Nice girls don't finish last

Song of the Day: Wouldn’t it be Nice? Beach Boys 

Yes, the song is kind of cheesy. But I love its innocence- the hope and excitement and simplicity of the message. It works for today’s theme since I’m thinking gratefully about all the nice people around me these days.

I think nice gets a bad rap. Growing up in Minnesota, we were all about nice. Then I moved to Silicon Valley and was surprised at the lack of nice in the business world. And the way that my “Minnesota nice” was sometimes interpreted as cluelessness and taken advantage of. For awhile I got really jaded and thought I should stop being too nice. But what I was calling “too nice” wasn’t nice at all- because it was not being nice to myself. You can be nice and still stand up for yourself- so simple, and yet so hard to learn. 

The thing I love most about Charmoné is that we can be as nice as we want, and in turn there is so much niceness around us. We get emails out of the blue from customers, just telling us how much they love their shoes and thanking us for caring enough to make something both stylish and vegan/eco/fair trade. When we were contemplating selling online, a lot of people warned us that dealing with “the public” directly would be a nightmare. But not for us- our customers are nice!

I started thinking about this today because I just returned from working with our new factory in Colombia (much more on that later). And the overwhelming vibe I got was that the people were so genuinely nice. Kind hearted, open, welcoming… something we really haven’t experienced working in the other countries where we’ve manufactured. I think we’ve opened up an opportunity here to not only make beautiful shoes, but also bring down the prices significantly while helping a country that needs to be associated with more positive businesses. 

It’s all coming together: beautiful shoes, lower prices, a more direct sense of ‘giving back’- isn’t that nice?