She Built a New Shopping Experience for Jewelry. Method’s Eric Ryan Couldn’t Resist
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Serial entrepreneur Eric Ryan is helping Cast co-founder Rachel Skelly breathe new life into a staid industry–while battling impostor syndrome.
BY KEVIN J. RYAN, FREELANCE WRITER@WHERESKR
ERIC RYAN HAS a soft spot for startups. After selling Method, his ecofriendly cleaning-products company, to Ecover in 2012, Ryan just had to do it all again, twice, launching the supplements startup Olly in 2015 and the first-aid company Welly in 2019. The three businesses have a combined valuation of more than $1 billion.
Ryan’s latest venture is the direct-to-consumer jewelry brand Cast, which he helped launch in 2021 as a founding investor, and which represents his first company outside of the consumer packaged goods category.
“I always want to go out and do something I’ve never done before,” says Ryan, 49. “That’s the only way to find out what you’re capable of.”
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Cast co-founder and chief creative officer Rachel Skelly shares Ryan’s penchant for branching out into new industries. Prior to serving as VP of creative at Olly from 2014 to 2019, Skelly, 45, held creative roles at the baby food company Plum Organics and at Old Navy. Her goal for San Francisco-based Cast is to shake up an industry that’s been dominated by a handful of large brands for decades.
“Shopping for fine jewelry should be fun, but it’s really intimidating,” says Skelly, adding that Cast’s DTC shopping experience is designed to be “warm, welcoming, and exciting.”
Armed with $18 million in funding from VC firms including Silicon Valley-based True Ventures, which invested in fast-casual restaurant chain Sweetgreen and wearable hardware company Fitbit, Cast launched its first retail location, a storefront in an outdoor mall near San Francisco, in October. The store trades the glass showcases and white-and-gold interiors of traditional jewelry retailers for a colorful, friendly design intended to create “a Willy Wonka, kid-in-a-candy-store experience,” according to Skelly, who recently welcomed her second child.
We sat down with Ryan and Skelly at Cast’s new store to talk about overcoming impostor syndrome, constructing a company culture, and why sometimes what you really need is someone to tell you that your baby’s ugly.
SKELLY So, about impostor syndrome–how do I overcome that fear and feel more comfortable owning my place at the table?
RYAN I don’t know if you ever overcome that fear. I think anybody who’s done anything great suffers from impostor syndrome. It’s the curse of pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone. You’ve created this concept, and as the brand starts to scale, you’re going to feel more and more like you got away with something: “Who am I to have this success? Who am I to deserve having done this?” The reason I say it won’t go away is because that’s what drives great people–that constant hunger for growth and to be challenged. The second you lose that impostor syndrome, you risk being overly confident and cocky. Those aren’t traits of people who are willing to keep growing, and that’s what success comes from as an entrepreneur. So get used to it.
SKELLY I tend to be very hands-on. I can really get into the weeds. How do I balance the need to be scrappy with keeping my focus on that bigger brand vision?
Eric Ryan. Photography by Carolyn Fong
RYAN As a founder, you’ve got to have absolute conviction in the vision, the mission, and where you want this company to go. But then you’ve got to empower your team to take you there. It’s a really tricky dance. It’s hard to trust other people to help nurture and raise your child, but scale comes only from empowering others. Otherwise, you’ll have a miserable life as a founder. If you try to micromanage and do everything yourself, you’ll suffer and your family will suffer. That process of letting go is one of the great balancing acts.
SKELLY It sounds like it.
RYAN The way I think about it is that I want to always be really clear with the team about where we’re going, and then let them surprise me a little with how we get there. When that happens, it’s really magical. You become so proud of your team and what you’ve created together. But before you can do that, you have to let go of your ego.
SKELLY Speaking of which: You’re someone who takes a lot of feedback from people, even if it hurts. It almost seems like you love the punishment.
RYAN I seek out feedback everywhere I can. It’s free advice. It’s a gift. But everybody wants to tell you that your baby’s beautiful, so you need to empower people to tell you why it’s ugly, to tell you why your idea might fail. What are the blind spots? What are you missing? And while I know it can be really uncomfortable to have people beat up on your child, I actually get comfort out of it. It provides a sense of security for me. Because if I can eventually get to the point that people who are way smarter than I am or have more expertise than I do can’t find flaws, then I can sleep better at night.
SKELLY But how do you know which voices to listen to?
RYAN If I agree with the advice, I listen to it. If I don’t agree with the advice, but I keep hearing more and more people say the same thing, then I’ll do something about it. Even if I disagree with it, I’ll say, “OK, I must be wrong about it.” But sometimes you do have to recognize that you’re deeper into this than other people are. You can see the moves you haven’t made yet in your head. They can’t. So you need to be able to make those distinctions.
Rachel Skelly. Photography by Carolyn Fong
SKELLY We’ve spoken to a lot of experts in the fine jewelry space, and a lot of them have pushed back on the things we’re doing. How much should that scare me?
RYAN Categories get disrupted by outsiders. When you’re disrupting an industry, the people in it often want to protect their own knowledge. All their years in the industry give them their self-worth, so they’ll protect how the industry was. That’s where a lot of that bad advice comes from.
SKELLY Being a new parent and an entrepreneur is, well, it’s a lot. You’ve had three kids throughout all these years of creating and growing new businesses. How the hell have you done that?
RYAN This is why people start companies in their 20s, when they have no kids or other responsibilities.
SKELLY Which you did–but then you kept starting new ones.
RYAN Yeah, I started Method in my 20s. It is totally different now. But I think the pressure is actually really good. Families are great forcing mechanisms for prioritization. They make you focus and not indulge. In the early days of Method, my theory was that when you’re working at a startup, your professional life is always going to seep into your personal life, so the only way to get balanced is if your personal life seeps into your professional life. That’s why we created a culture that was like a family and incorporated family. We’d have family lunches. Our kids knew one another. Company culture matters so much. It affects your work life and your home life.
SKELLY How do you protect that culture? Especially at a place like Cast, where we’re getting into physical retail and eventually expanding across the country.
RYAN I don’t like the word protect, because when you try to protect something, you’re trying to preserve it. Cultures evolve and grow. You put a leadership team in place. You bring in people you really respect from a cultural perspective–not just what they do, but how they do it. You build a culture at your workplace and put the right rituals into place. Then you let it go where it wants to go. Let it surprise you. One of the greatest rewards is a culture that goes in a delightful direction.
SKELLY How do you manage the highs and lows of entrepreneurship and not lose your head? I often feel like I’m on an endless roller coaster ride.
RYAN I wake up sometimes and I’m like, “This is going to be so successful.” And then I wake up sometimes and say, “God, this is a totally terrible idea.” I don’t know. I struggle with it too. You’re doing something you’ve never done before. This is why having co-founders and building great leadership teams is important. When things get hard, it’s easy to quit if it is just you. But you don’t want to let other people down: investors, founders, team members. And that’s what I think helps you push through. It is a roller coaster–even within the course of an hour sometimes.
SKELLY Seriously.
RYAN You’ve got to celebrate the wins. The successes give us the confidence to keep going. The hard part is how to be a role model to your team. They look to you for how they should feel, just as your children look to you to see your reaction when they get hurt. So it’s this tricky balance–you want everybody to trust you because you’re honest with them, but you’re still modeling a high level of confidence that everything is going to be OK. It’s a tough act. You have to challenge people and push them hard, but give them safe landings along the way. So, when things get hard, I don’t focus on myself. I focus on setting the team up for success. I know that if I do that, we’ll ultimately be successful.
