Thoughts about living the BK life

Interview with Canvas Rebel

I recently had an opportunity to take an interview project with Canvas Rebel, and the story just went live on their website. First, I love their name, "Canvas Rebel," since I try to continue to be a quiet (or sometimes very loud) rebel here, always asking a question about the status quo of how things are done, including how a woman-owned small business can be operated. I also appreciate the questions they asked. They are a little different from the typical "get to know you on the first date" questions, but rather, "how do you really feel about this" questions. I tried to answer the questions as honestly and as transparently as possible, and I hope you enjoy getting to know a little more about me as a forever mom to BK, as perfectly imperfect as I am.

Thank you so much in advance for reading the story.

Wakako, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today. The first dollar your business earns is always special, and we’d love to hear how your brand made its first dollar of revenue.

From day 1 of Baum-kuchen, I always believed that if you have a clear intention to contribute to the world in a meaningful way, and if you execute the intention one step at a time, the community will gather around. So, I approached the idea of “marketing” in a way that made sense to me – by sharing stories. When I started Baum-kuchen in 2010, making meaningful connections through a “blog” format felt genuine. Along with our online store, I created the Baum-kuchen blog platform to share stories about artifacts I carried on our website, what made them unique, and how they can resonate in everyday lives. I had no readers or audiences to start, but I kept up with my daily writing and sharing on our blog to build a space where people who found Baum-kuchen could get to know me and my shop better.

As I continued to write on our blog space and slowly built up Baum-kuchen’s inventory, I started reaching out to other bloggers who enjoyed similar flavors of aesthetics and lifestyles. I wrote personal emails to introduce myself and explain the idea behind Baum-kuchen and invited them to visit if they were interested. I didn’t want to be sales-pitchy or sound like marketing since I was seeking more of a community of like-minded instead of selling something. Some bloggers eventually visited my online store and shared what they liked about it, and slowly, I started to get the word out about Baum-kuchen to the bigger world.

Our first sales from our online store were purchased by a very kind blogger who featured our shop on her blog post. I remember it was a day before our oldest daughter was born, and between the preparations for birth, I wrapped and packaged my very first BK parcel and shipped it with love. It feels like so much has changed since then, including the size of our operation now, but the essence of Baum-kuchen still feels the same, and every order we receive still brings me a sense of gratitude I felt when I received the very first order.

Wakako, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Wakako and I am a founder of Baum-kuchen. I grew up in Japan and moved to Southern California during high school. Even though I was still young when I relocated to the U.S., I carry a lot of Japanese values I grew up with in my everyday life, including how I interact with our business Baum-kuchen. During my college years, I studied architecture and then graduated with an industrial design degree. Even though I did not pursue a traditional industrial design career, I have been using everything I learned from the design school to create and build our business from the inside out.

Initially, Baum-kuchen started in 2010 as an online store to nurture a love for all things analogue, operated in the small corner of our garage. My intention for Baum-kuchen was to create a place where it celebrated engagement with the present moments. I opened the online shop a week before my oldest daughter was born, so I always feel like Baum-kuchen is and always will be my first baby. During the early years of Baum-kuchen, I was learning how to be a mom to a newborn baby while figuring out what it meant to have an online store. So, I intentionally didn’t set any big goals for the business. Slow and steady was my motto, and I tried to always make sure that when I worked with Baum-kuchen, whether I was updating our website or fulfilling an online order, I was doing it with love. Eventually, we grew out of our garage, and I opened a brick-and-mortar space in Glassell Park in 2013, shortly after our second daughter was born.

We have been at Baum-kuchen’s second location in Altadena since 2019 and are about to move to our new location in Eagle Rock to expand our community space. Today, I live the Baum-kuchen life with the amazing support of our team members. Our shop specializes in sharing artifacts that encourage personal writing, journaling, and documenting everyday life. We open our space weekly on Sundays so our local community can see and touch these artifacts in person and meet like-hearted analogue enthusiasts.

