It Ain't Over (13 page)

“He’s very even-keeled, very calm,” she says. “Again and again, he proved to me that he would always be there. I knew I could believe in him.”

Most important, he loved her for exactly who she was, full figure included. “It was definitely easier to accept myself because he accepted me,” she says.

They married in 2001. Carlos was now a runner and busboy at another upscale restaurant, but after more than 20 years, Robina was burned out on the business—and the drug- and alcohol-fueled lifestyle that went along with it. “We were working late nights, going out afterward, and then crashing into bed at six in the morning. It was a blast, but you get older and you’re like, ‘Now what?’ ”

The answer came during that 2003 vacation to Puerto Vallarta. Sitting at the pool after her disastrous swimsuit shopping excursion, Robina couldn’t get the negative self-talk out of her head:
I’m so fat. I can’t fit into anything.

But then she started to look around her. “It was all these middle-aged women, some bigger than me,” she says. “Carlos was lying next to me, and I said, ‘What if all these women want to buy a bathing suit? It can’t be just me.’ Then, it was literally like, ‘Bing! You know what they need here? A plus-size bathing suit shop!’ ” And Robina knew that
she
was the one to open it. She and Carlos could sell their condo and relocate to Puerto Vallarta year-round.

Carlos was skeptical. He’d moved from Mexico seeking opportunity in America, and he’d found it. “He envisioned us living in a shack, eating beans and rice.” But Robina wouldn’t let it die (“I’m really dogged when I get an idea”). She knew it would be the fresh start they needed. She told Carlos, “I need you to do this for me.”

Eventually he relented, but he made her promise that they would come
back if things didn’t work out. That was Robina’s green light. With their savings, she began buying hundreds of bathing suits in sizes 12 through 40, storing them in boxes around their apartment. And she came up with a name for her store: Curvas Peligrosas, meaning “dangerous curves,” a reference to both her imagined full-figured clientele and the mountainous roads leading into Puerto Vallarta.

It took three years before Robina and Carlos were able to sell their San Francisco condo, but finally in 2006, they took off for Mexico in a Chevy pickup with a camper top, pulling a five-by-eight-foot trailer filled with bathing suits. What they didn’t have: a real business plan. “I’m impulsive. I just said, ‘I think we can make this work. Let’s do it.’ ”

And they did—though “to say there were hiccups along the way is an understatement,” Robina says. The biggest adjustment was settling into the slower pace in Mexico. “I’m very type A, so at first it was hard,” Robina says. “
Mañana
means ‘tomorrow’ in Spanish but not in Mexico. Here, when a person tells you
mañana
, it could mean something will happen tomorrow, but it could also be the next week—or never. I had to learn to go with the flow.”

It took a year to complete their many to-do lists, which started with finding a storefront (located not far from the very shop Robina visited on that first trip) that Carlos and a team of contractors remodeled. “They spackled, painted, fixed the ceiling, built dressing rooms, put in electrical and lighting,” Robina says.

She had to learn to do business the Mexican way, which meant jumping through hoops to get permission to hang an awning over the shop (only to take it down a few months later when a new mayor banned them). Or standing in lines all around the city to pay the water, electric, or tax bills. “You can’t just drop the bills in the mail with a stamp because they may or may not get there,” she says. “And if they do, it could be who knows when?”

Carlos’s fluent Spanish proved invaluable, and Robina made it a point to
brush up on her language skills as well, particularly swimsuit vocab:
Queda apretado
(“Does it fit tight?”) or
Tenemos de todas las tallas
(“We have all sizes”).

In its first six years, Curvas more than doubled its sales, and it did even better during the busiest winter months. But Robina isn’t focused on the dollars and cents—she shortens the store hours during the quiet summer months so she and Carlos can actually enjoy living in a vacation destination.

“We didn’t come here to become millionaires,” she says. “We came here to live.”

And it’s a beautiful life. The home they share with their two dachshunds has views of the mountains and a banana tree in the backyard. Carlos now works as a general contractor, managing crews that do everything from installing tile to building furniture, a business he came up with while remodeling the shop.

And for Robina, Mexico has been just the fresh start she wanted. Since moving there, she “just stopped” drinking and doing drugs. “It was about facing underlying causes,” she says, including coping with her decades-old guilt over giving up her baby. “I always wondered where she was and thought about how she was growing up.” So before moving to Mexico, Robina found her daughter, then 23, through the adoption agency and flew to meet her in Texas. “We both cried,” says Robina, who was overwhelmed to see bits of herself in this young woman. “She has my freckles and she’s built like me. We keep up online and get together whenever I travel to Texas.”

With a marriage that’s stronger than ever, a new relationship with her daughter, and a successful business, these days Robina says, “I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.”

The shop has also turned into an embodiment of Robina’s new selfembracing attitude, its Facebook page filled with jokes (“Calories—tiny creatures that live in your closet and sew your clothes a little bit tighter every
night”) and inspiring quotes (“Confidence will make you happier than any diet ever will—so embrace your body”).

“Now I’m the cheerleader, the positive one,” Robina says. When she hears women complaining about how they look, she says, “Stop! Would you say that to your friend? Then don’t say it to yourself!”

What makes Robina happiest are the women who appreciate their reflection in her shop’s mirrors. One in particular stands out: This 19-year-old girl was a size 30, so Robina pulled out suits up to a 40. “She was beside herself that I even had suits in her size,” and when she came out of the fitting room, she had a huge smile on her face. “Oh my God,” she said. “This has never happened before. This suit is too big on me!”

