It Ain't Over (17 page)

The next piece to fall into place was online retailing, which was beginning to take off. Because Truckee attracted a lot of out-of-town visitors, “people would come into the shop and spend $100, then go home and spend another $400 online.”

Without a dime going to advertising—word simply spread from one happy knitter to the next—within five years Jimmy Beans Wool had reached $1 million in sales. Once that milestone was achieved, Laura and Doug started working on building a brand around their quirky name. As a model, they studied online shoe retailer
Zappos.com
, with its strong focus on customer service.

Little did Laura suspect when she first opened Jimmy Beans Wool that the Internet, the very thing that had failed to come through for her twice before, would propel the company much further. Knitting can get very complicated very quickly, with difficult patterns to follow, so in 2008, Laura and Doug started making instructional videos and posting them on YouTube. The videos showed customers how to do everything from choosing needles to selecting the right wool for a specific project. Within a few months, sales had increased nearly 70 percent. Since then, the company’s revenues have grown to more than $8 million a year. It now has 45 employees, occupies a 20,000-square-foot base of operations, and boasts a following of loyal customers around the world. And
JimmyBeansWool.com
carries some 2,000 videos, with 1.5 million views.

“This is just the beginning,” Laura says. “It’s so exciting to see what we have built. We plan to continue growing and growing.”

And it’s all because of her willingness to pursue a Plan C after Plans A and B failed that Laura Zander landed where she is today.

Dianne Wood, 64

Danville, Virginia

D
ianne Wood was always a creative type. When she was a child, friends who’d come over to her house expecting to watch TV or listen to records were quickly presented with a different option. “Let’s make something!” Dianne would say, and soon the scissors would be out, or the crayons, or the MixMaster, and they’d be off, baking cupcakes and fashioning pinecones into a holiday decoration for the door. There was hardly a scrap of material or cloth or cardboard that Dianne couldn’t turn into something fun and clever.

At least, not until the day she received a notice that her house had been repossessed. That’s a hard one, making something from an eviction notice.

That blow, as devastating as it was unexpected, came in 2002, at a point in life when Dianne felt happy and secure. She had a lovely home in Danville, Virginia, her kids were grown, her business was strong. “I felt that I had made it,” she says. “My husband and I had worked hard, and we were entering that period of our lives when we expected to reap the rewards of our efforts.”

And for Dianne, those entrepreunerial efforts had played out like a string of scenes in a screwball comedy:

In the eighties, it was bunny pillows and ruffled curtains. The pillows were popular at local bazaars, but certainly nothing to live on. The curtains were a huge hit, “but they took me forever to make on my little itty-bitty sewing machine. So we opened a small workshop on my dad’s farm and brought in commercial machines and sewers, but after ten years, I was burned out. I felt like I was stuck in home furnishings, and it wasn’t where I wanted to be.”

Then came women’s and children’s clothing. “The ‘country look’ had suddenly become popular, so I made jumpers out of denim and corduroy, and jackets with appliqués.” Thanks to her popularity at trade shows, Dianne soon became overwhelmed with orders as Dillard’s and other department stores clamored for her clothing line. The business was so successful that her husband, Bill, who had been a manager at a local mill, was pulled in to help. Then, the bad news: “The clothing industry moved to China,” she says, “the mills shut down and it got harder to find the material we needed. But it was probably for the best: We’d been at it for 14 years, tastes were changing and we weren’t selling as much.”

Scrapbooking, Dianne’s next hill to take, seemed encouraging. And manufacturers were certainly impressed with the line of die cuts and stickers she created. Only problem was, they never ponied up a check or closed a deal with her. Then the apparel catalog she and Bill had been trying to get off the ground met a similarly fizzled fate. “The fabrics we ordered didn’t come through, the designs I created weren’t put into production. So there went that idea.”

Eventually, the calamities took a crushing financial toll. Dianne and Bill had borrowed $250,000 to underwrite their new ventures, using their house as collateral.

That’s when that eviction notice reared its head. “The banker had
promised me that he’d never take our home,” Dianne says. “He
swore
. Then he did. What’s worse, he didn’t even tell us that we were being repossessed—I just saw the notice in the newspaper. Our business was worthless and our home was gone. It was the most devastating time of our life.”

The Woods’ options came down to few and none. “Bill took a job selling cars,” Dianne recalls. “It paid terribly, but it put food on the table. It got us by.” Their accommodations were equally bleak: the former workshop building on her father’s farm. “It had a toilet but no hot water, no kitchen sink. We cleared out space for ourselves, put up a wall just to give us the illusion of rooms, and got a shower, sink, and hot water installed.”

But for all the blows she’d taken, Dianne refused to be knocked down. “I wasn’t looking for a dream or a success story,” she says. “I just needed to make a living so someday we would be able to purchase a home again.”

She started slowly. Focusing on gourmet foods, Dianne launched a meal delivery service, cooking the meals herself. That helped with the cash flow and, more important, bought her some time. Then she came up with an idea that felt like a hit: the Cocoa Cone, hot chocolate powder pressed into the shape of a cone that, when dropped into hot water, dissolved into hot chocolate. Another company had invented it, but it wasn’t going anywhere. “It was drab and ugly,” Dianne says, “so I added sprinkles and chocolate chips, and topped it off with a cheery ribbon. Now it had a wow factor.” She priced it at $4.95.

