Leigh Batnick Plessner: Chief Creative Officer of Catbird

0:04Leigh Batnick Plessner:Hi, everyone. I'm Hilary Kerr, the co-founder and chief content officer of Who What Where, and this is Second Life, a podcast spotlighting women who have truly inspiring careers. We're talking about their work journeys, what they've learned from the process of setting aside their doubts or fears, and what happens when they embark on their second life. Today on the show, I'm speaking with Catbird's Chief Creative Officer, Lee Batnick-Plessner. After Lee graduated from Georgetown with a degree in English literature and anthropology, she worked at various D.C. coffee shops and as a cocktail waitress before landing a job in the children's room at renowned D.C.

0:45Leigh Batnick Plessner:bookstore, Politics, and Prose. She was eventually promoted to sidelines buyer, choosing all the non-book items in the store. While working this job, she went to various stationery shows and then decided to start a stationery brand of her own called Jezebel and moved to New York City. In 2005, she met the founder of the jewelry brand Catbird at a stationery trade show and soon thereafter started working at the brand's storefront in New York. Eventually, Leigh transitioned out of running her stationery brand and into working full time for Catbird. As the company grew, Leigh grew with it, and she currently holds the role of Chief Creative Officer, where she's responsible for the overall visual identity of the brand, including Catbird's buzzy partnerships with talent like Claro and Phoebe Bridgers.

1:36Leigh Batnick Plessner:I love this conversation, and I'm so excited for you to hear Leigh's story. Now, on Second Life, it's Leigh Batnick-Plessner. Leigh, are you ready? I'm ready. Okay, so we like to start this podcast at the beginning. So what did you study in school? And much more importantly, what did you think you were going to be when you grew up? So in school, I studied English and anthropology, and I had no idea what I was going to be when I grew up. I could imagine sort of a quality of a life that I wanted to have, and I could see little like scenes from it, but I didn't know how I would get there. Got it.

2:19Leigh Batnick Plessner:Okay. So while you were in school, when you were in college, what made you want to study English literature? I did as well. And anthropology, like what drew you to those two subjects? Well, I was a lifelong reader and would fall asleep with a book on my chest and still do, as I'm guessing you did and do too. That was it. That was the center of my world. And so the anthropology was like a little bit more of an accident. I started school. I went to Bryn Mawr my freshman year, which is like a very small women's college. And it was really special. It's like a little jewel of a school. My roommate was from Pakistan and I became friends with all the sort of South Asian girls there and decided I wanted to do South Asian studies.

3:03And that didn't pan out. And so I moved to Georgetown and started taking some classes in religion and different cultures. And that's sort of how the anthropology started. It was the closest thing I could get to South Asian studies there.

3:17Leigh Batnick Plessner:You mentioned that you transferred schools. What was the impetus for that? I feel like I just never really found my footing at Bryn Mawr. I think that that might have happened anywhere I went. I just wasn't quite ready to leave my mom. But it's a really small school and it was in the suburbs. Very beautiful, very special. But I had grown up in the suburbs and I really wanted to be in the city. And so that was why I left. Got it. And then after you graduated from Georgetown, you stayed in D.C. for a little while, right? I did, yes, for about two years. Talk to me about what that postgraduate life was like.

3:57Leigh Batnick Plessner:How did you find the job search? What were you looking for? At the time when I graduated, there was a lot of banks and similar institutions that were hiring really broadly, like even English majors. They were recruiting and it was just never a possibility for me that I would be able to do that. anyhow I ended up being a waitress at this cafe and DC is really small especially if you're not in politics so there was a thriving arts community there it was just a cozy little one and so working in this cafe kind of put me in the milieu of you know the people who were there doing that and then I ended up working at this independent bookstore called Politics and Prose which is just this institution.

4:45And that was really, I think, where everything started to somehow take shape and change for me.

4:52Leigh Batnick Plessner:I love that. Talk to me about what it was like working there, what your routine was like, because you started in the children's room, correct? Yes. Yeah. So I started in the children's section. There was this woman named Jewel Stoddard who ran it and she'd had her own children's bookstore in DC. And at some point she went and became part of Politics and Prose. And so sometimes, you know, I'd be sorting her mail and you'd see this really familiar handwriting and it would be a card from Maurice Sendak or, you know, she was just, yeah, it was wild. I have goosebumps telling you this. So, I mean, she and everyone who worked in the children's room took that so seriously as well.

5:32You should. And I learned a lot from them. And I was really proud because when I was there, the sales for the Weedsey Bat books by Francesca Leoblock went up and they were like, what's happening? And I was like, it's me. I'm recommending them to everybody. I loved working in that room.

