“Just start” with Megan Kitt — Fem Founder™
By: Kristin Marquet
Tags: Founders, Founder Stories, Female Founders

Megan Kitt is the founder of Tuli, a fashion brand that fights poverty by selling ethically sourced, fair trade jewelry. She started the company while working as a journalist in Uganda and, since then, has expanded to Kenya. Outside of work, you can catch her reading, shooting photos, or traveling. You can learn more about Tuli at www.tuli.com or about Megan at www.megankitt.com.

Can you tell our readers about your background?

I started my career as a journalist, which, while much different from running a fashion brand, I think is part of my competitive advantage as a founder: I’m used to avid research, fast deadlines, and making things happen even when I’m told no. My goal as a journalist was to make a positive impact on the world, so while my career has changed, my purpose has not.

Years before, I’d worked as a model to pay for college, and I’d seen how powerful an industry fashion is. I’d long thought the industry should be harnessed for good, and when I met a group of women in Kampala who wanted jobs so badly they were making jewelry from salvaged scraps of paper, I knew it was time to act.

What inspired you to start your business?

I want to end poverty. It’s unjust that a person’s fate is determined by where and into what circumstances they’re born. The more I traveled and reported on global development, the more I realized that charity was a bandage, not a solution, to the problem. In fact, while walking the streets of Kampala, of Nairobi, of New Dehli, of Manila, what people living in poverty asked me for was not money. It was work. They wanted a long-term, sustainable source of income so they wouldn’t have to depend on aid.

I was inspired by the women I met in Kampala who wanted to work so badly that they’d make jewelry and take it daily to the market, despite how infrequently they made sales. In Uganda, buyers of that kind of jewelry are few. Worldwide, they’re endless. My role in Tuli is to bring artisans’ craft to a global market, so they can earn a fair, stable wage that empowers them to rise out of poverty.

Where is your business based?

We opened our first workshop in Uganda and have since expanded to Kenya, where our team makes beautiful brass and bone jewelry to complement our beaded Uganda line. Tuli’s US base is in Tri-Cities, Washington.

How did you start your business? What were the first steps you took?

My early steps were all focused on products and impact. You can have the most beautiful branding and robust marketing strategy in the world, but without a product to back it up, your business won’t last. I worked to find a stable supply chain, which is difficult to do in East Africa, and a small team of women whose skills would match the international market’s high standards. I also spent a lot of time ensuring that our wages were fair and that we were truly making a difference in our partner artisans’ lives.

Those steps were all during my initial, month-long trip to Uganda. I flew home to Tokyo, where I was living at the time, with a backpack full of jewelry, and got to work setting up a legal business, developing a name and brand, and building a website. I didn’t have a ton of money to invest (hello, journalist’s salary!), so I did a lot of it myself until I could afford to hire it out, so we had a scrappy company culture from the start, even when it was just me piecing a website together from my apartment.

What has been the most effective way of raising awareness for your business?

Storytelling has been huge for us. Tuli’s products are made with elevated design and an obsession with quality, but what truly makes them unique is how they’re made and what they stand for. We invite our customers into a story of impact and change and show them how they become a part of that change when they join us. Humans are story-driven by nature, and that’s where I think my journalism background is an advantage for us.

What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?

A huge challenge has been building infrastructure for business in East Africa. Ethical production is important to me, but that means it’s harder to do. Finding consistent sources of materials, building out production facilities, and training production managers have been more difficult than it would have been if I’d gone with a traditional production route.

Another has been growing in the fashion space, especially in the early days when our marketing budget was limited. Fashion is a big industry, but it’s also a saturated one, and it’s hard to stand out and make a name for yourself.

I solved both problems through the same skill: Tenacity. I’ve spent countless hours in both Kampala and Nairobi trying to chase down sources and being told no again and again and again — until I’m finally told yes. I’ve built workshops only to run into a new, unforeseen production hitch. I’ve had people I trusted try to steal my team from me. I’ve had so many issues arise that would have been understandable game-enders, but I kept pushing, and we’re still here.

Similarly, I’ve adopted countless strategies to get my brand out there. Some things have worked well for us and some have completely failed. And, to be perfectly honest, it took time before Tuli became an established brand with steady sales. I just kept pushing until I found a way to reach our customers.

How do you stay focused?

Anyone running a business has a seemingly infinite number of things running through her head at a time. The way I combat a wandering mind is by being very intentional with my time. I set goals for every day, week, month, quarter, and year and put benchmarks in place to ensure I’m meeting them, and I also have checklists of things I need to do daily, weekly, and monthly at my desk so I can ensure none of the minutiae gets lost in larger ideas.

I also create a daily, numbered to-do list. I used to simply order tasks in order of importance, but I’ve found putting fast, easy tasks between the larger ones keep me in a rhythm and feeling accomplished enough to stay focused on one thing at a time. There are tons of productivity hacks out there, but it’s important for people to self-monitor to see which strategies work best for them.

