how much the business has grown and how it has afforded both of them the opportunity to quit their day jobs. Cat and Morgan come from a marketing background, it's evident in the way that we chat, it's evident in the way that they have positioned their brand, and it's evident in the way that they pitch themselves to get on the podcast.
We talk about what tactics have worked, what haven't, what advice they'd give to other people, and also how it felt to be able to quit your day job and how it feels as well working with a friend. There's so much goodness in this podcast episode. Cardigang is going to go from strength to strength. If you have a look at them online, you can find them at Cardigang.com.au. You can find @Cardigang_Knits over on Instagram.
They've got a strong understanding of who they are trying to target through their products, what type of products those people would like, and what type of wool they would like. They have a friendly and approachable way to connect with people who are doing something largely for the first time or doing something that they don't feel super confident in. I love their realness, their rawness, and their authenticity. It's been a pleasure to have them on the podcast. Here is my interview with Cat Bloxsom and Morgan Collins, the founders of Cardigang.
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Welcome, Cat and Morgan, to the podcast. How are you both?
Good, thank you.
Thanks for having us.
It's my pleasure. I have used what was in your email when you asked to come on the podcast as an example to lots of clients as to how to do a good pitch. Well done.
I love that.
Thank you. It's always really awkward sending those out and putting yourself forward for things like that so that's nice. Thank you.
We probably get about five pitches a day and I would say that 98% are not even thought through the way that people are pitching. I'd say at least 60%, it's completely obvious that they've never listened to the podcast before, and then they give us no idea of what they could talk about. Your talking points and everything were good. I'm excited to have you on. Where are you coming from? That's what I always like to ask people. Where are you guys based?
Our office is in Collingwood, that's where we are. We have our own house in Thornbury. We were out there packing all of our new summer orders.
Do you guys have a soundtrack when you pack?
One of us usually DJs and then we’d get sick of each other's playlists so then we swap.
Music helps so much even if you're packing orders, making food, or doing Trello boards, which is a tedious task that I have to do. I love the name. The whole business looks good and interesting, which is part of the reason we got you on. I have talked about your business to some degree in the intro but can you tell us what is Cardigang and how did it come about?
At Cardigang, we sell DIY knitting kits. It seems to be expanding a little bit beyond knitting kits. The whole idea is that you get all the gear that you need to make yourself a masterpiece. We're all about DIY, slow fashion, and creating something that sparks joy in your life and that you'll have for a lifetime.
You're well-versed in your taglines. It flowed beautifully. Cardigang, the name is self-explanatory to some degree but how did you come up with that?
It was one of those moments that you look back and go, “How did that happen?” All good ideas come to us in the shower so that was one of those. It was thrown around. We'd had this idea around selling knitting kits and we were like, “Cozy kits, this or that,” and then Cardigang. We did some quick googling to see if it had been taken and, sure enough, it hadn't so we jumped straight on it. It was probably the first bit of business admin that we did, securing the name and the URL.
It's smart and it’s such a clever play on words. When did you get started?
It was a pretty quick and whirlwind way to start a business. Cat and I were looking for something to keep us entertained when we were in the middle of lockdown in 2020. Both being based in Melbourne, we were under those harsh lockdown restrictions. Neither of us is great in the kitchen. We had both already cleared out our wardrobes by that point. We were looking for something that we could bond over and do together virtually.
We thought we'd give knitting a go. We're both reasonably creative. We both have interesting fashion. Knitting felt like something we would enjoy. We bought knit kits online and started knitting. Through that process, we identified a bunch of opportunities that we thought weren't necessarily being done as well as they could. Through that process, we thought we could probably do this better and start a business. We've picked up the sticks in June 2020 and by December 2020, we launched Cardigang.
Do you both work in it full-time?
Yeah. We were lucky. I say luck but it was a lot of work. We were lucky to be able to quit our full-time job. We're both marketers by trade, we were in the corporate world, and we quit our jobs in March. Now we get to do this full-time, which is still incredibly surreal, and grateful that it's our job.
It comes across that you're both from a marketing background because it seems effortless.
