Chapter Five-The Roosters Crow, But the Hens Lay the Eggs

NEVER IN MY FORMIDABLE IMAGINA TION would I have thought our trip to Los Angeles that day would ultimately evolve into an exhilarating, growth instilling friendship, let alone a multi¬million dollar business.
We decided in May of 2002 that we needed $9,000 to get the business off the ground. Frances had crunched the numbers, and she’d determined that would cover the costs of stationery and the initial molds and production of our first few pieces, the costs of which we would split evenly.
My finances were precarious. I was still in a partnership with Rachael at Got Rocks?, but the business was beginning to fizzle. Our margins were too small, so even if we’d had a steady clientele, we knew our incomes would always be modest. We began to discuss just shutting it down and moving on to bigger and better things.
At that point, I didn’t have my half, nearly $5,000, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. The next day, I was at a pawnshop in Santa Ana with a lovely diamond ring, among other pieces of my jewelry.
Scene: Interior. Pawnshop Setting. Large
Man Stands Behind Cage of Iron Bars

“But, sir. You don’t understand,” was how I began my side of the negotiations. “My great-grandfather Elias bought this for the woman who was the love of his life.”
The rotund, sweaty man behind the thick steel-barred window just stared at me with his pudgy arms folded across his chest. He didn’t say a word, which, of course, I took to mean he was lis-tening—actually considering my argument.
“They were soul mates. I know you can understand. Great¬grandfather Elias knew that this was the woman he would spend the rest of his life with. I’m sure you understand what I’m saying,” I pleaded.
Since the proprietor wasn’t saying no, and still hadn’t moved, I decided to continue.
“Sir. I know the diamond isn’t very big by today’s standards, but you have to understand that my great-grandfather worked in a mine in Pennsylvania half his adult life, coughing out great plumes of coal dust with every grunt of effort, which was considerable considering he got up at 3:00 a.m. to be able to catch the tram that took him deep into the bowels of the earth where at mid-day reached temperatures over 100 degrees and he lost nearly 10 pounds of body weight every day in sweat and…”
Aha. I was getting through. The large, fat man simply held up his palm to me, like a school crossing guard about to calmly stop a runaway bus.
“Stop,” he said. “Little blonde lady, do you know what the markup on diamonds is?” he asked.
“Well, well, yes, as a matter of fact I do. I am in the jewelry business,” I said, telling only a small white lie.
“Then you know that this little piss-ant of a ring ain’t worth no $5,000. Emotions and sentiment aren’t part of my game. Do you understand?” he asked, pushing the tiny bauble back under the bars at me.
“I’ll give ya $300 for it,” he said and then turned, knowing from his years of experience that I’d either walk out or I’d stay and try for one more round of negotiations. Either way, it was of absolutely no concern to him.
Of course, he was right. The markup on diamonds can be nearly 300%, and the depreciation is immediate. Once you walk out of the store, your wife’s wedding ring is worth about half of what you paid for it, but of course, that’s not why you buy them. You buy them for love, not as collateral for future loans.
Eventually, I did manage to gather up enough of my jewelry and even some family heirlooms to hock and was able to raise my share of our start-up capital—great-grandmother’s ring was part of the mix, but it wasn’t really my great-grandmother’s anyway. It was a present from an ex-boyfriend, a sort of bribe to calm me after one particularly insensitive remark he’d made years ago.
In June, Frances and I went to the JCK Show, which is a major show for jewelry buyers at the Sands Hotel Convention Center in Las Vegas. I was looking for new things to purchase for Got Rocks?, because we still weren’t formally dissolved, and also get¬ting ideas for ourselves.
At that point, we had created a pendant and hoop earrings with three interchangeable charms, not exactly a line but a start.
Right from the beginning, we agreed that everything we cre¬ated had to fulfill four criteria: It had to be high quality, it had to be affordable, it had to be fun, and it had to appeal to women from 16 to 60—a tall order.
We did not want to be defined by novelty, or by excess.
Frances and I wore some of the pieces while we were visiting the show and as we browsed the glass cases, some women came up to us and commented on how much they loved our charm earrings. They wanted to know where we got them. In fact, they were so excited they followed us all around the Center.
It turned out that those women were the owners of a very suc¬cessful store called Tassels and would later become our first client.
Later that month, Rachael and I went our separate ways. Frances, being the financial brains of our nascent company, decided she would take on the task of setting up the bank account, getting the necessary business license, and whatever else was needed to make us legitimate.
