Time zones and Zoom meetings, a million emails, endless drafts sent back and forth, late night FaceTimes and early morning Whatsapp group messages, it’s all happening in the cloud and sometimes I forget it’s real.
Of course, the night that Gaston and I stayed up until 4 am at the lake house, buzzing off the humid summer heat and dreaming about creating a virtual space where story and community take center stage, we had no idea that it would be like this.
It was mid-February 2020. After a particularly harrowing and eye-opening day at my old job in online sales, I headed to Gaston’s lake house for the weekend to enjoy the waning days of summer in South America. We got to talking and from my complaining about the lack of humanness and connection in a job where I was literally talking to people all day, the idea that would become Cacha was born. Why not create a platform that does both? Why not build an ecommerce that invites community, that connects people, that encourages the makers and designers behind these beautiful products to tell their stories? It could all have a lot more meaning. We could bring these couches and tables and lamps to life. We could bring together a client in Seattle and an artisan in Egypt.
Our homes and our souls will be better for it.
We imagined that we’d be traveling around the world, meeting the people behind our brands, touring their factories and design studios, capturing photos and conducting interviews so that we could build a website that was as alive as they are. We thought we’d be doing it side by side, day in and day out, until poof! we would finally launch, our clients would love it, and everything would end happily ever after.
It probably will end happily ever after. But like so many, when Covid-19 reached our corner of the world, our dream took the back burner; the uncertainty settled in and we found ourselves focused on much graver matters. I wound up back home in Colorado, where I’ve been “stuck” for nearly 9 months now, and Gaston, who was about to move to Italy, stayed in Argentina. There were now hours between us, the factory tours turned into Zoom meetings and interviews were reduced to email questionnaires. While it is certainly not what we had imagined, if it weren’t for all of the time sitting at home idly and the anxiety of the world being on pause, we might have never started. And now, it’s real.
When Gaston called me in May and said, “Are we doing this or not?”, I said yes without hesitation. What better time to get your feet under you than when the world has stopped turning for a brief moment?