How to Create What People Actually Want with Erin and Sara Foster

Erin and Sara Foster have built an ecosystem—a fashion brand, a hit Netflix show, a podcast, a production company, and a venture fund—that suddenly feels like it’s working everywhere at once. But as they explain in this conversation with Emma Grede, none of it was planned. The foundation was laid through years of quiet failure, saying yes to things that seemed small, and learning to redirect when a path closed. The through line is not a grand strategy but a willingness to follow adjacent opportunities, even when they felt like a step down.

Failure as a Redirect, Not a Setback

Both sisters describe their careers as a series of blocks that forced them into new directions. Erin tried acting in her twenties and was bad at it—“acting gave up me,” she says. That failure pushed her behind the camera to try writing. Sara, meanwhile, was on a steady but unfulfilling TV show in Florida when Erin called in 2015 with an idea for a show called Barely Famous. That project, a comedy about vapid reality stars trying to become famous, was a cult hit that few people actually watched. But it was the first time they worked together, and it taught them a crucial lesson: take the thing you’re afraid people think of you, and be in on the joke. “That’s when everything shifted,” Sara says.