5:50Leigh Batnick Plessner:As a fellow English major who has always loved books and who reads constantly with my small children, I just think about like, you have such powerful memories of the books that matter to you as a kid. Like it's such an unlock and will stay with you your whole life. Like it's such a powerful thing. And I appreciate you understanding the gravitas of that because I think that folks sometimes are a little like dismissive of children's literature or children and books in general, but it's like, oh no, no, this is the foundation. Like you will remember this for the rest of your life. Yeah. I have my daughter's nine and a few weeks and it took a while and we're still working on laying the foundation for her to love to read.

6:33And I, I just thought it would be exactly like me and it wasn't exactly like me, but just sort of teaching her this weekend, you know, okay, let's go to your shelf. Let's pull off eight different options. You look at the cover, but then you have to sort of read the first, not just first sentence, but first paragraph. And what's the one out of those that you just get pulled back into? So teaching her how to do that and how to like swim in those waters and find that path is so thrilling.

7:00Leigh Batnick Plessner:Very much so. Okay. So while you were at the bookstore, you were eventually promoted to sidelines buyer. I don't know what that really is. And I'm guessing many of our listeners don't as well. So could you please explain and walk us through what that entailed? I didn't know either, but you actually, everybody does know. We just don't know the name for it. So it's all like the lines that are on the side. So the non-book stuff at Politics and Prose, they loved stationery and cards. So that is what I was doing. Did you like that piece of the work? Like, how did you end up walking into that promotion?

7:37I loved it. I wanted the job. You know, I was thinking about it. I don't remember exactly how it happened, but there was a woman named Elizabeth who was this like very, very elegant French woman who had run that business for a while. And she taught me about Marcel Pagnuil and all of these other French writers. And I think she was moving back to France. And so the job was open. So I must have asked for it or interviewed for it and I got the job. So good lesson. Ask for the thing you want.

8:09Leigh Batnick Plessner:Yes. I always say closed mouths don't get fed. So what were your responsibilities like? Were there challenges that you were surprised by? And then I also want to talk about stationary shows. Yeah, I was doing the buying, which was so fun, kind of a dream. There were sales reps who would come in with like enormous cases and we would just sit in the cafe downstairs. There was this remainder room, which is where all the books are that are remainders. So they have like the black mark on the bottom and it's full of all of these really wonderful art books and other things that just kind of fell out of circulation.

8:48So we would sit and we would go through things together. I did receiving. So I had a desk in the receiving room. And then I had to learn how to like lightly reconcile invoices, submit for payment, all of that kind of stuff. And then, oh, do the merchandising, which I was obsessive about.

9:06Leigh Batnick Plessner:So how did you know what to buy? Unless I'm missing something. There's nothing really in your background that would suggest that you... You're not missing anything. Okay. I'm so curious about that part because I feel like everything this day and age feels data-led. Sometimes data only tells you where you've been, not where you're going. So I'm wondering, are you thinking about, well, this appeals to me? Are you thinking about, well, I think this will appeal to the buyer based on what they've already purchased? Obviously, you had someone who had been in the role previously who had set probably a strong path.

9:39Leigh Batnick Plessner:But how did you step into owning that buying strategy piece of it? My strategy was just to buy the things that I thought were the most beautiful. And I think it worked. I mean, they didn't tell me that it didn't work. There you go. Yeah, things sold. And then when they would sell, I would reorder more of them. But yeah, it was purely just based on what I loved. It's a lesson in learning to trust your gut. Totally. Totally. Yeah. Okay, well, talk to me about going to stationery shows, which, like as a Virgo book nerd person, Like that very much speaks to my heart and seems like it would be extremely enjoyable.

10:16Leigh Batnick Plessner:But of course, I'm romanticizing it. What was it like? I don't think you are romanticizing it. I don't mean this in any way, shape or form as an insult, but just a statement of fact. It was before Etsy existed. And there was this renaissance, though I'm not sure what the first flowering was, but there was this renaissance of stationery happening. There were all of these women around my age or in their 20s or in their early 30s who had these really beautiful lines there was a lot of letterpress happening and so it was this really really vibrant community it was pretty incredible like the stationery show now is like tucked inside of a bigger trade show inside of the gift show but it was its own thing and like you could do like two days there just walking up and down the aisles it was pretty magical and full of people who were, you know, pretty highly trained graphic designers or had other careers as art directors and were, you know, really serious about what they were doing.

