Deez Interviews: AmyAnn Cadwell on scaling The Good Trade up and taking the slow cooker approach for crafting content
Happy Friday, Deezers! This week’s interview is with AmyAnn Cadwell, co-founder and CEO of The Good Trade. We talked about competing in the crowded sustainable lifestyle content space, scaling a media company amidst a boys’ club of an industry, and the one business decision that most start-ups are vastly overlooking. Enjoy!
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You launched The Good Trade in 2014, just a few years before the idea of being a "conscious consumer" went super, Everlane-in-every-city-level mainstream. Now that the whole sustainable fashion + lifestyle bandwagon has gotten so crowded, how do you make sure The Good Trade continues to stand out?
It’s not an exaggeration to say we are OBSESSED with our readers ... We don’t publish on a whim. We don’t publish by accident. We don’t throw spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks. We have a long (weeks, sometimes months, or years) editorial process where we leverage keyword research, social trends, and most importantly, community feedback, to carefully craft content that our reader is actually interested in engaging with.
I read that the site was originally the capstone project for your master's degree. What was it like running it as a blog early on while also working a full-time job and being in school? When did you know it would be more than just a project?
After about a year of publishing, we reached 500K average monthly pageviews on the site, and I felt the permission to go full time and start scaling a team. That metric provided the confidence I needed to make the pivot and it became clear that the conversation around sustainability demanded the work of a talented full-time team.
Candidly, gender played a role in my hesitation to take the leap and scale the company. The majority of media companies are still founded and helmed by men (even disappointingly, most women’s lifestyle media brands).
Because the media industry has strong a strong “boys club” culture, I questioned whether I could stand out and be a forceful and inspiring leader in a changing industry. I learned I could, of course, do all of those things, even in a male-dominated industry.
I'm curious about what the hiring process was like for you in the early stages of growing the team — how do you find/choose the right people to entrust something so personal to you?
Growing a team has been one of the most natural and rewarding aspects. We look for talented and mission-aligned candidates who share our values, and we place a high value on emotional intelligence, kindness, humor, and general good-naturedness.
Given your experience with The Good Trade and your other work as an angel investor, I'm curious about underrated business decisions you’ve seen in the startup scene. What are 90% of the startups out there overlooking?
Newsletters!! ;) Most media startups are wildly under-investing in their newsletter communities and remain heavily reliant on social and SEO for reader acquisition.
A few years ago, we made the strategy pivot to aggressively grow our newsletter community and couldn’t be more thrilled by the vibrant community we’ve gathered there. Newsletter has allowed us to develop direct and powerful relationships with our readers — we can reach them on our terms and in our timing, algorithm-free.
Finally, one I really love about The Good Trade is how....like, visually soothing?....the site is — i.e., images on the site all come from the same color palette. It made me realize just how noisy and disjointed almost every other site on the internet is! Tell me about the vision that went into creating this overarching aesthetic.
^^(I mean look it is very lovely!!)
Thank you! We truly aspire to represent our values (minimalism, sustainability, slow living, inclusivity, sincerity, approachability) in our visual aesthetic. When we first started shooting our own editorial imagery, I had zero creative direction or production experience — but like many things, we’ve discovered the final product doesn’t have to be perfect to resonate, and it’s okay to learn as you go.
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Don’t forget to follow @amyanncadwell on IG and have a generally soothing weekend!
Psssst also don’t forget to order your Deez Links totes & pins at our brand new merch shop!!! Items do NOT come with @wafflestheminidoodle just fyi I am deeply sorry in advance.
