It Ain't Over (15 page)

“ ‘I love it!’ he said, and placed an order on the spot. I thought,
Oh my God, this is exciting!”

With just a few months until her due date, Kerry recalls, “I quickly flew to the West Coast with my husband, and he drove me to all the hip boutiques I could find from San Francisco to L.A. I would show up unannounced, holding my tiny Chinese take-out container, and ask to speak to the manager.” The buyers all loved it.

In between stops, Kerry frantically made calls trying to nail down packaging, distribution—and details like how to get a UPC code. “It was hard, but I just made one phone call after another until I found people who knew how to get stuff done.”

Then a lucky break: Soon after Takeouts debuted at Bendel’s, Kerry got a call from a wardrobe stylist on the film
The Stepford Wives
. “They needed
us to FedEx dozens of Takeouts to the cast. A week later, they needed dozens more.” With her background in P.R., Kerry immediately recognized a golden marketing opportunity. “I called
People
magazine, told them what had happened, and they did a little write-up about it. After that, orders started pouring in.”

With a budding business and a baby on the way, Kerry and her husband moved to South Burlington, Vermont, where Kerry had grown up and where most of her family still lived. “My husband, who’s a banker, wasn’t working at the time,” she says. “We figured we could move back to New York any time. But the next thing I knew, things were taking off, and he and I were working together to make a go of the business in Vermont.”

And that meant expanding their offerings. Soon Takeouts were joined by Low Beams, little adhesive nipple cover-ups. Now Kerry was ready to tackle the all-time peskiest underwear problem: visible panty lines.

Why, Kerry wondered, did panties have to have ugly seams and elastic trim? “Every manufacturer I called told me that fabric would unravel if I didn’t have them, but I refused to accept that. Even though I didn’t have a technical background, I felt sure there was a way to cut the right fabric in such a way that it would hold together. I was bumped from one expert to another to another. And I didn’t stop until I found what I wanted.”

And that was a way to make a thong with no waistband, no trim, nothing but soft, stretchy, comfy microfiber that laid perfectly flat against the skin and seemed to disappear beneath clothes. Kerry dubbed her panty Commando, with the slogan “Better Than Nothing,” and introduced it to the marketplace—and the tiny, barely-there undies proved to be another big hit.

Kerry and her husband began scrambling to expand their enterprise: find an office-warehouse, file for patents, manage delivery schedules, and hire staff. It was all new to them, but they just hammered away at their never-ending
to-do list. “We decided to do as much as we could right in South Burlington, from quality assurance to distribution, even some manufacturing. We now work in the same building where forklifts move around boxes of bras and underwear, and it’s just a mile and a half away from the house I grew up in.”

Being in her hometown has set the tone for how Kerry does business. “I don’t want to work myself into the same burnout situation that I did before,” she says. “We appreciate the quality of life here. There’s no reason to put unnecessary stress on everyone by insisting the company grow at triple digits.” Yes, she takes emails and calls around the clock, but she still manages to get home by 3:30 p.m. four days a week to be there when her son, now ten, and her twin daughters, five, get back from school.

Kerry’s company continues to grow at a steady pace. The original Commando thong spawned panties, boy shorts, high-rise briefs, camis, tanks, bras, slips, shapewear, hosiery, and reversible swimwear, all designed with ultra-comfy, invisible edging.

Commando products are now sold in 1,000 stores and boutiques across the country, including Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus, Saks, Nordstrom, and Bloomingdale’s. “A year ago, I became one of the few lingerie designers invited to be part of the Council of Fashion Designers of America,” says Kerry. “That’s unbelievable considering I didn’t go to school for fashion design. When I got the call, I cried.

“Today, when I walk into a store and see a woman looking at Commando products, I walk up to her and tell her I own the company and I’d love to help her find the perfect underwear. I just can’t help it.”

Carol Oswald, 59

Gahanna, Ohio

“W
hat would you do if you won the lottery?”

When that question would come up around the watercooler at work, IBM manager Carol Oswald always had a ready reply. “I’d open a massage parlor!” she’d say, drawing out the word “paaaaahlor” to give it a bawdiness that made her coworkers laugh.

Truth was, Carol had understood the healing power of massage from an early age. Her older brother contracted polio as a young child, leaving his legs so weak that he needed braces and crutches to walk. As a teenager laid up in bed after one of his many surgeries, he’d ask Carol to rub his back the way the nurses in the hospital had. Carol, who adored her big brother and was proud of how accomplished he was despite all he’d been through, happily obliged. “I wanted to help make his life easier in any way I could,” she says. “I think I always had a caregiver side to me.”

Carol took that hands-on approach with her to Wittenberg University in
Springfield, Ohio, where she became the go-to girl on her dorm floor for anyone who needed a neck rub after a marathon study session. Freshman year, a friend even hung a plaque on Carol’s door that read “Madame Sophie’s Massage Parlor.”

But that wasn’t her only talent: Carol was also a math whiz. So she was thrilled when, the Monday after graduation, she was able to turn her mathematical prowess into a position at IBM.

