Fabian Geyrhalter:
Welcome to the show, Miki.

Miki Agrawal:
Thank you. So happy to be here with you.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, thanks for making it. I saw you were just at Burning Man a few days ago, so an extra thank you for making it back to the digital world here. It’s very cool.

Miki Agrawal:
No worries. Yeah, I was just there for three nights. It was actually my twin sister and I. We last minute decided not to, we were planning on not going, and then we decided last minute, screw it. We’re going to go. Because when you think about brand, what is brand? To me, it’s art. And where do I get so much of my inspiration of art is at the burn, and it’s beyond just the beautiful wild art structures that get erected every year, but it’s also just the spirit of play. And I think while Burning Man does have so many of its flaws, it’s wasteful, it’s pretty privileged, and there’s so many things about it that can be people can poo poo about. But there’s one thing that it returns me back home to is the spirit of play, the spirit of art, the spirit of creativity, the spirit of humanity, the spirit of possibility. And I think all of that is so, so relevant and so important. If you’re creative in the world,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I love it. It takes Miki exactly 30 seconds on the podcast to jump into branding. It’s like there’s no stopping that. That’s fantastic. Well, I’m going to channel my inner David Letterman and say, my next guest needs no introduction, but yet I’ll do a very quick one if that’s even possible. So you founded the period underwear brand thinks, which everyone listening to the show remembers for the ad campaign running in the New York City subways using grapefruit and eggs to represent menstruation. Then in 2019, you founded Tuhi, which you covered yet another intimate region, and you rebranded the Modern B Day, which I think a lot of people bought, including myself. Somehow you managed to squeeze in time to pen the bestseller, do cool shit, quit your day job, start your own business, and live happily ever after. As well as a second book titled Disruptor.
Disruptor. Get It? Yep. A Manifesto for the Modern Woman. But the reason you’re hitting the mark today is because if your latest venture, which completely stopped me and my creative director in our tracks, it’s Hiro diapers, the world’s first diapers that are digested by fungi. Now, what does that mean? Well, baby poops, fungi eat diaper, as you say, on the Hiro side, it’s sustainable low effort, and it’s quite magical. So is it self-inflicted of a rule that you only work on brand ideas surrounded by the pelvis? It’s like, what’s going on there? This is really interesting. Tell

Miki Agrawal:
Us. It’s so funny because it’s always like, oh my God, I’m in the business of periods pee and poop. And it’s been such a pretty much my entire career, except for my first business, which is a restaurant I still own my restaurants called Wild. It’s New York City’s first gluten-free farm to table pizza restaurant. And this year, 2025 will be my 20 year anniversary. And so the way I think about it, at first it enters your mouth and then it comes out as poop. And so it’s still kind of,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I wanted to say that it totally counts. It’s just not something that you talk about much. But yeah, it does count

Miki Agrawal:
If it, yeah, check it out. It’s wild in the West Village. It’s really, really cool.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s super cool. I didn’t bring that up. I knew about it, but I mean, I had to stop at company three or four because otherwise the introduction is half an hour with you.

