It Ain't Over (26 page)

Ella’s bags sold well, but rising success brought its own challenges. “You work and work to get boutiques and department stores to open an account and stock your product,” she says, “but as soon as someone places an order for $75,000 worth of merchandise, you have to turn around and shell out $37,500 to make them. And then a long time can pass between when you ship the products and when you get paid. The money issues may change, but they don’t entirely go away. Eventually, though, like anything else, you figure out how to manage them.”

Since it began, Ella’s company has had steady growth—through sales at boat shows, small accounts with boutiques and department stores, and larger accounts with retailers like Lands’ End and West Marine.

Steady as she goes
might also be a good way to describe Ella’s managerial style. Early on, a vendor associated with Key West Race Week placed what was then the largest order in the company’s history. “It was one of those ‘How can we possibly fill this order?’ moments,” she says. “But everybody got to work—I got on a machine myself—and we just did it.”

There was, however, one challenge that almost made Ella want to close the business. Initially, she called her company Nautigear, a pun on the word “naughty.”

“We loved that name,” she says. “We thought it was catchy, sellable, and cool.” But Nautica, the popular sportswear company, thought it sounded too much like its own and sued for trademark violation.

“It was tough, both financially and emotionally,” recalls Ella. “Nautica is part of a huge conglomerate, and we were just getting started. So even though we thought the name was different enough and our logo was very different from theirs, we simply didn’t have enough money to fight them in court.”

Now, she says, it was the best thing that could have happened. “We
changed the name to Ella Vickers, which is something no one can take from us and which also transcends ‘nautical’ gear. With the Ella Vickers name, we’re doing more than selling a bag; we’re building a brand.”

Today, Ella Vickers does more than $1 million in sales annually. Still led by the venerable Large Zip Tote, with its marine brass grommets and clips and corrosion-resistant zipper, the line has grown to include tennis bags, lacrosse bags, ski bags, snowshoe bags, boot bags, and items for the home like pillows and shower curtains. “We also do a lot of custom work for people who want flight bags or home design products,” says Ella. Besides boutiques, department stores, and the retail website, Ella Vickers products can be found at the company’s flagship store in Greenwich, Connecticut, not far from the sailboats of Long Island Sound.

After more than a decade in business, Ella has developed a few rules for success. “First, hire the best people you can. Pay a premium if you have to. They will stick around longer and make fewer mistakes, which will more than make up for the difference in wages. Years ago, I let one of my best seamstresses go because she wanted more than I wanted to pay. Instead, I kept some people who weren’t as good and who never got better, and I rue the day I did that.

“Second, make a premium product and keep it that way. Don’t sell out over cheap materials and overseas labor. Build in America.” Ella employs nine people in her design studio and workshop in Wilmington, and has most of her products sewn in a factory in Manhattan. “I was never tempted to make my bags overseas,” she says. “Something may look nice, but if it’s made by preteens in Asia who are running sewing machines for 15 hours per day under substandard conditions, you don’t really have a product you can be proud of.”

Like climbing that mainsail on the
Columbia
all those years ago, owning her own company has been risky but rewarding. “I am in control of my own destiny,” Ella says. “I set my own hours, and I’m spending most of my time designing, which I love.”

Ella has built a family, too—she and her husband, Tony, an engineer and fellow sailing enthusiast, have two young children.

When she’s not in her workroom, Ella still sails—on her very own fifty-foot cruising boat. “Everyone always says that when you’re past forty, you’re pretty much through with crewing on sailboats,” Ella says. “But I’ve found a way to keep the sails in my life—and I’ve got a good wind behind me.”

“My inner self was talking—and I listened.”

Troy Ball, 53

Asheville, North Carolina

I
t was as if young Frankenstein met Old MacDonald—with a touch of Austin Powers thrown in for good measure.

Tucked away in a small barn in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, Troy Ball and her friend John McEntire were like a pair of mad scientists—mixing, boiling, adding ingredients, then taking them out again—trying to achieve just the right formula for their precious concoction. “It was all undercover,” says Troy. “But it was also really exciting. I mean, we’d hear somebody pulling up the gravel road, and we’d close the barn doors.”

The reason for all the secrecy: Troy and John had built their own little distillery, and what they were doing—making moonshine—was criminal in the minds of some of the neighbors. “I’d come home from John’s at night in my Carhartt coveralls, driving my Mercedes,” Troy recalls, “smelling like a drunk who had passed out next to a campfire.”

Troy’s journey from mom to moonshine maker began back in 2003, when
she and her husband, Charlie, moved with their three sons to Asheville, North Carolina. Neighbors—usually old men—welcomed the family to the area by bringing over jars of hooch, a homemade, corn-based whiskey. “I would open a jar,” she says, “and it would smell so terrible. I’d tell them, ‘Yecch! I don’t want any more of this bad stuff, so stop bringing it to me!’ They’d say, ‘Well, you can’t get the good stuff, Troy, because people keep that for themselves.’ ”

Several years went by before an 80-year-old friend named Forrest, perhaps goaded by Troy’s teasing about the subpar local liquor, finally brought over a sample of the good stuff. “He said, ‘Now, Troy, this is something special. Promise me you’ll taste this.’ ” So she did.

And it wasn’t half bad. “It wasn’t that burning-hot moonshine,” Troy says. “It was surprisingly smooth.”

That evening, some of Troy’s girlfriends came over. “I said, ‘Would y’all like to try some
good
moonshine?’ We mixed it with some fruit juice, and they drank every drop.”

Inspired by their reaction, Troy decided to do a bit of reconnaissance. “I went to the store and bought every unaged white whiskey available, but they were terrible compared to what Forrest had given me.”

