Notes for research paper
Carrie Crawford Smith (1877-1954) Employment Agency Started: 1918 Shortly after moving from Tennessee to Illinois, Carrie Crawford Smith, an African American woman, set up an employment agency to help find work for the huge number of black migrants who were moving from the South to the North. Her business helped both black and white clients, but mainly focused on African American domestic helpers. Smith’s business was about more than just jobs she also saw her venture as a way to promote racial advancement and dignity. Sara Blakely (1971- ) Spans underwear started: 1998
Sara Blakely was working as a sales trainer by day and a stand-up comedienne at night before she started Spans. She had no business training and knew nothing about the underwear industry, except that she didn’t like the way her bum looked in white pants. So, at the age of 29, Blakely used her $5,000 savings to develop a line of shaper to make women look slimmer. The result: her company, Atlanta- based Spans, became one of the best selling body shaper lines worldwide, with 2011 sales estimated at $250 million dollars and an estimated corporate value of $1 billion.
A woman with a college degree, a job selling copiers and a pep frustration with panty lines, Sara Blakely began with a few thousand dollars in savings and built Atlanta-based Spans, a $1 50-million enterprise. The hosiery brand was born in 1998, when Blakely couldn’t find a way to hide thong lines beneath a pair of white pants. Shapers were too bulky, and stockings precluded the satrapy sandals she wanted to wear. So she cut the feet off a pair of pantyhose and tried to ignore the way the edges rolled up around her ankles. She then spent two years developing a prototype.
In 2000, Spans products made it into high-end department stores. Today they come in 00 different styles, including bras. Margaret Redskin (1897-1967) Peppering Farm started: 1937 Redskin began making stone-ground wheat at her family’s farmhouse in Connecticut for her son, who suffered with asthma and food allergies. Soon her son’s doctor, initially skeptical, was prescribing her bread to other patients and her husband was carrying loaves on the train to New York to be sold at specialist grocers. By the end of 1 939, Redskin had sold more than a million loaves and featured in Reader’s Digest.
In 1 940, she moved her business from her garage to its own factory, adding cookies to her range a decade later. She sold the business to Campbell Soup for $28 million in 1961, and was the first woman to serve on Campbell board of directors. Anita Rowdier (1942-2007) The Body Shop started: 1976 Environmental activist and entrepreneur Anita Rowdier opened her first beauty products store in the English seaside town of Brighton in 1 976 to create an income for herself and her two daughters while her husband was trekking across the Americas.
She claimed she chose the color green simply to hide the mold on her first shop, but The Body Shop soon became known for its green ideal. Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said when Rowdier died of apatite’s C at the age of 64: “She campaigned for green issues for many years before it became fashionable to do so and inspired millions to the cause by bringing sustainable products to a mass market. ” The Body Shop was sold to L’Oreal in 2006 for $million, and now has 2,500 stores in more than 60 countries worldwide.
Jean Unhitched (1923- ) Weight Watchers Started: 1963 Jean Unhitched, now 87, had failed with diets for many years and weighed Bibb when she went on a diet recommended by the New York Department of Health in 1 961. Worried she might “cheat,” she invited friends for coffee and seed if they’d like to join her in weekly meetings to discuss how they were getting on. Within a year, Unhitched lost 72 pounds, which she never regained. To share her success, she opened her first Weight Watchers in New York in 1963 and a year later began franchising the concept.
Unhitched sold the company to Heinz in 1978 for $1 billion. The company now estimates that more than one million people around the world attend a weekly Weight Watchers meeting. This week, Nineteen’s granddaughter, Heather (pictured above) helped celebrate Weight Watchers 50th anniversary with a dedication to the company’s founder. Opera Winfred: 1954_ ) cooking at the power, wealth and philanthropy that is Opera Winery’s life now, it’s nearly impossible to imagine the difficult childhood that shaped her larger-than-life persona.
She overcame long odds to become arguably the most influential woman entrepreneur in history. Opera’s rise began at the age of 1 7, when she became the 1 972 Miss Black Tennessee. That opened the door to a career in broadcasting, a full scholarship to Tennessee State and an anchor position at a local TV station. She got her first talk show in 1 976, and the genre propelled her not only to stardom she is loved by millions of people. In 1986, she founded Harp Communications and bought the rights to the Opera Winfred Show, proceeding to become the wealthiest self-made woman in the country.
Successful actress, activist, broadcaster, producer, media mogul and all-around star, Opera takes the entrepreneurial Gold. Opera’s been the queen of TV for decades, and while she’s moved on from her iconic talk show on network television, her Harp Productions Inc. Empire is still evolving. An entire cable network devoted to shows and people she finds inspiring is one of Opera’s latest projects as she continues to build up her website, magazine and radio show. Born in a poor community in Mississippi, Winfred was sent to live with different relatives around the country and was sexually abused as a child.
She credits her father with “turning [her] life around” and helping her recognize her potential and her natural gifts, a mission she has pursued on her talk show and in her many charitable endeavors, like her Angel Network. Forbes calculated Wineries net worth for 2011 at $2. 7 billion. Esteem Lauder (1906-2004) She was born Josephine Esther Mentor, daughter of Hungarian immigrants, and spent her early years in an apartment above her parents’ hardware store. She died Este Lauder, cosmetics mogul, sales innovator and billionaire.