Can you tell?
Even if it seems effortless, there's a lot of work and a lot of thought and everything else that goes into it. You mentioned the pandemic and not necessarily wanting to get on the sourdough train. I had a lot of friends who started knitting or took up knitting during the pandemic. I looked at this stuff. My mom was an incredible knitter. She could look at something in a magazine and knit it that day. She was amazing.
My sister and I were like, “I wish we'd listened a bit more when she was teaching us,” because we let it go. I looked at those kits and I looked at stuff as well. One of the nicer parts of the pandemic was that lots of people did take up a hobby or got more creative and stuff. Did you expect that the business would blow up because people were taking up more hobbies in some of the downtimes that they had?
Not really. We both knew how quickly we fell in love with knitting and how desperate we were for something to do that we could walk away with something. We were hopeful that some people would get them. We'd only bought enough Australian Merino for 40 kits. We were very conservative with how much money we threw into the business. We quickly sought out those kits and moved straight on to pre-order. From there, we realized that there was a real appetite. I don't think we could have ever seen how quickly it could have grown and how quickly it took off.
What was beautiful about it was, as marketers, we put in the work early on. We started with the name we built a whole brand identity around that and we did a business plan. We were quite diligent with all of that stuff to set the brand and the business up in a way that it could grow. It was all a thought and a prayer that people would want to buy knitting kits from us.
We felt confident in the business and the brand that we'd built but whether the product translated and whether we could capture new knitters, we weren't sure about. The lockdowns were a blessing and a curse for us. They accelerated the growth of the business. Operating a business in lockdown, we lived outside of each other’s five-kilometer zones. We had issues with the supply chain and all sorts of things. The lockdown forced us to be a bit creative and it challenged us.
We were working full-time. That was not a lot of downtime, for sure.
My mother has passed away. Between my sister and I, we have a lot of knitting needles. It's a whole world out there. They've got little numbers on them. Did either of you come from a knitting background?
Our mom’s both knitted but we hadn't learned it as kids or anything like that. We were both quite ambitious and naively thought, “We can teach ourselves.” We jumped onto YouTube and Google. You can google anything. We were guessing. We write all of our own patterns. We knitted a couple of jumpers but not with great success. My sleeves can up to my elbows and it had a few holes. They were pretty outrageous. It goes to prove that it's not that hard and that everything that we do is for beginners. We're three knits in and we're writing patterns for other people and we've taught ourselves and we've navigated the world for you so that you don’t have to do any of that hectic googling.
Coming into it totally fresh was good for us. We didn't understand necessarily all of the terminology, the ways, the patterns that are written, and all of these acronyms and stuff. When we came in, we were like, “This pattern looked like a cloche.” I was like, “How am I going to read this and understand it?” The experience that we had personally, being so fresh, meant that we could rewrite all of our patterns in a language that's super easy to understand.
There's no knitting jargon in our patterns and our how-to videos are simple. We say that we’re still beginner knitters so everything that we design is still something that a beginner could knit. Honestly, I am far from anything more than a beginner knitter but it's amazing how much you can create with a few basic techniques.
What I wanted to ask as well, with the needles, how did you know what type of needles to include? Was that through your research that you’re like, “This type of needle will make this type.” I’m sounding so naïve.
Not at all because it is a bit of a minefield. It was important that we had Australian Merino. We learned to knit on chunky yarn and we wanted to be able to create these chunky knit kits. We wanted big needles because we're impatient and we wanted to be able to knit things up quickly. Things like a jumper or cardigan can take anywhere from 10 to 16 hours versus months. It was a lot of trial and error. We still have lots of different needles and we're always introducing new needles and new styles to knit with the same wool because we are experimenting and doing lots of different things. We try to keep it simple and quick, beginner friendly.
I'm tempted. Now I'm going to go and buy one. I was looking at them when I was researching and I’m like, “There are so many good things there.” I'm not much of a perfectionist though. I'm married to an art director/graphic designer. He can look at something and see that it's half a millimeter out whereas I'm like, “It’s fine.” I did have a look at your blog and you have lots of great information on how to figure out if you're going off track with a tape measure and stuff.
