Working out in heels. 👠
A Bala origin story.
Nice to meet you. I am Natalie, the cofounder of fitness brand, Bala. We have spent 6 years (7 if you count 1 year of prototyping) to get to this stage in our company so I will be spilling the beans on how I built this company and the lessons I am learning throughout building the company on my newsletter “Working out in heels”. I hope you can gain some nuggets of wisdom from my journey.
I’ll start with a brief overview and timeline of how we got started. The beginning snapshot. That can also serve as a blueprint for the high levels steps of launching your company.
💡 It all started with the idea for the Bangles. My boyfriend (now husband + cofounder, Max) and I quit our jobs in advertising to go on a sabbatical where we came up with the idea for the product Bala Bangles, a new school chic wrist/ankle weight. We worked tirelessly on designing them. Then we launched a successful Kickstarter to fund our first production run. We made our goal of $40K, which was a great way to test the market and gave us the confidence to launch.
🇭🇰 Visited our factory in Hong Kong to finalize the prototype for the Bangles & to view the facilities.
📸 Once we got the prototype just right it was time to start creating content. Pics of our first photoshoot here.
🎨 Next order of business: color test the Bangles & design our first round of packaging.
✔ Landed on our first packaging design that was right for the Bangles. Looking back, it’s cringe but at the time it was right.
📦 Started shipping our first round of orders(!) from our Brooklyn apartment, with the help of our furry friends, Naomi and Penny. This is so much easier nowadays if you are launching your own brand because you can just print labels from Shopify (cheap & easy).
🎟 Attended our first trade show with our Bala booth at Active Collective. I always recommend that the best way to get started in wholesale is to go to a trade show. First, attend & then you can do your own booth. Great way to test the market but also get some early buyers! HMU if you need recs on where to show.
🌴 We moved to Los Angeles, still shipping every order by hand from our detached garage underneath a sign that read "GOOD THINGS COME TO THOSE WHO SWEAT".
🌵 Shot our first real campaign in Joshua Tree. Did this for probably $2500-3K. Bootstrap from the beginning.
🦅 Landed our first big retailer, @freepeople @fpmovement. This was a fun one because we basically just tagged them on a photo to get their attention and the buyer reached out from there.
💪🏼 Featured in our first magazine, @shape! Thank you to @mk_boylan & @brookeely for recognizing us :)
HUGE deal for us at the time.
🚲 Our first international retailer, @openride_, hosted us in Switzerland for one of our first co-hosted events.
🧘🏻♀️ Melissa Woodhealth started incorporating the Bangles into her classes. Again, this was cool because I just randomly DMed her to try the product… she loved it & started posting about it.
^ This is all pre Shark Tank. So this is how we got started but there is much more to the story. Subscribe & let’s chat.
xx Natalie