Why most business owners are just putting out fires all day

Boxers & Briefs Podcast #34: The reality of being a business owner with Georgia Patten

Starting a business is rarely a straight line from idea to success. Georgia Patten, founder of bored.george sunglasses, knows this better than most. Her journey from squinting through European markets to building a brand stocked in 90 stores across New Zealand and Australia is filled with the kind of setbacks that would make most people quit. But Georgia’s approach to business disasters might surprise you.

When her premium limited edition collaboration boxes arrived from China with two spelling mistakes in one sentence, her employee Charlie nervously asked if she’d seen them yet. “You’ve spelt exclusive ‘exlcusive’ on the box,” Charlie pointed out. As Georgia read it, she realised she’d also misspelled sunglasses. Her response? She laughed.

“What else am I supposed to do? This launches in two weeks,” Georgia explains. By that afternoon, she’d ordered stickers from a local manufacturer to cover the mistakes. Problem solved, business moving forward.

From squinting to designing

Georgia’s path to sunglasses entrepreneurship began with a simple problem. She’d never worn sunglasses because she couldn’t find any that looked good on her face. “I just squinted,” she admits. “Crow’s feet were going to come in hard.”

Everything changed during a solo trip through Europe when she was 20. The underground markets in Turkey and Morocco offered styles she’d never seen in New Zealand, and with newfound confidence from living independently in London, she came home with six pairs of sunglasses.

Back in New Zealand, working at physiotherapy clinics, the boredom set in. “I got paid really well, but it was just extremely boring,” she recalls. Inspired by a friend starting a jewellery business, Georgia decided to import sunglasses as a creative outlet, not as a business venture.

The accidental business owner

For the first eight months, Georgia sold predesigned sunglasses from Alibaba with her logo engraved on the side. They were cheap, which was part of the problem. “I loved the styles but I hated how they felt,” she explains. The quality issues pushed her to learn design from scratch.

This happened while she was still working her day job. “I’d get my work done by about 11 am and then till 5 pm I’d work on bored.george,” she says. She taught herself design, started building a community on Instagram and learning photography along the way.

The business name came from her travel blog ‘Not So Bored George’ for her European trip. “Moving back to New Zealand and starting this business, boredom was my biggest issue.” she explains. The name stuck and became the brand’s biggest talking point.

The trade show breakthrough

The turning point came when an optician reached out wanting to stock her designs. Georgia was on a girls’ trip in Whangamata when the email arrived. “I was like, what? I’m not even a business. Why does somebody want to stock me?”

Within a week, she’d booked a trade show. Six months later, she landed 13 stockists at that first show. The biggest break was Sails and Co, who took her on to six stores straight away with just two styles.

“That was probably the moment where I was like okay, I’ve got something if they want me,” Georgia says.

When success becomes a problem

Landing major retailers like Flo and Frankie should have been purely celebratory, but it nearly broke the business. When Georgia suggested an order size for their 16 stores, they came back and doubled it. The problem? A four-month lead time and only weeks to deliver.

Georgia, her mum, and her partner spent five days straight packing orders when they realised they didn’t have enough cases. The shipment from China had disappeared in transit. For weeks, they received only “we can’t find it, we don’t know where it is” from the manufacturer.

They had to unbox their entire inventory, repurpose cases, and place another order for 2,500 cases from a different manufacturer. The original shipment finally turned up a month later, but by then they’d already solved the problem.

“That was probably one of the most stressful three weeks of my life,” Georgia admits. But Flo and Frankie placed another order within four months, making it one of their biggest breaks.

The art of problem solving

Ask Georgia what she does for work, and she’ll tell you she ‘fights fires.’ Her partner says she doesn’t run a business, she just puts out fires, and Georgia agrees that’s accurate for most business owners.

The sunglasses with wrong printing became another fire to fight. They’d pre-sold 250 pairs of their bestselling Pipers, but they arrived marked as ‘bio acetate’ instead of regular acetate, making them misleading to sell.

