It Ain't Over (25 page)

The farther she ventured away from the city—toward the rural coastal regions—the more she felt her heart lift. “The towns became quirkier and more chaotic,” she explains, “and, all at once, the excitement of Asia took hold of me. I love that feeling of chaos, when you’re in a place that’s unlike any other you’ve ever been, and you have to discover its own hidden order.”

One morning, wandering on foot, Patty came upon a workshop where a man was making animal figurines out of sticks and paper.

“They were these little mythical creatures that were probably meant to be burned as religious offerings,” she says. “They were so beautiful and the craftsman made them slowly and lovingly. He wouldn’t let me buy anything, but he did give me one. You had to hold one in your hands to feel how special it was. It was exactly the type of authentic object that I wanted to bring back with me.”

As much as the trip to Singapore had been an eye-opener, businesswise it was a bust. “Everything I was interested in was way overpriced,” Patty recalls. And her next trip, to Mexico, was likewise a financial flop, thanks to customs agents who tossed fragile items around carelessly, destroying her new investment.

But each misstep taught Patty a valuable lesson: She needed to find cheaper sources and stick to countries where shipping was more reliable. Despite the setbacks, her enthusiasm never waned.

“I was so into this new idea for the future—no doubt because it was my
only
idea for the future—that there was no backing out,” she says. Unfortunately, her friend couldn’t shoulder the financial losses, so Patty used what was left of her own savings to buy her out.

Now nearly broke, Patty borrowed some money from a family member and prepared to go it alone. At that vulnerable moment, she happened to cross paths with a businessman named John Anderson. An importer who lived in Bali and traveled the world selling jewelry, John took Patty under his wing, inviting her to visit him in Bali to shop for inventory.

“I filled up a container with amazing handmade jewelry, art, textiles, and crafts, which I shipped back to Portland and had much more success selling.”

By soaking up John’s insights and monitoring sales closely, Patty hit her stride. “In the beginning, I was always interested in the exotic and unusual,” she says. “But that doesn’t always translate to the buyer. Sometimes I would be too far ahead of the buying curve. So I started to sell useful items that had a more immediate appeal—household textiles, like tablecloths and quilts; and desktop items like stationery, ink pads, and writing journals. I began mixing new products in with the old, a trick I had picked up from Powell’s that both raises the perceived value of the older item and gives the new item some context.”

Strategies that seem obvious in hindsight took time for her to adopt. “I began to reorder what was selling well instead of always leaping ahead to a new and untested product. I also realized the importance of introducing various price points so that everyone could afford something.”

With her husband and daughter, Katy, cheering her on, Patty continued
traveling to far-flung places throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe, taking monthlong trips two or three times a year and bringing back containers full of one-of-a-kind creations. She bought vintage and handmade toys, jewelry of all kinds, paintings and sculptures, pillows and quilts, chairs and tables, shrines and altars—all gorgeous, handcrafted, and hard to find. And of course, there were books—on travel, exotic cultures and cuisines, biographies, and guides to interesting textiles and crafts. In order to accommodate all of Patty’s purchases, Cargo had to relocate to a bigger space—and business boomed.

With success, however, came a problem—ironically, the very problem Patty had encountered at Powell’s. “The more employees I hired, the more
things began to implode from a lack of structure,” she says. “But this time, I found a solution: a business partner who is creative and fun, but is also amazing at all the things I’m not. She organizes the staff, works on the online store, and creates displays, leaving me to focus on what I love and do best: traveling and finding fantastic inventory.”

Seventeen years after her stomach-churning Powell days, Patty now heads to work feeling relaxed and confident. “I no longer think in terms of whether or not I’m successful at my job,” she says, “and that gives me a great sense of freedom. I know how blessed I am to be doing what I love, and I’m grateful for that opportunity every day. I’m 67 years old and I don’t see myself slowing down at all. I could be doing this well into my eighties.”

Patty continues to travel—seeing the sights, meeting her artisans, and joyously leaping over cultural boundaries with each new adventure.

“It’s amazing to have these meaningful connections all over the world,” she says. “Thanks to Cargo, I no longer feel like I’m being held hostage. I finally have a life that’s big enough for me.”

Ella Vickers, 42

Beaufort, North Carolina

“A
lmost 15 years ago, I was working as the First Mate on the
Columbia
, a beauty of a yacht out of Newport that had been the winner of a historic America’s Cup race. We were competing in a regatta off the coast of Rhode Island, and there was a great, powerful wind. It wasn’t a storm, mind you, just a heavy wind, and it had us keeled over quite a lot.

“But we developed a problem: The head of the mainsail kept coming out of the track. The mainsail is huge—90 feet tall and 68 feet long—and it was taking the force of this wind, really whipping us along; we were rolling up and down with the waves. If it came out of the track completely, we would be disabled, pretty near dead in the water.

“Well, somebody was going to have to do something about this, and since I was First Mate, as well as being the lightest person of the
14-member crew, it was going to have to be me. So I buckled myself into a bosun’s chair, which is really just a plank with straps and a harness, and the others hoisted me up in the air, 90 meters, just a yard shy of the length of a football field. My life was in their hands. When I got to the top, I had to wrap my legs around the mast, which kept waving back and forth, and lash the top of the sail to the mast with a heavy line. Then I had to wait patiently in the bosun’s chair, swaying in the wind, until the crew hauled me back down again.

“Of course, at night, the mainsail had to come back down, so I would have to go up the mast again. This went on for a week. Up and down, up and down.

“But I was never scared. My love of sailing made me crazy enough to do that.”

