Career Confidential: Janice W. Chan

Full name?: Janice W. Chan

Position / Job title?: Founder of Plan A Cases (We create stylish, female-centric condom cases). Please check out our Kickstarter campaign.

1. Fast-forward several years/decades. How did you land (or create) your current position?

I spent four years practicing law at a big corporate firm in Manhattan. It was a great learning experience, but not the format I wanted long term for work/life balance or personal satisfaction. While figuring out what I did want my long term career path to look like, I lucked out when a friend had a brilliant idea for a secure, elegant phone charging kiosk called Brightbox. I joined the team as a co-founder, providing legal and marketing services, and really learning all the ins and outs of starting a company.

We recently passed Brightbox off to a new management/investor team, leaving me the time to actively go after my first solo startup project. An idea hit me one night while chatting with my roommate: With all the small goods accessories out there, why are there not well-designed, grown-up condom cases for women to carry?

So I guess in summary, I created my current position by jumping through the prescribed educational, internship and entry level hoops first, then taking a step back, applying that experience and credibility towards novel, creative projects.

2. Did you have to take on internships to get there? How important in general, do you think, are internships?

They shouldn’t be so important, but they are.  I’ll skip my long rant on the exploitative nature of unpaid work and the effective exclusion of financially strapped kids from certain industries.  But within this flawed system I do think it’s important that college students think about what kind of experience will add to their selling points in the career they want to pursue, and go all out to land the ideal internship, including pestering emails to the contact people and bugging family friends for in’s. 

3. Tell us what a typical work day looks like for you. What is your job REALLY like, both the glamorous and not-so-glamorous parts?

Wake up at 10 cuz I think mornings are a human rights violation.  Rapidly read and answer some emails, update some cost projections, obsessively refresh my Kickstarter trackers, look up and ahhhh crap two hours have passed.  Grab the sample cases I promised to send to an Oregon feminist paper and head to the post office.

Rush from the post office to the die maker (think of them as cookie cutters for leather), examine the new set he’s made, they seem fine, I pay for them and head to my sewing contractor with them.  Stop at the leather hide warehouse on the way to pick out a few skins.  It’s an MMA battle in my brain between what Harper’s Bazaar and InStyle are preaching as the hottest colors and textures for Spring 2014 and what my own intuition says.  End up picking a couple from each category to hedge my bets.

Arrive at my sewing contractor’s.  Discuss the round of new samples I want made, including sewing details like thread color and stitch placement.  Haggle over per unit pricing.  Haggle over delivery time.  Haggle over the minimum number of units they’ll turn the machines on for me at.  Somehow we still part with a smile and handshake.

Huh, it’s 3pm, should probably eat.  Grab some fast food and head to a meeting with my marketing and web dev guys knowing they will give me so much shit for my greasy little bag of Burger King.  Worth it.

Marketing meeting is productive — we come up with a good donation reachout strategy and what we feel is an engaging layout for the website.  It’s dark by the time I’m heading home but I’m still whistling to myself like a happy schizo as I head into the subway.

Throw together a late dinner at home while catching up on more emails and calls, including reaching out to Cute New Guy.  Sorry for being so busy, he fortunately understands as a careerist himself, we laugh at having to schedule our next dinner date via Google Calendar.

Shower cuz they tell me that’s what civilized people do, sketch out a few design improvement ideas, do some laundry.

Around 2-3am I pop a Lunesta, shoot out a few more emails, update some spreadsheets and check a few more metrics trackers.  Start to drift off, wake up suddenly a couple of times to write down a new to-do or idea, then finally fall asleep.

4. Let’s talk about work/life balance. What does that mean to you? Is it important?

So startup hours can be just as crazy as law practice hours, but the quality and atmosphere is completely different when you’re pursuing something where every last thing you do is directly connected to visible results–for me, even if the quantity of hours worked stays the same, the mental stress takes on a much more palatable quality when I feel I’m doing something meaningful.

I guess it’s all about your own priorities and where you can draw the lines and not be slapped with regret.  For example, I had a crazy week recently where I had to forego both a gallery opening Michelle Obama was also attending as well as watching the US-Canadian hockey game, but I also did some insane schedule juggling to make sure I didn’t have to cancel a second date with a guy I really liked.  My sister told me I was crazy, but for me that was exactly the decision matrix I wanted.

5. Do you have any career role models? Who are they?  

Sara Blakely of SPANX.  I tremendously admire the way she grew SPANX from $5K of savings and a pair of cut-off pantyhose to a $1B empire.  Her story has the kind of determination and scrappiness that goes above and beyond the obligatory Fortune magazine nods to women in corporate board positions.  If I can duplicate what she did even on a small scale I’ll consider it a rousing success.

6. What is the best piece of advice that you have ever received – career-related or otherwise? 

Don’t be too good to do grunt work, but don’t lose sight of your dreams and ideals.

7. If you married a millionaire husband and didn’t have to work, would you? (Be honest.) 

Absolutely.  I would be bored out of my mind if I didn’t have an active work project to pursue.  Having some financial pressure relieved might open up the types of projects, e.g. artistic/philanthropic.  But I’ll always be micromanaging something tangly and headache-inducing, I can’t help it!