By Stacy Lee Kong

I've been thinking a lot about my relationship to work recently. To be fair, these are not new thoughts—like many people, I think, the past three years have helped me realize that a) I define myself by my work more than just about anything else, b) that is probably not unrelated to being a millennial, immigrant woman of colour and c) for all my ambition, I still don't want work to be the most important thing about me. But knowing that and being able to see what I need to change so my life better reflects that last bit are not the same things, as it turns out. (Unfortunately.)

That's part of why I wanted to talk to Lulu Liang, the CEO of Girlboss, the media company founded by Nasty Gal founder-turned-thought leader Sophia Amoruso in 2017. Yes, that Girlboss: the company that was at the forefront of a very specific wave of (now largely debunked) feminism, with a name that became a not-so-inspiring viral trend in 2021. Like me, the company has been grappling with some complicated questions: what role does capitalism play in our understanding of career success? How do we balance our ambition with our other needs? Do we really have to be working all the time? I chatted with Liang about all of those questions, how her personal approach to work has changed and what it means to be successful in 2023.

What was your career path prior to joining Girlboss?

I started off in management consulting. [At] business school, that was really marketed to us as the fastest way to success—well, this traditional idea of success—and a really great career launchpad. But I just didn't find it very fulfilling. While I was there, I discovered an e-commerce beauty brand called Luxy Hair on YouTube. I really resonated with the founders' philosophy on life and entrepreneurship, so I reached out to them and applied for a job. I think I applied for a customer service role; I just want to get my foot in the door and do whatever they would take me on as. They hired me as an operations assistant and I was able to work my way up to CEO within three years at the company. I had a really incredible run there; I was able to take it from a seven-figure company to a nine-figure company, we were able to sell the company to a really great strategic home and we were recognized as one of the best workplaces in Canada.

What drew you to Girlboss?

I was really like content at Luxy, I had a wonderful team, we were doing really well. It was a hard decision to leave. I would say one of the things that drew me to Girlboss was that I really aligned with the mission and values of the company. I've worked in a lot of male-dominated environments in my career, especially in the professional business realm. Even in beauty, boards and leadership teams are consistently made up of mainly all males. And also in my career, I've been lucky to work with some really incredible female leaders and mentors, and I think few things are more important in the world right now than elevating female leadership.

I feel like every profile I've read of you has really focused on your achievements—you landed a consulting job before you'd graduated and became a CEO at a really young age. All of these things are legitimately very impressive and very cool, but also feed into a kind of glamourization of being an overachiever. And as a person who has always thought of herself as an overachiever and who's realizing that potentially that's not always the best for my mental health, I'm very curious what are your thoughts on that? Have you always thought of yourself as an overachiever?

Yeah, definitely. I feel like I'm always optimizing my life for growth versus happiness and I wish I could just optimize my life for happiness instead. I think some of it is innate, and some of it had to do with my upbringing. I was born in China. My parents emigrated to Canada when I was seven and they were really, really poor. They had I think $10,000 to their name at that point, and just to fly back home to China would have been $5,000 for the three of us. So they really only had $5,000 and no friends, no, family, no job, they barely spoke English. They really grinded. So I feel like I had to overachieve to make my parents' sacrifice worth it. It's the least that I could do. All the hardship that I feel like I've endured, it's not even close to the things that they've seen in their lives and how hard they worked. They were much less privileged than I am.

I'm nodding so hard at everything you just said. I was born in Trinidad and we moved here when I was four, and much like your family, we didn't have a lot of money and my parents sacrificed a lot to build a life here. So, I do feel like I have a responsibility to make that worth it for them, and that feeling is very tied up in professional achievement for me.

For sure. I think we're all overdoing it to some degree. I think you can either overachieve out of fear (because you're afraid of failing) or love (because you're showing up every day with your best self because you just want to create something). And I want to [turn away from] that fear of failure, you know? Because I think you can be successful without it. That's all part of redefining success.

Like a lot of people, my relationship to work shifted over the course of the pandemic. I worked more than I ever have because for so long there was nothing else to do. And now I am so tired, because as it turns out, only working isn't actually good for you. I realized that I do love the work that I do, but it can't actually be the only thing I do. I'm curious if you had any similar shifts in your outlook on work or your approach to work?

