Category: entrepreneurship

business, entrepreneurship, fashion, retail

My Year of Hopefulness: Creative entrepreneur accessorizes jewelry with business

Christa Avampato

My friend, Laura Cococcia of Laura Reviews, did a terrific interview with an entrepreneur who proves that you can keep a day job while starting your own successful business. Johanna Ferguson began Rilee and Lo, an on-line jewelry retailer after noticing that she couldn’t find one place on-line to buy interesting, unique jewelry by individual designers at a reasonable price. She found a way to do what all successful start-ups do – turn a pain in the market into an opportunity.

This interview by Laura really inspired me to think about my life, and my work, in a very hopeful, positive way despite the downturn of the economy. I’m so pleased to have her as a guest blogger today! She is the author of “Laura Reviews,” a blog forum that features unique book reviews and article commentary as well as original author interviews. Cococcia is a freelance writer for various publications and a contributing author to Hungry Chicago (2009) and One to One B2B. She works full-time for Google, Inc. in its Chicago office and can be reached at laurareviews@gmail.com.

Johanna Ferguson was frustrated.

A consummate jewelry aficionado, Ferguson often found she’d have to go to multiple stores and Web sites to find the right jewelry pieces and designers to suit her styles. It took extra time and effort to simply do something she loved.

In August 2008, Ferguson solved her own problem. She launched “Rilee and Lo,” a one-stop shop that features jewelry from famous and emerging designers.

Ferguson explains the simple philosophy behind Rilee and Lo. “Jewelry can be worn whenever, with whatever, and can update your look and mood in a second,” she says. “We believe jewelry is the centerpiece of an outfit and should never be an afterthought.”

Ferguson also tends to be swayed by her mood when selecting pieces – hence, the birth of the Rilee and Lo personalities. Rilee represents the rocker glam persona, veering toward an edgy, urban, modern and funky style. Lo’s look is more feminine, bohemian, organic and chic. When she selects lines and pieces, Ferguson considers both Rilee’s and Lo’s style preferences.
I recently interviewed Ferguson to get a behind-the-scenes look at the entrepreneurial efforts behind Rilee and Lo, discussing what it takes to successfully launch a business that aligns so closely with one’s passions.

Laura Cococcia: You launched Rilee and Lo in late August 2008. How quickly has your customer base grown?

Johanna Ferguson: My customer base grows every month, which is so exciting to watch. I wanted Rilee and Lo to grow naturally, so it was a healthy, steady growth, which I could keep up with. I think the varied product mix and brands had a lot to do with Rilee and Lo’s growth; got the right brands in at the right time.

Laura Cococcia: What specific things have you done to get the Rilee and Lo word out to the marketplace?

Johanna Ferguson: My marketing efforts started small, which was intentional. I work full-time, so I needed to learn as my business was growing. Customer service is a huge part of the Rilee and Lo business and something we strive to be the best at, so again, we wanted to keep up with the growth.

In August, I sent emails to friends and family and launched a small Google AdWords campaign. In September, I included Yahoo! Ads in the mix and in October, I started formal email communications to my subscriber list. The holiday sales kept us busy; I focused on creating promotions that were relevant and fresh throughout the season.

I now work with a public relations manager and she’s done an amazing job landing press on fashion blogs, the Martha Stewart show, Kids Choice Awards and Glamour. She’s also helped grow the awareness of Rilee and Lo through Twitter.

Laura Cococcia: How is Rilee and Lo different from other Web sites that feature and sell designer accessories?

Johanna Ferguson. Rilee and Lo’s differentiates itself by offering a wide range of reasonably-priced, versatile and quality jewelry. Also, we focus both on established designers (Robert Lee Morris, CC SKYE, Maya Brenner, Adina Reyter) and new designers (Aviary, Iris Guy, and Fiona Paxton) to personify both Rilee’s and Lo’s styles.

Rilee and Lo will always be about accessories – we hope to add scarves and headbands soon – but there is a lot of jewelry we need to add before that time comes.

Laura Cococcia: Can you give us a sneak peek of where we’ll see Rilee and Lo featured in the near future?

