Well, I had no idea how homesick I was…. until one of my most favorite songs came on while I worked away.

Sigh.

I have been working on and planning some really incredible things lately, from planning how to make our children’s home in Haiti more cozy and homey for our kids to starting research on our very first project in the United States. I’ve been meeting with people (celebrities, international heroes, you name it) who are way cooler than I am and I am smiling and back-patting my way into planning incredible partnerships and press that is set to really redefine responsible business and what you can achieve and change as a totally normal person (like me.) I have been speaking all over the country, travelling 90% of the time, and am having to be ‘on’ every single moment of the day as I make new connections and get great new ideas.

So… things are hectic. I’m pushing myself harder than ever before because suddenly I have an incredible platform and perspective and audience to truly make a difference in the world.

I am so so thrilled about all of this, but have been feeling a lot of pressure lately. Pressure to do something huge, pressure to show people how they can make a difference, pressure to still be a normal fun 26-year-old not-quite-a-lawyer, pressure to grow up and ‘get a real job’ (parents, sigh), pressure to inspire others with my talks, pressure to fix an entire nation, and on and on. Going against the grain on everything ever is exhausting sometimes!

And this song came on… and I felt more like my old self again and just thought, “Man… I wish I was in Ohio.”

Anyway, thanks for listening. Your comments and daily e-mails are so so appreciated. They are the fuel to my/our world changing. (:

Two versions of Country Roads below, both my favorites and staples on my playlist.

Love,
Kyle

Toots and the Maytals:

Osborne Brothers:

Well, while I’ve been away from the blog, I bet you haven’t missed my sappy posts, huh? Unfortunately, this is one in the making. (:

Well, today is a big day for us at b&b, as its the one year anniversary of our online store.

The online store really changed things for us and we are loving every minute. It’s allowed us to connect with our customers individually, to chat with them, on the phone and via e-mail, about our products, their kids… and everything else you could imagine.

Its certainly also brought its challenges. We’ve been out of stock of something in the store since we launched and nothing stays in stock very long. We’ve messed up orders and shipping. Now that I think about it, we’ve really messed up in every way possible. BUT… we’ve alway put our customer happiness as our top priority, and I think we are succeeding.

All said and done, this has been an incredible year for us as a company, and we’ve loved being able to meet you all through our online store. We’ve been thrilled to  hand write notes in gifts to your loved ones and we’ve happily included some surprise free gift in your orders as a little ‘thank you for liking us.’ I, Kyle, have tried to include a handwritten note in a majority of orders, and definitely all of the orders that came in while I was in the office. Late nights spent at the office writing “Thank you for your order!” are some of my most cherished.

And I’m excited to tell you that our store will be evolving a bit between now & the holidays. We will start including stickers in the orders (we are WAYYYY excited about this) as well as including cards with how you can find us on Twitter/Facebook, etc. You know, we will start doing the sorts of things that real companies do. (:

We are also working on some ridiculous innovative and groundbreaking cradle-to-grave projects with our garments. (This is a disturbing term given our industry, so we are trying to figure out what to call it.)

AND, as I type this, Jodie is busy at work finalizing the design for the coolest (and most fun) mailing envelopes that anyone has ever seen!

But thats not even the coolest part about today being our 1-year birthday! I’ve been working hard for the past year to get us to a point where we can permanently lower our prices. Making the healthiest, safest, highest quality, most durable, most environmentally-friendly, most socially-conscious clothing available at a more affordable price has been my goal since the day I started barley&birch.

So, everything in our store is now $25.

If this seems sort of wacky, you are right. Companies don’t do this. But I would note that companies that love their customers and the world more than they love themselves SHOULD do this.

So we did.

Oh, and all through this month, all of our short sleeved lapneck tees are $15.

Yeah, its all a pretty big deal. (:

Happy birthday, online store! We love you!

Love,
Kyle

P.S. The official e-mail in the morning will look like this:

I’m sure you’ve all heard that the world lost visionary Steve Jobs today. It is certain that the world is far worse without him in it.

While we are in separate realm and industry, Steve Jobs was an incredible inspiration for me as I started and grew my company. I watched the talk below approximately a million times in the last 4 years. In some way, Steve Jobs validated my weird approach to everything in life. I have lived my life sticking out, being different, not fitting in with normal people, and perpetually going against the grain.

The New York Times, in their August 2011 article about his resignation, said, “His personality made Apple Apple. That’s why no other company has ever been able to duplicate Apple’s success…and that’s because [no other company has] had such a single, razor-focused, deeply opinionated, micromanaging, uncompromising, charismatic, persuasive, mind-blowingly visionary leader.”

Steve Jobs, his existence and success, gave me confidence that it was okay to be this way. To have a vision, to work at it, to not conform, to focus, and to succeed with humility and an increased determination to never stop.

His talks and interviews served as shoves onward, as I took risks and stayed out of a cubicle, moved all over the country, and stayed both focused and childlike.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

When I would question my path, get tired, and think about actually growing up, I would remember the closing line in this talk:

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

And just like that, I would increase my hustle and increase my foolishness.

To prematurely reveal part of an incredible secret, less than a week ago, I sat in the home of Steve Jobs talking about my vision for responsible business, young entrepreneurs that self-fund companies, and small scale, grassroots world-changing. In short, I will tell you that that day, my respect for Steve Jobs grew a millionfold. In my experience, the purest of hearts are those that remain humble and hungry to learn and help others without any fanfare. In light of his passing, I wanted to tell you all that this was Steve Jobs.

The thoughts of the barley & birch team are with Steve’s amazing family, his incredibly loving staff, and the fans that adore him. Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Happy Saturday to you all! Just wanted to share a quick personal story from this weekend.

