Deez Interviews: Meet the journalist/entrepreneur/author who foresaw the power of a solid commerce strategy & then wrote **the** book on female workplace friendships

Happy Friday, Deezers! Today’s interview is with Erica Cerulo, a former editor who both founded the retail site Of a Kind (hailed as a fashion industry disruptor by Forbes) and wrote a book called Work Wife (which came out last month!) with her IRL work wife, Claire Mazur. We chatted with Erica about her move into entrepreneurship, the fine art of mixing commerce & content, and the exact process she used to write their book. Enjoy!

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The interviewee: Erica Cerulo (follow her @ericacerulo on Twitter and Instagram!)

The gig: Co-founder Of a Kind & co-author of Work Wife

Before starting Of a Kind, your background was in magazines, most recently as a senior editor at Lucky. Tell us about the moment you realized that you wanted to start your own business!

You know, I’m not sure I ever really realized that I wanted to start a business. But two things did happen that motivated me to launch Of a Kind with one of my closest college friends, Claire Mazur, in 2010: 1) I recognized that I valued having a sense of ownership in the projects I worked on, and this came through in the magazine work that I’d found to be most gratifying when I was at Details and Lucky. At the time, I didn’t recognize that as entrepreneurial spirit, but it was—or at least a close cousin.

2) When Claire and I came up with the idea for Of a Kind, we were both jazzed about it immediately. Like, two days after we landed on the core concept — to commission up-and-coming designers to create limited-edition exclusives that we’d release for sale on the site conjunction with stories about what made those designers tick — I was thinking about marketing ideas in the shower and story rubrics before I fell asleep at night. It just really took hold of my brain.

In an interview last year with the Columbia Journalism Review about being a journalist-entrepreneur, you talked about how, when you started Of a Kind in 2010, you didn’t want to rely the advertising model that media was dependent on, and instead aimed to "to be able to sell the things that we were writing about as our revenue stream."

So like...basically, you foresaw the whole rise of commerce/affiliate marketing that everyone from the NYT to BuzzFeed to The Strategist are getting into just now. How did you know that was the way to go?

I was working in magazines when the recession toppled so many that I loved — and dramatically reshaped the editor-publisher relationships of the ones that remained — and to me it was clear that relying on advertisers for all the $$$, as opposed to readers themselves and their affinity for and trust in the publications, was part of the problem.

Magazine editors prided themselves in being experts and arbiters — and yet magazines made money if Levi’s bought a page in the issue, not a pair of 501s. Since then, you’ve seen the shift toward diversified revenue streams in such a big way — from affiliate links to merch (like those tees from The Cut!) to conferences. That’s the way all the smartest media brands seem to be going: not putting all their eggs in one basket.

I'm also curious how you approach the mix of content and commerce with Of a Kind, especially in a landscape where the line between brands and media is becoming increasingly blurred — i.e., Glossier just hired an ELLE editor to be their head of content! What are your thoughts on that?

Something that’s been satisfying about developing content for Of a Kind since the beginning is that it’s always been very clear to our readers-slash-customers that we’re trying to sell something — something we’re really excited about, that we believe in. We’re transparent about it!

The thing is, I don’t think readers care who’s producing the content they’re consuming as long as it is good, is trustworthy, and isn’t shilly. I know I don’t! Some of my favorite sites are by brands — including Furthermore from Equinox, a gym I don’t even belong to, and The Chalkboard from Pressed Juicery — and I’m quite proud of the blog the Of a Kind team runs for our parent company Bed Bath & Beyond, called One More Thing.

What I’ve been excited to see recently is editors and writers moving back and forth between the worlds of traditional media and brands, which didn’t happen so much even five years ago. I think people are realizing that the ability to create good content is just that: the ability to create good content.

Last month, you published a book called Work Wife with your co-founder, Claire Mazur, about harnessing the power of female friendships to kill it as entrepreneurs. For women in media who aren't interested in the literal idea of starting their own biz with a BFF, what lessons from the book are still applicable for workplace success?

So many of them! One of the biggest is that a patriarchal work culture has shaped our professional lives since work culture existed, and we’re only now just getting a chance to see what a matriarchal work culture might look like. When duos, trios, and whole teams of woman steer companies, they lead with vulnerability, compassion, and a penchant for collaboration in many cases, and that can change everything.

Finally, what can you tell us about the actual creative process that you used to write this book with Claire?

The good news was that Claire and I had been holding one another mega-accountable for years and already knew what each other’s work ethics and styles were — which can be big hurdles as you’re diving into a project with someone. But this was definitely a different sort of undertaking for us, and that created its own challenges.

We did all of the big-picture thinking and interviewing of the 14 other duos and trios of work wives we spoke to for the book together (and hired the wonderful Alex Ronan to do additional research and expert interviews). From there, each chapter got its own Google Doc, and I would write a draft and bounce it to Claire, who would edit and add her own thoughts and sometimes dramatically rework, and then we’d continue to bounce back and forth from there, with Alex incorporating her findings, until we had a legit first draft to send to our editor. We continued this ping-ponging after we reviewed notes we got back from our editor, too.

We relied heavily on a book outline spreadsheet to track progress that I swiped from Jenny Blake — it helped us keep tabs on status, word count, outstanding Qs, and all the things that needed to stay organized. Claire definitely loathed that spreadsheet, and I loved it. For a book project that can feel so overwhelming and just like a looong road, I found it satisfying to be able to see progress, even in small ways.

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Don’t forget to follow Erica on @ericacerulo on Twitter and Insta, sign up for Of a Kind’s own newsletter here, and go take yr work wife out to lunch this weekend!!