Johanna Ferguson: The July cover of Glamour will feature Sandra Bullock wearing two Fallon pieces provided by Rilee and Lo. In fact, Bullock liked the Fallon bracelet so much and wanted to have it, so we sent it to her afterwards as a gift and she wore it to the Kids Choice Awards in late March.

I love to see others in jewelry from Rilee and Lo. It’s reassuring that people understand our Web site, like it, shop there, and want to see us bring more fantastic jewelry designers into the mix.
Laura Cococcia: What advice can you give other entrepreneurs looking to launch their own business, based on what they’re passionate about?

Johanna Ferguson: You learn so much doing this! There are some days when I’m so excited and others when I find it challenging, especially when you discover new competition. Of course, my goal is to grow Rilee and Lo into a national brand at some point in the future, but until then, it’s all about being patient and doing the work.

Finding new jewelry is something I love, and now it’s an integral, necessary part of my life and business. I can’t walk into a department store, boutique or museum without going straight to the jewelry. It’s a slight obsession, but it’s also my job.

My advice to other aspiring entrepreneurs: try, make a plan, execute it, be patient, and be ready to work on it every day.

Many thanks to Ferguson (and of course Laura!) for sharing her fresh entrepreneurial insights and experience. Rilee and Lo can be seen at http://www.rileeandlo.com/. Ferguson can be contacted at Johanna@RileeandLo.com.
business, Business Week, career, entrepreneurship, Jack Welch, Suzy Welch

My Year of Hopefulness – advice for MBAs still on the hunt

Christa Avampato

I can’t tell you how often I shake my head at my own dumb luck. I started business school in 2005 for several very simple reasons:

1) I knew that I wanted to be a stellar performer in the nonprofit industry. Many of the donors that I worked with were from the business world and I wanted to understand their language, the circumstances they faced at their companies, and the way their minds worked.

2) I was 29, I wanted a graduate degree, and figured if I didn’t go then, I may not go at all.

3) I wanted to live an extraordinary life and I wanted to help other people do the same. Understanding our commerce and financial systems inside and out seemed like a very efficient way to accomplish both of those things. Money, and heart, make the world go ’round.

I graduated in 2007, when it seemed that nothing could stop our professional lives from zooming to the top of the charts. I was blessed to be graduating in a very strong economy and alums I spoke to said I should thank my lucky stars. I did.

And then 6 months later, my beliefs, and everyone else’s for that matter, about the economy were turned on their heads. The worst recession since the Great Depression. I have great empathy for fellow b-school grads who graduated the year after me, and more still for those set to graduate next month. You are facing extraordinary circumstances; we all are.

Today, I read Jack and Suzy Welch’s column in Business Week and they see three possible avenues for newly minted MBAs. Quite frankly, their advice applies to everyone in the job market at the moment and it’s very worthy of repeating:

1) Settle, work like heck, and learn to love it.
If you’re looking for a new job, or thinking of moving on from where you are now, you might have to settle for a lower title, a new industry, slightly different job responsibilities, or less money than you had originally planned for. And that’s okay. Make sure it’s work you enjoy and that strategically you’ll be poised to leverage it going forward into a position that is a better long-term match for you.

2) Put yourself out there full throttle. Decice the three dream companies or dream people you’d like to work for. Write to them, email them, call them and ask for five minutes of their time. Then prepare for that five minutes more thoroughly than you’ve ever prepared for anything in your life!

3) Go it alone, sort of. Sit down and make a list of the three things you’re really good at and that you love doing. Then imagine the types of companies you could start with those skills. If you need to fill in some gaps, recruit a friend or colleague who has those attributes and see if you can make a go of it. In an earlier column, the Welch’s said that this is the BEST time to start a company if you can deliver more value for less money than your competition.

Building on this advice, I’d say try two of the three. Actually, I think you should do all three, and here’s why:

1.) Settle and like it. When I was 22 and just graduated from college, I loved theatre. I still do. In a lot of ways my work in the arts saved my life. I wanted very much to work in that industry so on my mother’s suggestion, I wrote to every theatre company in NYC and asked them to hire me. I was willing to do anything from fetching coffee to taking messages to running errands. The Roundabout Theatre Company hired me as a customer service rep for $10 an hour and from there I built a career in that industry for 6 years. It was a great time in my life and taught me that a settle (strategically) and love it plan can and does work.

