In this talk, Jennifer Chong, co‑founder of Linjer (spelled Leanir in the transcript), recounts the gritty reality behind her seemingly glamorous startup. She describes how she and partner Roman launched their first men's bag collection on Indiegogo in 2014, raising $150,000 in pre‑orders and bootstrapping the business while holding down other jobs. By 2016, after a successful women’s‑bag Kickstarter launch, they faced a catastrophic production crisis: a Chinese factory had used defective leather without warning, forcing them to either accept the flawed goods or lose the entire shipment. Choosing the former, they spent tens of thousands on unusable inventory and then fled to Italy to rebuild. Over three weeks they lived in a cold Airbnb, made relentless calls to a failing fulfillment partner, personally phoned all 350 backers, and raced across Italy to secure a new tannery and factory. Despite near‑bankruptcy, they gradually resolved the issues, eventually shipping the bags five months later and later raising $1 million on a watch Kickstarter. Chong uses this story to debunk the myth of effortless entrepreneurship, emphasizing that success is messy, unpredictable, and requires relentless perseverance.
Chapters
Hi, my name is Jennifer Chong, and I'm one of the founders of Leanir. We're an independent design studio making minimalist, high-quality leather bags and watches. My partner Roman and I got our start 3 years ago, in 2014, when we launched our first collection of men's bags on Indiegogo, a crowdfunding platform. With the help of more than 500 guys, total strangers from around the world, We were able to raise $150,000 in funding, which was essentially $150,000 of preorders, and with that, we were able to start production. After that, Roman and I took turns working full-time on Linear, with the other person working a full-time job so that we could keep a roof over our heads until we knew our business had legs. Today, we're still proudly bootstrapped, and we're a tiny team. It's just the two of us, and we have three remote team members. And we're on track to do more than $10 million in sales this year, selling only online. Now, I know that many people think that my life seems really glamorous, charmed even. I get to work with my partner, I get to live in Florence, Italy, I get to design beautiful products, I get to bring a creative vision into reality. That's pretty cool. But today, I want to show you that my life is not so glamorous at all. I want to show you the ugly side. And I think this is so important to talk about because we live in a world of sensational headlines and Instagram. And I think it's so easy to look at somebody else's story from afar and think, "Man, she has it so easy." I think this kind of attitude is especially dangerous if you're an entrepreneur, or if you plan to start your own business one day, because it creates really unrealistic expectations of yourself and of what your entrepreneurial journey will look like. So tonight, I'm going to tell you about a particular low point that I've experienced. And when I say low point, that's a huge understatement, because these were truly a terrifying few weeks of my life. This was January 2016, and Roman and I had launched a collection of women's bags on Kickstarter a few months before. We were going to China, to our factory, to do our final quality control before sending out thousands of parcels all around the world. Now, when we arrived at the factory, we were astounded to discover that there was something a little off with the leather of one of our bags, the soft tote. That meant that the factory had received the leather a few months before, had seen that it didn't quite match the sample, decided not to tell us, and then proceeded to make bags with them. And we were finding out at the 11th hour. Now, we had 350 women who had kind of pre-ordered the bag a few months before, and they were waiting for this bag. And we knew that a lot of them might not have noticed the difference because they'd never seen the sample in real life. But we were adamant that we were not going to send out a single bag that was anything less than perfect. So we went to the factory owner to try to find a solution, and he reacted really badly. He refused to admit that they'd made a mistake. In fact, he put a metaphorical gun to our head. He said, "You either take everything and pay for everything, including the defective bags, or you leave it all here." Now, the factory was already one month late with production, and they were just about to close for three weeks for Chinese New Year. We decided to take a calculated risk. We had thousands of other parcels that needed to go out with good bags, and we didn't want to risk the factory keeping them over Chinese New Year. And so we knowingly spent tens of thousands of dollars on defective merchandise to ensure that the factory released our goods. We were taking a gamble that we would be able to reason with the factory owner later on. But deep down inside, we knew we were in big trouble. There was no way we could continue to work with this guy. And so, we booked it to Italy. Now, in Italy, we had 4 goals. The first was we had to find a new tannery because we no longer trusted the tannery that had made the bad leather in the first place. Second, we had to find a new factory. Third, we had to send out thousands of parcels for all the backers and customers who'd been waiting. And fourth, we had to break the news to the 350 people who were waiting for the soft totes. Now things started to go downhill pretty quickly. Our fulfillment partner lost control over the warehouse that they subcontracted, and while they were supposed to send out thousands of parcels after 5 days, By day 5, they had only sent out 26. Now, we were staying in a tiny crappy Airbnb in Florence with no heat, and we would wake up at 2 in the morning so that we could be awake when the warehouse staff woke up, and we would call them and try to get control of the situation. And then we would go to sleep at 4 AM. We'd wake up again at 6:30 and start calling. 350 people who were waiting for the totes. Roman and I personally called each and every single one of them. We had to explain to them that there was a problem, we were trying to remake the totes, but we weren't quite sure when they would be ready. Not a fun conversation to have. That was all before 8:30 in the morning. At 8:30, we would get in our rental car, drive out of the city, and meet with a bunch of suppliers, tanneries and factories. Over lunchtime, we'd try to take a nap in our car somewhere, and then over the afternoon, we would have back-to-back meetings, trying to find the tannery and factory who could help us solve this problem. We would drive home at 6, and then it was time for more phone calls, this time to our backers and customers in the Western Hemisphere. After a few more hours of phone calls, we would open our inboxes and have to deal with the hundreds of emails coming in from anxious people wondering where their parcels were. We'd go to sleep at midnight, wake up at 2, and so on, and so on. We did this for 3 weeks. We had so little money in the bank, we were freezing our tails off in this Airbnb, and there was not a night that we slept more than 4 hours in a row. And all this time, we had this ominous feeling that everything that we had worked so hard to build over the last year and a half would just come crumbling down around us. Well, it didn't come crumbling down, and bit by bit, we had small breakthroughs, and we were slowly able to right the ship. We found a tannery, we found a factory, we started making the replacement totes, We finally solved our fulfillment problem by calling their investors. And most of the 350 people that we called up were really kind and understanding. Best of all, when we finally sent out the totes 5 months later, they were delighted. But it was only 2 months later that we finally felt that we had crawled ourselves out of this deep, dark hole and were finally on solid ground again. And that was when we launched a Kickstarter campaign for our new watch collection. Amazingly, that Kickstarter campaign raised $1 million. And it was only then, when we saw that $1 million on our campaign page, that we breathed a sigh of relief and thought that we were able to keep moving on. Now, many people wrote to me around that time marveling at the Kickstarter campaign. "¡Oh my gosh, Jenna! A $1 million campaign, that's incredible! That's an overnight success!" Well, now that you know what we went through in the months leading up to that, you'll know that it was not an overnight success. It certainly wasn't very glamorous, and it wasn't very fun at all. We had gone through months of despair. We had gotten cheated out of half a year of my salary. And we'd been on the verge of bankruptcy. The thing is, entrepreneurship is a crazy, incredible ride, but it's messy, it's unpredictable, and it will squeeze you of everything that you've got. The reality is you're going to fall on your face over and over again. I keep falling on my face, and I know it's not going to stop. But it's in those moments when you feel like you've fallen on your face that you get to show the universe what you're made of. You pick yourself up, you dust yourself off, and you keep putting one foot in front of the other. That is what real entrepreneurship looks like, not some splashy headline or some carefully curated Instagram account. So don't be fooled by mine, and be ready for a fight. Best of luck with your ventures.