How do you differentiate your business from the competition?

There are a lot of fashion brands out there, but most of them use unethical production practices by sourcing from sweatshops that used forced or coerced labor and unsafe working conditions. Tuli offers jewelry that fits in beautifully with the current fashion market in terms of style and quality, but with an amazing cause behind it. Since I started Tuli six years ago, I’ve watched people’s lives entirely transform because of something as simple as jewelry. We’ve had artisans and their children go to college, start businesses, buy land, and rise out of poverty. I truly believe our products are remarkable, and I think that passion translates to our customers.

What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?

Connecting our artisans to our customers has been the most effective way we’ve marketed Tuli. We did this through three distinct campaigns: Our “Send a message to East Africa” feature on our site, where customers can send messages to our team and receive a response; our artisan bios and a video we produced showcasing our team and their lives in Uganda (you can see it on Tuli’s homepage at tuli.co); and our slogan, “Wear your values,” which succinctly tells new customers reached through ads the value our jewelry offers.

What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?

Just start! I learned on the job with Tuli, and while that means we’ve made some mistakes, experience is the best teacher (and the sooner you can generate revenue, the better). If I’d waited until I felt 100% ready, I’d probably still be pre-launch. Tuli is not perfect, but it’s made a huge impact on people’s lives. Waiting would have been a disservice both to our artisans and to me.

Along those lines, trust yourself. Studies have shown that women experience imposter syndrome more frequently than men do, and I spent too much of Tuli’s early days questioning my qualifications as a leader. Even today, I sometimes read articles about me or about Tuli and think I’m being oversold. But that’s not true — we’ve just been conditioned to question ourselves. The only way to get past that, in my experience, is to push forward.

What’s your favorite app, blog, and book? Why?

I love Later’s marketing blog; unlike others focused on social media, it stays brief and doesn’t dispense the same advice we’ve all heard (I also love using them for social media scheduling).

This may seem rudimentary, but the Google Drive suite remains my favorite productivity app. My team works around the globe, and even in the US, Tuli’s team is fully remote. I travel frequently in non-covid times and I’m a mom, so having collaborative documents in my pocket at all times keeps everyone on the same page and lets me step away from the office for large chunks of the day to spend time with my daughter.

My current favorite business book is Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink. It’s helped me both as a leader of my team and as a marketer.

What’s your favorite business tool or resource? Why?

I love Hubspot’s CRM software. It’s powerful for automating things like emails and follow-ups, tracking sales and projections, and remembering retail buyers, journalists, and other people I speak with regularly. I’m not exaggerating when I say I’m not sure what Tuli would do without it.

Who is your business role model? Why?

Although I take a lot of inspiration from famous entrepreneurs, my top business role models are my parents, because they’ve instilled their values of integrity and family into their home building company, which they co-own with my brother. My dad consistently earns contracts because people trust him, and they positioned their business in a way that gives them plenty of time with their kids and grandkids.

Those values shine through in the business’ marketing, which is not only clever marketing — who wouldn’t want a family-focused business building their own family’s home? — but is also honest to who they are. Similarly, I hope Tuli reflects my values of compassion and justice. My parents were the first who showed me business success can exist alongside ethical treatment of customers and employees, and that was what gave me the courage to pursue Tuli, whose entire thesis is that fashion shouldn’t come at human expense.

How do you balance work and life?

I’m very guarded with my time — it’s the only way. I could sit in my office and work on Tuli 24/7 if I wanted to; there’s always more work to do. Similarly, I’d love to spend all day every day playing with my daughter, traveling, and hiking. Both are important to me, and both feel all-encompassing. I have set hours to work on Tuli, and set hours to work on my business, and I’m strict with them. That way, I can enjoy both my personal and professional lives, and I’m not spending time in the office wondering if I should be with my family or vice versa.

What’s your favorite way to decompress?

I love to cook while enjoying a glass of wine and a good podcast or audiobook. It keeps my mind engaged and is creative in a way that has nothing to do with work.

What do you have planned for the next six months?

We just launched Tuli Studio, where we create private-label items for other brands. I want to see a world where all fashion is produced ethically and Tuli is not exceptional in its fair labor practices, but I know from building Tuli how difficult it is to integrate ethical production. So, we handle manufacturing for other brands who want to impact the world positively. The launch has been bigger than we expected, so that and our holiday campaigns and launches are at the forefront of our company’s planning right now.

Beyond that, we have an exciting new product line that will be releasing in early 2021. I can’t share many details of it now, but I can say this: I’m very, very excited about what it’s going to do for the brand, for our customers, and for our partner artisans in East Africa.

How can our readers connect with you?

Tuli is online at tuli.co or @tulistyle on Instagram. I’m also always happy to connect personally with other founders. I can be reached at megankitt.com or @megankitt on Instagram.