2.) Writing to people – My friend, Richard, has encouraged me for some time now to write to every person I admire that I’d ever like to have some type of working relationship with. He’s relentless about repeating this advice to me. Case in point – I love the work that HopeLab does. They build video games for young people managing critical illnesses. I wrote them a letter, they responded, and I hopped on a plane to visit them in the hopes that some day down the line the time will be right for us to work together on some project.

3.) Do your own thing – we should all be working on doing our own thing! If this downturn has made me realize anything it’s that I want to be in control of my career. I no longer want to just hand it over to someone else to evaluate and grow. Going forward, I’d always like to have my own side projects that I’m working on, and someday one of those side projects just might be a killer idea that I can build a whole business from.

In short, we all have choices and options. Even in these grim, tough times, we can all find a way to make ourselves useful, and with all the uncertainty a multi-pronged plan might just be the safest thing we can do.

career, economy, entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship

My Year of Hopefulness – Are you a social entrepreneur?

Christa Avampato

The core psychology of a social entrepreneur is someone who cannot come to rest, in a very deep sense, until he or she has changed the pattern in an area of social concern all across society. –Bill Drayton, Founder of Ashoka

This morning on Daily Good, an on-line publication devoted to spreading good news, the topic is social entrepreneurship. What makes these people tick? The post this morning may help us all identify whether or not this type of entrepreneurship is the right one for us. Simply stated, social entrepreneurs found a business (often for-profit) that addresses a societal concern.

Could you be a social entrepreneur? Could your business or business idea be a social enterprise?

A personality checklist:
1.) Unable to come to rest until a cause you are passionate about is accomplished
2.) Belief that profit and social good are on equal footing
3.) Relationship builder
4.) Ability to connect the dots between experiences that seem disparate on the surface
5.) Persuade and inspire people to think differently

A business-cause checklist:
1.) As your company grows, do the economics and the cause support one another?
2.) Does the core business activity profoundly address the social cause it was founded to solve?
3.) Are both financial and social gains measurable in your business?

The interest in and passion for social entrepreneurship is growing quickly. One upside to this economy, is that people are being encouraged to think more creatively about how they want their lives to look and what they want to accomplish. After seeing the failings and flailings of many large corporations, many people are beginning to consider trading in their lives whiling away in grey cubicles for a chance to be entrepreneurs in charge of their own careers. And they’d like that effort to bring them financial gain and some improvements to the world around them.

dreams, entrepreneurship, television

My Year of Hopefulness – Doing the Impossible

Christa Avampato

Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible. –St. Francis of Assisi

Tonight I’m home on one of my writing evenings: I come home from my day job, I make a quick dinner and I spend the entire evening until midnight writing, researching, and reading. I try to have a few of these nights a week. It helps me stay sane and makes me feel like I’m moving forward.

I usually have my TV on while I’m writing for a few reasons – one, it occasionally provides me with some materials and two, it keeps me company in my thoughts. I’ve noticed over the years that my writer’s block begins when I experience complete silence. The TV fills the void while also giving me complete control over the noise level.

I didn’t think I’d ever mention the TV show How I Met Your Mother and St. Francis of Assisi in the same blog post but here we are. I was just watching the show and one of the characters has decided to start his own architecture firm. Like many people who start a project that they are worried is more than they can handle, the character is staring at his phone, unable to pick it up and make calls to potential clients. He’s all he’s got in his own business. He is paralyzed by the fear we all know too well – the fear of failure.

He goes on to tell his friend a story about an architect who build an incredible library. The only problem is that he forgot to account for the weight of the books, and that extra weight caused the library to sink. “What if I forget to account for the weight of the books?” he asks his friend.

I did a little on-line research about this subject and it turns out that there is no truth to this beloved rumor of a library sinking because of the weight of the books it holds. The character was telling this story to himself as a way of stalling, of keeping a dream just a dream, perfect and untouched by someone’s ambition. We’ll tell ourselves anything if it helps curb our fear and anxiety. We’re so in love with the potential of our dreams that we some times have a tough time getting started.