Recalling that story, Robina chokes up. “It was the coolest thing in the world,” she says. “When I have days like that, it reaffirms that everything I am doing is good.”

Sue Rhea, 71

Lebanon, Tennessee

W
hen Sue Rhea throws a party, she always invites Bob. Several Bobs, in fact. The more Bobs, the better. Bob is
very
popular.

Bob, you see, stands for Battery Operated Boyfriend. He’s a vibrator.

Through her 25-year-old company, Surprise Parties, Sue sells 25 different kinds—from small, beginner-sized models like the Mini-G (for “vibrator virgins”) on up to the McDreamy, the Aquasaki, and the Lotus Flutter—“arousal for you, arousal for two, arousal for him,” Sue says.

And that’s not all that Sue sells. She also markets the Love Glove (for massages), Nude Body Shave, fur-lined “love cuffs” (in black or pink), “cock tail shakers,” and Chocolate Pens (“write love notes on your sweetheart’s body, then lick them off”). And she has made a fortune at it.

It was clear from early on that Sue had inherited the retail gene. “When I was little, our house was right off the bus line, so in the summer I would sit on our porch and sell Kool-Aid or homemade pot holders,” says Sue, whose
dad was a successful Ohio car dealer. “I was a go-getter. I wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

But Sue’s precocious business skills took a detour when she was 18; she married, had two children within four years, and was divorced by 30. “I had to make a living,” she says, and that often meant working two or three gigs at a time, from a $15-an-hour job as a receptionist at a busy Nashville medical practice to selling Avon products to running a dollar store out of a six-foot truck.

“I’d see these people with baskets of food they bought with food stamps, and I’d think,
That will never, ever be me
. I budgeted myself $12 a week for gas and food.”

In fact, it wasn’t until age 46, after Sue’s two sons were grown and out of the house, that she had time to find her true calling. “I always felt there was something bigger and better out there for me,” she says. “I’m not a big dreamer, but I wanted to have my own business.”

It was her second husband, Joe, who came up with the perfect idea. “We were living in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, and he saw this television ad for adult stores,” she says. “You know, windup penises, can toppers that looked like boobs.”

They thought the items were funny—and, from her work in the medical office, Sue knew that women could really use a boost in the bedroom. “People have always opened up to me, and one of the things women like to talk about is sex—if they’re getting some, any, or none,” Sue says. “And I could tell many women didn’t know A from Z about their bodies.” Sue thought she could fill that niche.

After taking out a credit line on her house, she invested $4,000 (“a huge sum to me at the time”) and filled her laundry room with 75 products, from arousal lotions to lingerie to “pants enhancers.” Now all she had to do was sell them.

So she placed an ad in a local newspaper: “For women only. I bring all the products. An evening of fun and laughter in your own home.”

“We have an expression around here: ‘Funny is money,’ ” Sue says. “I have a very outgoing personality, and I’ve always loved making people laugh. We were in the middle of the Bible Belt, and I thought,
If I can get this started here, I can take it anywhere
.”

Sue’s guests that first night were just regular working-class women, but there was no doubt that they wanted to buy what she was selling. “I wouldn’t have made as much in a week at my receptionist job as I made in that one night.” Thanks to that first party, Sue quickly booked a half dozen more.

Pretty soon, Sue was doing five to seven parties a week, often taking in $300 to $500 a pop. “The women didn’t know how to ask their husbands to please them—or how to please their husbands,” Sue says. “And they couldn’t believe the products would work. But they were too embarrassed to go into an adult bookstore, so we were their only source.

“I had grown up in a house where there was no introduction to sex or sexuality,” Sue says. “People just didn’t talk about things then. So I wanted to help women remove that stigma. I’d bring articles from magazines to the parties that quoted ob-gyns. I wanted to give interesting, educational presentations where a woman could realize ‘Oh, it’s okay to have these feelings.’ ”

Most of all, Sue wanted to make sex fun: “It’s a girls’ night out: The women are getting together, having a glass of wine, letting their hair down.”

Sue would get the party started by passing out “penis erasers,” a perfect icebreaker for lending some levity to the proceedings. Then she’d announce: “Tonight we’re going to be showing you beautiful lingerie and novelties, lotions and potions for licking, rubbing, smelling, and tasting. . . .”

She knew just how to hit the right notes. “I’d say, ‘Hey, girls, you know when you’re lying back and counting the dots on the ceiling and just waiting for something to happen, and the kids are banging on the door trying to get in? Well, it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Then she’d pass out her products: fishnet suspender panty hose, Guavalava Body Mist (“to moisturize and invigorate”), flavored and unflavored lubricants, the Venus Butterfly (a “mega-powered partner ring that vibrates”), Nipple Nibblers, then forge onward to Ben-Wa Balls.

“I’d make a joke out of them,” she says. She knew that most women were multitaskers, right? So, with the Ben-Wa Balls, Sue said, they could take care of business
and
get the laundry done. “I’d tell them to go down to the basement, close the door, get on that washing machine, and ride it till they were done.”

For the first year and a half after launching Surprise Parties, Sue kept her day job, spreading her message at night and on weekends. But fairly quickly, she was able to expand the business, putting an addition on her house, then enclosing her two-car garage to make it into a warehouse. By 1991, she’d hired other women to do the parties (training them at seminars and through DVDs) and had grown enough to move the business out of the house. Sue’s current warehouse is 20,000 square feet, and she has more than 1,300 reps selling her products in 42 states and Canada.