For a company name, we decided to use an acronym, a combi¬nation of our names: Jude Frances Jewelry or JFJ. Before Frances ever went off to find an attorney to help us form the business, we were already staying up late at night working on stationery designs, using various typestyles for the initials.
For those of you readers who are intimidated by the thought of starting a business, if you are planning on becoming a sole propri¬etor, or are going at it alone, it’s relatively simple: You obtain a DBA (Doing Business As), start a bank account under that name, and then get a business license from the city.
Our situation was quite different and not nearly so easy.
Our advisor told us to form an LLC, which is a Limited Liability Corporation. That way, our personal assets, such as they were, would not be subject to lawsuits or other liabilities, and there would be certain tax advantages.
With this knowledge, Frances entered the bank one morning, early, ready to fill out a few forms and make our initial deposit of $9,000. I should preface this part by saying that we, as women, were already quite familiar with the proverbial glass ceiling and the discrimination against women in all things business or money. Neither of us wants to harp on it here, because if you are a woman in the workplace, in business, or trying to spend money on any high ticket item that doesn’t resemble jewelry or clothes, then you know what I’m talking about.
Frances’ trip to the bank turned out to be just another of these kinds of challenges. The bank scrutinized her with questions, which wouldn’t have happened if she were a male “Why do you want to start a business?” is just one example. So that I can come and put bundles and bundles of money in your bank, she wanted to say. My God, it’s none of your business why we want to start a business. She wasn’t applying for a job with this man!
There were also problems because I was still not legally divorced. The fact that my divorce was not final created problems for reasons I’ll never know. I suppose it had something to do with liability. Even the fact that Frances was married caused problems— we couldn’t win either way—once again, probably because of liability issues.
The manager actually had the gall to ask her why her husband wasn’t involved—or was he? And she actually thought that had she said yes, the process would have gone much more smoothly. But, like a trooper, Frances bit her lip and dutifully dotted every i and crossed every t.
Several weeks later, we were blessed with a bank account and a nifty LLC certificate to show that we were the sole share-holders—fifty, fifty. Frances owned one share and I owned the other.
All told, the process was far from easy, and eventually required the help of a business attorney who went beyond the call of duty time and time again. But, like nearly everything we were about to do, we just put our heads down and charged in.
That was when Frances first shared her overriding philos-ophy—“Just go for it.” The biggest mistake that most people make is that they tend to overthink. She told me, it’s one thing to imple¬ment due diligence and some solid research, but it’s quite another to get so bogged down in minutia that you never get anything off the ground.
Our feelings were: Strike while the iron’s hot and then deal with the consequences later.
So many times, those who overthink the start of any new project find out, if they ever do begin, a great deal of what they studied and worried about never comes to pass.
So, our philosophy became, Wait till it happens, then we’ll react. Now, we’re not necessarily advocating that for anyone else, but it worked for us. By the time things started to happen, we had gained the experience to know that every impediment wasn’t a catastrophe and that opportunities sometimes came disguised as barriers or setbacks.
Repeat this pattern often enough and you actually develop some wisdom. And, after a time, if you’re tending to business and love what you do, things have a tendency to take care of themselves.
I must add one caveat here however: We learned from experi¬ence that reacting instead of planning isn’t always the most efficient way to operate, although that lesson came a little later on.
Before we hired our attorney and before Frances went to the bank that day, we had stayed up late at night designing a logo and stationery. When we had what we thought was perfect, a combina¬tion of the letters JFJ, we raced off to a Sir Speedy printer and had reams of lovely letterhead, envelopes, memo pads, invoices, and rubber stamps made. Armed with our new stationery, we thought we were ready to begin writing letters and billing clients on our very creative forms.
One slight problem, however.
When people saw our stationery, they said, “Oh no, you can’t use JFJ. That’s too close to JFA,” which stood for Jean Francois Albert, who just happened to be one of the most prominent designers in the country. To make matters worse, his operation was only five miles from us.
“You don’t want to be confused with Jean Francois, or have him sue you,” they said.
Our attorney concurred. We changed our name to JudeFrances Jewelry, LLC.
However, Frances and I agreed that since we’d gone to so much trouble in our graphic creative efforts, and because of the costs involved in reprinting it all, we would just keep using it until it ran out, which ultimately took almost two years.
We both had a hand in the jewelry designs, but Frances was and is more involved with the design and operations side of the business, and I took on the marketing and sales responsibilities.
Keep in mind, we were flying by the seat of our pants. We knew little about the jewelry business—designing yes, but manu¬facturing and sales, no.
Almost from the moment we’d sealed our deal, we both began to get serious about design and manufacturing and spent long hours in libraries and on the Internet researching our craft. We pored over books about antiquities, ancient art, and jewelry, and we looked at high-end magazines for ideas.