We're pretty fast and loose with how we knit. There's no knitting police in Cardigang. It's what's on the outside that counts. Never look at the inside of our knits because they’re pretty messy.
You've got this great friendship. Relationships are massively crucial when it comes to business. I work with lots of couples whether they're friends, cousins, sisters, or romantic partners as well in business. I've worked with people that are ending their businesses. It can be an awful thing to witness friends breaking up because the business didn't go to plan or they didn't talk about things.
I always like to hear about the ins and outs of a partnership. How did you guys meet? What have been some of the best and maybe also the most challenging parts of running a business with a partner, particularly during a pandemic? You alluded to like the fact that you live outside of that five-kilometer rule. What else has been the good and the bad of partnership?
Cat and I worked together in insurance marketing, that's how we met in 2018. Quickly, we became work wives. We bonded early on over similar interests, similar outfits, and, we joke, similar hairstyles as well. We both rocked a short blonde bob. We worked together for a year and then after the year, we both went into different roles but remained friends. We were both quite entrepreneurial. We knew we wanted to do something maybe outside of the corporate world for ourselves.
We did kick around a few other business ideas before we started Cardigang together. The benefit of having worked together meant that we had a lot of confidence in starting a business together. We've got similar values and work ethics and beyond being friends, we respect and admire each other's abilities when it comes to marketing and running a business. It felt a little less risky to start Cardigang together than maybe it would have if we hadn't seen that part of each other previously.
You know each other's strengths. We quickly and easily divided and conquered everything that needed to happen in the back end. We naturally fell into a nice pace in that regard. When one's up, the other may not always be up. We balanced each other out nicely. We know when the other person may not be feeling super inspired or energized. We can read how each other's feeling pretty quickly. The downside is we both want to take holidays at the same time. That's probably the hardest part. I couldn't have done it without Morgan. I don't know how people do it on their own. It would be tough.
The only thing that we've navigated but it's worked well is being both quite creative and loving the knitting process. Both of us naturally want to do a lot of the same things and neither of us is super into numbers. We are into them but we're not super interested in them. Splitting up some of the less sexy work can be hard sometimes.
We've also brought in experts when we need to and that helped alleviate some of that as well. Having a good accountant from the get-go has been important. We've got a business coach as well who's amazing and she's like our therapist as well. We get to talk through issues and things and get them out on the table regularly and frequently with her and that helps as well.
Many good pieces of advice there. I understand the business coach/therapist angle. It feels like that sometimes. This may not be a difficult question to answer because you've been in the business for a short amount of time but usually, there's something. Can you pinpoint one of the biggest mistakes that you've made so far? Mistakes are always learning lessons but one of the biggest lessons that you've made so far and what it taught you.
It's not so much a mistake but something that we would probably potentially do differently. As a small business, we have a high-risk appetite, both Morgan and myself. Sometimes that doesn't always translate the best when it comes to your cashflow. It goes back to Morgan's point about getting a business coach. We identified that our accounting and finance isn't necessarily our passion.
We brought our fabulous coach on. Number one is getting familiar with our books and looking at our cashflow and being able to forecast so that we can make calculated risks. An example is we were putting down money for stuff that we knew we needed for the business to be able to grow at the pace that it was but we didn't have that cash in the bank. The next time you do that, make sure that your forecast marry-up to what your final balance payment will be and make sure that all those other hidden costs, you've got complete visibility of.
One of the things that we've mentioned already and I'm sure it helped you tremendously in your business is that you both do come from a marketing background. As someone else who’s also come from a marketing background, I work with lots of people who've never done marketing and they find it scary and overwhelming.
Even the fact that you've worked in that before is a huge plus for your business. I'm sure that experience and knowledge have been crucial for where you are now. I also know because I've worked in marketing that it's maybe easier sometimes to see another person's business and figure out how to market it, let alone your own business. It's different to do it for yourself.
