It Ain't Over (14 page)

“Some people have said, ‘You sell what? Oh my God!’ But I say, ‘God intended us to make love.’ ”

Since opening her business, Sue has passed on her message of sexual empowerment at parties in banks, hotels, apartment complexes, and church
basements. “Everybody has sex, kiddo,” she says. “What we’re preaching is self-esteem, sensuality, and sexuality.”

And Sue practices what she preaches. After her second husband, Joe, died in 2001, Sue agreed to a date with a former car dealership general manager named Dean. They’re now married. “He’s funny, he’s caring, he has a good outlook on life, and he adores me,” she says.

And what does husband number three think of her business?

“He
loves
it!” Sue says. “He likes to tell everybody that he works for the company in testing and product development.”

Judi Henderson-Townsend, 55

Oakland, California

H
ang out with a roomful of dummies, and you might just come up with a brilliant idea.

For Judi Henderson-Townsend, that epiphany came in 2001, when she was trying to locate a female mannequin to mosaic and display in her back garden as a symbol of fertility and Mother Earth.

“I know that sounds pretty California woo-woo,” says Judi, who considers herself more practical than earthy. Still, it was something she had wanted to do for a long time. “I loved the idea.”

An ad on Craigslist led Judi to an industrial neighborhood in San Francisco and a gritty warehouse filled with dozens upon dozens of mannequins of every size and shape, some of them missing arms, legs, heads, or torsos. “It was definitely creepy,” Judi recalls. The mannequins’ owner told Judi she was lucky to have found him when she did, because he was about to close his
business and move to New England. That would leave the Bay Area without a place to rent or buy a mannequin.

Standing there surrounded by naked dummies in various states of dismemberment, Judi made the impulsive decision to go for something, well, completely different. “It was a
ding-ding-ding
moment,” she recalls.

Judi started peppering the mannequin man with questions about his business and clientele. Before long, she was asking if he would sell her the entire lot, along with his customer list. Sure, he said. “If I didn’t buy them, he was going to try to sell them off one by one,” she says. “And those that didn’t sell would end up in a landfill.”

They agreed on a price of $2,500 (“If he’d said $5,000, I wouldn’t have done it”), but Judi had to move quickly, as he was leaving within the week.

At first glance, starting her own business didn’t make much sense. After graduating from college, she’d mostly played it safe, climbing various corporate ladders as a sales executive at big companies like Johnson & Johnson and United Airlines, and she now worked for a dotcom start-up. Judi was also haunted by her one and only attempt at entrepreneurship: In her thirties, she had tried to start her own business as an agent for photographers and illustrators. She had failed—miserably—and the experience had damaged her financially while also sapping her self-confidence.

“I worried that this might be history repeating itself,” she says.

And
mannequins
? “If I’d had time to think about it, I probably would have talked myself out of it,” she says.

But Judi held out hope that this time she could make her own business work. Within a few hours of her close encounter with the mannequins, she had buy-in from her husband, Jay, and a few days later, all 50 torsos showed up at their front door.

From a practical standpoint, the timing was good. Because the couple had just refinished their floors, Judi and Jay had removed all the furniture from their living room, and that’s where the mannequins took up residence. “That was key,” Judi says.

Also, she had recently taken a 14-week class in entrepreneurship, and felt more prepared to start a business than she ever had.

“I was ready,” she says. “Whether it’s mannequins or widgets, many of the same business principles are at work, like managing cash flow, marketing, finances, and inventory. All of that is important no matter what you’re selling.”

Choosing a name for her venture was among the easiest early tasks. Once she discovered that the domain name for her first choice, Mannequin Magic, wasn’t available, Mannequin Madness quickly popped into her head. “It was perfect,” she says. “Either I was a little crazy or this was a crazy niche, but the name worked either way.”

Judi’s first setback came when the man she bought the mannequins from failed to follow through on his promise to send her his client list, which meant she had to generate business from scratch—and in the visual merchandising industry, no less, in which she had no experience.

So Judi started cold calling—tirelessly. She spent weekends driving around the Bay Area, leaving her card at Macy’s, Nordstrom, Sears, and other department store chains. If people came in asking where to acquire a mannequin, she said, send them my way.

Around the same time, Judi built a website for the business. This, too, turned out to be crucial. “I got a call from someone in Canada who had seen the website and was coming to San Francisco for a ski trade show and needed to rent a mannequin. That was a big ‘aha’ moment for me. I thought my customers would all be local, but now I realized I’d been thinking too small!”

Business began to take off as Judi rented out the mannequins or resold
them to smaller stores, dressmakers, and hobbyists. Then, in late 2001, the dot-com she was working for went under.

“That made me do some real soul-searching,” she says. So instead of looking for another conventional job, Judi decided to go into the mannequin business full-time.

The national trend toward recycling helped. Unless a mannequin gets reused or recycled, retailers toss them out as they get damaged, or as trends change, which shortens a mannequin’s life to as little as two years. The general shape, of course, doesn’t change—it is always young, tall, and thin. But one year, heads might be in vogue, while the next, heads come off.

“I couldn’t stand that these beautiful mannequins were ending up in landfills,” she says.

Within six months, Judi’s inventory had ballooned from 50 to 500, after a merchandiser from Sears who had held on to Judi’s card called to say the chain was getting rid of all its mannequins. If Judi could haul them away from the dozen or so Sears in northern California, he said, they were hers to keep.

“Jay and I cleared out the entire basement and turned it into a mannequin warehouse,” she says. Word spread that Judi had become the go-to gal for mannequins past their prime, and soon more companies—Nike, Nordstrom, Ralph Lauren, and Bloomingdale’s—were offering their stock. The garage grew engorged with mannequins, and there still wasn’t enough space. So Judi and Jay pitched tents for the overflow in the backyard. And when the shipment from Nike arrived in coffin-shaped boxes, the neighbors looked on with amusement.