Since we wanted to appeal to a broad segment of the popula¬tion, we knew our designs had to remain accessible and elegant. That’s when it hit both of us. We admittedly both loved jewelry and enjoyed designing it, but we weren’t really artisans or artists in the traditional sense of those words, and that ultimately worked to our benefit.
Designing jewelry for us was more of an avocation, but busi¬ness was business. We had to distance ourselves from the desire to create art and focus on designing for our target audience of 16-year-olds to 60-somethings.
We took inspiration from the ancient and traditional designs we had studied, but distilled them down to basic geometric shapes. We focused on classically elegant designs that referred to historical styles, but with their emphasis on geometric shapes that had a con¬temporary edge.
For our first marketing effort—very grass roots—we gave some of the earrings to friends to wear to parties. I figured if the owners of Tassels had noticed them, having friends wearing them out in public might attract a similar response, and sure enough, it did.
Frances and I got an immediate response as women would clamor around our friends asking them where they’d gotten the jewelry. Our first big break occurred when the Tassels’ owners called and requested our line sheets.
There was only one problem. We didn’t have line sheets. A line sheet is a full color, slick catalog sheet containing pictures, descrip¬tions, pricing, and item numbers of your entire product line.
“Frances, Tassels called and asked to see our line sheets. Isn’t that fantastic?” I asked, squirming in my chair as I relayed the good news.
For a moment the line was silent.
“Frances, are you still there?”
“Yes. I’m still here.”
“What’s a matter? This is it! We’ve hit the big time, girlfriend,” I said.
She said, “Line sheets? Jude, we don’t have a line sheet. We don’t even have a line.”
All we had were a pendant and three earrings.
Suddenly all my enthusiasm was waning, like the air in a three-day-old party balloon. “Oh,” I said.
“Not to worry—just go for it!” Frances said.
She always had fresh, bright green apples sitting on her dining room table, lined up in the center, a tradition from her English family, she told me.
I brought my camera gear with me later that evening as she’d suggested, and when I arrived, she said, “I’ve got a brilliant idea. We can make our own line sheet. I was thinking last night how fan¬tastic our pieces would look using those green apples as a backdrop.”
“Huh?”
“Yes, yes. The bright green would compliment the gold color perfectly,” she urged.
“But Frances, all the great jewelry photography we’ve seen always focuses just on the jewelry. They’re always tight shots on pieces; nothing in the picture to detract from the jewelry.”
“I know. How boring? Think about it. Those green apples will jump right off the page. That’s what will catch people’s eyes. It’s different. That’ll help us stand out. Besides, it’s fun.”
That night, we arranged our pieces on a large swath of white satin draped over the edge of Frances’ dark wooden dining table and used her five green apples as a backdrop.
I ran around frantically the next couple of days having color copies made up. Then she called the Tassels’ ladies and admitted we didn’t really have a proper line sheet, but that we’d taken photos of our pieces. To our surprise, they nonchalantly said, “Fine. That’ll do just fine. Send them along.”
When the sheets were completed, we sent them off to Tassels, along with the other information they requested, and crossed our fingers. Within days, we got the call and our first order. We were ecstatic! To my utter surprise, the apples were as well received as our jewelry. From that point on, all of our advertising materials used those green apples in some fashion, and the black and lime green color scheme became our signature. Oddly, we had chosen those very colors for our stationery in the very beginning.
Looking back, we were incredibly naïve, not only about line sheets, but also about our line. We had only the few pieces, but we did have drawings for others: Pendant and hoops with three charms, a kite, a Guinevere cross and Maltese cross, all inter¬changeable on the hoops.
Frances’ idea to extend our line was to clone the kite, so to speak. That’s when she remembered one of her interior design clients. His name was Brian and he manufactured jewelry in L.A. In fact, they’d been friends for years. Therefore, he was the obvious first choice to manufacture our products.
Even though they were friends, when Frances showed him her drawings and told him what we wanted to do, he wasn’t exactly supportive. I remember the awkward meeting very clearly.
“Brian, this is what we want to do,” Frances began as she showed him the drawings.
He studied them silently for a few moments then launched into an argument for why it would be too expensive and too time-con-suming to manufacture our designs. Then he said, “Frances, dear. Why don’t you just stick with interior design? You’re so good at it. Why start going off into something you know nothing about? Let me tell you, this is a tough business and you could lose your blouse.”