Este Lauder was selling her chemist uncle’s skin care formulations at beauty parlors and spas when, with the help of husband Joseph Lauder in 1948, she decided to take it up a notch. She turned on her famous charm and scored space at a beauty counter at Asks, and those family-made cosmetics became “Este Lauder. ” Through innovative sales and marketing techniques, including giving her richest and most beautiful friends product samples to be seen with, she grew her business into a cosmetics empire that now includes lines like Clique, Arms and Prescriptive.
Lauder was the only woman to make Time’s list of the 20th century’s “Most Influential Business Geniuses. ” ;One of the most famous female entrepreneurs in American history, Esteem Lauder built an extremely successful business that’s still earning big profits today, despite the recession. Lauder was born in New York City to immigrant parents, but with the help of a chemist uncle, quickly began developing skin creams that were sold in clubs and resorts. Lauder eventually fought for her own counter space at Asks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, gave samples to all of ere friends and acquaintances, and expanded to fragrances in the next several years.
Lauder became a billionaire before dying in 2004, and the Esteem Lauder Companies shares are at this moment selling for $95. 36 on the NYSE. Mary Kay Ash: (1918-2001) A gifted salesperson and a top trainer in a Texas direct-sales firm, Mary Kay Ash was 45 years old when she left a sexist workplace and revolutionized women’s roles in business. In 1963, Ash took a $5,000 investment and turned it into a business selling beauty products but that’s just part of the story. Mary Kay Ash set about giving women a winning role in sales, instituting a evolutionary incentive program and a wholesale-retail structure that allowed for unlimited earnings.
She succeeded to the nth degree, building not only a $2. 2 billion company but also a space where enterprising women could (and still can) escape the limitations of a male-dominated sales world. Mary Kay Cosmetics has 1. 8 million sales consultants and has won Fortune magazine awards for best places to work and best companies for women. -Another inspirational American entrepreneur is Mary Kay Ash, the woman who created Mary Kay cosmetics. The Texas native began her own business recruits after resigning from a company that continued to promote male employees ahead of her, despite her seniority and higher skill set.
She used her $5,000 in savings and the help of her son to start Beauty by Mary Kay -? a company that now relies on 2 million beauty consultants to sell her products around the country. Debbie Fields – Founder of Mrs.. Fields Cookies (1957- ) The asses were tough years to be “just” a housewife. At the height of the women’s Bib movement, 20-year-old Debbie Fields was tired of the condescending looks at dinner parties and set about putting her baking skills to new use. She opened a cookie store. In 1977, Mrs.. Fields’ Chocolate Chippers in Palo Alto, Cilia. Was about to go its first day without a sale when she started handing her product out for free on the sidewalk, and the rest is history. That business became Mrs.. Fields’ Cookies, and her baked goods earned her a following, a fortune and a franchising system. More than just a great cookie maker, though, Debbie Fields was an innovator. Harvard Business School uses her company as an efficiency case study. Debbie Fields ran the company until 1993. -At age 20, Debbie Fields was a housewife with no business experience, but a retreat chocolate chip cookie recipe and a dream. Today, Mrs..
Fields Cookies is one of the world’s most recognizable dessert franchises, with over 600 stores in the U. S. And ten other countries. Ruth Handler Barbie Doll (1916-2002) She has taken flack for her invention, accused of creating an unattainable female ideal for little girls every. Veer. But no matter how you look at it, Ruth Handler was a top entrepreneur: Barbie is one of the greatest successes in toy history. In the mid-asses, Handler co-founded Matter, and in 1959, she created Barbie. Named for Handler’s daughter, Barbie was the first doll with reacts and, it seems, exactly what the little-girl world had been waiting for.
Handler is also responsible for Chatty Cathy. Matter ultimately went through some difficult legal times in the asses, and Handler had to resign as president. She then began a new business selling the first realistic-looking artificial breasts designed for breast- cancer survivors. Martha Stewart Martha Stewart Living (1941-) Model, mother, stock broker, caterer, empire builder and queen of living elegantly, Martha Stewart is an entrepreneurial phenol few women, or men, can match. She is the business mind and “homemaking” skill behind Martha Stewart Living.
After her divorce in 1 989, having gained experience running a home-based catering business and converting a Connecticut farmhouse into her family’s home and a picture of rustic refinement, she turned her skills into an empire. There were books, a magazine, a TV show and finally a “homemaking” media conglomerate that positions her as not only the foremost expert on beautiful living but also one of the wealthiest and most influential Women in America. After serving a jail Sentence for insider trading from 2004 to 2005, Stewart resumed her role as head of Martha Stewart Living without missing a beat. Goode, Sarah S. Sarah E.
Goode was a businesswoman and inventor. Goode invented the folding cabinet bed, a space-saver that folded up against the wall into a cabinet. When folded up, it could be used as a desk, complete with compartments for stationery and writing supplies. Goode owned a furniture store in Chicago, Illinois, and invented the bed for people living in small apartments. Geode’s patent was the first one obtained by an African- American woman inventor (patent #322,1 77, approved on July 14, 1885). Walker, Madame C. J. Madam C. J. Walker (December 23, 1867 – May 25, 191 9) was an inventor, congresswoman and self-made millionaire.
