Going into business with a friend can be a fun way for two close pals to leverage their passions and entrepreneurial spirit into creating a dream career. But are there extra challenges when working alongside a gal pal? Are you more apt to fight within the workplace or disagree over company decisions? And will transitioning from good friends into business partners change the dynamic of the relationship? While these types of situations can arise, that doesn’t mean you can’t be successful business partners with a buddy. Emily Current and Meritt Elliott are living proof of that.
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The duo, who bonded in college over their mutual fashion taste, went into business together in 2008, eventually creating popular “boyfriend” style jeans. In 2012, they began collaborating on home design, offering lines such as Emily + Meritt for Pottery Barn. Current and Elliott also run the women’s apparel line, THE GREAT, have transitioned into a crafting Emily + Meritt friendship-themed knits and accessories, and were responsible for spearheading the Los Angeles launch of the Female Founder Collective, Rebecca Minkoff’s women-run business network.
We caught up with the successful girlbosses, who have worked together for nearly two decades, to get their tips on how to go into business with your friend:
How did you two decide to work together?
Emily: Meritt and I met at UCLA in college and we bonded over a love of vintage. At a time when everybody was wearing tight jeans and bedazzled shirts, we were wearing Levi’s and overalls and flannel shirts. We’re both from California and we just bonded over fashion. And we ended up going to vintage stores together all the time and becoming friends that would shop together and really started to realize that we have a shared point of view on fashion. And we were always searching for the same things. We got seated together at graduation by happenstance. And we were like, “We should do something together one day. We have such great shared interests. But let’s go off and see what happens.”
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And after a year of so of Meritt exploring editorial and I was working on visual merchandising, we started a styling portfolio with photographers and building out a styling book. And we really created this aesthetic for ourselves that was mixing fashion from the runway like everybody else but with this layer of vintage and found things that really gave each look a personality and personal style. And through that process, we started customizing a lot of vintage denim for our clients, and we really fell in love with re-cutting vintage. As we moved from styling after many years into consulting and working with fashion brands and labels, we started realizing that this denim concept that we were really craving wasn’t in the marketplace. So we set out to build a denim line, which is named after us. We created the boyfriend jean and did a lot of different different silhouettes that were vintage-inspired at the time. And after about six years, that company sold to private equity and we exited and we were able to start THE GREAT, which was what we’ve been dreaming about for so long, which is a multi-category brand that incorporates not only the denim and tomboy aesthetics that we love, but also with feminine pieces and vintage-Victorian inspired pieces and building together the wardrobe that’s both high and low masculine and feminine, girly and relaxed all together. We create clothes for real life.
Emily & Meritt’s Tips for Going into Business with Your Friend:
Get on the same page:
Meritt: I think big picture and on a more serious note is make sure that your moral compass, big viewpoint on life, is all aligned. You kind of sense that about a friend. That’s how you become friends, right? So when you’re clear on that, you share the same sort of work ethic and integrity and sense of loyalty and you know those things are in check.
Emily: I think the fact that Meritt and I are fiercely loyal has definitely influenced how long we’ve been able to be business partners, which is almost 20 years. There’s this concept of just you’re there for each other. It’s like a marriage. So loyalty is definitely key.
Communication is key:
Meritt: I would say it’s so important to hone your communication skills. You share somewhat of a language with somebody when you’re really close to them and just make sure that the foundation of that language is respect and honesty and humor. And speak with love and respect. We’re just in constant communication and we can text two letters to each other or a paragraph or vent to each other or whatever it is. We have a really healthy communication style but it takes work, just like any relationship.
Emily: We have this concept of healthy debate in our office. We like to make sure that we really go around on something if it’s important, tangible and also not tangible. For example, if we’re designing a new pair of pants, I’m 5’3″, Meritt’s 5’8″. We both try them on. We have to get a gauge on “Will this fit lots of body types?” We go back and forth. We talk it through, what color we’d wear it in. We definitely work together with our different points of view to sort of land in a place where we feel democratic. So we like to open up conversation and make sure we’re really open and honest.
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Friendship First:
Emily: I would say always friendship first. And I know that may not seem like what most people would say, but I think we have to be human first. And if somebody’s struggling, then the other needs to pick up the slack. If somebody needs a hug, the other needs to anticipate that. If somebody needs to be the one to make a difficult phone call one day, then you’re the one that steps up. We always put friendship first and we’re sensitive to each other and the journeys that we’re on. Everybody has good days and bad days, good weeks and bad weeks. And you definitely have to ebb and flow.
Remember your why:
Meritt: We obviously had been running businesses together for a long time and we have to make a lot of important decisions and we have a lot of people that depend on us. But it’s always important that we’d go back to the core of why we started what we’re doing. And it started with us going around and discovering things together and finding things that we love and remaking them. And I think that we just have to always find ourselves going back to that. And that just kind of reenergizes our friendship and reenergizes us at work. So even this week we looked ahead at the week, we were like, “Can we still sneak in two hours together to go hunt around some vintage shops in southern California and get inspired and grab a good coffee and make good conversation in the car?” And I think that’s how we started and we just always have that touchpoint to keep us focused on why we’re doing what we’re doing.
Work as a team:
Meritt: This morning, we both have kids that we’re getting up to camps and schools and then we had a meeting that got changed. We both kind of just walked in and sat down, sighed, and said, “I’ve got a really hairy morning this morning. I’m really stressed. These are the things that went wrong and these are the things that I want to fix about the day.” And then we’d go back and forth, “OK, how can we turn this around?” And we just start the day with this sense of “I’m putting it out on the table.” And then maybe the other person’s like, “OK, but these are things to look forward to” or “How can we turn that around?” or “Let’s talk about something fun.” We just start in a place of real sincere honesty and communication so that we’re all on a level playing field that we know where our heads are.
Be transparent:
Emily: Communication is very important to us. We’re two women. It’s really the foundation of why we’re able to work together. I can’t even express how important communication is. We keep paper calendars. We have back and forth text chains with different executives within our company that really keep communication flowing. We grew up in an industry that was very male-driven and very secretive and not everybody got to know everything. Everything was sort of siloed. And as we started this business, particularly with THE GREAT, and particularly with the team that we have over the last almost five years, it’s been really important to us that we’re transparent. We put everything on the table, good or bad. Everybody understands the context in which they’re working. Everybody understands what the goals are. And when there’s ups, we all celebrate it. When there’s downs, we all hunker down in and get better. And that’s just a really important part of the ethos of our company.
Know how to work through a conflict:
Emily: The number one question we get asked in any interview is do we fight? It’s sort of funny. I don’t know how many men get asked that. There’s definitely conflict from time to time. It’s not generally between Meritt and I, but there are disagreements about how things should be done. And we all just put the skunk on the table and talk through it. Again, communication allows for us to avoid a lot of conflict. If everybody’s upfront about goals and gives context of what they’re doing, generally, there’s not a lot of conflict. But we just talk it out respectfully, the way you would want to with any partner.
Meritt: We also don’t have the luxury to actually hang on to anything overly negative either. We have to keep creating and keep working every hour. So usually we’re pretty resilient just in sort of moving forward anyway.
Trust one another:
Meritt: I really trust Emily so if she feels very passionate about something and she feels very strong that something needs to be a certain way, I trust her enough after this many years that she makes the right decisions. I go, “Hey you know what? I’m feeling that you really feel passionate about that and I’m gonna with you on that.”
Emily: Ditto! And I think that’s the other thing about our partnership is there’s oftentimes something where I will feel neutral about and something that Meritt feels very strongly about. So she’ll take the lead on it and vice versa.
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