I'm wondering if you could think about or share any of the most surprisingly successful marketing tactics that you've implemented over the last couple of years and maybe some of the least successful. There are lots of myths about marketing and I hear them all day long from different people. You guys might also be able to understand or share some of the myths that you think are out there in small business land around marketing.
We started with a marketing plan and a business strategy and we were optimistic about what marketing activity we would take on. Because we both come from growing other brands and bigger brands with bigger budgets, we took an approach that we would do things like PR, Facebook advertising, all of those things early on, set up search campaigns, and all of the things that you would do for a typical brand.
Having spoken to other small business owners over the past 18 months to 2 years, that's not necessarily something that everybody does. Those activities are what got our attention early on and catapulted the brand. For things like PR, which we naively release, which is what we would have done for any other client, and sent it out to different journals and tried to make connections. All of that stuff paid off.
In our first 3 or 4 months, we were featured in Broadsheet, Urban List, Good Weekend, and a bunch of others. That exposure then lead to other people finding the brand and influencers buying kits and things. It’s something maybe, if you're a small business, you wouldn't think of doing, writing a press release and sending it out to journalists because it feels like a foreign concept. Because we've got that experience, we did it and it paid off enormously.
In terms of things that probably haven't worked as well, we've had some influencers organically buy our kits and they did amazing things for us. Clementine Ford is an example and Olivia Molly Rogers. They both found us through Broadsheet. That was amazing. We gifted our kits to another influencer who had an even bigger following and it didn't do anything. We didn't see any traffic come to the website or any sales. It goes to show to make sure that the audience is the right one.
While you may be trying to get in front of who you think your ideal customer follows this person, they may not necessarily. It’s making sure that you're laser-focused. A lot of followers doesn't always mean that you're going to get more people to buy your product. Make sure that you've got a good alignment there.
We've had a lot of free press and we did do a paid opportunity with a publisher, a magazine, and that didn’t do anything. We thought the audience was perfect for Cardigang. It's a lot of trial and error. We are marketers and we know that you have to test and try things and not everything is going to land. There is no silver bullet. You've got to make sure that you take those learnings and don't repeat the same mistakes.
We've got an interesting challenge. The people that we're trying to bring to the brand may not have ever thought about knitting. They're probably creative people and they've probably tried all the hobbies and things but they've never thought about learning to knit. We need to reach them in ways that are a little bit more creative because they're not going, “I want to learn how to knit. I'm going to search that in Google.” I might be looking for a mindfulness activity or I might be interested in clothing and slow fashion but never thought about the actual skill or craft of knitting. Even more so for us, there's a lot of trial and error in who we try and market with or to and the channels that we use.
That answer alone, people would be scribbling down a bunch of notes. You've perfectly brought up one of the myths. People always think there’s a silver bullet or, “If I could get this particular framework, everything will work.” It's not. I'm always saying to people that it's a big experiment. Marketing is experimenting all day long.
If you're working with some agency that is promising you this and this over the course of twelve months, they cannot promise that. “We might have a new social media platform come up in two months.” One of the things that a lot of people grapple with is imposter syndrome. You started knitting not that long ago, a couple of months before you started the business.
What advice would you give to someone reading who's maybe wanting to start a business in a field that they didn't study or maybe starting in a hobby that they want to take a bit further? I hear all the time, particularly from people who say they’re interior designers but didn't study interior design, haven't got their master’s, or haven't done this or that. There's this massive feeling of like, “I've got to fake it.” Do you have any advice for people like that?
Fake it until you make it. If we were held back by those mindsets, we wouldn't have gotten off the ground. We're not professional knitters. We do get a bit of flack from some of the knitting community around some of our techniques or what we do. We're crystal clear that we're not for them. We know who our customer is. We're targeting people who have never knitted before. It's not about perfection, it's about creating something epic, and having this real hit of dopamine. It’s being super crystal clear on why you want to start and who you're creating your brand for. Give it a go.
