30 Inspirational Tracy Dinunzio Quotes [2024] Founder Of Tradesy

•

Updated: January 20th, 2022

Tracy Dinunzio is a young American Business Woman with a vibrant and inspiring personality.

She is the Founder and CEO of Tradesy, the largest online resale marketplace for buying and selling designer fashion clothes.

Tracy announced their acquisition of New York-based closet organizing and styling service, Fitz — now rebranded as Tradesy Closet Concierge in 2018.

We've put together an incredible collection of Tracy Dinunzio quotes to read.

Here they are:

30 Inspirational Tracy Dinunzio Quotes [2024] Founder Of Tradesy

List of Inspiring Tracy Dinunzio Quotes

I try to think of building a business like making art.

I start my day with coffee and emails. I like to give myself a little time to wake up and clear my inbox, so I can start the day fresh. Then I get ready for work while listening to NPR, so I'm all caught up on the news.

I have wrapped up work for the day, I go home, eat dinner and think about our company strategy and how the team is doing. To settle down into a mode where I can reflect well, I do these very complicated jigsaw puzzles. I look for the ones that are the hardest -- the harder it is, the more it lets me get absorbed and think on a deeper level. My house looks like a 12 year old lives there, but it works for me.

I read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari twice. It broadened my view of everything from human behavior to how industry formed and how we got here today. I think more than anything it contextualizes modern life against the backdrop of the larger human history. To me it felt like it brought wisdom into my life that I didn't have before I read it.

Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance. For me, Elon Musk is our greatest living entrepreneur. And his story is both inspiring and practical for any entrepreneur. Normally the only people that look for book recommendations are entrepreneurs. So, I've been recommending and giving away copies since it came out.

I recommending a book called By Invitation Only: How We Built Gilt and Changed the Way Millions Shop by Alexis Maybank and Alexandra Wilkis Wilson. I recommend it to any commerce-oriented founders and entrepreneurs because it's an amazingly rich story of how Alexander and Alexis, the co-founders of Gilt Groupe, really transformed shopping in a very short period of time.

There are two sides to staying focused. One is to figure out how you find your way to your own flow state. To get really absorbed in that specific piece of work and spend hours inside of it. Mine is about a certain amount of privacy, about having my schedule cleared. I like to be in a public place, but in a private part of the public space.

The complete flip side of that you also need to master the art of quickly switching gears. So I keep copious lists that allow me to switch between tasks without forgetting or losing things that I know I have to come back to. If you just write down everything you've done and need to do then you know you're not losing the thread and can jump to the next one quite quickly.

I've never really had a boss. But what I've learned from observing people being bosses within our company is just how much we all influence each other and how careful a leader has to be with how they choose their words. It is a tremendous responsibility to be someone's boss, to say what you mean and mean what you say, and be thoughtful about your words.

John Doerr [an investor], who is on our board. He is just an incredible, remarkable leader who has figured out how to scale himself in ways that I've not seen up close with anybody else. I think that he has influenced me to let go and learn how to scale -- meaning let other people do the work and keep offloading things you used to do so that you can gain more capacity.

I went to Mexico and ended up staying to get my master's degree in fine arts. I was there for over three years. It was supposed to be a short trip that turned into a pretty long one. And when I came back from Mexico, the difference in how we treated objects shocked me. There is less of a disposable culture there -- you don't throw things away. That really inspired me to start Tradesy.

Our customers and team inspires me. I don't know how I got so lucky to have them all in my life. I think knowing that we're touching millions of women and making their lives a little easier, a little more affordable, empowering them to look and feel the way they want is endlessly inspiring.

Watching our team learn and grow, get better, get stronger and be the talented and incredible people they are, just makes it exciting to come to work every day.

Tradesy was my first business idea. I know a lot of entrepreneurs scaled a lemonade stand at the age of 12 but that wasn't me. I came from a much more creative place. All of my projects were about making art.

I worked my way through high school and college waiting tables and bartending. I learned that people are mean when they're hungry and nice when they are drinking.

Somebody told me very early on when I was starting Tradesy is that the only reason any business ever fails is because it runs out of money. And as a founder/CEO, my job is to keep fuel in the tank. If the business is a bus, the only reason that the bus is going to stop is if it runs out of fuel. That's how every business ends eventually. It's easy sometimes when you're focused on other parts of the business as a leader to forget that very basic common principle.

More than one investor that I pitched in the early stage commented on my appearance and told me I needed to look more like that of a fashion founder, rather than showing up for meetings looking like I spent three days straight at my computer, which is what I was doing at that time. That was terrible advice. What you look like has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of your work or the validity of your pitch. I think anyone who thinks it does is probably not worthy of being your investor or partner.

Relentless list-making. I tend to re-prioritize my list about three times a day. So I'll take 10 minutes and ask myself With what I know now, what's the most important thing on this list? What's the most urgent thing on this list? As you grow as an entrepreneur and there are more moving pieces, in order to remain productive and not just busy, you absolutely have to pause to prioritize with more frequency.

I use tool called notebook on [the Tradesy] app that lets you create multiple different books of notes and lists. I find that super useful.

For workflows, there are a lot of fancy solutions, but we find that Google Docs is the absolute best and most flexible way to keep track of stacks of documents, share and collaborate.

I’m still figuring that out, but I think it means more work-life integration. Being able to take vacations but do some work when you’re on them. Or take breaks while working to do things that feel leisurely. But in all honesty, this area is not something I've yet mastered.

I can't always prevent burnout, but I've learned how to quickly recover from burnout with a combination of meditation and for me, a short trip to the desert, to Palm Springs, is healing.

In our office, we have a lot of art-making tools, so if anyone feels blocked, they can go paint or build a lego set.

I’m learning to meditate and a little bit of self-hypnosis. It’s important because when you’re focused a lot on mastery and achievement, as I have been with my work, you can forget that there there is a whole other area of life that can be equally or even more fulfilling. I'm a very humble meditation student. I'm terrible at it so far, but I keep at it, because I believe in its value.

Your wedding, your marriage, and your life will be filled with flaws, mistakes, inappropriate jokes, and unexpected plot twists. Embrace the weirdness of it all, and learn to laugh at yourself.

Planning a wedding is just like starting a business. You have a budget and need rent space, hire employees, and create something that delights your customers/guests. If wedding planning with your partner isn't fun, you probably shouldn't start a business together.

Wedding photos lie. Especially the ones on blogs, in magazines, and on Facebook. Pretty does not equal happy, and happy is way more awesome.

Everybody has gross morning breath. That's kind of unrelated, but not necessarily. It just a thing that's true.

There are no signs or omens. If your dress arrives late or it rains on your wedding day, it has no bearing on the quality of the life that you build, every day, together.

An artist. It was all I ever wanted to be, and that’s what I was until I started Tradesy.

meet the author

Pat Walls

I'm Pat Walls and I created Starter Story - a website dedicated to helping people start businesses. We interview entrepreneurs from around the world about how they started and grew their businesses.

See full profile