"We are trying out experiments like streaks and gamification, but also helping users to connect much easier with each other in order to have a great experience."
Alongside co-founder Tak Fung, Nicole Kobilansky founded Storey in 2020 with the goal of creating a more sustainable fashion economy. After moving from London and spending over a decade in the tech industry, Nicole decided to use her skills to combine sustainability, tech, and fashion. She is excited to use her experience and love for clothes to change the story of fashion on earth.
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Table of Contents
Welcome to your ValiantCEO exclusive interview! Let’s start with a little introduction. Tell us about yourself.
Nicole Kobilansky: I’m Nicole, the co-founder and CEO of Storey. I grew up in Ukraine, and then Canada, before immigrating to the UK – but most recently, I’ve been living in the San Francisco Bay Area with my husband and young son.
NO child ever says I want to be a CEO when I grow up. What did you want to be and how did you get to where you are today? Give us some lessons you learned along the way.
Nicole Kobilansky: As a child I was really interested in anything creative – dance, drawing, singing and drama – and later I dabbled in professional dance, photography, journalism and jewelry design, before entering a career in tech. It was there that I learned you can get creative fulfillment through overseeing projects and helping to design new products to address unmet user needs!
Tell us about your business, what does the company do? What is unique about the company?
Nicole Kobilansky: We are a social network for your clothes! Our mission is to digitize everyone’s wardrobes to make clothes more wearable, shareable, searchable, and re-sellable, but really we want to help create a more sustainable fashion economy through connected wardrobes. 🙂
How to become a CEO? Some will focus on qualities, others on degrees, how would you answer that question?
Nicole Kobilansky: Anyone can be a CEO! You just need to found a company and appoint yourself as CEO. 😉 There’s a few other things you need to do – like keep the company afloat, hire great employees, and oversee the product strategy and fundraise!
What are the secrets to becoming a successful CEO? Who inspires you, who are your role models and why? Illustrate your choices.
Nicole Kobilansky: Anyone who beat the odds and started a company that no one took seriously at first, or someone who was persistently trying to solve a problem everyone else ignored. I definitely admire Natalie Massenet, the CEO of Net-a-Porter.com, who brought the designer shopping experience online with an editorial approach that was dismissed at first.
Many CEOs fall into the trap of being all over the place. What are the top activities a CEO should focus on to be the best leader the company needs? Explain.
Nicole Kobilansky: High level strategy and doing what’s best for the company without being sidetracked or getting too involved in the nitty gritty. Also maintaining and fostering a great network of advisors, mentors, potential employees and clients.
The Covid-19 Pandemic put the leadership skills of many to the test, what were some of the most difficult challenges that you faced as a CEO/Leader in the past year? Please list and explain in detail.
Nicole Kobilansky: The lockdown has actually been pretty kind to us! More people have been shopping online than ever before which has made it easy for us to show the value of our wardrobe digitization product.
What are some of the greatest mistakes you’ve noticed some business leaders made during these unprecedented times? What are the takeaways you gleaned from those mistakes?
Nicole Kobilansky: Folks who became too scared of the uncertainty of navigating the Covid landscape often took fewer risks, but many more continued to persevere and I think those have ended up better off.
In your opinion, what changes played the most critical role in enabling your business to survive/remain profitable, or maybe even thrive? What lessons did all this teach you?
Nicole Kobilansky: Being small and nimble, we’ve been able to navigate the changing circumstances pretty well. Though we have noticed that the more features and complexity we add to our app, the harder it is to experiment with new approaches, so we are working to keep striking the right balance of being lightweight but fully featured.
What is the #1 most pressing challenge you’re trying to solve in your business right now?
Nicole Kobilansky: We are trying to understand our growth levers and flywheel effects and how we can effectively reward our users for sustainable habits related to clothing. We are trying out experiments like streaks and gamification, but also helping users to connect much easier with each other in order to have a great experience.
You already shared a lot of insights with our readers and we thank you for your generosity. Normally, leaders are asked about their most useful qualities but let’s change things up a bit. What is the most useless skill you have learned, at school or during your career?
Nicole Kobilansky: Can I answer the other question instead? One of my most useful (but seemingly simple) skills is touch-typing! It’s meant I’ve been able to answer this interview fairly quickly and also saves me a lot of time when replying to emails and allows me to take really detailed notes so I don’t forget anything!
Thank you so much for your time but before we finish things off, we do have one more question. We will select these answers for our ValiantCEO Award 2021 edition. The best answers will be selected to challenge the award.
Share with us one of the most difficult decisions you had to make, this past year 2021, for your company that benefited your employees or customers. What made this decision so difficult and what were the positive impacts?
Nicole Kobilansky: We have had to turn down some investments which we knew weren’t right for us for various reasons, and that has been hard knowing that we have limited runway! But this added pressure has actually ensured we stay laser focussed on our KPIs.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Nicole Kobilansky for taking the time to do this interview and share her knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Nicole Kobilansky or her company, you can do it through her – Instagram
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