“The day I got the job offer was so exciting for both my mom and me,” she says. Her mother had been a huge fan of the company ever since she’d worked as a white-gloved “systems support girl” in its Lansing, Michigan, office in the 1940s, giving up her job only because of an IBM policy favoring returning World War II veterans.

Like her mom, Carol fell in love with Big Blue, learning the business inside out, from parsing the technicalities of how its computer systems worked, to helping clients figure out what hardware and software they needed, to helping them install it. “That was part of what I liked about working for IBM: learning about a lot of different things,” she says. “And I felt respected, supported, and challenged by both management and my coworkers. It was like a family.”

But then in 2001, things at IBM took a bad turn, and for the first time, Carol, who’d always prided herself on her problem-solving and communication skills, had a sales quota.

“I was supposed to be calling on customers and closing business. It was not my strike zone. I didn’t enjoy sales because there’s lot of rejection. You have to be built of Teflon.”

IBM also began thinning its ranks, and as a manager, Carol was often the one delivering the grim news to fellow employees. Then, in October, she got a new list of people who were to be offered buyout packages. This time, Carol’s name was on the list. “I felt like I’d been punched in the gut,” she says.

She was only 46, six months shy of her twenty-fifth anniversary at the only company she’d ever worked for. IBM made a big deal out of its quarter-century employees, honoring them with a special luncheon. “I had done several of the lunches for other people, and I was looking forward to my own. I loved the company; it meant a lot to me.” But now, it seemed, there would be no twenty-fifth anniversary for Carol—only anxiety over her next move.

She did the math. If she took the package IBM was offering, she and her husband, Denny, who was ten years older and a retired computer programmer, had enough saved for Carol to take a year to figure out her next move. Or she could stay at IBM and take a job in a different department.

“I looked at those positions, but it felt like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Like, ‘You thought
your
job was stressful? Try this one on for size!’ ”

The last thing she needed was more stress; she wasn’t taking care of herself as it was. “I was eating at my desk or in the car when I was running late for a customer meeting. And I’d often stop for sandwiches from a fast-food place to eat at eight or nine at night. I also wasn’t getting out to exercise. Sure, I’d squeeze in a yoga class every once in a while, but work took priority.”

Slowly, the idea of massage crept into the back of her mind. Though Carol loved getting professional massages, she treated herself only every six months or so. But every time, she’d end up quizzing the masseuse: How did you get started? What classes did you take? How did you get licensed? One masseuse told Carol she worked in IBM’s marketing department. “I nearly fell off the table,” she recalls. “She said she went to school at night and was working at the massage clinic on weekends. That was inspiring.”

Denny inspired Carol, too. His hobby of tinkering with old bicycles had morphed into a small bike repair shop in their garage. “He was doing something he was so passionate and happy about. I wanted to have that kind of feeling myself.”

So Carol made the leap and took the buyout. “I thought,
This is exactly what you’ve been waiting for.
Sometimes life conspires to say, ‘If you’re not going to go do this yourself, I’m going to give you a boot and
get
you to do it.’ ”

Feeling that boot on her own backside, Carol enrolled in a one-year program to become licensed as a massage therapist. “And once I started school, studying massage techniques, anatomy, and physiology, I knew I was where I belonged. I was on the edge of my seat, soaking it all up.”

Going from cold computers to warm bodies might seem like a 180-degree turn, but the two fields turned out to be more similar than Carol had ever imagined. For instance, to computerize medical records in her old job, she first had to understand the process—how papers moved from the admissions desk to the doctor’s office to the radiology department to the lab—before she could figure out how to make everything flow smoothly on a computer.

“What I discovered is that our bodies have processes, too,” she says. “If you understand them, you can follow the chain of symptoms back to the root cause.” Take stress. Scrunched-up shoulders lead to a tighter neck, which leads to a headache, and so on. “Once you know physiologically what is happening in someone’s body, then you can deal with it,” she says. “It’s in your control. It’s a freeing feeling to say, ‘I
can
do something about this.’ ”

Carol also found that, after spending her entire career in one industry where she was supposed to know all the answers, it was liberating to be able to ask her instructors as many questions as she liked without feeling stupid. “I could explore and be curious. It was invigorating.”

But here was the clincher: At a party one night, she overheard a friend ask Denny, “How is Carol’s new venture working out?” Denny replied: “I haven’t heard her laugh this much in years.”

“That made me tear up and think, ‘Oh my God, what kind of grouch have
I been?’ It was such a pure acknowledgment that I’d made the right decision for me
and
for him.”

In 2003, Carol opened a massage clinic called A Quiet Space with a woman she’d met in class, a former accountant who’d needed to get professional massages to make it through tax season every year. And Carol began making house calls to businesses to give chair massages to stressed-out employees. “I could completely relate to that kind of tension,” she says. “I had lived that life.”

The house calls business took off, so in 2011 Carol decided to close the clinic to focus on corporate massage. She loved the freedom of it—a far cry from being stuck in an office all day. Toting a massage chair and new-age CDs in the trunk of her car, she makes regular visits to companies large and small. One might hire her to reward employees at the end of a big project; another might invite her to set up shop in its conference room, dimming the lights and unplugging the phones so employees can get ten-minute stress-busting sessions; she also works in doctor’s offices, treating nurses to half-hour decompression sessions.