Chapter Four-Orange Bean Bag Chairs and Plum Colored Sofas

My life was 180-degrees different than Jude’s. Even though we remain quite different, we are also similar.
I was, and still am, happily married. My brief courtship was not unlike the way I do many things; my future husband Rich and I met, dated for seven days, and then got married. It’s now been 20 years. Simple as that. Well, maybe not quite that simple. I met Rich in New York where I was living after arriving from England, where I grew up. In those days, I was a model. He was in New York from California on business. When he went back home, we had a whirl¬wind romance over the phone for the next year, never actually seeing each other in person. Then, when I got a chance to go to Africa in 1985 on a week-long photo shoot, I asked him along. A week after we returned, he asked me to marry him.
After we were married, we moved to California. I stopped modeling, but still wanted to work and I had few friends, so I took a job as an assistant earning $5 an hour at an interior design firm. In fact, as far back as I can remember, I have always worked. I even remember my first job, one that I created; it was making chairs at home at the age of 10. My father owned a company that made all kinds of Styrofoam products for just about everything that was an insulator, like ice chests or coffee cups.
I loved to sew and with a small amount of start up capital from my mother, while living in the English countryside, I decided to take advantage of that very stylish and fun phenomenon—beanbag chairs. I drew up the patterns and sewed them together, and my father brought home what seemed like an endless supply of Styrofoam pellets.
Using a large ladle from the kitchen, I happily filled the pat¬terns for the giant bags with foam and when they were nearly bursting, my mother held the last few inches of vinyl together while I stitched the seams closed by hand. The two hot colors of that era were chartreuse and orange.
We were forever finding these little pellets in every conceivable nook in the house. They stuck to everything because of the static electricity, even in our dog’s hair. Poor Bear was always shaking his furry head and scratching to get the foam out of his ears.
I remember selling quite a few of those lovely beanbag chairs for 10 pounds each, a tidy profit in those days. I felt quite creative, both as an artist and a young businesswoman.
After my $5 an hour stint as an assistant, I started my own interior design firm and continued with that for more than 15 years. It was an experience that was both challenging and quite ful¬filling. However, even after meeting and working with incredible people for those many years, I was beginning to tire of it especially after I met the client from hell, a woman I wouldn’t wish on a troll. I started a project for her, a project that was supposed to have taken less than nine months. It ended up lasting over two years. To make matters worse, much of the work wasn’t even design.
I now refer to those two agonizingly long years of my profes¬sional life as the “plum couch” era. Since this book is a very positive one, I won’t go into too many of the details. Suffice it to say, the experience was a nightmare for everyone involved.
I’ll call her Millicent because that sounds as constipated as she was. But even that doesn’t begin to describe her. It was the combi¬nation of her “conservative” nature and unforgivably horrendous taste that nearly sent me over the edge—literally.
Millicent had a penchant for the colors plum, orange, gold and red—not as accents, but all together. Every chair, sofa, wall, and room had to have all four colors in it. It appeared that a crazed golfer from the ‘60s had decorated her house.
She was extremely wealthy and her project was a substantial commission, but that’s not the reason I kowtowed to her “eccen¬tricities.” Her husband was my husband’s most important client, and I can’t stress how important that important client was.
Rich had just quit his job with Merrill Lynch, and was foraging out on his own. Millicent’s husband was his first and only client at the time—think Jerry McGuire with Tom Cruise.
When I took Millicent’s project on, I thought it would take about 10 months because it involved a fair amount of construction.
Once I began, though, and I realized her favorite color scheme was plum, orange and gold, and red particularly side-by-side, I knew it was going to be a struggle.
Fast forward: After two years, not 10 months, of fighting over whether her bedroom walls should be orange, to match the plum¬colored sofa in the living room; whether bright gold walls were appropriate for the kitchen, along with the dark red cabinets; whether we should use the Ikea catalog for the rest of the furni-ture—which she actually did for her $3 million beach house. Millicent’s job finally came to an end in 2000, when against all my better judgment and training, I finished the project the way she wanted it. The customer’s always right. In a sarcastic mood one day, I almost suggested we throw in some beanbag chairs.
