Shark Tank: Why we did it. Why we didn't.

In early 2015, I was enormously pregnant with twins and determined to be a stellar working mom. (Just visualize me sleep deprived and full of ambition; Idk how the two co-existed, but they did). I was also determined to make Simplified as big as big could get. She was on fire and I didn’t want to stand in any bit of her way. Our inventory was small-ish (we were / are determined to run a debt-free company), the demand was astronomically larger than we expected (both retail and wholesale), and we had decisions to make. As a young entrepreneur, during the height of the Shark Tank craze, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to stand up in front of Barbara Corcoran and GET A DEAL. (Fun fact: I ran into her at a hotel in Grand Cayman in 2013 and told her I wanted to bring my business to Shark Tank. She told me to BRING IT!) I wanted investments, and partners, and resources to take this dream of mine to the next, next, and NEXT level. So we applied.

A few weeks later, we got a call.

“Hello, this is so-and-so from ABC. We’d like to interview you and your husband for ABC’s Shark Tank.” I died.

By this time, the twins had arrived and I likely had avocado on my tee-shirt and a diaper stuck in my back pocket. “Wait… like really?” I’m pretty sure that is (embarrassingly) what I said.