In 2007, Mannequin Madness moved to a 1,300-square-foot warehouse in Oakland. Two years later, Jay was laid off from his job at a nonprofit and joined Judi full-time. Now they sell mannequins, rent mannequins, broker mannequins, repair mannequins, blog about mannequins, and even deliver them. “We’re the FTD of mannequins,” Judi says with a laugh. Annual revenues for the company are just shy of their goal of $1 million. “Every year, we get closer,” she says.

When Judi tells people what she does for a living, she gets her share of raised eyebrows and outright laughter. But she has learned to take it all in stride.

“I couldn’t have done this in my twenties,” she says. “When I was younger, I needed the validation of a big company. Now I’m happy to talk about my mannequins. I’m here to show that everything is possible.”

As for that garden art project, she never did get around to it. She got too busy.

Kerry O’Brien, 43

South Burlington, Vermont

W
herever Kerry O’Brien goes, there she is, checking out other women’s bodies. “I notice every pinching panty line or suffocating bra strap,” Kerry says. And when she spots a problem, as she invariably does—muffin hips, pooch-y waists, droopy bottoms—it makes her smile. “It reassures me that my company is on the right track.”

Kerry founded her company, cheekily named Commando, in 2003 out of a belief that what lies beneath—seamless, body-smoothing undies and tanks—is what makes whatever is on the outside
truly
ogle-worthy.

Turning lumpy into luscious is a talent that has always come naturally to Kerry. “When my friends and I were single and in our twenties in New York, we all wanted to wear these cute fashions, but often they were made of unlined fabrics or had odd necklines,” she says. “If you wore just any old bra and panties with them, they would completely ruin the look, not to mention make you feel self-conscious and uncomfortable.”

Kerry couldn’t stand that feeling—the awkward, distracting sensation of panty elastic digging into her skin, hose slip-sliding down her legs, a bra that felt like a boa constrictor wrapped around her chest. “I’m not actually obsessed with underwear,” she says. “I’m obsessed with
comfort
. When underwear would dig into me, it made me feel bad about myself, even if I was in good shape. It could ruin my whole day.”

So whether dressing herself or playing stylist for a friend, Kerry became a MacGyver of undergarments, using any and all tools at her disposal. “I would hand-stitch a bra into a strapless dress, make a friend wear a swimsuit under a low-backed top, use double-sided tape to affix straps in place. I even applied duct tape to my skin—I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, but it worked pretty well!”

Duct tape? That ugly, gummy stuff favored by furnace repairmen? Yup. As Kerry says, “My favorite place to look for style solutions used to be the hardware store.”

And Kerry’s innate problem-solving ability was just as effective in the boardroom: By age 28, it had catapulted her to senior VP at one of the biggest financial P.R. companies in the world, doing media relations for Fortune 500 companies. “After college, I sprinted to excel in my career, and I did very well,” she says, “but I started to burn out. By the time I was 30, I wasn’t excited about my work anymore. I didn’t want my boss’s job or my boss’s boss’s job.”

Then came September 11. Kerry and her husband were living in downtown Manhattan when the planes hit, and she knew she’d never be the same again. “I needed a change, and there was no reason to wait.” On September 12, she quit her job.

“Everyone said, ‘Give it some time, Kerry, don’t do this now,’ ” she recalls. “But I wasn’t going to change my mind, and I wasn’t worried. I’ve always thought that if you’re really good at one thing, you can be just as good at something else.

“I’d always wanted to be an entrepreneur. When I was a kid in Vermont, my dad helped my sisters and me start a lawn-mowing business. I also had my own enterprise: picking corn from my family’s field, then selling it at a stand, ten ears for a dollar.”

Kerry’s first idea after quitting her job—writing a short advice book on getting over breakups called
Hit the Road, Jack
—went nowhere. She intended her next book idea—
Rack Management 101: What Every Woman Needs to Know about Bras, Chicken, and Duct Tape
—to be a primer on, among other things, clever undergarment solutions. But a few chapters in, she thought,
Why am I writing about this? I should start my own underwear company!
If someone can build a better mousetrap, she thought, I can build a better pair of panties.

Kerry already had a ready-made focus group: her friends. “I’d call them up and invite them over for dinner, but only if they would bring three ideas on a certain lingerie topic,” she says. “And like me, they had
a lot
to say about how our panties, bras, and hose were failing us.”

Kerry wanted to launch her new business with something simple that wouldn’t require a huge investment. “I’m not a big gambler,” she says. “Everything I did, I did in a measured way. I never took any big financial risks.”

Her first idea was bra inserts—soft pouches that could instantly turn an A cup into a B or even a C. But she wanted them to be pretty, even sassy—nothing like the sad-looking “chicken cutlets” that lingerie departments kept hidden behind their counters. “I wanted to call my inserts Takeouts—and, for fun, I came up with the idea of putting them in a pink cardboard Chinese food take-out container,” she recalls.

“I had a prototype made by a company that manufactures silicone breast implants, worked with a graphic designer to create a logo, and went to Kinko’s to print out and assemble my first and only take-out carton.

“When I took one look at that prototype, my toes tingled. It’s this
euphoric sensation I have always gotten when the right combination of factors come together and I know something is going to be great.”

Those tingling toes were right. When Kerry, by now six months pregnant with her first son, waddled into the president’s office at the posh New York department store Henri Bendel (“I had called a friend of a friend of a friend and managed to get the meeting”) and put the falsies in the take-out carton on his desk, he howled.