This weekend was the first in a while that I have been in town and able to spend some time with 5 of my closest friends.

We went to dinner to celebrate one friend’s birthday. We had a wonderful night. Just before midnight, two of our friends said goodbye for the night.  Later, the rest of us were getting ready to do the same when we got a call telling us that the basement of one of our best friends was flooded (after the foot of snow on the ground melted in one afternoon.)

What happened next made me feel happy.

The guys I was sitting with all immediately said “WELL, let’s pile in the cars and go clean it up.”

Two friends (including the one whose birthday we were celebrating) had their 3-month-old baby in tow. One friend had just had her galbladder removed. All of us had had a long week.

The friend that had left earlier also happens to own a professional cleaning service. So we woke him up and drug him over to the basement, where we were all standing in water, looking puzzled and ready to work.

(Side note: I went with him back to his huge office building and rode back to my friend’s house in one of his big trucks. My excitement was on the level of a 5 year old on their first field trip.)

Anyway, we all worked to get furniture out of the water, vacuum (?) up the water, run big hoses out through the window and do whatever our professional cleaner friend told us to do.

And at 3am, we all slinked off to bed.

I woke up this morning with a warm heart.

Of the zillions of people that I have met in my life, I struggle to think of more than a handful that would jump up without a second thought to cap off their evening of margaritas and celebration with some wet-box-moving and furniture-hauling to help a beloved friend.

My parents always told me “Kyle, you ARE the company you keep.” when I was growing up.

And last night, I was really proud of who I, through the power of association, was. I’m so lucky to have all of them as friends.

So all of you raising kids out there, feel free to employ one of the most oft stated phrases of my childhood. I also encourage you all to do whatever it takes to instill the loyalty and kindness in your young ones that I saw my adult friends write the book on last night.

(Another side note, the equipment used to clean up flooded basements looks suspiciously similar to the equipment used in the movie Ghost Busters. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t singing the theme song the entire time I was allowed to be using said equipment. Photo below is not indicative of who did the lion’s share of the work, the others just moved too fast to be photographed. But how sweet is the vacuum thing I am attempting to maneuver?)

Typically, I don’t get too worked up about all the technological developments and new gadgets on the market. I actually tend to shy away from it all for the most part. (I’d much rather type a letter to a friend on my typewriter than on my laptop.)

Today, however, I realized that my smartphone has succeeded in bottling sunshine, something I have been trying to figure out since childhood. Its true. I think I should call a scientific journal or something to report my findings.

Time for another story!

So I met one of my best friends, whom I will call ‘Elizabeth’, at age 4, on the first day of kingergarten. She had just moved and didn’t know anyone, so our teacher placed her at the red table, next to a overly talkative and friendly yours truly, who had known all the kids in the class since she was 1. (Small town.) Needless to say, we were fast friends.

Flash forward 21 years later. Elizabeth has been teaching kindergarten for a few years and I have always made a point to come into her classes for an afternoon or two whenever I was back in Ohio. This year, though, I am back in Ohio and live close enough that I am able to spend every other Friday in her classroom, helping out with whatever she needs help with. This is always the highlight of my week.

By now, the kids have figured out that I am their age at heart (they think I am 11 years old max) and we get pretty excited when we see each other. They are great.

After a few months volunteering in the classroom, I would find myself be in the middle of a long work night, after a long day of school behind me and another full day ahead, and I would think, “If only I could be re-energized by those kids right now…”

It then occurred to me that I could attempt to bottle this joy in the form of recording it on my phone.

See Example A of my first successful attempt to bottle sunshine. I am walking into their classroom. (I’ve cut out the video and cut the audio of these to take out names to keep these little ones well insulated and private. Hence the reason for their teacher’s name change.)

Example A:
kindergarten #1

Now, Example B makes me smile for the amount of wonderfulness that can be crammed into 64 seconds. I actually tried to stop recording but failed. Thank goodness. I walk into their class, spend 20 seconds getting 25 tiny hugs. They then dispense with formalities and begin telling me about getting casts off, showing me the cool stick-on tattoos they have, asking me to help them come up with a word that starts with ‘C’ and deducing that my name starts with a ‘K.’ I love these kids and I have played this audio at my most utterly exhausted of moments, remembered the hugs and smiles and goofiness, and have yet to not smile/giggle.

Example B:
kindergarten #2

Example C is even mushier for me. My friend Elizabeth recently had surgery and will be out for at least two weeks recovering. I don’t think she has ever, in her life, taken a sick day. (We are raised to be invincibly tough in our hometown. She was trying to do squats the day after her surgery.) Needless to say, its killing her to be home from work. She is so unbelievably dedicated to her job and students that its truly torture. On Tuesday, I went in to her class to have my tiny friends sign a card for her and today I went to their Valentine’s Day party to drop off my treats for them and Elizabeth’s.

While there, I filmed a video from them, to her. So she can see her kids. She can see them enjoying a party that she worked hard to plan, she can see them behaving for their substitute (sort of), and can see their smiling faces and hear them say hi and that they miss her and hope that she feels better soon. That is my Example C. I won’t share this video/audio, but I will tell you that it would melt you into a puddle of candy hearts. I rewatched it and got super mushy.

So three successful attempts to bottle sunshine thus far. I will keep trying before I formally publish these scientific findings. I am just pretty excited about it.

So, no really great takeaway here. I am sure every single one of you realized a few years ago that if your phone takes video, it an capture some special moments.

I just wanted to share this lovely sunny moment with you as we head into the weekend. (:

Love,
Kyle