Give it a go and own it. That's what we've done. We don't pretend to be expert knitters. We share all of our hits and misses with our audience. If someone spots something that's not quite right or suggests a different way that we could do something, we're open to all of that. We built the business by googling everything from how to knit, all the way through to website development, and all the things that we do. It's Cat and I in the business. If anything needs to be done, it's the two of us figuring out how to do it. It's being willing to try to learn something new or push yourself a little bit and owning it and being proud of what you can create.
You guys should be so proud of what you have created. You mentioned that it is the two of you in the business and you've outsourced and got some experts where you need them. You've made something that in the old-school light could be seen in a certain way, knitting. You've made it super cool like your social media, your branding, your colors, and your mood boards. Everything looks super cool in addition to the actual product, which has also great colors. It can fit anywhere and it looks lovely and comfortable as well as fashionable.
You said that you're clear on your audience, it's the non-knitters coming into knitting. Were you clear on that from day one or has that grown? In terms of you googling stuff, the branding, and the visual parts of the brand, it looks awesome. Is that something that you guys have that taste level because you're both interested in fashion? Is that something that you spent a lot of time? Did you work with a branding company to do that? That's something that people also get caught up on that it doesn't look as good as it looks in their mind.
It's hard to bring that vision to life and that's where you can get held up on perfection. We were pretty crystal clear from the outset. We've always effectively targeted people like us. When we were looking at buying the knit ourselves for the first time, we didn't find anything that was super inspiring or felt modern and fresh. We almost compromised or settled on something so that we could give knitting a goal and create. We both chose the brightest colors that we could from this brand that we bought from originally to try and bring a bit of cheer and joy.
From the outset, we did want to modernize what you would normally expect from a knitting brand and to create stuff that we would wear. In everything that we do, we think, “Would another knitting brand do this?” If the answer is yes, then we tend not to do it. Even from our photography, our approach to our creativity, our tone of voice, and our language, we try to set ourselves up. Ultimately, yes, our product is knitting but we would see ourselves more as a fashion brand. We want to bring people into the brand who love fashion, love style, and love color, and who are young at heart as much as we are.
I love that idea, young people of all ages. That's good. I'd love to hear about who has helped you with this business. It sounds like you guys have a tight, great, supportive, and encouraging relationship between the two of you. I imagined each other has helped. Have you had any mentors? You mentioned a couple of people. Are there mantras, books, films, or anything that's helped you with building this business outside of Google?
We've got our business coach. When it comes back to your question before about brand identity and whether we did that ourselves or outsourced that, that was all us. We’re lucky to have a good friend, Alex Parker, who is a phenomenal photographer and incredibly creative. She started knitting when we did but didn't get as far down the journey as us but has always been close to what we're doing.
Before we even created our samples, we had a chat with her and said, “We've got this idea. We would love you to shoot it if you can.” She's been as much a part of this brand as we are. We would go to her with an idea and she will come back with this wild vision. Sometimes we'll have to pay her back a little bit because we've got $4 to bring it to life. She's been an incredible resource and a help to us.
A friend of ours created our logo and did some videography for us. We've had friends in PR who have shared their media hit list. We've been lucky in terms of the connections and relationships that we have. Being able to have people like that in your corner is priceless. We've got many mantras that we live by. We've got one, “Think like a CEO.” Even when we were starting the business and we were a fledgling, we're like, “What would a CEO do? Do we buy this? Do we think like this or do we think big?” That was one.
Also, momentum over perfection. Zoë Foster Blake said, “The universe will always reward momentum.” That's another one. Keep moving and moving even if you're exhausted and feel like you're about to fall over in a heap. We knew that we had to keep moving forward because there were bigger things over the hill. There are a lot of little tidbits that we live by and lots of people helping us. Even though they're not necessarily in the business full-time, they're in everything that we're doing.
I love that, “Momentum over perfection.” I have written down a bunch of notes while I've been listening to you. Thank you for sharing all of those. I love that idea, I often have that as well, think like a CEO rather than an employee. We come from an employee's mindset. A lot of people live in corporate and then come into work for themselves. What about any tech tools? You guys are young and up with the internet and all the things. Are there any apps or platforms that have helped you build the business?