She was adamant, though. We’d spent far too much time in research and design to abandon our ideas, just to make them easier to make. We were absolutely convinced they would sell, no matter how difficult they were to make, and we were willing to reduce our profits to maintain our concepts.
Frances’ first and only question was, “Can you make them the way we’ve designed them?”
His answer, “Yes, but…”
“Great, so you’ll work with us then?”
“Yes, but only as a favor. You’ve done plenty for me. It’ll just take me a little longer. I’m telling you, you’re making a big mistake.”
“Fine, we’ll be back,” Frances said. She looked at me as we walked through the door and said, “Don’t worry about Brian. He’ll do a great job and some day, he’s going to eat those words.”
For the next week, we spent nearly 15 hours a day designing our line at Frances’ dining room table and kitchen counter with felt pens and large drawing pads. Each time we had what we felt was a winner, even if rough, we taped it to the dining room wall so that we could see all of the designs together.
Seeing everything together was a big help because we could see how each piece related to another, how they complimented each other, and how they could constitute a signature look. We really wanted women to recognize each item as a JudeFrances piece, even if they only owned one pair of earrings.
“Can we make jewelry, too?” Frances’ 11-year-old daughter Charlotte asked, looking at all the sketches on the wall.
“Sure, honey. Why not? Here, you and Kendall can use these markers,” Frances replied.
The two girls started in. They seemed as intent as we were, quickly grabbing assorted colored pens for themselves, while tearing off sheets of drawing paper.
Charlotte is the younger of Frances’ two children and unlike her brother Rich, she’s not afraid to fall on her face, either as a young athlete or in anything else she takes on. She started drawing in a flurry, using all the colors on the table. Kendall was more deliberate, taking her time, drawing something that more resem¬bled a hamster than an earring.
There was something magic about that afternoon watching the two girls mimicking their mothers and applying their own cre¬ative flair to their renditions of earrings, bracelets, and things we’d not seen before. The girls’ playful mood enlightened our senses as well. When you come right down to it, the four of us were actually playing!
Being creative together was good for the soul.
The fact of the matter was, Frances and I got some good ideas from both of the girls and by the end of the week, we had hundreds of drawings taped up, not only in the dining room, but down the hall and out into the living room, as well. It was great fun. We just let loose.
Even after we’d decided which designs to use, we left all those drawings on the wall as evidence of our creative burst.
Later, when some of the new designs were complete, we showed them to the girls and told them that these were two of their designs, which in essence they were.
“Guess what we call them?” Frances asked. “The Kendall Crown and the Charlotte Charm.”
The wide-eyed smiles, the new swagger in their walks, the way they momentarily stood up straighter, said volumes about their sense of accomplishment. And to be honest, Frances and I felt the same way.
Those brainstorming sessions made us realize how much syn¬ergy the two of us had. I knew that when we ultimately made it, it would be the result of our differences, more than our similarities.
That thought first occurred to me while we were making those rough drawings. Frances would be sketching beautiful, but conser¬vative pieces intended to hang delicately from a thin chain around the neck, while I would be creating funky designs, something edgier—a piece I might wear around my neck with a length of leather cording rather than a chain.
Not to worry. Instead of fighting over the direction we were headed, or trying to convince the other that our own idea was more marketable or more fun, we reveled in our differences and in the range of our combined creativity. It was like having a whole staff of artists on hand.
Similarly, we knew early in our relationship the differences in our personalities were going to be a source of strength, not weakness.
Frankly, I don’t know if our partnership would have worked, had we already been good friends. I think that the synergy came, in part, from the fact that we were new to each other as collabora¬tors as well as friends, so a whole new world of discovery was taking place on both fronts.
Frances would often comment later about how important she thought it was to surround ourselves with people that had talents we didn’t. That concept was already in force with us. We could not have been more different in just about every aspect of our lives, and someday, we knew we would have a staff of dedicated, creative thinkers working with us—all with something different and unique to bring to the table.
For the foreseeable future, however, it was just us—and we had to do it all.
Shortly after our creative sessions in the kitchen and dining room, Frances decided we needed an office, something close to both of us, preferably with free rent. Since there were no magic lanterns lying around to make a wish on, she suggested we pull all the junk out of the storage room above her garage and convert it into our offices.
That weekend, we enlisted the help of the kids along with Frances’ husband Rich. (Frances didn’t want to throw anything of his away without an okay and of course, he didn’t let us toss any¬thing.)
It was like a long-unused attic; I had to wear a surgical mask as my nose wrinkled at the musty odors, and lots of dust and spi¬derwebs.