Sailing is in Ella Vickers’s blood. She grew up on the beaches of the Cape Fear River near Wilmington, North Carolina, not far from the coastal town of Beaufort, where she now makes her home. As a child, Ella sailed with her father and her uncle, learning the ways of the sea until she was old enough to earn her keep by crewing on excursions to the Bahamas and back. She raced competitively in college, ran whale-watching catamarans in Hawaii, sailed solo around the Caribbean in her twenties, and raced in the waters off South Africa. And if you saw her today, you’d probably think she could spend a decade at the bottom of a cave and still come out with her skin bronzed and her hair sun-streaked.

But Ella’s days racing yachts are behind her. The turning point came a couple of years after that memorable experience on the America’s Cup yacht. The
Columbia
was docked in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard when it was time to replace its sails.

“Racing vessels get new sails every couple of years,” Ella explains. “The wear and tear is usually minimal, but after a time the sails stretch out a bit, and when you’re racing, you want them to be as taut as possible. After we changed the sails, I realized that the ship’s owners were making arrangements to have the sails taken to the town dump.”

Ella was appalled—it seemed like such a waste. “It’s odd,” she says. “I’d been changing sails all my life, but I’d never paid attention to what happened to them next. Once I realized they were going to be tossed, I said, ‘I’ll take them.’ ”

Of course, that was not as easy as it sounds. “A mainsail alone weighs 225 pounds, and it’s unwieldy,” she says. “I didn’t really know what I was going to do with the material, but I was sure I’d think of something.”

Sailing, as it turns out, wasn’t the only thing Ella was good at. As a child, she’d been taught to sew by her great-grandmother and often made clothing and accessories for herself. Ella proved to be such a good seamstress that she was hired by her aunt, who had a marine canvas business that made tarps, biminis, dodgers, and awnings for boats.

Now, after disembarking from the
Columbia,
Ella persuaded some friends to help her haul the salvaged sails back to her apartment, where she sat down in front of her heavy-duty sewing machine and began fooling around to see what she could make with them.

“It was just creative time for me,” she says. “Anybody who knows me knows that I can sit down, sew something, rip it up, sew something different—and do that for half the night.” She thought the sailcloth might be good for totes or duffel bags. “I played with size, colors, decoration. I figured the bags would come in handy sometime on the boat.”

That night Ella created three large carryalls made from the white mainsail cloth, decorating them with brightly colored abstract shapes from smaller Mylar sails. In the morning, she slung them over her arm and was carrying
them to the
Columbia
when a voice called out to her from another boat: “Cool bags!”

“Thanks,” Ella replied. “I made them last night.”

“No way!” said the woman, who came over to get a closer look, joined by her husband. “Can you make some for us?” he asked.

Ella was reluctant; the
Columbia
was about to set sail, and she wasn’t sure when she’d have the time to sew more.

“Or can we buy these?” the woman asked.

That was Ella’s first sale. “I don’t even remember what I charged,” she says. “Twenty dollars each? Thirty? Basically I was just charging for my time.”

A few nights later, Ella made more bags, and the same thing happened—people bought them off her arm. “I was astonished,” she says. “Twice in one week. But that reaction gave me the idea that maybe I could make a living selling these bags.”

Ella hadn’t been in the market for a career change. She loved crewing on the
Columbia
. “Sometimes, we would take on passengers and go cruising,” she says. “There would be three of us on the crew who would handle everything, and it was a great, fun atmosphere. And then sometimes, we would take on more crew, often as many as 14 people, and we would be competing. That was exhilarating; it was a blast to race.

“I wasn’t thinking about the long term very much, just kind of assumed that before too many years I would move into something else. The people I knew who crewed professionally, and who did it into their forties—their bodies were hurting. You could see that this career was tough on the body. I was only having the normal aches and pains, but I didn’t think I was immune.”

More important, Ella was realizing she had ambitions beyond being a member of a crew. “In sailing, you experience a sense of freedom every day,” she explains, “but you are also committed to the boat. You travel the world,
but you go where the program says you go. You eat on the boat, you sleep on the boat, you don’t go home for days at a time. You can’t be a professional sailor forever if you want other things in your life, and I did. I wanted a family. I was interested in starting a business. I didn’t expect to be making a switch imminently, but here was an interesting opportunity, and I felt I had to act on it.”

Within a year of sewing that first bag, Ella quit the boat, but not without misgivings. She missed the opportunity to be First Mate the following year when the
Columbia
sailed to Great Britain for a regatta held in honor of the 150th anniversary of the America’s Cup. “I got to go over and crew a little bit, kind of a ‘friend of the ship’ thing, but the boat did a whole tour down to Sardinia and around the Mediterranean, and I didn’t get to go. I was bummin’! But I made a decision, and I have no regrets.”

Ella moved back to Wilmington and set up shop. Two years of courses at Cape Fear Community College had taught her business fundamentals.

“I can’t say we had that steep a learning curve,” she says. “I just got some sewing machines. Reached out to racing friends to tell them about our interest in used sails. Hired some people. My best seamstress, the one who has been with me longest, couldn’t even sew when I hired her! It took her a year to sew a straight line. She was just someone who needed a job, and I was someone who needed people.”

But one thing Ella was not nonchalant about was her commitment to making the business work. “I put about $60,000 into the business during the first year or two,” she says. “I took out loans, maxed out credit cards, and put every penny of profit back into the business. Back then, the principal place we sold the bags was boat shows—we still do that—and every weekend I’d go up and down the coast selling bags. Sometimes when I didn’t have enough money for a hotel, I’d park at a friendly yacht club and sleep in my car.”