Why I Went Back to Folding Shirts

I was at Park Meadows Mall on a Friday evening, sitting in a chair designed for retired men waiting for their spouses, writing on my MacBook Air about what it costs a founder to build their identity inside their company.

I know. The irony is not lost on me.

Park Meadows has these high, cabin-like ceilings. Wood and light and a particular kind of quiet that you don’t expect from a mall. I never feel peaceful in malls. I felt peaceful there. So I kept going back, finding that chair, and working.

I had bought a black button-down from UNTUCKit a few months earlier. A Gironde tall slim, performance fabric. I didn’t know any of that at the time. I just knew it fit and I liked it.

When I got up to leave, I caught a sign out of the corner of my eye. “Now Hiring.”

I didn’t stop. I kept walking. But over the next few days it wouldn’t leave me alone. It kept growing, the way certain things do when your intuition has decided something before your brain has caught up. By Sunday night it was loud enough that I made a deal with myself: go talk to them Monday.

Monday came and went. Tuesday I walked in, browsed for a few minutes, and told someone I’d seen the sign and it had been in my head for days. By Thursday I’d completed my second interview and they’d taken a chance on someone who, for nearly his entire career, had either been the boss or worked alone.

The first four weeks were genuinely disorienting. I didn’t know where anything was, what anything was called, or why certain things were done certain ways. I asked a lot of questions. Probably too many.

But the music was a problem from day one.

The store used a service called Cloud Cover. It played songs that seemed specifically chosen to be incongruent with everything the store was trying to do, and then it repeated them, on a loop, every day. I started wondering whether the selection was driven by licensing cost rather than intention.

The incongruence wasn’t subtle. Here was a store that had thought carefully about its fit, its fabric, its customer, its floor layout, its staff presentation. And then: whatever this was, on a loop, every shift.

I’d spent years as a producer. I know what it sounds like when the wrong lever gets pulled. This was a lot of wrong levers, every day, in a room that deserved better.

A few months in, I was on the floor with a coworker named Chance. We were somewhere between a task and a conversation and one of us said: what if the music was actually designed for the customer? What if it made them feel like this place was built for them?

I sat on it for a week or two before doing anything with it. Then I ran it by a musical collaborator of mine, Jordan. He said it honestly sounded like too hard a problem to solve.

There’s something I had to reckon with during those early months at the store. I came in having scaled a company to 180 people. I knew how to run things, how to read a room at the organizational level, how to make decisions at speed. What I didn’t know how to do was be the new guy.

Being the boss, especially early and with some success behind you, forms habits in how you interact with people. Some of those habits aren’t good. I wanted to get people in the door. But foot traffic was out of scope. I had to learn, slowly, how to operate without taking responsibility for everything. That recalibration is ongoing.

Some people thought I tried too hard. They were right. I was still learning what it felt like to just do the job in front of me.

The shirt job is about following my intuition into something, and discovering new things about the world and people and myself along the way.

Entuned came out of that. So did a few other things I’m still figuring out.

For the story behind Entuned, see the about page.