We cleared out old boxes of clothes that went to the Salvation Army; dusted off loads of baby toys that went to CHOC, the chil-dren’s hospital; and carried out at least two truckloads of odds and ends. Voila! We had the beginnings of an office, or at least a good¬sized, fairly empty space.
The following weekend, Frances and I scrubbed every other conceivable surface, pulled down cobwebs, chased bugs with brooms and tried to make the place habitable.
Soon after, the phones arrived, we bought a fax machine for $90 at Staples and the two of us proudly displayed our laptops on the makeshift desks—a card table and an old drafting table Frances had from her interior design days.
Somehow, with an office, we felt more official. At least we had a lot more wall space to tack up our drawings!
On Monday, we got back to work. The room was drafty and still a bit musty, but we reveled in our own space, even though both of us kept a can of Lysol nearby at all times.
Our first order of business in the new office/studio was to create a charm with two kites, then three, then four.
Then we repeated the process with the cross. In some cases, we turned one of them upside down and had it resting against another kite, side by side. Essentially, we would be using three small molds— a kite and two crosses— to make every piece of jewelry in our tiny line. The next morning, I had Frances take the designs back to Brian, and I also called the Tassels’ owners. According to the Brian, he needed at least three to four weeks to make our new charms.
That was in July of 2002, and I remember how terrified we were when all of the pieces were completed and we had to let go of them. Since we were out of money, we were brash enough to send it C.O.D., a real slap in the face to a quality store that had been in business for years.
It wasn’t enough for one of us to ship the single box; we both had to hold onto it and baby it all the way through the Fed Ex process. I made out the label while Frances clutched the box to her bosom. We spent an hour to make sure it was properly insured, that we had the right tracking number, and that we actually placed it into the hands of a real live clerk.
To put it mildly, we were paranoid, and yet excited, and that mood didn’t end once we handed off the package. Frances was on the phone promptly at 10:05 the next morning, calling the Tassels’ owners to make sure shipping had received our precious jewelry. The entire order amounted to less than $7,800, but to us it might as well have been $100,000.
From June through August, and actually beyond, we had friends wearing our jewelry to lunch, dinner, shopping, parties, and the theater, our only affordable form of marketing at that point, saying to them, “When people ask you where you got the stuff, all you have to do is to say the name of our company slowly and clearly.”
Of course, at that point, we didn’t even have a Web site to refer them to, or a place to buy our jewelry with the exception of a single Tassels store, which was in Atlanta.
The big names in jewelry use celebrities to showcase their wares. Just look at the actresses at the Academy Awards. But that wasn’t our niche. It was more important to us that the average woman could afford our work and could have fun wearing it.
Later that summer, we learned that our line was what the industry called a bridge line—sold in the designer sections of stores instead of in the fine jewelry departments. That also turned out to be fortunate. Pieces sold in the fine jewelry cases are quite expen¬sive. Women are less likely to ask further to see a ring or pendant that costs $10,000 than they are to walk a few feet and ask to see a piece, often as lovely, which only cost $300.
Our next big break, or at least what led up to it, came on July 12, 2002. It was my girlfriend’s birthday and I went to Los Angeles to attend.
While I was sitting at the outdoor dinner table, the woman sit¬ting to my right kept staring at the side of my face. Finally, she said, “Gosh, I just love your earrings. Where did you get them?”
I smiled, sat up much straighter, and said, “They’re mine, or ours. I mean, my partner and I are starting a jewelry business.”
“That’s fantastic. I want some. Where are they sold?” she replied.
“Uh, well, err... nowhere just yet, but they’ll be all over the place soon,” I said with my fingers crossed under the table.
As we started to eat, the woman related to me how one of her best friends worked for Manheim’s in Beverly Hills as a jewelry manager and how she felt her friend would agree that chain really needed something like this.
I smiled and thanked her for her interest, feeling a little like one of those first dates where you’re standing at the door and the man says, “I’ll call you,” or when your friends keep telling you they’re going to set you up with an incredibly great looking, smart, funny guy, but never do.
Only, it didn’t work like that. I stayed at a hotel downtown that night and the next morning my cell phone rang early. It was a Sunday and I didn’t recognize the number. Lo and behold, it was the woman from the party.
“Jude. I have great news,” she said. “I talked with my friend. Her name is Angela Robbins. She’s expecting your call.”
My God, I nearly fell off the bed! Within seconds, I was telling Frances the story over the phone, all uttered in the verbal equiva¬lent of italics and exclamation marks.
After ten minutes of fantasizing about how we were going to be millionaires, and how we would be on Oprah, and…Frances suddenly stopped talking. The phone was silent.
“Jude. We still don’t really have a full line.”