So here are a few ways to help get us going:

1.) I like lists. They can be tools of procrastination so you need to be careful of them. However, if I can break tasks down into smaller tasks and then do one small piece at a time, they seem less daunting.

2.) Reading for inspiration helps me, too. I try to find people who I model my career after and read about how their success unfolded. Usually they made a lot of mistakes and wrong turns on their journey and that helps assuage some of my fears.

3.) And I follow the advice of St. Francis. I have big dreams and big ideas. And sometimes they are too big for me to bear myself. So rather than starting with the seemingly impossible, I just do what I need to do. Then I do what’s possible. And all of a sudden I realize that my big dreams can be accomplished with my big efforts. And before you know it, I’m humming along just fine.

This confirms my desire to believe that the impossible is nothing more than the possible that we just never thought of before.

business, entrepreneurship, innovation, marketing, music, new product development, Seth Godin

My Year of Hopefulness – Small Audience

Christa Avampato

Seth Godin wrote a terrific post today relating the contrast between concert opening acts and rock stars to the different grades of marketers. He has some very good advice for all of us: Seek out a small audience who thinks you’re a rock star and then grow that audience. Don’t go out into the market as an opening act and have the market shape your work based upon something else they love (the rock star). You want to stand on your own two feet and have customers who love you and will back you exactly the way you are.

Many companies are so hungry for growth, so hungry for fast, quick wins, that they do whatever they have to do to their products and services to make them appeal to everyone. Of course some other companies focus so closely on one tiny piece of the market that they exclude others who might also benefit from their products with just a few weeks. So what’s a company to do?

A few ideas:
1.) The “Me-conomy” seems endless. The personalization trend can be seen everywhere in the market. Is it possible for a customer to customize some piece or your product or service to make it suit them perfectly? This allows you to serve a number of different groups with just a few minor changes to your product. Think about what adding colors and engraving to the ipod did for that product!

2.) There are a lot of ways to slice and dice a market into segments. Is there a segment that you can serve that’s small enough to provide something special to them while also having a wide enough appeal to enough people to meet your costs and profit goals?

3.) Look for holes in the market. Many companies are set on being fast followers. They don’t want to get out there, innovate, and build something new. Fear holds them back. They’d prefer to watch others, copy, and paste. The saddest part about this kind of ambition is that it never allows you to be the first in the market to fill an unmet need that makes consumers grateful and loyal to your brand. You’re just an opening act in that scenario. You want to be the first association a customer makes with a new product or service. You don’t want people to say, “Oh yeah, there’s that option, too” about your brand. So get out there, talk to people, and find a way to provide a service or product that makes their lives easier.

While it’s fun to play in the market, it’s more fun to build a market and delight customers with a product or service they never even thought was possible. Your following will be filled with early adopters at first so learn from them, get their input, improve your offering, and other people outside of that early adopter segment will catch on. Be a rock star.

career, entrepreneurship, women

My Year of Hopefulness – Launching Sideways

Christa Avampato

In New York City, there is a an organization that helps women launch their dream businesses by providing support, advice, and networking at a reasonable cost through after-work classes and networking events. Ladies Who Launch, provides a venue to help women not only dream about building their own careers on their own terms, but also helps them reach that goal. I receive a daily email from Ladies Who Launch that contains an inspirational story or a short piece of advice that keeps me going at the exact moment when I think that I might not be able to make a go of being an entrepreneur. It shows up at precisely the right time, with exactly the message I need in that moment. I’m not sure how they do it, though I am so grateful for their skill!

Today, I received an email about launching sideways – keeping your day job and excelling at it, while also developing your own business on your own time. Victoria Colligan, the founder of Ladies Who Launch, offers some advice on managing this balance and a three-step action plan to put some life back into a side-business that has stalled or to give you inspiration and encouragement if you’re just about to begin the journey:

“One of the lowest risk ways to propel your dream, test your idea, and fund your new venture is to launch on the side of a full time job. Many women have passed through the Incubator Intensive Workshops with full time jobs and full time ideas that they are yearning to start but feel too busy or to guilty to do so. Side launching is a viable and smart way to launch any new business. Follow these tips and give it a try:

1. Be disciplined and consistent about the hours you choose to work on your idea. Is it from 5 to 7am before the kids wake up or in the evenings after you put them to bed? Are you carving out time on the weekends? Be honest and clear with yourself about your time constraints and time commitments; your road to success will be faster.