Yeah, for sure. I think all of us did. I think this happened for me in three main ways. The first was that, very similar to you, setting boundaries became way more important. I'm really grateful to be able to work remotely, but it's made it a lot harder to shut off and separate work from home because you can always just... respond. It's so easy to go on your phone or go on your computer. You're never gonna shut off unless you force yourself to, so I set up some really strict boundaries for myself. I'm completely offline every Saturday. And it's not just work. For 24 hours, I don't check Instagram, I don't check my phone, I don't check [the news]. At first, I felt really guilty—I was like, What if the board texts me? What if there's an emergency? But I realized I need this for myself. I need to recharge every week. And it's not even that big of an ask! I know someone whose slogan is, what would Chad do? And Chad would be like, 'No, I'm taking the day.' So yeah, a weekly offline day. I think every single person should do it. I tell my team all the time, take slack off your phone, take the email off your phone, set boundaries.

The second thing is working remotely. Pre-COVID I was like, there's no way that I can ever work remotely, but I've been working fully remotely for the past two and a half years; I was in Tulum, Mexico for a while and now I'm in Portugal. It's not like my days are that glamorous—I'm mainly still working. But it has been really awesome. I'm so grateful for that.

And then the third thing is that I spent a long time working from my parents' house [at the beginning of] COVID, which I know is a privilege. I lived in a 700 square foot condo in Toronto and I gave up my lease and moved home. I haven't spent time living with my parents like that since high school, so it was an adjustment. But I think one of my main takeaways was that family time is rare and you should cherish it. I'm actually so grateful to be able to work remotely and spend so much time with my family. Living with them is so different than going home for dinner once a week or once every other week.

I imagine you must have had similar conversations about how Girlboss talks about work, too. Because I don't think previous iterations of the company would really fit in a post-pandemic world, because the conversations have shifted so drastically.

Totally 100%. Our new mission is redefining success. Girlboss 1.0 is done, for sure. That ethos is success at all costs, hustle culture, climbing the corporate ladder and that's not relevant anymore. I think COVID helped a lot of us realize that, too. But with Girlboss 2.0, we're really trying to redefine what being a Girlboss means to us now, and what success means. Girlboss 2.0 is way more balanced. She knows that success doesn't have to be achieved in the traditional way. She's leaning a lot more into wellness and mental health. And, you know, work is changing. The future of work is changing. I think the similarity between Girlboss 1.0 and Girlboss 2.0 is that this is still a woman that goes after what she wants and is unapologetically herself, but she defines success in a different way and will not sacrifice her well being and mental health for the traditional definition of "success" or "herself."

One major critique of the idea of the "girlboss" was that her ethos ended up replicating the same patriarchal barriers that kept us behind, especially women of colour, queer people, people with disabilities, people from 'marginalized backgrounds.' So to me, part of redefining success is not just what would make me successful, but also thinking about the ways my success might comes at the expense of other people's and, how can I avoid that, right? Even the term girlboss is so fraught; did you have internal conversations about brand identity? Did you ever consider changing the name?

For sure. We've had all those conversations, we've had focus groups with millennials and with Gen Zs, because they approach it differently. We've done anonymous surveys with the team so people can really share exactly how they feel. And the overwhelming consensus, every time we've had all these conversations, is to keep the name, but engage in the conversations about the word girlboss. And that's how we've been showing up every single day in our content for the last year and a half. We talk about crying at work, untraditional career paths, having sex during work hours. We have a freelancer starter pack. It's definitely changed and I'm really proud.

It's also how we approach it internally. We have menstrual leave, we have a very flexible, asynchronous, global work environment.

At the core, though, our mission is still the same: to elevate female leadership and to help women find success on their own terms, which is still important. It's still an issue these days; 2% of venture capital funding went to women in 2021. It's still very bad. So, the mission is there, but we don't abide by the original definition anymore.

Okay, final question: What does it mean to be a girlboss in 2023? What does it mean to be successful at work?

We're hiring a lot right now; we're growing really fast so I've been doing a lot of interviews. And one candidate I spoke to recently she said something in her interview and I really resonated with it. She was like, Success is never dreading your day. So I think what it means to be a girlboss in 2023 is really just allowing yourself to like feel joy and forgiving yourself and being kind to yourself while still achieving all the things that you want to. So, whatever success means to you, go for that. That's why I like that definition: success is never dreading your day. It's nice, because it's personal to you.

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