Miki Agrawal:
So it was basically inspired by my son Hiro, actually in 2019 when he was two years old. He was born in 2017. He was two years old when this idea came to be, and I started as a creative. I think it’s so important to create spaciousness for ourselves. I think it’s so, so challenging to be creative right now when you’re bogged down by emails, calls, meetings, you have this interruption, that interruption. And so seven years ago, I started taking what I call Friday thinking days, right? Don’t take any calls or meetings on Fridays. I let that day be a day of inspiration of downloads. It’s not a day off. It’s really a day of tuning into nature of allowing my creative spirit to open up. And I think that’s so, so important for the creative process, to have that spaciousness to allow for ideas and inventions and campaigns or whatever to come through.
So on a Friday thinking day, I was just sitting there and I was staring out the window and I was looking at a tree, and I was just like, wait a minute. Breast milk is liquid gold because it’s full of nutrients, and therefore baby poop must be fertilizer gold because it comes from mama’s breast milk mainly. And if you’re even formula, it’s full of nutrients. It’s just like, and yet right now, we’re wrapping billions of pounds of this potential baby poop juju energy fertilizer in plastic diapers and throwing it in the trash and not harnessing billions of pounds of this for good. And yet right now we’re using pig poop and cow poop to fertilize our food. And we’re not using our very own clean, clear, pristine baby’s poop to fertilize anything and grow anything and support the ecosystem in any way. Whoa, that needs to change.
So then I was sitting there, I was like, wait a minute. What could potentially, when the baby poops in the diaper, what could potentially, what could it fertilize and potentially break the diaper down and eat the diaper? What could that be? And as I was asking myself, what could break down the plastic diaper? Literally this, literally, not even joking, this is what happened. My son Hiro at two years old comes running into my room points to a book in my nightstand saying, Pacha Pacha Pacha mama, which means mother, mother, mother earth. And literally, I look in my nights in my bedroom, and there was this book there called Patras Pajamas, and this book had no business being in my bedroom. In your bedroom, you have a couple of books that you’re kind of flipping through and you decide you are going back and forth between two books.
We don’t have a random book. This book was given to me a year prior at an event that I was speaking at. And you get given books and you put ’em in your bookshelf, and at some point, maybe it’ll cross your path, but it’s downstairs in your bookshelf. But somehow book made its way, one floor upstairs into the back, into my bedroom, into my nightstand, where my son, when I was thinking what could break down plastic, my son at two years old comes running into my room, does not know how to read, saying Pacha Pacha, Pacha mama pointing to this book, mother Earth. I pull out this book and I start reading it to Hiro. And on page 31, it says, there are certain types of fungi that can break down plastic.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Unbelievable,

Miki Agrawal:
Amazing. It was a pure divine intervention moment. It was a divine, divine, divine moment of just listening and tuning in and allowing for the moment to deliver a universe request, which is that, hey, you can literally help solve the global plastic crisis harnessing nature’s greatest ancient technology fungi. And it just stopped me in my tracks. And then over the next four and a half years, it has led me and my team on figuring out literally all the steps required. I brought together the most interdisciplinary team of PhDs in microm remediation, microbiology, biology, chemistry. I brought the top diaper engineer from Proctor and Gamble. I brought top entrepreneurs, top, top, brilliant thinkers, designers to come and come together with me and figure out can we harness nature to heal nature? And the answer is resoundingly. Yes. Nature has been breaking things down. Fungi been breaking down the carbon backbone of trees for hundreds of millions of years.
And if you look at plastic, what is plastic made out of? Plastic is made out of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels come from dead trees and dead animals that have been compressed over years. And so if fungi can break down the carbon backbone of dead trees, it can then therefore break down the carbon backbone of plastic because it all really comes from the same thing. And so it was just like, wow, okay, how do we then harness this a hundred million mural technology and serve and basically train it, teach it in the most nature based way to break down plastics? So we have literally allowed for natural selection, and we would put these fungi on plastic, and then the fastest growing ones we would harvest, and then the fastest growing ones on the next iteration of plastic we would harvest. And the fastest growing one on those.
And then we were like, I don’t know, over now, maybe 28 generations in. And we have a fungi that really likes breaking down plastics. And there are hundreds of plastic in fungi that exist actually in the planet, so many different types of carbon that needs to be broken down. And so we have whittled it down from hundreds and hundreds of strains into the top winners. And we are the first company ever to create shelf stable and scalable fungi that can break down plastic. And we’ve done it in our lab in under six months under the best conditions. And we’ve done it in simulated landfill environments. And now really the game is can we create truly a first truly landfill biodegradable product in under 12 months instead of four to 500 years? And the reason why we went after diapers is because diapers are the number one household plastic waste item, the number three waste item in a landfill.
They take four to 500 years to break down. Every baby goes through up to 6,000 diapers in their lifetime. The very first disposable diaper is still in a landfill somewhere today. It’s just a crazy set of statistics when you really look at it. And 75% of all soft plastic can be found in a diaper. So if you can actually solve the diaper and return it back to the earth, and you can actually solve 75% of soft plastic problems that end up in a landfill for four to 500 years. So it’s been a really, really exciting, interesting project. And we launched our very first product, just literally, we had our first kind of quiet launch in April, but we really launched our website last week, Hiro, HIRO diapers.com. And it’s so beautiful. I’m so proud of, I flew to LA to work with an artist to make the videos and to make it look and feel so artful diapers have never looked like a flower before.
I wanted diapers to look like flowers that would turn to the earth and that are so soft. And because it is, we have the softest unbleached diaper on the market. We’re the only unbleached diaper in the market we’re made designed with up to 50% less plastic. We removed all the toxic crap in it. It’s the best performing diaper. It truly is. And it comes with these little fungi pouches that when you just drop one in during changing time in a landfill, these little pouches, which house our sleeping friendly fungi wake up and then start to break down, start to grow eventually.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
How long does this process take? The breakdown process?

