You may know Melissa Bernstein as thee “Melissa” from the world famous “Melissa and Doug,” billion-dollar toy company, which has created over 10,000 toys for kids around the world since she confounded the company in 1988. In fact, your kids may have some of their products!
In this episode, Melissa tells Moshe how she and Doug turned their business into an empire, and why you should never wait until your product is “perfect” before releasing it. Plus, she shares why they’re so passionate about their new venture, Lifelines.
How Melissa and Doug’s company came to life:
“I mean, it was truly that leap of faith jumping into the abyss of the unknown and leaving our corporate jobs. But every product I create is a leap of faith, right? Because you have no idea whether it will be received beautifully or be promptly rejected.
So, I think creativity and entrepreneurship are a leap of faith every single day. We left our jobs at a time when everybody followed that corporate path all the way to retirement and usually with one company. So, it was not recognized as a good move by anyone we knew.
Working with your spouse:
“You can’t do entrepreneurship alone. It’s too challenging and it’s too difficult. And the best partnerships are the ones where each partner takes completely different roles and then you support each other in your respective roles. … If you both have the same skills and talents and you’re both in the exact same pieces of the pie, it will inevitably lead to a bitter breakup.”
Releasing products before they’re perfect:
“I mean, every single day, every product I make – because I am the product creator of Melissa and Doug and of our new Venture Lifelines – every product we come out with is in a state of what I call ‘continuous improvement.’ … I was a perfectionist, which is honestly the worst scourge that can happen to anyone. There is no positive benefit from being a perfectionist. But I’ve changed that word to a verb, which is now perfecting.
So, I am in a continuous state of perfecting everything I do. So, when I come out with a product, you know, it’s as good as I think it can be without being in the market. I call it my 80% rule. I release things when they’re about 80% there because I can’t think of any other way to get them closer to 100%. I need to put them in the market to then see what’s wrong with them. To be able to fix those things and get them closer to 100% … even though they never get all the way there.”
Melissa’s upcoming book “The Heart of Entrepreneurship:
“The takeaways are very simple. We’re all born creative. You know, we are born completely open to experience. Like we are a wide-open book showing everything we feel; being a sponge that is curious and reveling in the wonder and awe of life.
But unfortunately, very early on, we become clogged with extrinsic societal expectations. And before long, all that wonder and awe and creativity is replaced by performance and perfection. And it makes it very hard for us. To take that essence, that genius that is born in each one of us, and bring it out to the world because we’re terrified of rejection, and we also are trained with needing to arrive at a destination too quickly.
So, this book is the recipe to live a life where you will go back to that childlike wonder and be a wellspring of creativity without ever having a blockage the rest of your life.”
Why she and Doug created Lifelines:
“As I was going through my own wellbeing journey in the last four years since we spoke, I realized that I needed to create a practice to ground myself, right? Because my mind wants to be worried about the future. It wants to think about the past.
So, I started thinking about what tools and I also realized along the way that my senses were the way that I always was able to ground myself, either through nature or through a warm bath, through rubbing my hands together, through smelling something delicious.
And as I thought about the tools that I can integrate into my daily practice, I realized when I started to look them up, none of them existed and I started to see an entire line of wellbeing tools. Tools that I can have at my disposal at any moment of the day, wherever I travel, to make it so I can immediately untether from stress and activate calm and joy, and that’s what I did.
Since I couldn’t find them, I created them. And we have close to a hundred products now already that are these sensory immersion tools.”
