For Lisa Schulner-Positive and Michael Positive, the journey to enterprise possession started greater than a decade in the past in New York — when their new child son would not go to sleep.
“I’d be in his room at midnight in the midst of the evening, holding him, and I’d begin daydreaming,” Lisa, co-founder along with her husband Michael of life-style model Quiet City, tells Entrepreneur. “For some purpose, my thoughts would go to bathe curtains.”
Picture Credit score: Courtesy of Quiet City. Lisa Schulner-Positive and Michael Positive.
Lisa had been pissed off with the dearth of bathe curtain choices available on the market for some time. She and Michael each had an eye fixed for design — she labored as a director of styling at Madewell and he as a contract style photographer — and the couple struggled to search out aesthetically pleasing lavatory equipment on retail cabinets. To make issues worse, a lot of the objects obtainable had been removed from sustainable.
 ”We would be at Mattress Tub & Past with a giant buying cart, selecting out terribly made plastic stuff that did not really feel like us in any respect,” Lisa recollects.
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To Lisa, bathtub equipment appeared just like the “greatest underdog class” that she might method from a inventive and sustainable perspective. She continued to meditate on bathe curtain designs on nights and weekends, balancing the facet hustle along with her full-time profession and elevating a younger household.
To start with, Michael admits that he did not fairly perceive the impetus for his spouse’s ardour undertaking.  ”[I felt] like, That is loopy,” he says. “No person cares about bathe curtains. Why would you ever wish to begin a enterprise like this?” Nonetheless, he additionally knew that Lisa was “very inventive” and “visionary” — so it made sense that she was able to carry a recent perspective to the business.
“So I mentioned, ‘Okay, I might help you get this off the bottom,'” Michael recollects. “We had no thought the place it was going. It was actually like a facet hustle.”
Picture Credit score: Courtesy of Quiet City
“It was all about temper for us, much less about being particular in what we do.”
Lisa determined to make the bathe curtains out of canvas materials. The couple put quite a lot of thought into each step of the method, from dyeing to ending. The objective was to create a product that grew to become extra lovely with age, “like a pair of denims,” Lisa explains.
For the facet hustle’s first-ever shoot, Michael and his pictures assistant took samples of canvas bathe curtains Lisa had made onto the seashore. They set the curtains up with rope, pulled them taut and photographed them in good gentle — then put a splash web page up and used the picture for the model’s inaugural Instagram put up to let individuals know one thing was coming quickly.
“We by no means did something conventional that means,” Michael says. “It was by no means like, shoot in a toilet in entrance of a bathtub. It was like, go to the seashore, or discover a actually lovely pink wall, and shoot it there. It was all about temper for us, much less about being particular in what we do.”
Picture Credit score: Courtesy of Quiet City
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As a result of again in 2016 and now, the couple sees the enterprise as extending past lavatory equipment — and into a life-style model. Michael and Lisa wished to create useful merchandise that individuals actually wanted, however they strived to do it in a “lovely, aspirational means.” A number of the first merchandise had been named after their favourite quiet cities, like “Ojai” and “Mendocino,” which additionally impressed the corporate’s “Quiet City” moniker.
In these early facet hustle days, Lisa discovered herself selecting up and saving “each scrap on the ground” throughout manufacturing, not desirous to waste the “lovely byproduct.” So, earlier than lengthy, one other alternative emerged: to start out a undertaking, dubbed Re:Canvas, that might protect these remnants and rework them into “one thing new and funky” via strategic partnerships.
The couple partnered with the Brooklyn-based Textile Artwork Heart for the primary Re:Canvas undertaking, upcycling the fabric into Portuguese-inspired rag rugs. Quiet City went on to collaborate on hand-quilted pillowcases with the artist Rebeca Raney, placemats and napkins with West Elm, a colorblocked jacket and shorts set with the designer Alex Mill and extra.
“ It is actually laborious, very costly, and it takes a very long time.”
Dedicated to constructing a sustainable model from the beginning, the co-founders admit that they initially hesitated to provide liners for his or her bathe curtains. Lisa and Micahel did not wish to introduce extra plastic into the world, however after discussing the difficulty with associates, they realized they’d to determine the way to put a sustainable spin on the product — Quiet City did start as a bathe curtain enterprise, in any case.
The co-founders’ answer, which they do not even check with as a “liner,” was the “solar bathe curtain.” Constructed from non-toxic EVA vinyl plastic that’s chlorine-, PVC- and BPA-free, solar bathe curtains can be utilized as a bathe curtain liner or as a standalone curtain. In addition they resolved to kind a post-consumer recycling plan for them — a difficult endeavor for a small enterprise.
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“ It is actually laborious, very costly, and it takes a very long time,” Lisa says. Establishing a recycling undertaking was the objective from the beginning, and over the previous a number of years, Quiet City has been “charting a map in direction of circularity” for its solar bathe curtains, working with a world recycling neighborhood referred to as Treasured Plastics, which offers sources to assist individuals deal with the plastic waste drawback. The corporate’s round solar bathe product will launch this summer time.
“The solar bathe class began to blow up as a result of it was reasonably priced and aspirational.”
Like many companies with a concentrate on merchandise for the house, Quiet City noticed a spike in demand throughout the pandemic.
“In the event that they had been fortunate sufficient to nonetheless have a job and will afford to spend cash, individuals did not know what to spend their cash on apart from groceries and bathroom paper,” Michael says. “It was like, Oh, wait a second, I am spending a lot time in my lavatory. The solar bathe class began to blow up as a result of it was reasonably priced and aspirational.”
Quiet City graduated from facet hustle to full-time enterprise in 2020. In April of that yr, income began rising month over month. Quiet City made about $300,000 throughout its first yr on that trajectory; now, the model generates greater than $3 million a yr.
Picture Credit score: Courtesy of Quiet City
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Moreover, like many individuals throughout the pandemic, the couple started to rethink their location. Michael and Lisa had lived in San Francisco in 2001 for a few yr; they cherished the West Coast and had all the time felt as if they’d “unfinished enterprise” there. So that they determined to make the transfer, give it two years and dedicate themselves to Quiet City.
“[The Bay Area] provides us entry to all of the issues that we wished,” Michael says, “like mountains, seashore, metropolis, a very good spot to boost children. So it was all the time there at the back of our minds, to the purpose of utilizing the world as our lavatory on photograph shoots.”
“[The West Coast] all the time knowledgeable our design method,” Lisa provides. “Now it truly sort of looks like we’re residence.”
“ Regardless of how small or massive you develop [the business] to, you need to consider in it so passionately.”
Now, almost a decade into operating their enterprise, the co-founders have realized so much about what it takes to navigate the ups and downs of entrepreneurship — and the way invaluable having a associate via all of it is.
“The perfect piece of recommendation I feel I may give to any individual is to attempt to begin a enterprise with a associate,” Michael says. “It is so laborious to do by yourself. And be sure that associate has completely completely different abilities than you do.  If you’re inventive, discover somebody who has a thoughts for finance, enterprise or operations.”
Michael additionally suggests sustaining a wholesome work-life steadiness, noting that he finds a few of the finest inspiration for the enterprise when he is on a hike, listening to music.
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Lisa stresses the significance of being “obsessed” with the enterprise that you just wish to begin — and believing in it so absolutely that you just’re prepared to struggle for it from day one.
 ”Regardless of how small or massive you develop [the business] to, you need to consider in it so passionately, 1000%, as a result of it actually does take over your life in so some ways,” Lisa says. “Except that factor is one thing you actually, actually consider in, don’t give it that a lot energy over your life.”
