It Ain't Over (38 page)

Walking down the next aisle, she noticed a man puzzling over a jar of curry, putting it in his cart, then studying it again before returning it to the shelf. “Why don’t you stir it into some veggies, add yogurt to make it creamy, and serve it over rice?” Deana suggested. Bingo.

“As I drove home, I thought,
Why isn’t there a Trader Joe’s cookbook
?” she says.

It wasn’t a rhetorical question. Deana had been tossing around “exit strategies” from her job for a while. She missed little daily moments with her young kids (“Whenever I squeezed in time for a mommy-and-me class, I always felt stressed that I had to get back to work,” she says). And after seven years pursuing her PhD and investing another ten in her field, she was ready for something new.

When Deana told her husband about her idea to write a cookbook using ingredients from Trader Joe’s, he thought it was a home run (and this from a usually skeptical engineer who had given the thumbs down to all of her
previous brainstorms, like marketing a baby food warmer). Only one problem: He, too, was thinking of starting a new company—his was in biotech—which might mean going without a salary for a while.

“We wondered if it was wise for both of us to make such drastic career changes with two small kids and a mortgage,” she says. Over a sushi lunch at a Japanese restaurant, they both decided to go for it.

First, Deana needed a partner in crime. So she called Wona Miniati, an old pal from MIT and fellow foodie who struggled with balancing her high-tech marketing job and being a mom of two. “When she called, it was like a lightbulb went off in my head,” says Wona. The answer was yes.

The long-distance friends—Deana lives in Encinitas, Wona in San Francisco—didn’t waste any time: “With millions of Trader Joe’s followers, we were positive someone else had this idea, too, and we wanted to be the first to market,” says Wona.

After long hours at their day jobs, dinnertime became R&D time. Deana and Wona would whip up as many as five main dishes each night, along with sides and desserts, holding off kids and husbands until they’d meticulously photographed each plate. Only then could the family dig in. One Saturday morning, Deana was helping her five-year-old son, Mason, make pancakes. “When I told him it was time to eat, he said, ‘Wait, Mom!’ and ran out of the room. He came back in with a toy camera, snapped a picture of his plate, and then said, ‘Okay,
now
I can eat.’ That made us all laugh.”

The women made as many as four Trader Joe’s runs in a single day and often worked well past midnight, paring down the recipes, photographing the dishes, and writing the stories behind their inventions. Their concoctions were global and varied, influenced by their ethnic backgrounds. Deana’s heritage is Middle Eastern. Wona is Korean but grew up in Venezuela. “We’re comfortable fusing all kinds of foods together—bringing together an Italian
dish and Indian flavors and making a Saag Paneer lasagna, for example—or making really approachable versions of food we grew up with.” Dishes like Chicken Pot Pie, California Fish Tacos, and Apricot Baked Brie made the cut.

Within five months, their already-full plates were now overflowing, and they both quit their six-figure jobs. “Our friends thought we were joking,” says Deana, “asking us why we thought we could change course like this at our age. But to me, it was like that great
Winnie the Pooh
line: It’s today, my favorite day.”

But they needed time to learn the ins and outs of publishing, marketing, and distribution. Eager to get the books out by the holiday season and wanting to expedite the process and control the final product, they chose to self-publish. “There were things that were super important to us, like color photos and a hard cover, and we didn’t want to compromise,” says Deana.

One obstacle they didn’t count on: When they called Trader Joe’s to arrange for the cookbook to be distributed in its stores, the company said no—it had a strict policy against carrying books. Wona turned to some old Stanford business school colleagues for help and they advised her to close up shop and move on. But Deana and Wona had already quit their jobs, and they
knew
they had a hot product. “It forced us to make lemonade out of lemons,” Wona says.

So they launched Plan B. (Always have a Plan B.)

On a rainy afternoon in November 2007,
Deana maneuvered a rented forklift to unload a pallet of 10,000
Cooking with All Things Trader Joe’s
cookbooks (their favorite 125 recipes, plus suggested wine pairings and nutritional info) from a semi-truck into her garage. Then she and Wona set up a website (now called
www.cookTJ.com
) and an 800 number and, through word of mouth, orders started trickling in. Wona couldn’t help answering the 800 number at all hours of the night—even at four a.m. when an early riser on the East Coast called. “One by one, we started selling every one of those 10,000 books out of my garage,” says Deana.

Though the November release date meant they missed a lot of holiday “best cookbook” lists, the women forged ahead, reaching out to food editors across the country. When the
Sacramento Bee
ran a rave review but failed to include the website for ordering, the women were disappointed—that is, until individual bookstores getting requests from customers looking for the book started placing orders. Soon, Borders and Barnes & Noble came calling, too, taking distribution to a whole new level. “That was the silver lining,” says Deana.

Trader Joe’s still doesn’t carry cookbooks, but no matter. Deana and Wona now have nine titles in the Cooking with Trader Joe’s series. They also have vegetarian and gluten-free editions and a portable version to fit into readers’ purses or back pockets and be taken into Trader Joe’s with them.