As we move into a new space in Eagle Rock and mark the 15th year of Baum-kuchen, I feel passionate about pouring our energy to continue nurturing a genuine connection with our community, whether it is by hosting a meet-up at various locations or investing in a virtual platform where we can share ideas and inspiration. I also deeply believe that our growth comes from having an opportunity to explore more of our inner world. A notebook and a pen feel like simple tools, but my dream is for more folks to experience and lean into the inner journey through their writing and journaling.

Do you have multiple revenue streams – if so, can you talk to us about those streams and how you developed them?

From early on, figuring out how to diversify our offering while staying true to who we are has been a core creative question we have asked ourselves.

Our main business revenues come from the sales of stationery-related products both online and in-person, so selling new products was a core business model for many early years for Baum-kuchen. However, I wanted to offer more ways for our customers to sustain their relationships with their leather notebook covers instead of constantly needing to purchase new ones since they are meant to be used for a long time. In 2018, we created a service called “Truly Yours” to customize a leather notebook (often Traveler’s Notebook) by adding leather pockets, patches, embossing details, etc., to transform the experience of using the notebook cover to be more individual and personal. It is a highly involved process, from online consultation for the design and production to shipping the final item; however, the service also brings us very meaningful connection points with our customers. Through the dialogue about the customization, we get to know more about each customer and the personal hopes and dreams they embed into their analogue experience. No matter how big we might grow as a business, I never want to lose the personal touch with individual customers; this service allows us to do that.

More recently, we have started to add online courses for creativity and drawing to contribute to our customers’ experience of analogue artifacts, not just the products themselves. I also started writing for “Recipe of Baum-kuchen” on Substack as a place to share reader-supported essays. I hope the platform will continue to serve as a place where I can share a little bit of behind-the-scenes from Baum-kuchen and the lessons I am learning from living at this time in this world as a human being.

I don’t see Baum-kuchen as a fixed state of being but rather an organic entity that breathes a life of its own. So, I am sure as we journey through the BK life, we will continue to extend how we interact with the world, which feels exciting.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

My first advice would be not to use the word “manage” when discussing about a team. I feel that the word “manage” immediately puts a relationship into a one-sided view of the situation when it should be a dialogue about our interactions.

I do have to admit, though, that having the very first person to work with me on a business I held so close to my heart, building a team, and navigating the relational dynamics of the team members over the years have been the most difficult challenges for me as a business owner. And it is NOT because our team isn’t good (they are AMAZING!), but it has to do with everything I am not good at.

If left alone, I am comfortable and content doing my own thing at my own pace, which included running Baum-kuchen for many years of early BK days by myself. I am intuitive and often navigate the world using my natural intuition, so articulating my intentions, feelings, and project directions into actual words is not always my strength, especially if ideas are new or different from what we are comfortable with. I have also been a lone wolf for a long time, even during my design school days. I never really wanted to be a part of any pack just to belong and wanted to pursue what truly felt resonant, even if it meant being on my own. Luckily (and thank goodness), I met Frido, my partner-in-crime, so we have been a duo to discuss designs, life choices, and everything in between. It is to say that I was (and probably still am) a newbie in playing a role as a part of the growing BK team.

But, once I decided to welcome our first team member to my business in 2015, I committed myself to becoming the best leader I could be for our team. I love the work by Simon Sinek and his book “Leaders Eat Last.” I read and re-read his book at every turning point of the BK team formation.

The idea of a leader’s most vital role to be of service to his/her/their people has been what resonates with me the most. It gives me a lens to imagine how to best move the business forward each day. For example, we were highly impacted by the recent wildfire in the Los Angeles area. The Eaton Fire, especially, came very close to our location, and we had moments when we were unsure if we still had a physical building. Our location was also under a mandatory evacuation zone, so we could not access our business for a week, which could have resulted in a cash flow challenge. It was a very stressful moment, not knowing what might be ahead, but what grounded me at the time was to imagine myself in our team members’ shoes and ask myself, “What can I do to be helpful to them right now?” And when I thought of my next action step based on that lens, it was much easier to make decisions instead of trying to figure out the uncertainty of the future, which would have only led me to more panic. Thankfully, our storefront and studio space were spared by the fire, and we were able to find our rhythm again.

So what if we switch the word “manage” to “inspire” when discussing our teams?