episode 073: Anna Heyd

Anna Heyd has an animated energy that, in turn, energizes all those around her. The cofounder of luxury linen bedding company Flax Home has a million creative ideas and personal interests, and she develops deep relationships with others quickly. Prior to launching Flax with two business partners, she was in restaurants & hospitality, running the Hawksworth Group’s Bel Cafe for seven years. She was born outside of Toronto in a town called Newmarket, before her parents bought a piece of five-acre land where her civil servant father built their family home with friends over a summer. Her mother homeschooled Anna and her sister, wanting them to have broader experiences through the amount of time spent at the library, going to plays, and doing extra curricular activities. Each year, her mother always asked them if they wanted to go to ‘regular’ school, and when Anna was 12-years-old, she made her choice to go to high school. There, she played field hockey and immersed herself in theatre. After high school, she went to the University of Guelph, where she got her Bachelor of Commerce. She was hired by longtime hospitality veteran Chad Clark to manage Bel Cafe—the cafe side of Hawksworth Restaurant—after a role at the Fairmont’s Empress Hotel and a stint in wine sales. He gave her the task of getting to know everyone in the downtown core and treating them as if she was welcoming them into her own home. It was there that she met her friends and future business partners, who were regular customers with whom she often brainstormed ideas. In 2017, they launched direct-to-consumer Flax Sleep, now known as Flax Home, which has quickly grown since coming to market and has a showroom & warehouse in East Vancouver. In this conversation, we talked about the nature of homeschooling and how it allowed her to love learning; how growing up doing theatre and performance dovetailed nicely into her hospitality career; the way she developed friendships with her Bel Cafe customers; Anna’s natural journey into entrepreneurship; exercising her love for arts and creativity in business; the process of growing quality linen; how her business partners are mirrors for her; the things that bring Anna joy; and much more.