“Who knew when I was leading PhD research teams that in a few years I would be walking by Barnes and Noble to see my cookbooks displayed in the window?” says Deana.

What’s more, they’ve created a flexible work schedule that allows them to chaperone their kids’ field trips or volunteer at school—even if it means staying up until two a.m. to work on new books or blog entries for their website, which now has a database of more than 800 recipes and product reviews.

“We
love
what we do—it’s fun, not a chore,” says Wona. “I never would
have expected, coming out of MIT with an electrical engineering degree, to eventually end up authoring cookbooks and writing recipes. No one should feel trapped by their formal training or what their past experience points them toward. We need to give ourselves the open space to think beyond what our career path looks like.”

Susan Walvius, 48

Michelle Marciniak, 39

Columbia, South Carolina

I
t was a sweltering August afternoon, and coaches Susan Walvius and Michelle Marciniak had just finished running a day of basketball camp at the University of South Carolina. Hot, sweaty, and exhausted, Susan tugged at the high-tech athletic jersey she was wearing and said, “This stuff is so soft and silky. I would
love
to have bedsheets made out of it.” And then Michelle, without missing a beat, responded with a comment that they’d both retell hundreds of times over the next few years: “Why don’t we make them ourselves?”

The more they talked about the idea, the more convinced they became that this could be a business. Athletes loved this material—it breathes and wicks away moisture.

Both hoped they could make such a business happen—they needed a break from the stress. Like all head coaches, says Michelle, “On any given day, Susan was either the savior or the scapegoat, depending on how the team was doing.” Michelle, a former WNBA player who had been Susan’s assistant coach for five
years, was also ready to move on. “Coaching meant a life of never-ending ups and downs, and I didn’t have the same passion for it that I had for playing.”

But was this a viable business idea? “I called up the dean of international business at South Carolina, told him my idea, and asked if his classes ever built and vetted business plans,” says Susan. “He said, ‘Yes, we do,’ and put his students to work on our idea for two semesters.”

That fall, Susan and Michelle came up with the name SHEEX (inspired by the success of SPANX), and Michelle even created the brand’s Under Armour–esque logo while sitting at her kitchen table over Christmas break. Then the business students came back with their plan, which projected mind-blowing profits for SHEEX. Susan and Michelle were ecstatic.

“The students had worked out a top-down plan,” Michelle says, “how and why the business would work, who the sheets would appeal to, even how we could get it off the ground. It seemed like a sure thing. Once we said, ‘We’re doing this,’ we locked in and it was game on.”

Both women resigned from their coaching positions in April 2008. Now that Susan and Michelle were going to be partners, their relationship quickly changed.

“Michelle told me, ‘I don’t work for you anymore,’ ” recalls Susan. “ ‘You have to learn to make decisions with me.’ And I respected that. Michelle has a skill set that I don’t. I’m levelheaded and strategic. She walks into a room and brings energy and emotion. Would I have tried to start this business without her? Maybe. Would I be successful? Probably not.”

Step one of their plan was to raise start-up money, and they were able to collect $500,000 in surprisingly little time. “Most of the money,” says Susan, “came from successful women who were part of a mentoring program I had developed to connect the girls I coached with professional women in the community—doctors, lawyers, and high-level business executives.”

When Susan and Michelle pitched SHEEX to these women, a few handed
over as much as $100,000. They culled additional money from friends and relatives and even rented out their houses to save cash.

“It was clear that we were going to be on the road constantly, visiting factories and meeting with people,” says Michelle. “We figured we’d stay with friends or sleep in motels.”

So the two ex-coaches hit the road, pursuing meetings with every top business executive they could. “I had read a bunch of books on how to start a business, and one lesson I never forgot was that you should ask successful people for their advice,” says Susan. “That rang true to me—you don’t win games with freshmen, you win games with talent and experience, and Michelle and I were freshmen. We had a lot to learn.”

Their athletic background came in handy. The two towering blondes (Susan is six feet two inches and Michelle is five feet ten inches) project killer confidence. “We’re both extremely driven,” says Michelle, “and as teammates, we know how to zig when the other one zags.”

And their ability to talk sports gave them an instant advantage. “There’s absolutely no question about it, men love to connect through athletics,” says Susan. “We’d often sit down with mostly male senior management, and spend as much time talking about sports as we did business. It helped us build relationships.”

Among those relationships was one they formed with Bob Damon, head of Korn Ferry, the largest executive search firm in the country. “It took forever to get 15 minutes with him, but once we got there, we ended up talking for two hours,” says Susan. “He said he had grown up in a tough neighborhood and on two occasions he was headed down the wrong path when a coach helped set him straight.” He clearly had a soft spot for coaches.

When Bob asked how much capital they had raised, they told him $500,000. “That’s all?” he said, laughing. Then he proceeded to connect them with investors who were willing to put up larger sums of money.