A Fashion Designer And Her Emotional Control Headband

Ariel Garten is both a fashion designer and a psychotherapist, but now she is engaged in software development, which is not related to both.

Because of her keen interest in Science in high school, Garten participated in the research of the school stem cell laboratory. At the same time, she also had her own clothing production line and delivered door-to-door services.

From university to graduation, she has been fully enthusiastic about these two things. Under constant efforts, she has opened a clothing store in downtown Toronto, and has also become a trainee psychotherapist.

Garten said she had been trying to find a way to combine neuroscience with human brain consciousness, and after Garten established InteraXon in 2007, she found this method.

But the company did not launch any products immediately, and Garten wanted to study how to use brain waves in computer technology.

In her efforts, at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games, the wearers only lit up all the landmarks in Canada by using the company's electroencephalogram sensing helmet.

The technology was then applied to a headband called Muse.

The product is sold in a retail store, asking for 300 US dollars, and it is used in conjunction with an application called Calm for decompressing and improving user's attention.

Muse will turn the brain waves into the sound of the wind. People's attention and anxiety will gradually disappear in the wind. When the mood of the users completely calm down, there will be a group of birds as hints in the application interface of Calm.

But such a product plan does not always bring benefits to the company.

Garten proposed that the company team should focus on product market caters and brain sensing research in 2015.

The company currently has 50 employees and has collected $10 million from investors.

You know, it is not common for a completely layman designer and psychotherapist to join the software industry.

Self reflection and self control

Garten says she can judge herself objectively. She believes that she has been trained in clinical medicine so that she can distinguish between negative emotions and positive emotions. In her opinion, negative emotions are garbage in human brain, and there is no need for them to exist.

Although Garten is extroverted, she says she will still be nervous when speaking to a large group of people.

As a company's CEO, she needs to sum up the company's situation and company's products every day. In the face of so many people, Garten must consciously control her emotions.

Taking into account the external and performance of products

Muse is very challenging to design wear products. Users are concerned not only with the appearance of the product, but also with the user's feelings and functions.

Unlike Muse, which is not functional and wearable in the market, it has a special trick that it does not possess: emotional control of the human brain.

Muse was born in the right time and the right place is part of the reason that it can achieve certain results. She believes that Muse can maintain sustained sales because most customers like it very much, and the feedback that the company receives is optimistic.

Good at listening

As a psychotherapist, Garten has a better insight into motivations and intentions of employees than other managers.

Although she does not like to spy on employees' thoughts or emotions, she says that when recruiting new employees, she will pay attention to whether the applicant's motivation is consistent with the company's purpose.

Garten says listening is very important inside InteraXon.

She advocates that employees can fully express what they hear and think, especially at company meetings.

There is no gender difference.

Garten doesn't care that she works in a predominantly male field. Nor is she so different about the so-called risk investors' prejudices against female entrepreneurs.

Because they are a woman, the company has indeed lost a lot of business, but it is precisely because of their female identity, the company has also been a lot.

So in her view, this so-called "theory of men and women" is unfair.

She recently recruited a woman as a senior deputy manager of the company's marketing. She said that when companies recruit young employees, they do not care about men and women.