Million-dollar concepts are few and much between. Most of us want for simply a kind of breakthrough moments when a lightweight bulb seems above our heads and begins spewing cash like a slot machine.
Actually, it is seldom so easy, developing with the large concept or scoring the large break or just deciding you’ve got obtained what it takes. Extra usually, it is a research in perseverance, creativity, self-confidence and, from time to time, placing a bit of frustration to good use.
Right here, 10 ladies who began small and made it large, creating media empires, worldwide magnificence conglomerates or corporations that Harvard Enterprise Faculty now makes use of as effectivity case research.
We’ll begin the record with a girl who introduced us truthful commerce.
Contents
- Anita Roddick — The Physique Store
- Sara Blakely — Spanx
- Coco Chanel — Chanel
- Estée Lauder — Estée Lauder Cosmetics
- Debbie Fields — Mrs. Fields Cookies
- Mary Kay Ash — Mary Kay Cosmetics
- Ruth Handler — Barbie Doll
- Mary Katherine Goddard — Writer
- Martha Stewart — Martha Stewart Dwelling
- Oprah Winfrey — Harpo Productions
10. Anita Roddick — The Physique Store
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Dame Anita Roddick introduced sustainability to mainstream magnificence merchandise.
Gareth Davies/Getty Pictures
(1942-2007)
In 1976, along with her husband touring extensively and two daughters at residence to assist, Anita Roddick started a magnificence enterprise that might change into an ethics phenomenon: The Physique Store was one of many first mainstream enterprises to prominently function ideas like sustainability, cruelty-free product testing and truthful commerce.
Roddick started with a tiny retailer in Brighton, England. In the present day, there are virtually 2,000 Physique Retailers with 80 million clients talking 25 totally different languages worldwide.
Dame Anita (she was knighted in 2003) and her husband offered the corporate to L’Oreal in 2006.
Up subsequent: She "shapes" our lives.
9. Sara Blakely — Spanx
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Sara Blakely turned panty line frustration into a giant enterprise. Right here, she opens her Haute Contour line at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York Metropolis.
Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Pictures
(1971- )
A lady with a university diploma, a job promoting copiers and a deep frustration with panty strains, Sara Blakely started with a couple of thousand {dollars} in financial savings and constructed Atlanta-based Spanx, a $150-million enterprise.
The hosiery model was born in 1998, when Blakely could not discover a option to conceal thong strains beneath a pair of white pants. Shapers have been too cumbersome, and stockings precluded the strappy sandals she wished to put on. So she lower the ft off a pair of pantyhose and tried to disregard the best way the sides rolled up round her ankles. She then spent two years growing a prototype.
In 2000, Spanx merchandise made it into high-end department shops. In the present day they arrive in 100 totally different types, together with bras.
Up subsequent: A style icon raised by nuns.
8. Coco Chanel — Chanel
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Coco Chanel made a triumphant return to style — and enterprise — in 1954.
AP Picture
(1883-1971)
You do not have to be a fashionista to know the identify Coco Chanel. Her Paris couture home, solid within the early 1900s as a single hat store, continues to be exhibiting on runways.
Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was born poor, raised an orphan and had a singular sense of fashion. Whereas designing hats for high-society ladies, her identify was thrown round in Paris society a lot she turned not solely a prime designer but in addition a member of that higher crust.
Chanel closed her style home throughout World Battle II and reopened in 1954, all of the sudden discovering herself in a style world dominated by males. However by the tip of that decade, her strains have been again within the highlight, and on the finish of the century, she was the one style icon on Time’s "100 Most Necessary Folks of the Century" record.
Up subsequent: She turned do-it-yourself pores and skin lotions into billionaire standing.
7. Estée Lauder — Estée Lauder Cosmetics
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The Lauder empire began with a household skincare formulation and tenacious gross sales techniques.
AP Picture/Susan Ragan
(1906-2004)
She was born Josephine Esther Mentzer, daughter of Hungarian immigrants, and spent her early years in an residence above her mother and father’ ironmongery shop. She died Estée Lauder, cosmetics mogul, gross sales innovator and billionaire.
Estée Lauder was promoting her chemist uncle’s skincare formulations at magnificence parlors and spas when, with the assistance of husband Joseph Lauder in 1948, she determined to take it up a notch. She turned on her well-known attraction and scored house at a magnificence counter at Saks, and people family-made cosmetics turned "Estée Lauder."
Via progressive gross sales and advertising strategies, together with giving her richest and most lovely associates product samples to be seen with, she grew her enterprise right into a cosmetics empire that now contains strains like Clinique, Aramis and Prescriptives.
Lauder was the one girl to make Time’s record of the twentieth century’s "Most Influential Enterprise Geniuses."
Up subsequent: Her cookies made her well-known.
6. Debbie Fields — Mrs. Fields Cookies
(1957- )
The Seventies have been powerful years to be "simply" a housewife. On the top of the ladies’s lib motion, 20-year-old Debbie Fields was uninterested in the condescending seems to be at dinner events and set about placing her baking expertise to new use. She opened a cookie retailer.
In 1977, Mrs. Fields’ Chocolate Chippery in Palo Alto, Calif., was about to go its first day with out a sale when she began handing her product out at no cost on the sidewalk, and the remainder is historical past.
