I’d Rather Be Interested Than Interesting

I've always approached my life and my work with a clear intent of being curious.

I'd rather be interested than interesting.

That mission carried over into many parts of my life, and even made it inside shipments to my petit frère customers. (petit frère was my children's clothing line. I designed it, manufactured it, and poured everything I had into it for six years.)

When I sent off an order, I never just sent the clothes.

For example, I knew one client's husband only liked the red Starburst—this was before you could buy a bag of just the reds—so I opened sleeve after sleeve, picked out every red one, and sent them along with their order.

That's not a customer service strategy; that's being attentive. But attentiveness, over time, becomes something else entirely.

It becomes leverage.

In March 2020, the world shut down and the company I worked for went from forty people to eight overnight. I was one of the eight. Nobody told me why. I like to think it was because I brought something worth keeping. What I know for certain is that being part of the smaller team meant I had a responsibility to earn my stay.

We were a boutique retail company, and the pandemic meant we had no foot traffic, no events, no lure to draw anyone out of their bubbles. The pressure to generate revenue with a skeleton crew during a global pandemic was real and it was immediate.

I pitched an idea to the team: What if we did what Stitch Fix does — offer curated boxes built around what we knew about our best clients and delivered to their homes?

We started workshopping the idea immediately, and within a couple of weeks it had become something real.

We reached out to our top-tier clients personally—not with a mass email, but with actual conversations. We asked what they needed, like gifts for graduation, Mother's Day, birthdays, life events that were still happening, even when the world had stopped. Then we built the boxes around those answers.

It worked because we already knew the answers before we asked. We knew their families, their milestones, their preferences, their stories. That knowledge didn't come from an analytics report; it came from years of knowing our clients.

What started as a survival tactic evolved into something more. We developed themed, ready-to-buy, curated boxes. Different occasions, different price points, and a new revenue stream built from a crisis. This allowed us to generate strong additional sales during a period when most retail was fighting to survive.

Some people think knowing your clients on a personal level is overstepping. A boundary issue. Too much.

I think it's the most underrated business strategy there is.

When everything else falls apart, what you're left with is your relationships. The ones you invested in before you needed them. The ones built on actually knowing who you're serving.

So, I will keep sending handwritten notes to clients. I will always pay attention to the details others overlook. Not because it's good customer service, but because it's a genuine reflection of how I believe people deserve to be treated. And it works.

When the moment comes and you need to ask something of your clients (their trust, their business, their attention), you can do so confidently because you know you've earned it.