Miki Agrawal:
Yeah, like I said, in our lab, we were able to break it down under six months. It was the best conditions in the and simulated landfill environments. In three months, literally, these diapers were fraying. And if you know anything about nonwovens, you can’t fray diapers like that. You can’t just split them off with your fingertips. And then now we’re testing our diapers in all the different conditions with our fungi, of course, they’re live beings. And so under arid hot, dry climates, it’s very different from cool wet. So it’s just a different climate. So now we’re in that testing process. And so this is why we’re in that process getting a third party landfill biodegradability claim, so we can actually have it as a claim. Because people, you need unique claims. And so in that process right now,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
So many questions, but the first one is the minute that you figured it out, well actually your son Hiro figured it out for you and you’re like, oh, I need to do this. I mean, there so much is pointing against you doing this, right? It’s like, why did no one else do this? Why did no one else succeed in this? And during the first six months, 12 months, you must have most probably realized why no one else is doing that, right? I mean, was it incredibly hard? I mean, obviously you got the best team together, but why is this not something that is more widely used and follow up question that will most probably be the future of Hiro, where it’s not diapers only, but it will go into all kinds of other plastics,

Miki Agrawal:
Right? Yeah. I mean, it is a very, very, very complex problem to solve. It requires me, it’s been a four and a half year journey so far, and we’re still, we have our 1.0 product out. It doesn’t work in every conditions. It works on many conditions, but doesn’t work in every condition, depending on how dry it is, if there’s a lot of things that we’re still working to making version 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, but we have the first one out in the market, which is so cool. And most people don’t have the patience to wait four to five years to launch something. And again, unless you’re someone with a really big vision that can be like, wow, I can withstand building something for seven, eight years before it launches into the world. And the diaper world, it’s a multi-billion dollar category. It’s one of the most unregulated categories out there because of all the lobbying, et cetera.
And so they don’t have really any incentive to change their ways unless there’s a challenger brand that comes and just disrupts it. And I think we did that with Think with period proof underwear. All the tampon companies and pad companies are like, yeah, right. No one’s ever going to bleed in their underwear until we took half a billion dollars worth of market share. And there’s a real like, oh shit, okay, we got to now buy them and self disrupt or we’ll be disrupted and become the blockbuster with Netflix. And so I think there’s lots and lots of ways to go about it. And so for us, the only way I believe culture can truly transform is through conscious business. I don’t think governments will really change consciousness. I don’t think nonprofits are going to change consciousness. I don’t think it’s for-profit businesses pure. I think it’s conscious businesses. I think it’s businesses where the stakeholder model is really front and center. It’s conscious capitalism versus pure capitalism. It’s a very different thing. I sat on the board of Conscious Capitalism for five years with John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods Market as the one who wrote the book with Raj, SIA. John is actually my son’s godfather now. We’ve become such dear friends.
And the idea of conscious capitalism is every stakeholder has to win. It’s a win, win, win, win win model versus just the shareholders winning. It’s the shareholders, it’s the shareholders, it’s the employees, it’s the customers, it’s the suppliers and the planet and nature that has to win as well. And so one of the things that we’re doing that’s pretty radical is that we put nature on our board. So we have nature as a board seat on my board so that nature has a seat at the table, has a voice at the table. I think it’s really important to consider that the major player in the world, which is our planet. And if we’re not considering her, we’re going to be ravaged by her and we’re going to become extinct. It’s not the planet suffering. It’s like we’re going to just go extinct. And I think when you think about global warming, I think it’s like the planet having a fever and we’re the viruses and it’s just trying to fever us out and then it’s going to start over.
It’s just a slower process than what happens in our bodies. When we get a fever, we get really hot, and then we kill off the viruses and then we get back to homeostasis. I think the planet’s going through global warming. It’s like the globe is having a fever, and we are the viruses that are getting kind of killed off. And so hopefully we can become good bacteria, not bad bacteria, and we want to be beneficial and beneficial bacteria for the planet as part of the ecosystem. And because we are the leaders of the ecosystem, we are, we have a prefrontal cortex that works. We are human species. We are the most advanced out of all of them. We are, as they say, we aren’t just deciding from our animal brain. We actually can have a conscience that can decide from a different place. So with that ability, it’s like, what are we going to do? And so far, it’s like wars. It’s like killing. It’s like power, it’s money, it’s control. It’s all the different pieces that are really challenging. So for me, one thing I’m really excited about this brand and what we’re creating at Hiro is one of the reasons why I chose diapers as a first product is because it is truly an acupuncture point of change. When you go from Maiden to Mother or from Bachelor to Father, it’s like a big point of change in your life. You’re no longer just me consciousness, you’re in a us, we consciousness.
It just changes. And so that’s why we chose to go with diapers first.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, and the kind of impact that you have with Diapers, which is a product that is everywhere, I mean everywhere. So yeah, it makes tons of sense. So now your son carries the name of a highly successful Diaper brand because he pointed at the book. Yeah,