11:15Leigh Batnick Plessner:That sounds amazing. So I can only imagine that this part of your career was also extremely formative because you ended up starting a stationary company of your own. Talk to me a little bit about making that leap and where the idea came from and how you thought about going about it? So I did. I started a stationary line. I called it Jezebel. There was like a tobacco store in Adams Morgan, which was the neighborhood that I lived in in DC. And I had a box of these rose scented cigarettes with gold tips and they were hot pink and the brand was Jezebel. So that's where the name came from. And I still have that empty box on my bookshelf.

11:59And I had just been observing that most of what I was seeing at the stationery show was these very lovely sort of ivory cream backgrounds and a small pale medallion design of some kind letter pressed in the center. And I had some books of like 19th century silhouettes, paper cuts, and I had this idea that I could use them and I could do it full bleed. So take up the entirety of the space and have it be really narrative, like a little play and have like a saturated candy color motif to it. And that's how I started.

12:38Leigh Batnick Plessner:I love it. What does it actually look like though, going from having an idea to actually producing something? So I moved home. I grew up on Long Island. So, you know, I was in the orbit of this incredible stationery show and just the world and also could live for free. And that was really, really helpful. And then I just used whatever remote connections I had. So for example, my dad had a patient. They were offset printers. So they became my printer. And there is this boy that I used to hang out with and he was kind of a graphic designer. And so I like very poorly sketched a logo and he made it into a logo for me and then made a website for me.

13:22You know, it's probably, I was going to say not dissimilar to how you would start something today, but it's maybe very dissimilar to how you would start something today. Because it was just like putting like tiny little pieces together and figuring it out.

13:35Leigh Batnick Plessner:So from there, how did you get in front of stores and buyers? I'm assuming that you probably knew some from your days on the other side, but how did you go about selling your stationery to anyone? I can't remember the exact order of events, but I had a website and I did the stationery show and my stepfather built me these like wooden frames that we turned into walls and I covered them in lace and I sewed bird's nests on them and draped pearls and I put the cards inside of that. And a lot of people just wanted to buy the bird's nests with pearls. And I was like, no, I'm selling the cards. Isn't it so obvious?

14:19so I met a lot of buyers that way and also press would walk the shows so I had a feature in daily candy which was like huge moves the needle yep and then design sponge so did that drum up business from your website yes I feel like those were like the influencers of the day right and so immediately you would get orders and it would be so exciting it would crash your site yeah the three people on my like very little banter that I can pay for.

14:52Leigh Batnick Plessner:So I also want to point out, you're being somewhat modest about this, but Jezebel ended up being sold in really amazing stores. ABC Home Store, the Frick Museum Store, the New Museum Store. That must have felt incredible and gratifying. But also as someone who has started a business, there's a lot of logistics and a lot of behind the scenes. What were you learning from this whole process of having clients and deliverables and running a business? I was learning that I needed more accountability, that it wasn't enough to just be me. And it wasn't enough to just, you know, have my mom nudging me in my early to mid twenties.

15:33And I think I probably always had a low sort of hum of guilt that I wasn't doing a good enough job, but I didn't have enough of that motivation to realize that I had the agency to make that guilt go away. Maybe not go away, like, you know, to get quieter. So I think starting a business by yourself, you have to be voracious. I think I was voracious. I was maybe just a little bit too young to really hold my own feet to the fire. I used to joke with my friends who also had their own businesses. They were like, we should just do each other's books because we would do an incredible job if I had to do yours.

16:20But because it's mine, I'm like, you know, allowing myself to mess up.

16:27Leigh Batnick Plessner:I understand that more than you know. Okay. So then in 2005, you met the founder of cat bird at a stationary trade show. And she loved your designs so much that she ended up selling them in her store. Talk to me about your early relationship. And did you have a hunch that you would want to work together long-term? No, not at all. So this was the show where I had the bird's nest on the walls. And, you know, there's a lot of people walking down the aisles and you can sort of see people coming towards you and you have a sense of who's going to be the one who looks and connects. And it's really such a bad feeling when they don't because 90 % of people were not interested in the bird's nest setup and the stationery.

17:18But Rony came in, she stopped and I was really excited. It was my first trade show and it was her first trade show for Catbird. And I think I had just sold to maybe Spatial Etcetera, which was another store in Williamsburg, like early days. And I remember her being kind of irritated, you know, that she hadn't gotten there first. And I think that that is sort of a lot of, you know, the drives that you need to have of being like, I need to be the first one to make every discovery and find everything. So anyway, she bought Jezebel for Catbird. And then maybe like six months, a year later, this was when Catbird was like a teeny tiny store on Metropolitan, which is for people who know, just like it was pretty sleepy then.

18:05It was not the main street. It was on purpose to like not be on the main street. She was opening the second store on Bedford and was looking for people to come and work. So that is how I started working at Catbird. And it was a teeny, tiny little store.