That got her thinking about something she’d once heard Ross Perot say: “If you want to be successful, study an industry and figure out what’s missing.”

“I realized that even though this quality white whiskey was an American tradition, it was unrepresented in the market,” Troy says. “People all over the country were drinking Russian vodka when we had our own white spirit right here. It was the hole in the doughnut.”

Discovering that hole came at a perfect time in Troy’s life. At 48, she was itching to do something new. “I’m a born businessperson, but I got married right after graduating from Vanderbilt, and soon had two special-needs
children.” Troy and Charlie’s first two sons—Marshall, now 27, and Coulton, now 25—were born with a still-undiagnosed genetic disease. “They both came home from the hospital healthy,” Troy recalls, “but at four or five months, they stopped thriving.” Nonverbal and with limited physical abilities, the boys required round-the-clock care, and still do. “My husband always had a good job, but it wasn’t until Marshall was six or seven that we had enough money to hire someone to help out during the day.”

When the boys were young, the family lived in Texas, where the droughts, forest fires, and harsh allergy and flu seasons only made their problems worse. So in 2003, Troy and Charlie decided to move with Marshall, Coulton, and their healthy adopted son, Luke, then ten, to Asheville. Just as Troy had hoped, her sons’ health began to improve. And by 2008, the family had enough money to expand their home-care staff. “For the first time, we hired a night person and were able to sleep,” Troy says. “I was finally at a point where I could consider starting a business.”

Troy felt that her vision—to make a high-proof, highly drinkable white whiskey—was the right idea at the right time. But she had no idea how to do it.

“First, I asked Forrest if one of his friends who made moonshine could show me how it’s done,” she says. “He told me no—these guys don’t want anyone knowing who they are. I said that he could blindfold me if he had to, but that I needed to do this.”

Forrest eventually did find someone willing to show Troy the ropes. “We drove out to his farm, and around back of the barn he was using a 15-gallon cook pot to boil corn mash with a propane burner. The moonshine wasn’t very good, but it was a solid first lesson. Now I needed to talk to someone who was crafting
quality
whiskey.” This time, the husband of Troy’s best friend came to the rescue. “He found a guy who was using white corn with sugar and wild yeast—this guy knew what he was doing.”

Troy couldn’t wait to get home to try it herself.

“I walked through the door and told Charlie I needed him to build me a still so I could make my own moonshine. He said, ‘That’s illegal!’ and refused to help, so I bought a five-gallon pressure cooker and started experimenting with that.”

Eventually, Charlie gave in and added a condenser to the pressure cooker so Troy could distill the mash. “He came around when he realized that if he wasn’t going to help, I’d do it on my own. That tends to be eye-opening for a husband.”

Next, Troy needed to find someone who was selling white corn, which is central to the best-tasting moonshine. And that’s what led her to her eventual partner in crime, John McEntire.

John’s family had been growing corn for seven generations, but when Troy called and said she needed 100 pounds—he was accustomed to selling one or two pounds at a time—John hesitated and asked what she was up to.

“I told him, ‘Well, I just have some recipes I’m working on. . . .’

“And he said, ‘Are you that lady who wants to make whiskey?’

“And I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ ”

John paused for a second, but then agreed to trade some of his corn for some of her whiskey. “That sounded like a good deal,” Troy says, “but when I drove out to his farm and got to looking around, I said, ‘My gosh, you’ve got the corn, you’ve got these old barns, you’ve got the grist mills. How about we do some tests for fermentation out here?’

“He said, ‘Lady, I do not want to get arrested.’

“I said, ‘I don’t either. How ’bout this: You let me use your address, and I will file the federal application for a distillery permit.’ ”

And with that, Troy and John were in the whiskey-making business.

The two started in, working stealthily out of one of John’s barns. Day
after day, Troy kept meticulous notes, logging every distillation, testing white corn versus yellow, trying different milling techniques, comparing sprouted grains with unsprouted grains, adding sugar or not, and figuring out how best to filter the whiskey. “At one point, I was pouring five-gallon batches of whiskey through a Brita filter!” Troy says, laughing. Eventually they settled on cherry wood charcoal filters.

Through it all, Troy says, “I was willing to do whatever I had to do to achieve my goal, whether that was manning the still in the freezing cold for hours or dragging around five-gallon buckets of mash. And when you roll up your sleeves and work like hell, other people want to jump in and work with you.”

Once Troy was satisfied they had something special, she took a sample to a friend, Oscar Wong, owner of Asheville’s famed Highland Brewing Company. “Oscar was shocked by the quality,” she says. “He invested in the company immediately.”

Oscar’s involvement couldn’t have come at a better time, as Troy had no idea how they could produce enough whiskey to start selling it. “When you distill 50 gallons of mash, after eight hours, you have five gallons of whiskey—if you’re lucky,” she says. Oscar recommended she think big and order a 2,000-liter German still—and to get the flavor she wanted, Troy decided to age the whiskey in old bourbon barrels.

In 2010, Troy and Sons distillery got its federal license, and in 2011, Charlie quit his job to come work for the company, which moved from John’s farm to downtown Asheville, right next to the Highland Brewing Company. Troy, Charlie, John, and Oscar all agreed that the aging process and the higher cost of the heirloom corn they were using were both worth it to create the taste they were after. But they also have something deeper in common. “John has a special-needs daughter, as does Oscar,” Troy says. “All of us are parents who have dealt with very difficult situations, and that has brought us together.”

Troy and Sons spirits are now available in ten states. And only two years after it started, the company was selected by Disney to join a short list of liquors sold at its resorts across the country. It’s their first big-volume account and a major coup in the liquor industry.