Beverly Anderson: Founder of EQ Wear

In this episode

In this episode I sit down with Beverly Anderson, founder and CES of EQ Wear and a dear friend of more than fifteen years. Our boys started in preschool together and are now seniors in high school, so before we ever get to business, we reminisce about the group of women who've walked that whole parenting journey together — the kind of friendships you can pick right back up with, no matter how much time has passed.

Beverly is a lifelong equestrian, and EQ Wear was born out of a very personal need: she couldn't find riding pants she actually loved, so she set out to make them herself. What I love about her story is how honest she is about the messy middle — the booth at a horse show with no product to sell, the red-eye flight to Portland to fix a batch of pants that would only have fit Humpty Dumpty, and the night she sat on her living room floor drawing patterns because a professional grade would've cost fifteen or twenty thousand dollars.

We also talk about the highs and lows of small business ownership, why she'd look for a partner if she did it again, and her surprisingly candid advice: if you can possibly imagine being happy working for someone else, do that — because entrepreneurship is hard and lonely. But if the idea is burning in your soul, keep going. And we close on purpose — how her horses became her zen space, and how the biggest, best decisions of her life weren't the financial ones, but the personal ones, like reshaping her whole career to raise her son.