We use Canva a lot. The majority of our day-to-day, creatively, we do on Canva. We also use some Adobe tools for video editing.
We use MYOB. It's not necessarily the sexiest tool but it's handy because our accountant jumps in there and we can scan our receipts and not have to worry about that in terms of expenses. Tool-wise, Canva is probably number one. We use Slack for our own comms back and forth with our developer. Our websites run on Shopify, which simplifies everything. It's a great platform.
We've got a lot of apps, plugins, and things within Shopify that make things easy. We've got a referral tool within Shopify that's all automated. We use Klaviyo for our emails so that integrates with Shopify. As much as possible, we try and streamline a lot of that stuff. Email is daggy. We do a lot of our stuff by email with customers even.
It's not daggy. Lots of these tools are amazing. At the end of the day, lots of people are comfortable with email. You're not getting too much crazy email trails. I loved as well that you said streamlining because people can get fixated on having this incredible tech stack. They come and they're like, “I've got 22 subscriptions to things. We're spending so much money.” They don't connect with each other. Whenever people say to me which website provider should I use, I'm like, “Are you already using an email provider? Look for one that integrates with that because you don't want to have all these workarounds and things going wrong.”
There are two others that we use. We use Miro and it can be an inspiration whiteboard. We drag all of our little collection ideas in there and colors and things like that. That's a fun tool. It's super collaborative. We use Trello to map our workflow with our pattern development. Two free tools are great to work with.
I love Trello. All of my coaching clients have Trello boards and I have hundreds on there now and they've never charged me. I'm like, “That's great. It's been years.” What are you guys most proud of from your journey so far in business?
They've been heaps of milestones. We try to celebrate milestones. We had a six-month birthday and got all of our friends and people who had helped us with the business together to celebrate. As much as possible, we do try and take a moment and recognize the success that we've had. The biggest milestone event for both of us was the day that we quit our corporate jobs. Cat jokes about the first knit kit we sold, she was like, “Can we quit our jobs now?” It's been involved since starting it. That moment in March this 2022 was pretty huge for us.
We both got Cardigang tattoos on our first day of full-time work. Time well spent.
If you want to be part of the Cardigang, you've got to get a tattoo.
Is that part of the initiation for anyone who joins?
Absolutely.
Did you quit on the same day?
Yeah. That was the plan. Morgan went early. I had quit because Morgan had already quit.
I got in a day early to make sure that Cat wasn't chicken out.
What is next for you both? You hinted that there might be expansions. Where can people connect with you if they're reading this and thinking, “I want to get a matching tattoo with these women. They sound amazing.”
Join the club. In terms of what's next, we've got a big launch coming up. We're launching our crochet kit. We're not just going to be doing any kits, we're going to be doing crochet. We've got some other bits and pieces on the horizon. We’re thinking not just about knitting and crochet kits. Watch the space. The US is also firmly on our site. We are potentially having a trip over there to do some meet and greets, which is exciting.
We launched our chunky cotton, which is a first for us. We had Merino wool to start with. We then introduced mohair and now we've got chunky cotton as well. We've got something for 365 days of the year. You don't need to stop knitting because the weather gets warm. That will be big for us. We launched it and it's taking off so that's awesome.
We are at Cardigang.com.au. On Instagram, it's @Cardigang_Knits.
It has been such a pleasure to chat with you. I can't wait to see where the business goes because it's awesome what you built and it sounds awesome what you're about to launch. Congratulations and thanks so much for coming in and sharing so much and so many tips and practical things that people can do.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you so much.
Bye.
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What an upbeat pair. Honestly, they're the kind of people that you feel like, “I'd love to go have dinner with those people and chat.” So many ideas, so much freshness, and so much enthusiasm. You can feel their passion for what they do. It's exciting when you can see people move from an idea to reality to it transforming their lives, being able to quit their jobs, do something that they're passionate about, work with each other, learn, test, and experiment. That's what I love about running my own business as well, it's never stale. It’s never turning up to work and doing the same thing over and over.