With Christmas orders waiting and no time to send them back to China, Georgia got creative. She spent days in hardware stores looking for solutions, testing acetones and polishing machines on sunglasses. The final process involved nail polish remover, car wax, and her dad’s garage polishing wheel.

“We had trestle tables set up in dad’s double garage, and we did this for 250 pairs of sunglasses,” she recalls. They came out perfect, and customers never knew about the drama behind each pair.

Strategic pivot that doubled revenue

Twelve months ago, bored.george was 70% wholesale, 30% ecommerce. After researching how much more money they could make through direct sales, Georgia decided to flip the model.

The transformation required significant investment in brand awareness and advertising. They employed an ads buyer for Google and social media campaigns they’d never run before. The results? The revenue split completely flipped to 70% ecommerce, 30% wholesale, while doubling overall revenue.

“It’s been fun having way more control over your business,” Georgia explains. The shift enabled more creative marketing activations and community involvement, moving beyond just “putting five grand behind an ad campaign.”

The cost of constant growth

The success comes with personal costs. Georgia admits she doesn’t have work-life balance figured out, and burnout is something she’s actively trying to manage. “I feel super under-equipped for dealing with the amount of things I’m dealing with,” she says.

But she’s made peace with choosing this particular kind of hard. “You can have work-life balance if that’s what you’re looking for, but while we don’t have a family and kids, I can afford to not have work-life balance right now.”

Her evenings often involve “some trashy reality TV” (Love Island is a favourite) combined with digging into work projects. It’s not traditional balance, but it works for her current life stage.

Trust and learning from mistakes

One of Georgia’s biggest learnings came from trusting the wrong accounting firm. Despite her gut feeling that she wasn’t big enough for their services, she followed a business coach’s recommendation. The result was one of her most costly business mistakes.

“Nobody knows your business as well as you do,” she reflects. While professionals can help, Georgia learned the importance of trusting her instincts and ensuring any business relationship has mutual respect.

The experience shifted her approach from automatically deferring to supposed experts to maintaining her own judgment while seeking advice.

Building resilience through fire fighting

Georgia doesn’t think she started business with natural resilience. “You learn it. I don’t think you come into business with it.” Each mistake becomes a learning opportunity, and she’s developed the ability to laugh at problems rather than be overwhelmed by them.

“You laugh or cry, and laughing is just so much easier,” she says. When faced with the spelling mistake boxes, her employee Charlie was amazed at her calm reaction. But by that point, Georgia had learned that panicking doesn’t solve problems faster than thinking through solutions.

The recognition worth waiting for

Despite five years of business growth, Georgia says her ‘I’ve made it’ moment came recently when bored.george won Excellence in Marketing at the Girls in Business Awards. Standing in front of 700 businesswomen, she finally felt confident in her decisions rather than just stumbling through.

“It’s the recognition, and maybe people looking up to what you do rather than you just feeling like you’re stumbling your way through,” she explains.

The authentic approach

One thing that sets bored.george apart is Georgia’s transparency about mistakes. Her social media followers regularly point out spelling errors in her posts, which has become part of the brand personality.

“It’s well known on my social media that I can’t spell,” she laughs. Rather than trying to hide this human element, it’s become an authentic touchpoint with customers who feel like they’re part of the journey.

Looking ahead

Georgia’s approach to business challenges offers a different model for entrepreneurship. Instead of pretending everything is under control, she’s honest about the chaos while demonstrating how to navigate it with humour and determination.

Her advice for other business owners facing seemingly insurmountable problems? Learn to laugh at the disasters, trust your gut even when experts disagree, and remember that every mistake is just another fire to put out and learn from.

The spelling mistake boxes launched on schedule with their strategically placed stickers. The customers never knew about the drama, the polished sunglasses in dad’s garage, or the missing shipment that nearly derailed Christmas orders. They just saw a brand that keeps delivering quality products and authentic communication. Sometimes the best business strategy is simply refusing to let the fires burn down the whole operation.

This article and podcast is proudly brought to you by Gilligan Sheppard, the problem solvers in business who believe in thinking differently.