Rich managed to hang on to her husband’s business, and I stopped thinking about getting a prescription for Valium.
Foremost, I’m not a quitter. Secondly, I will always work at something. And last, but certainly not least, I never wanted my friends or others to say that any success I enjoyed came because I had the good fortune to be married to a great man who happened to also be smart and had the ability to make our family comfortable.
The fact is, I never asked my husband and he never offered any help in starting our soon to be jewelry business, which I considered a compliment of the highest degree. And now he’s our greatest cheerleader.
Now, several years later, the question most women have on their mind is, “How did you get started?”
Before I answer that, I should tell you that Jude and I both believe that there is a reason for everything, if we can just keep our eyes and minds open to the possibilities. But we also believe that we make our own destinies. That may seem a bit of a contradic¬tion, but we don’t look at it that way. Yes, things happen, but what you do with those circumstances is what creates change—that’s where you have the control. One of those circumstances was my meeting Jude in the first place. If I hadn’t closed the interior design business, we never would have met.
I’ve also learned that new doors don’t open until old ones close. That’s why whenever we’ve had a setback, I instinctively think of it as a positive, not a negative. I know an opportunity is on the horizon—a door is about to open.
When I closed the door on the design business, I went back to an old interest—I had loved sketching jewelry designs since I was a small child. Early on in the interior design business, I began to create jewelry for myself, which in turn became a sort of hobby— designing for my friends who fell in love with what I’d made.
This was followed by designs for my business clients and so when Jude and I worked the yard sale together that Saturday, the conversation soon turned to our common interest, and our common interest soon led to a real friendship, not just passing waves and smiles at various PTA meetings and parent/teacher conferences.
As fate would have it, that spring my sister Fiona was coming from England to Carlsbad, a city about 60 miles to the south of me, to study precious stones at the Gemology Institute of America. She had always loved jewelry as well.
When I told Jude about her, Jude suggested the three of us have some fun that weekend and go into L.A. to show Fiona all the cre¬ative things that designers were doing on the West Coast.
I thought it would be a great way to spend the day and since I was thirsting for a new creative outlet and business, it was at least worth investigating. Jude and I had never discussed starting a business, as she knew from our conversations that I was as burned out as a cheap candle and I wasn’t coming back to life as an interior designer.
By the time we were crawling back down the 405 freeway that evening, Fiona’s passion had been stirred to new heights and Jude and I were babbling to each other like two schoolgirls. We went on and on about the incredibly inventive art forms we had seen, about their designs, and how they were actually made.
However, I have to be honest, in that it wasn’t just the jewelry that excited us. That was something we all enjoyed, but it was sev¬eral other things as well.
It brought Jude and me closer together in a common enthu¬siasm; we were becoming good friends. And I know that neither of us would have had the strength mentally, physically, or spiritually to launch a jewelry business on our own—but the thought of both of us working together to start such a business and bidding our current ventures adieu was nearly irresistible. So one night, not long after the L.A. excursion, we had dinner and I asked Jude if she wanted to start a line of our own jewelry. She was as enthusiastic as I was and we sealed our agreement with a champagne toast.
Another trait that Jude and I shared was our ability to just throw ourselves into the prospects of opportunity. Like my father used to tell me, “Frances, life is short and uncertain. Eat dessert first.”
So we did. We took a huge bite out of what looked like a double-layer German chocolate cake at the time, and it ultimately did become a feast. However, dessert did not come without quite a few unwanted extra pounds.
Our story isn’t so much about the details of the jewelry busi¬ness. It’s more about squeezing every ounce of life into our lives every day. It’s about just doing it; savoring the uncertainties rather than stewing over them; about chasing dreams even if you have to run through a field of sharp nettles barefoot; being productive; about giving a lot of your spoils back; about sharing, friendship; about getting along and negotiating and giving some things up with full dignity.
These are just some of the things we learned and they weren’t all about business. As it turns out, there were just as many family sacrifices as there were business challenges.