If you're reading this and thinking, “That's how I feel about my business right now,” I would urge you to go back to the start. Why did you start it? What were you trying to achieve? What are your objectives? How can you move back to that excitement and passion that you had at the start? That is present in Cat and Morgan's chat with me. There were many things that stood out. Of course, I'm going to point out two as I always do.
The two things that stood out was starting with the long term in mind. What are you trying to achieve? Why are you doing this? This is something I work with clients on all the time. Quite often, people can lose sight of that. It goes to what I was saying that we can get into a business with all this excitement and all this passion but we've got to know where we're heading. The journey may take all sorts of twists and pivots and all sorts of different changes over the years. Ultimately, what are we trying to do here? Why are we doing it?
As exciting and passionate as we can be about business, there will be a lot of challenges. There are a lot of things that you never have to face if you are in an employed role, “How is my business going to work if somebody in my family passes away? How is my business going to work if I decide to have another child?” All these things, when you work in an employed role, you get compassionately, you get time off, you get in a lot of places, a maternity or paternity program that is set up to support you along with money some of the time.
It's equal parts exciting and nerve-wracking. I love that they talked about, “Let's have a long-term goal in mind here. Let's have a reason as to why we are doing this and a bigger sense of what it could become as well.” I love that they talked about how it's open to becoming all sorts of things in the future. They're building that community and they're building that audience for lots of different purposes outside of people that want to come and learn how to knit.
They could learn about crocheting. They could learn all sorts of things. They could learn about all sorts of different types of crafts. That opens up the gamut of direction for Cat and Morgan, “Where could we take this? What collaborations could we do? Which brand partnerships could we do? Where is this going and growing as a business?” I love starting with the long term in mind.
I also loved the concept that they talked about a bit, momentum over perfection. Often, and I'm guilty of this as well, we can freeze in this idea that everything has to be perfect until we move or take action on things. With this actual podcast, I got an intro track done in 2016 or even 2017. I didn't launch this podcast until 2020. I don't think I thought necessarily that it needed to be perfect. I didn't like the way that things had been produced in the intro track. It was cheesy.
I've had three operations on my nose and my sinuses. I've got bad sinuses. I've had all these issues with breathing. I've been told in the past that I have a nasally voice. That was also a theme that I thought, “What if people are like, ‘She's so annoying to listen to because of her nasally voice.’” There were all sorts of 2things that stopped me from going for it.
When I decided to go for it, I also did it as a test with a friend. I said, “I'm going to do this. Let's put out ten episodes. If it doesn't work, I'll be like, ‘That was season 1 and we're not returning for season 2.’” It worked. It's done way more than I thought it would do in terms of marketing my own business, marketing myself, and connecting with all sorts of people like the lovely Cat and Morgan from Cardigang.
I love momentum over perfection. If you are facing something in your business and you know that you're stalling on it because you're using perfection as a procrastination tool, I would urge you to, what's the first step? For me, the first step was signing up for a paid hosting platform. You need a hosting platform when you have a podcast. A side note, if you want to start a podcast, we have a great short course called How To Start A Podcast that goes through all the things like hosting platforms. I had to find a hosting platform and pay for it.
As soon as I started paying for that hosting platform, I was like, “Come on, Killackey. Get some episodes up because you don't want to be paying for this platform that you're not using.” That was a simple first step in forcing me to get going with it. I also put a date in the diary and was, “That's when I'm launching.” I wanted to launch before I turned 40 and my birthday was at the end of June 2020. I launched in early June 2020. Use that momentum over perfection to consider, “What is the smallest thing that I can do right now to get going.” It’s my absolute pleasure to talk to Cat and Morgan from Cardigang.
If you're interested in chatting with them, you can check them out at Cardigang.com.au. You can find them over at Instagram with a bunch of inspiring visuals, ideas, testimonials, and all sorts of things over at @Cardigang_Knits. If you enjoyed this episode, I would love it so much if you could take two seconds and leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. It helps other small business owners find this podcast and maybe something that Cat or Morgan said in this episode is exactly what they need to learn right now. Thanks so much for reading. I'll see you next time. Bye.
