 Today we're excited to welcome someone who proves that it really is all about the journey. Kate McLeod joins us to talk about pivoting to a more creative role and combining all of her passions to build her dream business. This is School of Hustle, the show where we find advice and inspiration from people who are making their own way. I'm Shannon, the VP of social here at GoDaddy and I live and breathe at the hustle of business. Today we're filming from the hustle of it all at the WeWork Times Square in New York City. Everybody, let's give Kate the biggest welcome. It's so good to be here. It's good to have you. Well, I'm fascinated by your story. You started working at a trading desk and now you're the co-founder of the Body Stone. I am. Oh my goodness. What was your inspiration in creating a product that completely reimagines lotion? My first job in New York was trading rates at Goldman. That was really not for me. I lasted a couple years and actually wound up in culinary school. I've always loved working with my hands and then really long journey years later love brought me back to New York and I really didn't know what I was going to do. It was actually my sister-in-law who ripped a bottle of lotion out of my hands and asked me if I knew what I was putting on my body and to be quite truthful, I had never really given that question any thought. She threw the lotion out and she handed me cocoa butter. Have you ever seen raw cocoa butter? It's hard. Yes, it's raw hard solids. Yeah. Cocoa butter is the most stable vegetable bath at room temperature. It's an amazing moisturizer. It goes on very nice like silk onto the skin on like a shea butter or a beeswax which is stickier or can rub or tug you know on the skin but it has a very high melting point. Its melting point is our core in our body temperature so you have to melt it down in order to apply it. My sister-in-law told me to just go spend some time with my body. We don't all have that much time so I took it home. I after culinary school I became a pastry chef and I was based in London and Paris and South Africa and Zurich. In Paris I worked a lot with chocolate. French chocolate is called couverture. It has a very high percentage of cocoa butter. So I threw the cocoa butter into my double boiler and instead of tempering the cocoa butter with like butter or other typical fats we might use in the kitchen, I was actually going through yoga teacher training at the time and had learned all about these other base oils and are you data. So I brought in some of my favorite sweet almond oil apricot kernel avocado fractionated coconut and I wanted to see if I could change the cocoa butter really make it so that it would just glide on contact and this is definitely not the first iteration of this. This is the body stone. Oh it's real this is great so it's nice it fits in the palm of your hand and then actually I don't use the stone at home but just I mean sorry the cloth at home for application but if you could just give me your arm so you can see this just melts right on contact. It uses we have five core ingredients the cocoa butter those four nourishing oils just melts right on contact uses your body heat. It's a really nice application this one too. Yes I like it and what's cool is there's no dispensing unit no plastic no pump no chemicals going back to what my sister in law initially said to me you know do you know what you're putting on your body yeah no so five core ingredients and also go spend some time with yourself and this is really a large part of it this is my self-care practice and it's about coming to know yourself taking care of yourself through the power of your own touch and I love the packaging as well. So I had a custom mold made um that in and of itself was really fun there was only one guy I could find his name is a video and he's in Long Island City he's a sculptor by trade and he sat me down and we came up with the stone shaped together and it was very grounding and tactile and I literally spent probably seven months talking to different distributors and I looked at glass and marble and copper um different types of wood and this is a sustainable bamboo farm in northern China and it's a custom spice canister. We monitor the temperature process from beginning to end we melt the cocoa butter down we blend in the oils they're hand poured they're unmolded by hand they're wrapped in organic unbleached linen and packaged in their sustainably farm bamboo canisters. So it is really a process of love this is a ritual a self-care ritual it works this is not something that was cooked up in a business school classroom that's right or literally created to create a business this was me over my stove in Williamsburg and the first I don't know two thousand stones were made in my kitchen um and that was just a hot mess yeah but um what does success look like in your business I think the answer that comes to my mind is to just keep going and you just keep if necessary pivoting and iterating and continuing but just making it work but I think for you too since your life is so much about the journey I don't know that you ever have just one moment where it all has culminated success because I feel like for you you will have something else that will come you know what I mean I think it's an evolving story for the rest of your life I wanted to have achieved something or I wanted to build something just to show whether I had like a little boy or a little girl like it's hard out there this is a tough city yeah it is like yeah you can do it and this is actually it's a tough city but it's a loving supportive city and you can go out there and build something well we're going to go out there right now and play my favorite game called hustle time in hustle time for 60 seconds okay how many cards you can get through something that is currently stuck in your head yeah ski trip or beach vacation ski trip describe yourself in three words feisty scrappy loving surfs up or cocktails poolside surfs up least favorite candy snickers came to my head saturday morning cartoons or late night tv saturday morning cartoons drive yourself or call a car service drive summer or winter winter favorite breakfast cereal um hashi favorite