2. Decide whether and when to tell colleagues or your boss. You may be surprised by their enthusiasm and support.

3. Determine benchmarks for yourself that indicate when you would consider making your side gig a full time adventure. What are your lifestyle demands? What would you be willing to sacrifice for a time if it meant being able to devote more energy to your business? Be realistic but also be willing to go for it!”

business, Business Week, entrepreneurship, hope, Jack Welch

My Year of Hopefulness – Jack and Suzy Welch

Christa Avampato

I never thought I’d say that Jack and Suzy Welch give me hope. Sound business advice. Straight talk about tough issues. A dissenting opinion. Yes, yes, and yes. But hope? Pure, empathic hope? Yep. Believe it.

In their recent BusinessWeek column, Jack and Suzy Welch not only gave me hope, but they made me tear up. They talk about the entrepreneurs all over this country who are about to emerge as the bright shining light to lead us into economic recovery. “Those kids (the ones at colleges inventing businesses right this moment) and their ideas are the future of business, if we just hang on tight…you can be sure, too, that legions of people out there aren’t frightened by the economy. They’re called entrepreneurs. And challenges don’t make them surrender; they make them fierce.”

If ever there was a rallying cry, a mantra to hang on to in this economic mess that seems to get worse by the day, this is it! And if you, as an entrepreneur (or an aspiring entrepreneur), still had any doubt about whether or not entrepreneurs should really consider starting a business in this climate, isn’t a vote of confidence from Jack and Suzy Welch just about the best vote you could find? They don’t say things to be nice or supportive or upbeat. They say them because they believe them whole-heartedly.

I love this article so much that it is currently hanging up by my desk. So when I sit down to do research, to consider where my career might, could, should go, and to write about entrepreneurs, I’m reminded that Mr. and Mrs. Welch are on our side. And with support like that, it seems we’ve run out of excuses to not take our careers in our own hands. In their very simple language, Jack and Suzy Welch have not only given us their support, they’ve put all their cards on the table and told us that the world needs us – we are the people we’ve been waiting for to lead us out of these dark days and into a better world of business. It is not just an opportunity for us, it is a responsibility. The world needs us. Be fierce.

Africa, economy, entrepreneurship, investing, Kiva.org, money, philanthropy, social entrepreneurship

My Year of Hopefulness – Kiva.org

Christa Avampato

I’ve given up on opening my 401K statements. The news is just too depressing. Given our current economic state, I’ve been searching of where to put my investment money. Where will it do the most good, for me and for the companies I choose to invest in. When I look at the Dow 30, I don’t have a lot of faith in many of those institutions to reinvent themselves. Some of them have remarkable potential. Most of them have to accept that they have a very tough realization to come to terms with – in the words of Darwin, “Change or die.”


The investments that are intriguing to me these days are in entrepreneurs, particularly those in developing nations such as Rwanda. I just placed my first investment in an entrepreneur in Ghana through Kiva.org. I lent $25 to a woman named Agnes Cobbina for a 7-month term. She owns a hair salon and she wanted to borrow $375 to expand her business. With 14 other lenders, I completed Anges’s loan goal. What was remarkable is that I clicked on several different entrepreneurs and by the time I got to the “lend to” page, their goal was already completed. In the 10 seconds that it took me to read a bit about them, someone else had stepped in to help! One loan is made every 14 seconds through Kiva.org. 

Some people might think of this as a charitable donation rather than a loan. Nothing could be further from the truth. 99% of those who receive loans through organizations like Kiva.org pay them back in full. How many U.S. investments can say that these days? And not only am I confident that I will receive my money back; I know that I helped someone help themselves through this loan. I am empowering Agnes, providing her with a dignified way to grow her business and support her family. 

