So You Make Bags?

I had coffee with a potential partner last week in a shop near our London office. I spent fifteen minutes laying out the architecture of Canard. I talked about the logistics shift, the single-hub model, the global market reach, and on and on. I felt like I was painting a masterpiece. When I stopped for air, he shifted his weight and said, "Interesting. So you're making bags?"

This is brand number sixteen for me. By now, the pitch should be a razor. Instead, I’m still swinging a blunt object. It’s embarrassing to admit that after twenty years, I still walk into meetings and fail to explain the very thing I’m building. But experience has taught me that visions are like raw clay; they need to be handled, dropped, and reshaped a hundred times before they can actually hold water. The confusing looks people give me are not a sign the idea is broken. They are a sign that I am still just tapping on a table.

I remember this Stanford study in the 90s where they asked people to tap the rhythm of Happy Birthday on a desk. The tappers were certain the listeners would guess the song fifty percent of the time. The actual success rate was two percent. The problem is that the tappers have the full orchestra playing in their heads. They hear the melody, the lyrics, and the harmony. The person across the table just hears a series of disconnected, erratic beats on wood. This is what I call the founder’s trap.

We live inside our vision. I obsess over the weight of the hardware and the specific shade of duck egg blue on the liner—Pantone 7457 to be exact. The whole song is playing on repeat in my brain. Then when I try to share it, all the other person hears is a thump. Most founders stop there. They get frustrated or think the listener is the problem. They retreat into a deck with sixty slides to try and prove the melody exists. I’ve learned that the first twenty conversations are supposed to be bad.

You have to hear your own tapping from the outside. You have to notice where the eyes glaze over and where they lean in. The narrative doesn't arrive fully formed; it’s carved out of the friction of being misunderstood. I realized halfway through that coffee that I was giving him too many variables. Too much logic. I was buried in the specifics of a 3PL API and shipping manifests when I should have been talking about why the product deserves to exist.

The sting of that "So you make bags?" comment is exactly what I needed. It’s a reminder that the orchestra is only playing for me right now. I have to keep talking until the person across the table starts humming along. I might be wrong about how long it takes to find the melody, but I know the only way to find it is to keep tapping until the rhythm finally breaks into a song.