18:21Leigh Batnick Plessner:I love that. So after working at the store for a while, you started taking on more responsibility and eventually at some point decided to shut down Jezebel to work at Catbird full time. By the way, it's just, it's so lovely because like Catbird has been such a part of like my story because I feel like there aren't that many brands that we worked with early on and like that we were aware of in 2006 that are still, you know, like so meaningful. So I'm so delighted to hear more about what Catbird was like at that moment in time, because we were just obsessed out in LA and thought it was like the coolest.

18:59Leigh Batnick Plessner:We're always checking the site and talking about it. And anytime we were in New York for fashion week, we would go, like it was a whole big thing. But what was it that you saw in that moment that made it worth it to you to think like, yes, this is where I want to spend more of my career. That makes me so happy. And I think that I felt a little bit of that feeling, but in a very different way, I felt like we were building something and making something. And like, I remember in around 2008, I think it was 2008 or saying to my mom, like, I think this could be something more than what it is, but I didn't know what that meant.

19:40And I had nothing in mind, but just, I felt like the 225 square feet wasn't quite containing what we were doing. And because of where we were, it was so vibrant. It was so exciting. I felt like we were in conversation with the world because Williamsburg at that moment was really where you would want to come visit.

20:05Leigh Batnick Plessner:It was the culture of the moment. Like it was so important. It totally was. And so I felt like we had this sort of mix of things happening where our local customers and community were taking Catbird out into the world because they were makeup artists and they were stylists and they were models. And so they were going to, you know, L.A. and Paris and wherever. And then they would share it with people who would then come back when they were visiting. It was really exciting and it was really fun. Yeah, I think that's one of the things that is like the blessing of early internet is that it felt like you could experiment and grow and have community and it didn't feel like there was so much pressure on you or there are so many eyes on you or that you needed to have metrics overnight because none of it meant anything at that exact moment in time.

20:55Leigh Batnick Plessner:It felt like a very, not a pure place to create, but it felt very creative and like community centric. centric. It was like having pen pals, but it was just all like a lot quicker and more immediate. We didn't have internet in the store for a really long time because for whatever reason, I don't know, like they're just, it was really hard to get internet on Bedford for a long time. And so I used to have to take our desktop computer across the street to internet garage to update our POS system. And I was like, I think the only thing you could have done in Williamsburg in like 2008, 2009, to get people to look at you twice was to bring your desktop computer to the internet company, like nothing else, anything else went, but that was totally.

21:38Leigh Batnick Plessner:So today you are the chief creative officer, but I'm curious about the trajectory that your career took to get to that point and how you and Catbird grew along together. So how did you go from like working in the store to being the chief creative officer? So alongside working in the store, We had a website, Roni, had a website from day one and was really good about building an email list from the beginning. So we always had e-commerce. And so it was sort of like Goldilocks isn't the right fairy tale analogy, but maybe Alice in Wonderland, like the business was, I think, bigger a lot earlier than people realized.

22:23And then we also had our own jewelry line. We were sort of, you know, designing it, having people make it. And then we went from somebody making it off-site, an old employee making it in her kitchen. And then we had the studio apartment above the store, which was the same size as the store. And it was our web fulfillment center. And it was also our first studio. So we had one jeweler's bench in there. And then we had an office. And then we started building a jewelry studio. So it was slow and deliberate and intentional process. It wasn't intentional in the sense that there was a business plan leading us there, but it was very considered every step of the way.

23:07Leigh Batnick Plessner:And then you work on all of the visual elements of the brand, right? Yes. So how did you take your previous work experience and use that to apply those skills to this job that has continued to grow? It goes back to like how I bought the stationery. I bought the things that I thought were beautiful. And for Catbird, it was so clear what we were doing to us that it made decisions really easy because we knew it either felt right or it didn't feel right. and so I learned along the way there's still a lot that I don't know and I have to ask my colleagues all the time and I kind of say that sometimes I'm homeschooled and then I have colleagues who are more classically trained so I'm always trying to learn from them but also let them be the masters of their discipline so a lot of questions I made a lot of mistakes.

24:06Leigh Batnick Plessner:And that's such an interesting point though I always joke that like when you're in the early days of a company, everyone has to be a generalist and everyone's doing everything. And then as time goes on, you need more specialists and some generalists can become specialists, but not all of them. And it also becomes a really incumbent upon some of like the folks who are there early on to realize like, oh, I don't know as much about this. I should give it to this person who specializes in it. And sometimes that's really easy when you're like handing over finance stuff that you don't want to do. And sometimes it can be harder when it's like creative direction or, you know, like some aspect of something that you do feel comfortable doing.