It Ain't Over (3 page)

In February 2013, after the Cellfolio was mentioned in a Los Angeles magazine, it was chosen to be included in the gift bag for the Academy Awards—and Jamie got to fly out for the ceremony. She also streamlined her inventory by creating a Velcro-free design made solely for iPhones. “When I did the market research, I found out that 70 percent of people in the U.S. carry an iPhone.”

For all her success, Jamie has just one regret: that her parents didn’t get to see the fulfillment their daughter found with her “fifth baby.”

“It’s almost been like a rebirth,” she says. “I was lucky that I was only 50 when all of this came into being. I still had time in my life to be something else. I know they would have been really proud of me.”

Lori Cheek, 40

New York, New York

H
ow many times have you locked eyes with an intriguing stranger on a train, in a café, or at the beach, and wished you could see him again? Over the years, Lori Cheek had had her share of such fleeting,
what-if
moments.

But then one night she was grabbing a bite to eat with a guy pal. “I’m the exception to the rule that you can’t be friends with the opposite sex,” she says. “My guy friends are some of my best girlfriends.” At one point, Lori excused herself from the table; when she returned, her friend was scribbling a note—“Want to have dinner?”—on the back of his business card, which he slipped to a woman at the next table as he and Lori left the restaurant.

“I loved it,” Lori says. “No
what-if
for him.”

The more Lori reflected on the card-passing encounter, the more she became convinced that such old-world pickup lines were just what the online dating world needed.
There’s so little mystery in this too-much-information age,
she thought.
Wouldn’t it be great to create a website that combined newfangled technology with good, old-fashioned flirting?

The thought excited Lori, a single New Yorker who had worked in architecture and interior design for 15 years. “I had a good salary and was able to afford an insane amount of designer clothes,” she says, “but I found it beyond frustrating to always be building someone else’s dream. I had a burning desire to do my own thing.”

For a year, Lori explored her dating website idea with friends. “Then I talked to two guys who showed me how to write a business plan and patent a trademark and offered to partner with me in the business.” Their support convinced her to give it a go.

So Lori quit her job and poured her entire savings—$75,000—into launching the site, but the partnership quickly proved less than ideal.

“Finding the perfect partner in business is almost like getting married,” she says. “Both parties have to be equally involved and bring different skills into the relationship.” What she realized was that she and her partners had similar expertise, but all three lacked the know-how to build a website. Before they could even get it off the ground, Lori had gone through all of her $75,000 investment.

Lori was devastated but determined to start over, this time flying solo. “I’m an all-or-nothing kind of gal,” she says. To replace the money she’d lost, she sublet her apartment, sleeping on friends’ couches and living out of a suitcase. She hawked her designer clothes at consignment shops and on eBay. And she earned money by participating in focus groups, guest bartending, and selling off her electronics on Craigslist and Amazon. It was tough, but her sacrifices raised another $75,000, and in May 2010 she launched her new dating site, called Cheek’d.

The service costs $20 to join; for that fee, members get a deck of 50 black calling cards printed with different messages like “I saw you checking me
out” or “Let’s meet for a drink” or a basic “You’re hot.” See someone you like? Then hand them a card, and a code on the back will direct the recipient to your page on the Cheek’d website, where they’ll find your bio and contact information. To keep the code active, members pay $9.95 a month.

Lori viewed Cheek’d as a huge improvement over the popular online dating site that she had once briefly tried years earlier. “It took me forever to fill out the profile on that site, and immediately one of my architecture clients popped up. I didn’t like mixing my personal life with my business life—or having him know what I was looking for in a mate. I also felt that shopping for the love of your life in solitude was kind of creepy. It lacked the natural chemistry that can happen in real life. Cheek’d encounters begin in the physical, not virtual, world.”

As soon as she launched Cheek’d, Lori promoted her new business relentlessly. “I’d carry three cards in the morning and three at night,” she says. “If I was on the train and saw a guy reading a book, I might slip him one, so that he could use it when he saw someone he wanted to connect with.”

That kind of guerrilla marketing has continued to be Lori’s main tactic for getting the word out. She’ll slip cards into people’s pockets (“Tag. You’re It”), shopping bags, and wallets (“Emotionally available”)—even between the pages of dating advice books at Barnes & Noble (“Need a date for my sister’s wedding”). She’ll plaster them on the insides of subway cars and bathroom stalls, on movie ads and street art. She’ll hide them in the sugar stacks at Starbucks. Or she’ll chalk “Have you been Cheek’d?” on the sidewalks outside events and parties.

New York’s Citi Bike bike-sharing program became another vehicle for promotion: Lori printed a batch of cards that read “My bike likes your bike” and dropped them in bike baskets all over town, driving more traffic to her website.

Lori is also a walking billboard for her brand. Her iPhone and laptop sport Cheek’d wallpaper, she has “Cheek’d” fake-tattooed on her left arm at all times (reapplied every week), she carries a branded Cheek’d backpack, and she often wears a Cheek’d T-shirt bearing various come-on lines. Her favorite is a black one that says “My AmEx is also this color.”

Every little bit helps: Lori says a day doesn’t go by without someone asking her, “What’s Cheek’d?”

Cheek’d now has about 10,000 subscribers, 51 percent of them female and 49 percent male. The average age is 32 to 35. Stacks of little black cards have been shipped to 47 states and 28 countries, translated into German, Swedish, and Russian. “We just sent some to a guy who lives in a forest in Washington State. Just think how hard it is for
him
to make a connection.” Lori is launching a mobile app that will allow users to “flick” virtual Cheek’d cards with icebreaking pickup lines to a hottie nearby. And in 2013 she was listed by American Express Open Forum, which helps power small-business success, as one of the top CEOs to watch.

