Five Minutes With a Female Founder: Meet the Founder of Dri Umbrellas

At 143PR, we're constantly inspired by the women building innovative companies, solving real-world problems, and redefining entrepreneurship. Five Minutes With a Female Founder is a blog series featuring quick but insightful conversations with female entrepreneurs. Through five questions, we explore what inspired them to start their businesses, the lessons they've learned, the challenges they've overcome, and the advice they have for other women pursuing their own ventures.

In this interview, we're highlighting one of our clients, Deirdre Bird, the founder of Dri Umbrellas, a company proving that everyday products can make a meaningful environmental impact.

Dri Umbrellas was born from a desire to tackle one of the world's most pressing environmental challenges: ocean bound plastic. Dri Umbrellas creates durable, high-quality umbrellas made with sustainability in mind. Built to last and backed by a lifetime guarantee, Dri's products challenge the throwaway culture that contributes to environmental waste. The company's commitment to both sustainability and product excellence has helped earn the trust of customers who appreciate an umbrella designed to withstand years of use.

Here’s Deirdre interview.

What motivated you to start this company? 

When I learned about the ocean plastic crisis I felt compelled to act. I knew that to truly have a positive impact on this problem, building a business was the way to both raise awareness for the environmental issue, and create a scalable solution to address it. I had no business background or education, so I began by Googling, "Where do I get ocean plastic?"

What has helped you build trust with customers/clients? 

Unquestionably we've built trust with our customers because of the quality of our product. Unlike many others on the market today, our umbrellas don't break or snap after only a few uses. Strength and durability were at the forefront of every decision during our product's manufacturing process. For example, I avoided aluminum poles because they're more likely to bend; instead, we used stainless steel. 

I challenged myself to craft an umbrella of such caliber that I could confidently back it with a lifetime guarantee, which we've successfully done. A Dri umbrella is the last umbrella you'll ever have to buy. 

What's been the hardest part of entrepreneurship that nobody talks about? 

For me, the hardest part of being a solo female founder is accepting that entrepreneurship is about momentum, not motivation. Society (and Shark Tank) makes us think that business success requires unrelenting passion and motivation every minute of every day. We need to be up at 5am working on the business, and not go to bed until after midnight. If you aren't motivated at all times, you might as well exit the Tank and accept you aren't built for business ownership. 

But it's impossible to be motivated all the time. Why? Because motivation is a feeling. It's a fleeting emotion, like sadness or excitement. And like those emotions, it comes in waves. You're full of it one moment - void of it the next. Momentum, on the other hand, is a state of being. You're literally in motion. And it's momentum, not motivation, that propels the business forward. 

What's your one piece of advice for other female founders? 

If you're in the very early stages, my advice is to just start! Even if you feel underqualified, underprepared, and under-resourced, as long as you start, you won't be any of those things for long. For later stage female founders, the quote I cling to is, "The only way to fail is to give up." Holding on to that mentality ensures that even when you're disappointed, stressed, tearful, overwhelmed, or simply feel like you have no idea what you're doing, you can still remind yourself at the end of the day that no matter what happened, you didn't fail. 

Read more interviews in the series here.