“We decided to test it out at three trade shows coming up in North Carolina,” Dianne recalls. “So we made 3,000 cones, figuring that would get us through all three. Well, at the first one, people were grabbing armloads, buying them by the dozens. We sold all 3,000 in one day. When the last one went, a little girl waiting in line just broke down and sobbed.”

Dianne knew she had a winner. She immediately signed up sales reps, who rang up orders from department stores and boutiques and gift shops. “At
night we would be in bed in that little shed, and we’d hear the fax machine ringing into the wee small hours. The sales reps had come back from selling and were in their hotel rooms filing their orders. I remember Michael’s, the craft store chain, bought $260,000 worth for Christmas and placed another big order for Valentine’s Day. We eventually did more than $1 million in sales.”

It was a solid win, but Dianne missed an even bigger jackpot; she had failed to trademark her product, leaving a larger corporation to swoop in and grab much of the business. But the good news was that after four and a half years in the shed, she and Bill had earned enough to move into a brand-new, bought-and-paid-for home.

Dianne continued to develop products (“though I wasn’t sure there ever would be anything like the Cocoa Cone”), and one day she began surfing on Etsy.com. “One of the most interesting things about Etsy is that you can see how many units of a product another business is selling every single day,” she says. “And I started to notice that paper straws were selling like crazy. I thought,
I need to get me some straws
.”

But who knew that straws could be such a headache? They were made in China. Supplies were limited. There was a four-month backlog. They came in only three colors (gray, blue, and red). They were poorly made. And some were simply unusable.

Dianne instantly knew she could do better. If two or three colors sold well, what would twelve colors do? Or fifteen? Or maybe even prints and designs? Dianne smelled a hit again. She found an American manufacturer, which at first wasn’t interested. There were too many complications. They’d need to stockpile a lot of paper and get FDA approval for inks or dyes. Dianne was undaunted. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s ‘Don’t take no for an answer.’ The plant was saying, ‘What if they don’t sell?’ I said, ‘What do you care? I’m paying you to do it. Just tell me what it costs.’ Finally they agreed.”

On a crisp November afternoon in 2010, Dianne’s straws were delivered: fifteen colors arriving on fifteen shipping pallets, 240,000 straws per pallet. “All I had to do was take pictures of them and post them on the website. And people came out of the woodwork, from all over the world. It just exploded.” In 2012, Dianne’s business, called the Sugar Diva, did more than $1 million in sales. “My mom said, ‘I don’t get it—they’re just paper straws.’ And I said, ‘Mom, I don’t get it either. I’m just so happy I have them.’ ”

Copycats inevitably sprang up in China, but Dianne remains confident. “You may do something as good as I do it,” she says, “but you’ll never do it better.” She and Bill recently hired an operations manager for the company and brought their granddaughter on board to begin preparing for the day when she takes over from Dianne.

“I have never given up,” says Dianne. “You get knocked down, you get stepped on, you get up, you brush yourself off, and you keep going. I’ve been all the way up and all the way to the very bottom. And look at me now.”

Susan Porter, 56

Ithaca, New York

H
ave you ever sat cross-legged on concrete with a group of 18-year-olds and had to pretend your knees didn’t hurt? It’s hard on the body and worse on the ego.

“I was so sore,” Susie Porter recalls, “but I didn’t dare let on for fear that they’d say, ‘Oh my God, she’s
really
old!’ ”

Susie was clearly out of her element. She’d transferred to Cornell University at the ripe age of 54. Going in, she knew she had more than three decades on her classmates, but reality didn’t sink in until that first night of orientation in August 2012, when she and a gang of fellow classmates sat on the sidewalk outside the campus dorms.

“We were playing name games, and as I looked out at all these young baby faces, I realized they were looking back at me like, ‘Hmmm. We just left our parents. How’d she get in here?’ ”

Her age notwithstanding, Susie had reason to be proud: She was at
Cornell on a full scholarship—pretty amazing, considering that three years earlier she had been working 18-hour days trying to keep her restaurant in a rough Cleveland neighborhood afloat.

“Back then I would have said, ‘No way will I ever be going to an Ivy League school!’ ” But now here she was, the only grandma in the group, biting back the pain in her knees. The whole experience was getting more and more surreal. Just a few days earlier, her youngest daughter, Katy, then 27, and Katy’s boyfriend, Pat, had driven her the five hours to Ithaca, New York, in a Subaru station wagon stuffed with clothes, sheets, towels, pots, and pans.

“It was hilarious,” says Susie. “They were like my mom and dad driving me up to college, teasing me about how I shouldn’t go out partying and really needed to buckle down and do well in school. And I was stunned when Katy actually slipped me 50 bucks at one point. I said, ‘What’s this for?’ She said, ‘Well, you never know when you might need it.’ ”

After they helped her move into her one-bedroom apartment, Katy and Pat dropped Susie off at orientation, and like a good mom and dad headed to Target and a few local thrift shops to pick up some items for her new place.

“It was so sweet,” Susie says. “I came home and had new plates, an ironing board, a shower curtain, and food in the cupboard. It was role reversal at its finest.”

But when orientation weekend ended and Katy and Pat headed home, Susie’s excitement about her academic adventure quickly turned to fear.