Miki Agrawal:
It’s on its way. We’re early days right now, and we believe it’s something that mothers want, that parents want. We believe that there isn’t a diaper out there that really is thinking for the whole ecosystem. And I think what’s so important is we have looked at the reduce, reuse, recycle model, reduce reuse, recycle that re reduce, reuse, recycle wheel
That we wheel. So we looked at it deeply and we were like, wait a minute. Reusing and recycling require a lot of energy and processes to actually create this model. Let’s actually update the model. And so we updated it to reduce Regenerate. And so reduce your consumption and use regenerative products. If you’re going to use regenerative principles, that’s going to be the way forward. And the way we’re showing up with Reduce Regenerate at Hiro is we are teaching parents and moms this practice called Elimination communication, but we’re going to help parents get their babies out of diapers in 12 to 18 months instead of three to four years. So you’re going to reduce your consumption by learning, elimination communication from us. And then if you’re going to use a diaper, use Hiro diapers because it’s the best unbleached high-performing diaper that returns to the earth to the help of fungi.
It’s a no brainer. And because of that, you’re going to use half the amount of diapers, so you’re going to save the money. So upfront it feels like it’s a higher end, expensive luxury diaper cost, but because you’re using half, it’s going to cost you half the amount and you’re using the best diapers. You do get what you pay for. So you get crappy bleached processed full of toxins diaper, or you can get an unbleached diaper made with unbleached cotton from local farms and made with 50% less plastic and five times drier and three times more high. It absorbs three times faster than the current leading brands leading eco brands. It’s just the best diaper on the market. Plus it comes with these fungi that can break ’em down. It’s, there’s no comparison from my perspective of a better product on the market. There’ll be way cheaper long-term

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Also, of course, and you need to support this in the beginning to make that happen in order to get you there. But Hiro was launched originally as Hiro Technologies and then it turned into Hiro diapers, which makes tons of sense because you’re basically, do you see yourself, what type of business are you in as Hiro? Is it technology? Is it, I mean, we talked about regeneration, but do you see Hiro as a brand in the future, turn into all kinds of different regeneration consumer