That enterprise turned Mrs. Fields’ Cookies, and her baked items earned her a following, a fortune and a franchising system. Greater than only a nice cookie maker, although, Debbie Fields was an innovator. Harvard Enterprise Faculty makes use of her firm as an effectivity case research.
Debbie Fields ran the corporate till 1993.
Up subsequent: She gave enterprising ladies a ready-made house wherein to succeed.
5. Mary Kay Ash — Mary Kay Cosmetics
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Mary Kay Ash began her cosmetics firm after leaving a sexist office in her mid-40s.
AP Picture
(1918-2001)
A gifted salesperson and a prime coach in a Texas direct-sales agency, Mary Kay Ash was 45 years outdated when she left a sexist office and revolutionized ladies’s roles in enterprise.
In 1963, Ash took a $5,000 funding and turned it right into a enterprise promoting magnificence merchandise — however that is simply a part of the story.
Mary Kay Ash set about giving ladies a successful position in gross sales, instituting a revolutionary incentive program and a wholesale-retail construction that allowed for limitless earnings. She succeeded to the nth diploma, constructing not solely a $2.2 billion firm but in addition an area the place enterprising ladies may (and nonetheless can) escape the restrictions of a male-dominated gross sales world.
Mary Kay Cosmetics has 1.8 million gross sales consultants and has received Fortune journal awards for greatest locations to work and greatest corporations for girls.
Up subsequent: The primary (youngsters’) doll with boobs.
4. Ruth Handler — Barbie Doll
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Barbie creator Ruth Handler will get a kiss at her creation’s birthday celebration.
AP Picture/Robert Clark
(1916-2002)
She has taken flack for her invention, accused of making an unattainable feminine best for little women all over the place. However irrespective of the way you take a look at it, Ruth Handler was a prime entrepreneur: Barbie is without doubt one of the best successes in toy historical past.
Within the mid-Nineteen Forties, Handler co-founded Mattel, and in 1959, she created Barbie. Named for Handler’s daughter, Barbie was the primary doll with breasts and, it appears, precisely what the little-girl world had been ready for.
Handler can be liable for Chatty Cathy.
Mattel in the end went by some troublesome authorized instances within the Seventies, and Handler needed to resign as president. She then started a brand new enterprise promoting the primary realistic-looking synthetic breasts designed for breast-cancer survivors.
Up subsequent: A lady who stepped as much as assist gas an precise revolution.
3. Mary Katherine Goddard — Writer
(1737-1816)
In Colonial America, when most ladies have been elevating youngsters and retaining houses in what was then a fairly hard-living New England, Mary Katherine Goddard was appearing because the first-ever feminine postmaster and utilizing her enterprise to additional the American Revolution.
In 1777, when no different writer would contact it, Goddard fearlessly printed the primary copy of the Declaration of Independence that included the names of its drafters, making herself a member of the riot and making the riot a certain factor: The signers may now not again out. Whereas she would by no means obtain the wealth boasted by the opposite ladies entrepreneurs on this record, she earns a excessive rank for utilizing her enterprise expertise to assist change historical past.
Up subsequent: Not even jail may sluggish her down.
2. Martha Stewart — Martha Stewart Dwelling
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Martha Stewart mixed her catering expertise and aptitude for residing elegantly with sharp enterprise sense to construct a media empire.
AP Picture/Alik Keplicz
(1941- )
Mannequin, mom, inventory dealer, caterer, empire builder and queen of residing elegantly, Martha Stewart is an entrepreneurial phenom few ladies, or males, can match.
She is the enterprise thoughts and "homemaking" ability behind Martha Stewart Dwelling. After her divorce in 1989, having gained expertise working a home-based catering enterprise and changing a Connecticut farmhouse into her household’s residence and an image of rustic refinement, she turned her expertise into an empire.
There have been books, {a magazine}, a TV present — and at last a "homemaking" media conglomerate that positions her as not solely the foremost skilled on lovely residing but in addition one of many wealthiest and most influential ladies in America.
After serving a jail sentence for insider buying and selling from 2004 to 2005, Stewart resumed her position as head of Martha Stewart Dwelling with out lacking a beat.
Up subsequent: Even on the planet of self-made ladies, she’s a jaw-dropper.
1. Oprah Winfrey — Harpo Productions
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Oprah Winfrey introduced the launch of her personal community in 2010.
AP Picture/Mary Altaffer
(1954- )
Wanting on the energy, wealth and philanthropy that’s Oprah Winfrey’s life now, it is almost unattainable to think about the troublesome childhood that formed her larger-than-life persona. She overcame lengthy odds to change into arguably essentially the most influential girl entrepreneur in historical past.
Oprah’s rise started on the age of 17, when she turned the 1972 Miss Black Tennessee. That opened the door to a profession in broadcasting, a full scholarship to Tennessee State and an anchor place at an area TV station.
She obtained her first discuss present in 1976, and the style propelled her not solely to stardom — she is liked by tens of millions of individuals. In 1986, she based Harpo Communications and purchased the rights to the Oprah Winfrey Present, continuing to change into the wealthiest self-made girl within the nation.
Profitable actress, activist, broadcaster, producer, media mogul and all-around star, Oprah takes the entrepreneurial Gold.
For extra info on self-made ladies, look over the hyperlinks on the following web page.
