The You-Shaped Niche
There are many kinds of entrepreneurship out there in the world, but this kind is my favorite kind:
The one where someone turns a passion into an offer that nobody asked for, but once it’s there, everyone wants.
That’s my mom’s story. The Rosanna Inc. story. I’ve heard it so many times, I can recite it chapter and verse, or deliver a well-honed précis. For the purpose of this post, I’ll choose the précis:
My mother earned her graduate degree in Italian language and literature. Desiring to use her degree, she looked around for opportunities and found her options to be…limited.
After a baroque, months-long interview process with the CIA, throughout which she was pretty sure her phone was being tapped, her application to become a secret agent ferrying secrets back from Italy was ultimately declined. Probably for the best; I can’t imagine my ebullient mom keeping secrets for a living.
After a few years as a freelance translator and “Italy consultant” for clients with projects focused on the region, among them, Nordstrom, which mounted a sort of tableau vivant as a promotional stunt in the early ’80s, setting up Italian artisans in their Seattle flagship store to practice their crafts before the wondering eyes of American shoppers, my mother decided to launch a concept of her own.
With encouragement from my dad, a fellow driven Capricorn with business acumen and an MBA, she took out a small business loan and started importing Italian ceramics to Seattle, Washington.
She flew to Italy and sat next to artisans at their factory stations, developing contemporary designs different from the motifs painted on the traditional ceramic pieces sold in Italy. That was new. That was interesting. That twist on the form caught people’s attention.
And thus, a business was born.
What tickles me about the founding of Rosanna Inc. is that no one was standing on the street corner shouting Someone must import hand-painted Italian ceramics with an updated and contemporary aesthetic to the United States of America! We. Must. Have. Those. CERAMICS!
But once those ceramics were here, wouldn’t you know it, people bought them.
Watching this business unfold over the years has had an outsized influence on my idea of how an ideal career looks.
To my mind, the ideal career is one spent carving what I like to call the “You-Shaped Niche” into the world.
The You-Shaped Niche is a cousin of making your mark and ikigai from Japan, but it’s not quite the same. Carving the You-Shaped Niche requires vision: seeing something no one else sees, much less thinks that they want, much less asks for, and midwifing the passage of that idea from the realm of the imaginal into the realm of the real.
And it doesn’t have to be a world-altering vision you bring forth; it can be something as specific as soulful dinnerware, or as hyperlocal as a really excellent, esoteric bookstore-cum-bar that serves as a homey and vibey third space for the community. (For those in the Bay Area, I’m thinking about Clio’s Books.) Or, it could be as practical as a principled, affordable, pleasant-to-use soap. Hi, Dr. Bronner’s.
But whatever your thing is, it has to include a heaping dose of passion, your specific zone of genius, and be born of your personal experience. It is by following this recipe that entrepreneurs create something no one else could possibly have come up with or pull off. The You-Shaped Niche.
And because businesses that take the form of the You-Shaped Niche are so highly personal, they are also always and inevitably suffused with story.
Growing up as the Irish Twin of Rosanna Inc. — the company is 40-plus years old, I am 38 — I grew up cheek-by-jowl with the moments that became the company’s mythos and lore.
I suppose this is the reason I’ve always loved the podcast How I Built This hosted by Guy Raz. Every business featured on the show, businesses we know, love, or just simply see all the time, are about entrepreneurs who felt inexplicably called to create the You-Shaped Niche.
There’s also something about innocence and intuition with the You-Shaped Niche breed of entrepreneurship. It’s the one-thing-leads-to-another, or the stumbling-upon-the-Eureka!-Moment or the accidental innovation or the upshot of modest initial successes and the ensuing urge to elaborate, refine, or soup something up based on the sentiment.
Well, that went well / was fun / looked great. What if we kicked it up a notch and did this.
All my life, my mother has quoted the mythologist Joseph Campbell.
“Follow your bliss,” she would intone, “and the money will follow.”
The second part of the statement was hers, but based on the full context of the quote, I think Joseph would agree:
BILL MOYERS: Do you ever have the sense of... being helped by hidden hands?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time––namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.
- Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers
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