Miki Agrawal:
Brands? It’s a biotech company first and foremost, from a lens of a
Technology business that’s bringing nature to heal nature. That’s our initial frame. And then we’re going to launch products underneath Hiro Technologies. So Hiro diapers is our first product Hiro technologies and Hiro diapers. Again, like I said, the reason why we wanted to start there is because it’s the number one household plastic waste item. We want to really get to the parent in that very big change moment in their life. And I believe that when you start here, it’s going to change the conversation for parents for the rest of their lives, hopefully, that they’re going to start to really learn about ecosystem consciousness from this point forward and that it’ll stay. It’s not going to just be like when your baby’s in diapers and that’s it, but actually it’ll hopefully be a consciousness that stays forever and so for the rest of their lives, and they start to really learn how to braid with nature in a new way.
But yeah, it’s definitely, we’re going into a big territory right now, and yeah, it’s going to require a new way of having people learn about Hiro. We’re not doing it the traditional way by just spending and spending and spending, because we are a startup. We’re doing it by having deep community events in each city. We are meeting up with doulas, midwives, like lactation consultants, night nurses doing it through the way the mycelium do it one quietly, one mom at a time, one person at a time. So they really learn what we’re doing. We’re building allies all over the country, quietly, slowly. And then one day it’s just going to fruit. If you look at bamboo, bamboo spends four years underground growing quietly, cultivating itself, and then just pat its soil, and then one day it starts to shoot 39 inches per day every day, 39 inches a day, 39 inches a day, and just blows. And we are really tuning into the way nature does it, and we’re trying to build a regenerative way of growing our business, and it’s very challenging sometimes because it’s so easy to grow in the old way to build something like the old way. It worked. I’ve built two big companies. I’ve done it, although they both really, really have support the planet and people at Tushy.
We have saved over 10 million trees from getting flushed down the toilet. We have funded reiling and forestry projects all over South America. We have built toilets for over 60,000 families in India at thinks. We’ve helped divert billions of tampons, pads, applicators from landfills. We have funded menstrual products for millions of girls in the developing world. So we really care about doing good and doing well. We really do believe in conscious capitalism, and I think Hiro has the most amount of promise to really, really change the consciousness and shift where the way people are thinking about their consumption.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I really love your metaphor about Bamboo and the idea of scaling fast, right? Fail quickly. The whole startup idea from 10 years ago and now it’s like, no, let’s really slowly connect with the right communities and slowly build, and in one day it’s all just going to happen, and then it’s going to happen really, really quickly. Community must be at the heart of it. That’s why you started the Kickstarter campaign to Launch Hiro. How did that go? Any big lessons learned along the way?

Miki Agrawal:
Yeah, clarity is important. I think we were ahead of ourselves. We wanted to launch a Kickstarter under Hiro Technologies, and because we didn’t really have the diaper product yet, we didn’t really like, and we were like, if you were in the fungi community, we still wanted you to support, but if you don’t have any kids in diapers and how are you going to support? You can just donate. But people like collateral. So we made this kit that a plastic breakdown kit with fungi, which has proven to be such a pain in the butt, by the way, and it’s like

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I was wondering about that. I saw it on the side as one of the incentives, and I know a hundred people ordered it, and it must’ve been such a pain to produce it. It

Miki Agrawal:
Was such a pain to produce it, and ultimately we just wanted it to be a place to just build a community and start that mycelium conversation, right? It’s like this is one of those projects that people love to share. It’s like, oh my God, this company that breaks down plastic diapers with fungi, how cool is that?

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Exactly.

