Here, Juliette Gimenez, the CEO and founder of fashion search engine Goxip, highlights the five most important lessons any future CEO needs to know before they get started
Juliette Gimenez, the co-founder and CEO of online fashion search engine platform Goxip, describes herself as a straightforward and honest boss––but one that places great emphasis on listening to her employers.
Leading a team of 30 across Asia, her leadership style has led Goxip to international success. The startup stocks over 36,000 brands and more than five million products. It also has a strong social presence, with over 200,000 likes on Facebook.
Founded in 2017, Gimenez says she started Goxip because she was “bad at styling”.
“I was always looking online for fashion inspiration from cool celebrities to see what they were wearing, but I found that I was always spending over an hour online to find the style,” she says. “And then you still need to compare the prices and shipping policies.”
She recalls having all these different tabs open with different retailers, just trying to find one pair of jeans when it dawned on her: “If I’ve had this issue, tons of other people would have had it too. So I realised, I might as well create a platform that could facilitate it all.”
Along with her co-founder YC Lau, Gimenez created an online search engine that allows users to snap a photo of the clothing item they like––online or in a magazine––and Goxip’s search engine will find the the same, or similar, items that match your image from 500 different retailers across the globe.
Here, Gimenez shares five important lessons any future CEO needs to know before they get started.
1. Schedule, Schedule, Schedule!
“I learnt that the hard way,” Gimenez laughs. “When I was working at my first startup, Groupon, I was so overwhelmed and no matter how many hours I worked, it just wouldn’t be enough. At the time, I never planned my day or week and it was a real wake-up call.”
Now, Gimenez plans her schedule two weeks in advance and breaks down her daily schedule into 30 minute blocks. “I start every day planning what I want to do every half-hour, and I also try not to put similar things in the same time frame, so that I can have variation in my schedule and stay productive.”
For Gimenez, scheduling didn’t just help her organise her time, it also helped her ease her mind by giving her more time to prepare for upcoming meetings and events. “I made sure to budget time into my schedule to prepare and now in meetings I’m extremely efficient, especially when it comes to knowing what I need to discuss. I get a lot more tasks done.”
It’s important to remember that as a founder, you’ll always be overwhelmed by different tasks––whether it’s driving your product, recruiting or getting funding, you’ll always have a multitude of different tasks on hand, says Gimenez, so the most important thing is how you plan and schedule your time.
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