jennifer lopez movie oh oh the wedding how would your mother describe you as a lot number one guilty pleasure chocolate one word you wish you could take away from the english language boozy brunch or morning workout morning workout all right i'm gonna count that one 11 12 13 14 15 favorite part of your day yoga with my husband best piece of advice you've ever gotten do you worst piece of advice to continue doing something that you don't love because it's safe how do you use your career to inspire others i try and move through the day with integrity ever felt like walking away yes um starting this has been such a roller coaster i'm so blessed to have so as i mentioned my husband started hinge i'm within his network he has just an amazing network of other founders and so i've been blessed to have exposure to them and realize that this is a constant roller coaster but there are days where i am like this is so cool and i love what i'm doing and there are days where i'm like wow my ego got like really big and i can't believe i'm doing this and what am i doing and i just want to stay in bed one thing you still need to learn building a team for this is is hard and giving pieces of it away and learning to trust and to to actually to not sometimes i can be really negative very quickly and i'm like no you're doing it wrong but like helping people and working together and when it's so close to your heart it's it's difficult i completely understand what do you want people to learn from you that you're never on the wrong path that you're you're right where you are supposed to be right now and you're doing beautiful what's next for you um a baby and hopefully building body stones into a national and international company who inspires you everyone who gets up and does something they love in particular like my husband inspires me people like jen hyman from rent the runway and fire me who challenges you i talk about my husband a lot but we are each other's opposites we are each other's triggers we either work really well together or it's like her um and and he's a tough critic like ninch has grown into a really big brand for a reason he's hard social uh was very excited to hear that you were coming as well we let everyone who follows go daddy i want to know that they could even though they're not necessarily here with us they can ask you a question what do we get and i i picked you that i really liked and the first is from kelly okay and kelly asks what is the most inspirational story from a client a mom who had a six month old who was suffering terrible eczema and the thing about so this one the stone i brought on the show is mama stone this is completely unscented no essential oils so this can literally be used on the most sensitive of skin and also in the most sensitive of places it doubles as essential lubricants just a little that's amazing they are very amazing in the bedroom just telling you but going back to that story no go there it's incredible um but going back to that story when little babies start to like when moms start to bathe them you know regularly and start to incorporate so a lot of soaps can be very harsh and very drying on the skin and so babies can break out with rashes they can develop like excessive dry skin eczema and babies don't like lotion they get it it's icky it's nasty um but babies really like the stone yeah matty asked what was your method behind creating the branding for your company that's a great question matty so our actual symbol which is highly abstracted this actually represents the hindu goddess kalli and kalli is a badass warrior goddess she like drinks blood and cuts men's head off and she's just she's she's raw feminine power um and she's occasionally portrayed in tree pose um and so we found this amazing font and this wonderful freelance brander actually took apart the letters in the keep the cloud and made our logo we have one last question okay another form of advice from our pug noodle oh that's right now noodle however it's not physically with us today because noodle is on summer break i'm soon as a point in but we have we have a different plan here he says hi i want to show you um just so you can see what noodle is actually doing here noodle is upstate literally living it up yeah now he did send in his um proxy and we have a friend for you here and noodle his question is um noodle loves to look and feel his best and he loves to moisturize he also understands how important it is to use natural ingredients what should he consider as a pug when looking for his grooming products so i actually get a lot of people write in and say that their dog accidentally sometimes dogs have eaten these um or like if they put the body stone in their legs dogs go crazy and they lick and lick and lick and eat and eat and the amazing thing is none of these dogs get sick up to 60 of what we put on our skin sinks through within the first 30 seconds after application you might not be putting it in your mouth but you are consuming it so noodle you have to make sure that you could actually eat it and it's not toxic well we all learned a lot today thank you for sharing all of that with us thank you again for having me we always like to end the show on a final thought like a fortune cookie at the end of a great meal okay i'm going to read you three quotes listen to the quotes and let me know which one resonates the most with you in one okay number one life is 10 of what happens to you and 90 percent how you react to it number two the way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing number three don't let yesterday take up too much of today definitely the second one the hardest part for me was just getting getting over that fear well i hope that everybody watching enjoyed today's episode i loved i loved this episode i loved thank you so much it was great to meet you as well and yeah and how can you even follow me on social if they want to look into your product we join the tribe that uses body stones we are at the body stone um and our website is kate mcleod dot com that's awesome and of course follow go daddy across social because we are bringing fabulous entrepreneurs like kate every week and you don't want to miss out thank you so much bye