Miki Agrawal:
It’s like it already has a very game of telephone energetic to it because of its uniqueness. And so for us, we were like, well, let’s just start with a small offering on Kickstarter. We’re not going to put any dollars behind it. We’re just going to put out the community and see if there’s some pickup. We passed our goal. We didn’t want to again, push too hard. We still, we didn’t want to sell too many kids. We didn’t want to have to produce that many, but we wanted to grow. We wanted to grow the start of a followership. And then from there, we launched a little Instagram handle. Here are diapers, and we have 7,100 followers right now, and we’re building a quietly, slowly, it’s still, it’s like person by person. It’s conversation by conversation. It’s like that kind of a slow burn. We’re not like, what is the zeros and ones?
And if I put this number of dollars into the machine, how many people am I going to get? This is a spiritual nature based project that we’re going to really build the way nature loves. And if you read The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer, it’s like I’ve raised the money also in quite a beautiful way just through community, through friends, through people who are like, I want to invest. This is so epic. I believe in you. You’ve built two big companies, had major returns for investors, and I really believe in this. It’s been so organic and beautiful, so the money shows up when we need it, and I know that we’re aligned when it’s all flowing in that way versus when we’re pushing and trying and pushing. It’s so much harder to raise the capital to make the things happen because nature operates from inspired action.
It’s not pushing, it just does. It just effortlessly. Easefully grows, it just does its thing and it’s not pushing or scaling or it’s an effortless cultivation and an effortless fruiting and an effortless abundance. And so for me, I’ve shifted, I’m looking at building Hiro from what I call soft power. It’s a framework that I kind of created instead of the hard powers as trauma scale next quarter, results building at all costs your body, you’re getting your family just like zero to a hundred million, raising as much money as you can, but not making that much money, but raising all the money. That’s not the way nature works. And it’s no wonder that there’s a bubbles that burst. It’s no wonder that there’s so much problems in this condition system that we’re living in no wonder. And so can we build and cultivate from a new consciousness, from a soft power consciousness?
And by the way, nature, she’s soft power, but she could kill us in one fucking yawn if she wants to, and she hugs us and holds us when we walk into nature, we felt so held and loved and she just gives and gives and gives and gives and gives, and we just take and take and take and take. And there’s just so much extractive consciousness that comes from this old paradigm. This is trauma scale, patriarchal consciousness that everyone’s victim to, men, women, whatever. I’m victim just like that. We’ve all just been conditioned to, so can we create a regenerative model that’s effortless, that’s easeful, that’s in trust mode, it’s full of trust. I know that whenever I go back to the pushing, I just lose it. I lose that inspired action. I start, I go back to this feels like a grind. The minute I go back and sit at my altar and tune back into nature, and I’m back to being in that consciousness, in that state of soft power, like nature-based philosophy, it becomes effortless again.
Like, oh, the next idea, the next inspired action just comes. It’s fluid. It’s no big deal. It’s so easeful. And so I’m constantly kind of forgetting and remembering and forgetting and remembering. And that’s really ultimately what we’re here to do is to forget and remember, it’s the game of how fast and how much can you remember. Again, our interconnectedness are tuned in and it becomes a philosophy that’s different, but I know just from myself that when I’m operating from a place of tuned in, connected to this higher consciousness, energy, I can just create. And that’s how the ideas from Hiro came to be. Well, tushy magic happens. How the thinks magic happen, it’s all from this effortless tuned in place. All the disasters, all the shit that I’ve experienced came from when I was pushing or my ego got in the way or when I was trying. It’s a game of trust and remembering.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s so interesting because when I did research on your journey, and I mean just building these successful companies, one after another, tons of failures along the way, some public, some not. Every startup has it. And I’m just wondering, how do you persevere? How do you refuel and how do you get that strength to keep pushing, to keep innovating and to keep at peace while the world gives you war, so to speak? And you just completely got into that. And I think it’s so important for so many people, not only founders, I mean, anyone, creatives, marketers, we’re all part of the red race, and we’re all just running, running, running, and it’s so inspiring to see someone like you having done all of this and now talking about that piece that you have to have in order to actually create something meaningful. And I think it’s really powerful.

Miki Agrawal:
I really feel like for me, the way I’m able to get through a lot of these obstacles is just by tuning into my true nature. And it’s like people can say all kinds of crazy things about you, throw you under the bus, try to make you out to be this person or that person, because people a don’t like change. People don’t like good people trying to change the world. When people are doing good things in the world, it makes people feel guilty, bad, weird, and therefore they want to take those people down and make them look bad. And so I really, it’s okay. And I also have shortcomings. I also have my own things to work through. I’m not perfect, of course, I am emotional. I want to move fast. There’s lots of things that I can constantly be working on and getting better at and retuning to, but when it comes to people saying crazy things about you, you have to just remember who you are. It’s like, oh, someone’s saying you have blue hair. I’m like, I don’t have blue hair. I don’t have to believe you. When you tell me I have blue hair, I know my hair’s not blue. So just taking in what parts feel right and then not accepting the parts that feel not true.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, and taking your own advice, right? Because you want to move fast, but yet you bring the bamboo analogy, right? It’s like you have to

Speaker 1:
Constantly

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Remind yourself too of like, no, this is how it needs to be done in order for everyone to be at peace. I think that’s one of these big things with entrepreneurial advice. A lot of times we give this advice to people also because we need to hear it from ourselves. We need to remind ourselves to do that. I wrote an article once, I think it was in Forbes,

