Meet Brienne Derosier

We were lucky to catch up with Brienne Derosier recently and have shared our conversation below.

Brienne, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

The idea of resilience is a very interesting topic because a component of resilience I feel I was born with, which is a creative thirst to investigate, learn, solve, and produce. But there is the other side to resilience, which if I did not have a physical body that requires fuel, rest and rejuvenation, I would just keep going and going, 24/7 without looking up and expanding my world beyond work. This mindset leads to burnout, which I have done many times during Architecture school, working at an architecture firm, and starting my first company, an interior design firm. It is a task to take my ambition and creative force surging through me and balance it with my unique self-care techniques that I have curated and developed over the years. These techniques include organic gardening, cooking healthy meals, yoga, pranayama, and meditation. I also love to be in nature, soak up time with my family and dog, and take a strategic bath or hot tub to soothe myself at the end of a long day chasing my dreams. My self-care regime is a way for me to avoid plowing myself into the ground, a preventative measure. Living out my creative potential is what my heart loves, and tempering my endeavors with those things in life that replenish and restore me, allows me to live and work to the fullest incarnation of myself. Resiliency cannot be achieved without active effort to stay balanced. It’s not something I do once in a while, if I am in the mood, but rather woven into the fabric and routines of my life. These activities and states of being help me to stay on track and to meet the daily challenges of being an entrepreneur.. I deal with chronic pain, and this challenge in life led me to create what I call the Wellness Onion. The Wellness Onion is a blog on the Mache website where I explore the world of self-care, one layer at a time.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

My journey into a life of health and wellness started over two decades ago when I discovered yoga in my late teens. A few years later in college at the University of Oregon, yoga served me well by helping to reduce my stress level during a demanding design curriculum, which resulted in my earning a degree in Architecture and a Masters in Interior Architecture.

Post-graduation, and shortly after securing my first architecture job, I discovered I had an auto-immune condition which made it difficult for me to expel toxins from my body effectively, left me nutrient deficient and led to several serious dietary allergies. These physical challenges further-fueled my personal commitment to the health and wellness path. During this time I became uber aware of not only the toxins found in some foods, but also in the built environment. I was setting up an interior architecture department within the firm and began to realize how many standard materials used in architecture and building were full of toxins with high potential for off-gassing dangerous chemicals into the built environment. This was something I was trying to mitigate in my own personal life and the lack of healthy finish materials, furnishings and home goods choices left me discouraged.

In spite of these health issues, I joined my co-workers in maintaining 60 hour work weeks, mostly stooped over a computer in a light-deprived basement. By this time, I’d held a regular yoga practice for a decade and had become a certified teacher in order to facilitate health awareness in others. I instituted lunch-time yoga classes in the office in service to myself and my hard-working team. Riding my bike to work everyday, I’d strap my heavy Manduka Pro mat to my shoulders to teach yoga at lunch and after work I would go to my local yoga studio to drink from the well of my own practice.

One morning, I had a brilliant idea, as I hoofed my bike, work bag, and yoga mat across the Willamette River. I envisioned a multi-tube yoga mat storage system for my local studio, whereby yogis like myself could pay a small monthly fee to store our mats at the studio, benefiting studios with increased customer loyalty and dependable and recurrent monthly revenue. The studio and its members were delighted with the studio mat storage system I created. What a relief it was to take that yoga mat burden off my shoulders- literally! Other studios began to show interest, so I developed custom mat storage units for several more studios on the side, helping these small businesses to grow and thrive.

After four years working and learning at the architecture firm I decided to start my own design firm and follow my dream of integrating wellness into interior design. My first company, 2Yoke Design was born. In addition to designing and building custom yoga mat storage units for yoga studios, 2Yoke Design’s portfolio includes eco- and health-conscious homes, health clinics, farm-to-table restaurants, ergonomic workplaces and co-housing communities.

It was designing in this capacity that truly opened my eyes to the critical lack of non-toxic materials and manufacturing processes in the architecture, furniture and home goods industries. On both a personal and professional level I could not find anything on the market that was aesthetically pleasing, eco-friendly, and specifically designed to house fitness gear, yoga mat, blocks, foam rollers, straps, etc. So, I designed a totally tubular storage manufacturing company in order to satisfy this need, and Mache was born.

Since this time, Mache has battled to stay alive and relevant from the onset of the world epidemic and beyond, offering new products to our sustainable line of self-care products, and the Wellness Onion, our online journal that covers every layer of conscious healthy living.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

One of Mache’s guiding principles is to embrace change, which involves assessing the current situation, adapting and evolving by staying resilient to outside factors that are beyond our control. The covid epidemic gave us a real life opportunity to put this principe into practice. We were able to survive this unexpected and potentially devastating downturn to our fledgling business by pivoting hard from B2B (business-to-business) market to B2C (business-to-consumer) market. It was like redirecting a team of horses mid-stream, but we did it by redirecting all of our focus and resources to offering storage to the at-home fitness market.

Have a driving force behind every decision you make for your company is a game changer in building your brand. Mache Makes More With Less is a maxim central to Mache’s mission and is why I have chosen to make sustainability at the heart of all my product designs and education component of the company.

Give yourself space for making mistakes, learn from them, and move forward with a strong strategy to mitigate them and avoid making them in the future. Without hard-earned lessons and integrating what you’ve learned into the next iteration of your company there would be no opportunity for growth and the increase of knowledge that paves the way for greater success and meeting your next horizon of goals.

Do you think it’s better to go all in on our strengths or to try to be more well-rounded by investing effort on improving areas you aren’t as strong in?

I think it is informative and financially prudent in the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey to delve into all areas of the company, do each task yourself. This will not only inform you of what the task is, and the most efficient way to execute, but will give you an intimate knowledge of what skills and qualities it takes to do the job well, making it easier to recruit and hire the right person for the job. In doing tasks that you may hove no prior experience or real talent opens your eyes to what tasks you are good at and enjoy doing! You do not need to like every task or become a master at it. After this phase and as your company grows you will zero in on your area of talent and fun and hire others to support you with the rest.

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