I’m thrilled to be able to participate with Kiva.org. But I want to do more. I’d be willing to take part of my investment money and provide it directly to an entrepreneur in a country like Rwanda for a return. What an amazing thing it would be to combine the idea of Sharebuilder with that of a Kiva.org. Could this be a new paradigm for global investment?  
Africa, entrepreneurship, Fast Company, government

My Year of Hopefulness – Happiness is Forward

Christa Avampato

This month Fast Company ran an incredible article about Rwanda and the economic revolution that is happening in that country 15 years after the genocide that robbed it of 1 million people (1/8 of the entire population) in 100 days. 


President Paul Kagame has set audacious goals for Rwanda: increase GDP by 7X, move half of Rwanda’s subsistence farmers into paying jobs, quadruple individual income, and make Rwanda a tech center for Africa. All by 2020. In 11 years, he believes he can transform his country and he is dedicated heart and soul to the effort. His charisma and ambition is so powerful, you’ll want to ask where you can sign up after reading the article. 


The connection I felt to Rwanda after reading the article is very much a testament to Jeff Chu’s talent as a journalist. He captured small details as well as the big picture so that a reader can imagine lumbering down the roads of Rwanda with President Kagame, Jeff Chu, and Marcus Bleasdale, the talented photographer who captured iconic images of Rwandan life for the article. The one small detail that has played over and over in my head since reading the article is a short phrase that Jeff Chu saw painted onto the back of a truck. “Happiness is forward.”

Despite the vast separation, geographically and historically, between Rwanda and the U.S. there are universal themes that bind us together. I imagine that in 1994, hope was a scarcity in Rwanda. After the genocide, many Rwandan must have doubted that their country would ever heal, forgive, and flourish. And somehow they were able to keep moving forward. Our nation’s hope has waned considerably in the last 18 months, and though for different reasons, that sense of hopelessness and helplessness is the same. After all, the loss of hope is the same for everyone who experiences it, regardless of the cause. 

Rwanda’s story is a poignant one of resilience and strength. Their ability to move forward and not only hope for better days but work hard for them, day in and day out, is remarkable. We have much to learn from them that is particularly relevant given our country’s current crisis. We must all believe, remember, and recite to ourselves and to one another “Happiness is forward.” This sentiment in Rwanda is moving from an ideal to reality. 

The photo above was taken by Marcus Bleasdale for Fast Company. 
books, entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship

My Year of Hopefulness – The Blue Sweater

Christa Avampato

Inspiration is one of the main reasons I read. To my delight, Jacqueline Novogratz, the CEO of Acumen Fund, a nonprofit venture capital fund dedicated to eradicating poverty through strategic entrepreneurial investments in the developing world, wrote a book from her heart that is uplifting for anyone who ever had a dream and went after it. The Blue Sweater is a story of encouragement, faith, and determination for people who want to live a purposeful, fulfilling life. In other words, this book is for everyone. And you must read it. 


Jacqueline takes us on a journey from her life as a young college graduate working for Chase Manhattan into Africa where she worked in microfinance back to the US where she attended Stanford Business School and then through her career post-MBA up through her founding of Acumen Fund. Articulate, powerful, and deeply moving, Jacqueline’s prose are so fluid it’s as if a friend sat me down to tell me her life story. Every page took me further and further down the road of adventure. I couldn’t put it down and read it from beginning to end in one weekend. 

With a vivid writing style, Jacqueline introduces each character so clearly that you feel they’re in the room with you and you feel compelled to help them in the way that you’d help a friend or family member. I wanted so much to see each character succeed. As their pride welled, so did mine. As they smiled and grew more confident, so did I. And when things didn’t go well for the characters, I felt their heartbreak, too. I wanted them to keep going and I wanted to go with them. 

Perhaps the most incredible feature of the book is Jacqueline’s humility and her ability to try and try again she made some positive progress in everything she ever attempted. Too often we are reading the stories of people and companies who are too afraid to admit mistakes or failure, who don’t want to take risks or step out of their comfort zones. It was refreshing to hear the twists and turns that Jacqueline’s career in social enterprise has taken. She owns every success and every failure with grace and dignity. And the many entrepreneurs she has helped throughout her career are all better off for her tenacity and ambition.  

Warning: there is a high probability that this book will motivate you to make a difference today. Be ready.