Miki Agrawal:
Over and over and over and

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Over again. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I think I wrote an article in Forbes on Entrepreneur Magazine of one of those typical subjects, and I called it 10,000 Steps to Entrepreneurial Success, which is the literal way of every one of these articles. It’s like click bait. And then I said, yeah, you got to walk 10,000 steps and be nature, because if you’re not one with nature, it’s like good luck going back to your office. So it’s very much that it’s all of that advice in the end. If you’re not grounded with what’s going on around you, it all goes to shit. So let’s slowly move the conversation over to branding, to design to the power of visuals and words, which are so important to every single one of the brands that you build. There was always bold copy, super bold stance. First of all, bold ways of sharing with the world.
What that stands is incredible design. Of course, it was the product in the end and the tribe that purchased the product and raved about that really catapulted your companies into brands. But before they reach that product, before they even get there, it was that power of copy and brand design that convinced them. How do you approach the art and science of branding? Does it start with you usually? Does it start and then you go outside and hire people to help? Or how does someone like you who built incredible brands that resonated with people, and most importantly, that always took a stance that always immediately separated people into groups of either you love us or you hate us, but there is no in-between, which I think is so important with everything. How do you go about it? What are some ways that you reflect on that? You’re like, well, usually I do A, B, and C, or, this is what’s really important to me. When I build brands,

Miki Agrawal:
I usually first just feel into what aesthetic feels really interesting and good to me. And I usually do that through going through art books, going into nature, going to museums, just looking at the world with real beginner’s eyes like a baby, and just seeing textures and colors and surprising combinations of colors, textures, and just seeing, just, again, looking around with a fresh pair of eyes. And I think a lot of people, again, aren’t able to necessarily be present in a lot of ways to all the different things that they see all the time. You’re like, oh, wow, that pattern and that texture and that color, and that combination feels so surprising when I put those two together. Or oftentimes I look at Pinterest and put Pinterest mood boards together and take, find this color, and then that color. I’m like, wow, those two neon and burnt orange and brown don’t really go together, but they kind of do in this fresh new way. I’m going to put those together for my new company. And then I bring in really talented designers and not necessarily creative because I’m a creative director, so I just need really good painters to come in and paint the canvas that I’m visualizing. They usually bring their own ideas, their own brilliance, their own magic, and we get to really collaborate and co-create together. And I usually work with lots of junior designers oftentimes because to me, they’re the least impacted by the world and by what’s already been done.
And so I bring in students, like recent grad students or even students like interns. I actually designed this website with my intern and because I just know what I wanted and I just know if I can find the right paintbrush, we can work together beautifully. And so it was, its inspired, right? It’s inspired action. And you don’t really, again, a lot of people when they’re blocked, of course, I believe in a agency model as well. There’s no part of me that doesn’t believe the work is important, but I also find it to be challenging to at times work with people who are working with many different companies and they’re not fully, fully immersed in the world and the universe that you’re in. And so for me, that’s why being a creative entrepreneur, and I’m so immersed in, I’m drinking, waking up, dreaming about thinking about it.
So going back to bed in the middle of the night, waking up, writing things down, there’s just a lot of the spaciousness of inspiration is there for everyone. It’s not just for, oh, you’re creative. I can’t think like that. Everyone is creative. I talk to my scientists, they’re so creative. I talk to my diaper engineers are so creative. I talk to my marketing people. They’re creative. Everyone is creative. It’s just about the context in which you get to open your eyes and create from that most of the times needs to change. And so yeah, I look to everywhere for inspiration. I’m not like, oh, I go here. I, I’m just looking at everything and textures and colors of beginner’s eyes. And then oftentimes I have designers present three different moods to me and I’m like, oh, let’s try this color with this color and this texture, and lemme try this font and that font and this thing and this subtext.
So I generally have an aesthetic that work that I like, that I feel like, oh, this feels like a universal aesthetic that people would really feel good being into being around. And let’s just see what that looks like when you put it together and then you start to build from there. It’s not like I was talking to my writer today. I found this amazing mom, comedian writer’s, a 2-year-old and pregnant. She’s like right now, mostly stay at home, momming it. And I was like, I love your voice. I think I can cultivate it. I think I can really help shape build your voice. But I want you to just throw up on the page and be as authentic as you can. And I don’t want to give you too many pointers. I want you to just give your true you, but in this sandbox to play in, but then go crazy and be yourself.
And I think oftentimes we’re choosing the wrong paintbrushes who don’t really understand the vision or who don’t really get it. But when you’re choosing the right creatives to work with who really get you understand what you’re doing, then there’s again, an effortless braiding that happens. It’s not like a thousand back and forth. It’s like one or two because they really get you and you get them. So we oftentimes try and just fit people in places as fast as possible because we need a hot body. I’ve done that a billion times myself. I need someone with a pulse so busy, I just got to hire anyone. And then you end up putting way too much time in that person because they’re just not the right fit
Versus just the right fit, the right creative, the right artist, the right multimedia designer, the right junior, whatever, who isn’t jaded or the right senior person who has ideas, who has seen stuff that whatever. There’s no right or wrong methodology when it comes to creativity. It’s ultimately, does this person have taste? Can I build on their taste? Is their taste match my taste? Can we align? Do they get me? Do they get the vision? And when we worked together on the first few things, does it feel like, wow, that clicked or not? I would say the last 10 years, I’ve had two or three designers that I have clicked with that have been with me for four years and X years, and that I really am so grateful for. But usually it’s like, yeah, it’s just wrong until it’s right.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
So much, I mean, you said so many really powerful things there of how it’s so intuitive. And I always firmly believe this, even though someone who ran a brand agency for a long time who still runs a brand consultancy who’s part of a brand, it needs to come from within. I mean, that’s what it comes down to. It’s like that initial pulse of a brand. It needs to come from within. And then you need to align yourself with people that you feel can add to that vision. Made it be verbal, made it be visual. And you said it really, really nicely. And it’s great to hear that from someone like you, because what you said about, Hey, if you hire a creative, they work on four different projects. One is a bank, it’s like one is your product, one is whatever, and it’s like they’re not in that zone. And how do you get people into that zone? Really cool. So branding is such a misunderstood word for a lot of people on the streets. How do you describe branding? What does branding mean to you?