For all the connections Lori made for others, there was one that was still missing.

Until summer 2012.

“I was sitting alone at a crab shack in Montauk, New York, with no phone signal. I tossed my iPhone into my beach bag and when I looked up, a gorgeous man in Ray-Bans and a baseball cap sitting next to me said, ‘Nice tattoo.’ It was my fake Cheek’d one. I handed him the card that reads ‘Let’s meet for a drink.’ We did—and we got engaged almost seven weeks later.”

His name is Sebastian, and he’s an actor and personal trainer. Lori no longer lives on friends’ couches; she now lives with him on the Lower East Side.

And the proposal?

“I’d had a tooth pulled,” Lori says, “so I was sedated and spent the entire day in bed. That night I went down to our local bar to meet him for a glass of wine. He was shaking and nervous and I thought,
Oh my God, is he going to ask me? If he asks me to marry him right now, without a tooth, he loves me.
” He did, and he does.

Score one for the Cheek’d team.

Natasha Coleman, 35

Panama City, Florida

A
t five feet nine inches and just over 400 pounds, Natasha Coleman was, amazingly, unconcerned about her weight.

Her entire family was obese, including her parents and three older sisters. Overeating fattening fried foods and sugary desserts was just normal for them; exercise was not. And they weren’t unusual—most everyone in Natasha’s tight-knit African American community in Panama City, Florida, where she still lives, was heavy.

“Obesity was never a big deal. It was just accepted,” Natasha says. “My sisters and I always had nice hair, nice clothes, and a lot of friends. We were known as the heavy, pretty girls.” And she never wanted for boyfriends. In 1997, Natasha married her high school sweetheart, David, a six-foot, 280-pound guy, and they had three great kids.

Despite her size, Natasha had always had a sense of confidence. In 2009, she entered the American Beauties Plus pageant—for women size 14 and
up—and placed first. As part of the competition, each contestant had to declare a cause they were passionate about; Natasha’s was fat acceptance.

“There are a lot of preconceived notions about overweight people, including that they’re lazy and stupid,” she says. “I wanted to stand up for plus-sized women.”

Of course, there were aspects of being big that bothered her. “It got on my nerves when people told me I had ‘such a pretty face.’
What about the rest of me?
I’d think.” Natasha spent a lot of time and money on clothes, which she either special-ordered or sewed herself. “Looking back, I think I was hiding behind all the makeup, outfits, and jewelry.”

Naturally competitive, Natasha outperformed her coworkers in phone sales, where her job was to persuade people to switch their cable and Internet service. She was so good at closing deals, her company regularly awarded her with luxury trips for being a top performer. It was on one of these trips, in February 2010, that she had an experience so mortifying it changed her life.

“The company was flying my husband and me to Mexico first class, which we were so excited about,” recalls Natasha. “But when I got to my seat, I couldn’t maneuver my body into it. I was just too big.” As a flight attendant tried to help, the other passengers began to stare, and what she saw in their eyes cut her to the bone. “The looks these people were giving me were cruel and judgmental, as if they were saying, ‘How dare you be so fat that you hold up this plane?’ ” Told she’d have to move to a special seat at the very back of coach, Natasha walked down the center aisle of that plane feeling huge and humiliated. To make matters worse, when she arrived at the extrawide seat, the seat belt wouldn’t fit around her middle, so she had to flag down the flight attendant again and ask for an extender.

As she sat alone in what felt like exile for the long flight, her
embarrassment hardened into determination. “It was that competitive part of me that swore this would never happen again. I was
going
to lose weight.”

Natasha’s resolve doubled when she returned home and went to see her doctor about a chronic sinus problem. Weight had been a regular topic at previous visits, with her doctor suggesting both prescription weight loss pills and gastric bypass surgery. Natasha had even tried two commercial diets, losing an unsatisfying 20 pounds on each, then quickly regaining the weight.

On this visit, with the scale under Natasha’s feet reading 428 pounds, her doctor said that weight loss was now a necessity, not an option. “She showed me my chart, and I had gained each year since my first baby was born. At the rate I was going, she said, I wouldn’t be able to walk by the next year.” Her doctor recommended that she get gastric bypass surgery immediately, but the risks frightened Natasha.

“I thought,
What if I lie down on that table only to never wake up? What would happen to my family?
I asked her to just give me a chance to lose the weight on my own. ‘Tell me what to do,’ I said. ‘Tell me where to start.’ ”

Natasha’s doctor advised her to stop drinking soda and handed her a sheet of paper with meal ideas for a 1,500-calorie-per-day diet. She said to come back in three months—if Natasha was unable to shed pounds the hard way, surgery would still be an option.

“I leapt out of that office ready to get my mind right. I was a star at work, a decent wife, a really good mom. I had had twins without an epidural. I was a superwoman. I could do this.”

But once Natasha began reading stories about people who had managed to lose hundreds of pounds, she was disheartened by how slow the process was. “It could take years. I’m a typical American—I want it now and fast,” she says. That’s where her fierce drive helped. “I looked in the mirror and saw
my only competition. I’d already beaten a lot of other people in my job. Can I beat
her
?”

At the time, First Lady Michelle Obama was launching her Let’s Move campaign, and Natasha was angered by statistics revealing that nearly half of all African American children were obese. Her 14-year-old son and 8-year-old twins (a girl and a boy) were also overweight and steadily gaining.

“I started getting mad at food, mad at being surrounded by unhealthy options, mad at my lifestyle.” At every event she went to in her community, tables were groaning with platters of fried, sugary, fattening foods. It seemed like overeating was practically part of her culture. But Natasha was horribly conflicted given her recent public stance on fat acceptance.