"How did you ever get into a business like that?" people ask me. They're confounded to hear that my product is industrial baler wire—a very unfeminine pursuit, especially in 1975 when I founded my company in the midst of a machismo man's world. It's a long story, but I'll try to shorten it. I'd never been interested to enter the "man's" world of business, but I discovered a lucrative opportunity to become my own boss—even if it involved a non-glamorous product. I'd been fired from my previous job working to become a ladies' clothing buyer and was told, "You just aren't management or corporate material." My primary goal then became to find a career in which nobody had the power to fire me and to provide a comfortable living for my two little girls and myself.
We're living through an unprecedented time. It's scary, but I've been here. I started my career working for design firms in 1993, then added a side venture in the mid-90s, a custom kid's bed linen business that I ran for 10 years. In the late 90s, I added a second moonlighting layer (because who needs a social life in their 20s): smaller, then bigger interior design projects in whatever waking hours I had. In 2004, I got an opportunity from one of those side clients to launch my own interior design firm. It took a nagging gut instinct to make the leap, but I'm grateful that I said yes.
It seemed like everything happened overnight because, well… it did. One moment, my team and I were business as usual, running a multi-million-dollar edible cookie dough company I built from scratch in my at-home kitchen five years ago and the next we were sitting in an emergency management team meeting asking ourselves, "What do we do now?" Things had escalated in New York, and we were all called to do our part in "flattening the curve" and "slowing the spread."