Miki Agrawal:
Branding is to me, it’s how do you artfully share your vision?

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I like that. I like that. Yeah. And artfully is everything, right? Words are art, visuals are art. How you bring it across. I like that very much to the point. If you would take the Hiro brand, which we call it a brand, because it will be a brand, and it already is a brand to a certain extent, but it’s like we catch you, sir, early on. It’s so funny to say that. But if we take Hiro as a brand, and you think about one word that could be like that DNA, that could be that through line through the entire brand. May it be Hiro diapers or may it be Hiro, biotech and Hiro as a greater future company. What comes to mind that could describe the company in a word

Miki Agrawal:
Hiro? When I describe it in a word, I would say regenerative Hope.d

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Like that. Yeah.

Miki Agrawal:
It’s a hope for the future. It’s really like an actual practical application for how nature can heal nature.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, very nice. And that’s a vision that’s basically timeless for the company. Whatever happens in the future that will, I usually ask my guests at the very end of our time together, what’s next for your brand? I mean, with you, there’s a lot. That’s next. So you’re going to spend,

Miki Agrawal:
Oh my God, we have so much magic coming. I’m working right now on a giant art installation that’s going to, I think really showcase what the challenge that people aren’t seeing is that’s all I’m going to say, but I let you know when we launch it because you’ll learn about it from media most likely when you see it.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, how exciting. How exciting. And there’s community again. So you work together with an artist to create that.

Miki Agrawal:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, we’re going to do it internally. Yeah. I have a great amazing team here that we’re just going to make it.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
So where can people find out about this in the future? Where can they follow you? Where do you want people to go?

Miki Agrawal:
Yeah, at Hiro Diapers, HIRO, diapers on Instagram, please follow us. You’re following the Hiro’s Journey. It’s a really, really fun journey to follow. And then if you want to follow me, it’s just at Miki Agrawal, M-I-K-I-A-G-R-A-W-A-L. And I will be actually sharing a new series on both Instagram and YouTube that I’m starting on how to build from this new place, from this regenerative nature-based effortless. But you can scale even bigger, even more abundantly, even better, but through this easeful effortless no stress way, the way nature does, it’s full of range. And so I’ll be sharing a lot more about this model on my Instagram and YouTube. So stay tuned.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Makes tons of sense that you’re going to do this, and we’re all excited to follow along and to learn and to see where Hiro is going to go next. Great things around the corner. Thank you so much. Taking almost an hour out of your busy day to be with us. We really, really appreciate it.

Miki Agrawal:
Of course, absolutely. Thank you so much for hosting.