Barb - Article in Santa Cruz Sentinel - June 27, 2004

Post by **Scott** » Mon Jun 28, 2004 10:52 am

<H3>Multi-millionaire businesswoman sets out to break some taboos</H3>
By PEGGY TOWNSEND

Sentinel staff writer
If you were a multi-millionaire with three houses, a stable of fancy cars and designer clothes, would you drive around with a sign advertising tampons on your car?
If you were Barbara Carey, you would.
In fact, if you were Barbara Carey you would even talk your mother and your 18-year-old son into driving around with the same sign on their cars.
And while you were at it, also convince your investment banker that going head-to-head with the giant corporations who manufacture tampons and panty liners and sanitary napkins was a wise thing to do.
Such is the power of Barbara Carey.
At 43, blond and fit, Carey has the energy of a high-voltage line and the kind of sunny optimism that makes it hard to resist anything she asks.
So when the part-time Santa Cruz resident announced she was bringing out a new brand of feminine protection products called dittie, people tended to go along with her.

After all, she had come up with Hairagami, a hair accessory that has reportedly generated $64 million in sales, and she holds a dozen patents.
And once, on the verge of bankruptcy, she slept in her car and lived off peanut butter sandwiches for 17 days while she negotiated a deal that brought her the first million.
She even helped turn her son into a millionaire.
"Come on in," she says, throwing open the door to her tasteful Westside beach house.
So you do.
That dark room

Carey is wearing denim Dolce & Gabbana and her nails have a perfect pink-and-white French manicure.
You notice them as she takes you through her beach house which is pale pink stucco on the outside and brilliantly white inside.
There are crystal chandeliers and plantation shutters and beds as fluffy and white as clouds. 
In the kitchen is a Viking stove and refrigerator, even though Carey says she does not cook. In the street is her black S500 Mercedes with custom wheels and tinted windows and paint so shiny you could check your mascara in it if you
wanted.
She loves cars. Theyre like fashion accessories, she says.
But it isnt too long before she sits you down at her kitchen table and tells you the story of how she came to design a new line of feminine protection products and about her first colossal failure and the simple formula she says is the
way to achieve financial success.
And when she does that, a whole different side comes out.
"Once Barbie puts something in front of her, its kind of like the horse and carrot," says her mom, Margie Kraft.
"She just moves forward."
Carey had always dreamed of being an entrepreneur, she says ever since she told her dad she wanted to be one of "Charlies Angels," and he told her, "why dont you be Charlie."
Her first venture was selling metal facsimiles of Social Security cards door-to-door at the age of 10.
But like any good Horatio Alger story, it was failure that made Carey a success.
In her late 20s, Carey had invented an interactive childrens timepiece, which she was positioned to sell to the famous Swiss watch company, Swatch.
But on the eve of the deal, the executives at the licensing company for her product abruptly left their jobs in a business reshuffling.
All Carey had for her efforts was a pile of credit card debt.
"I decided to sleep in a dark room for the rest of my life," Carey says of what was the business equivalent of a hurricane strike. 
"After day six, my husband came into the room waving a new credit card (the 13th one), and he said, you know, they have an institution in this country for people like us. Its called bankruptcy," Carey
remembers.
"Were going to Mexico," he told her.
"Then well file."
So Carey and her husband Rich, a former nose tackle for the Denver Broncos, took the credit card and headed south for a last hurrah.
The first day there, Carey went to get a fish taco and saw a vendor selling Halloween masks.
"All of a sudden, I thought I could cut my own unique mask designs," Carey says. "It was three weeks before Halloween. I said, lets go home."
The couple never did file for bankruptcy.
A tough sell

Back in the states, Carey held a garage sale and made just enough money to buy a plane ticket to St. Louis, Mo., which was the only place she could rent a car without having to pay mileage, she says.
She also did something that only someone like Donald Trump might understand.
She charged a $4,000 Donna Karan suit on her credit card.
"First impressions are everything," she says simply. "I needed to dress the part."
Sleeping in her rental car in Wal-Mart parking lots and living off a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread, Carey headed to Lexington, Ky., where she found someone to manufacture her Halloween masks.
Then, she turned around and drove to Troy, Mich., headquarters of Kmart.
Dressed in her power suit, she wrangled her way into an appointment with one of the corporate buyers.
She told him about the Halloween masks, the dark room and sleeping in her car.
"He looked at me and said, no, " says Carey. 
It was too late for this Halloween and too early for the next one, he told her.
"That no just rang in my head," Carey says, "It was awful. I can still hear it today."
But Carey didnt give up.
She asked if the buyer would order the masks if his boss said it was OK. Nobody bought Halloween masks until the last minute anyway, she told him.
So she and the buyer trooped up to the next boss, who also said no.
Carey asked if she could talk to his boss.
She gave her final pitch to the vice president of merchandise with the two other buyers standing in the room.
"He said yes, I believe in you," says Carey. 
She walked out the door with a $600,000 order for masks she hadnt even manufactured yet, then sped back to Kentucky where she oversaw production of the masks and delivered the goods seven days later.
Seventeen days after she first got on the plane, and with $400,000 in her bank account, Carey headed back home. The masks would eventually net her a million dollars.
The victory wasnt so much about the order, as it was about reclaiming her life, she says now.
It also taught her lesson about how to achieve success in business.
She calls it simply, "The Formula."
Its how, she says, she made the rest of her millions.
Her formula
Carey used The Formula to market her next big invention, the Hairagami.
The Hairagami is a band of flexible steel that, she says, was inspired by those snap bracelets that were popular in the early 90s. She invented it so women could use it to style their hair into elaborate buns and French twists. (Its
creation, says Carey, led to one of her patents a way to change the molecular structure of steel.) 
She sold the Hairagama to drug stores and pitched them on television.
Today, sales are at $64 million.
In 1998, Carey used the same formula to help her then-10-year-old son market his own invention an underwater walkie-talkie. He sold the company three years later for an undisclosed price, although reports at the time said it made
the boy-inventor a millionaire.
"Anyone can do it if they follow the formula," Carey says of her success.
First, Carey says, you choose a relatively low-priced product that has a high perceived value.
Then, you create dynamic packaging for it.
Then, you pre-sell the product before you even start manufacturing it.
Its how she started dittie, her answer to what women usually just call, "that time of the month."
Women werent sick

Carey could pitch her products to millions on the QVC television network, buy a $4,000 suit in the face of bankruptcy and sleep in her car.
But buying a box of tampons just about unhinged her.
"I dont mind going to Safeway and coming back with bacon and eggs and tampons, but to go into a store and just buy tampons ..."
Carey shivers as if shed just had a taste of raw chicken.
But one day, driven by the sudden arrival of period, she was forced to make a tampon run to a nearby Target store.
Standing amid the Tampax and Playtex, she had a revelation.
"I realized that Kotex looked like Dr. Scholls wart remover, Tampax looked like Lactaid and Playtex looked like Benadryl," she says.
These companies were treating women like they were sick, she thought.
Carey doesnt like to wait when she has an idea so two days later, she was pulling together focus groups. It wasnt long before she came up with a brand of tampons and panty liners the girls from "Sex and the City"
might use.
She put sassy little sayings on the packaging for each of the tampons and pads things like "Fast cars arent just for boys" and "Wanna know Victorias Secret? Its called airbrushing" and
designed modern, hip boxes to hold them.
She created a Web site where you could send your boyfriend or husband a "PMS warning" or go "tampon bowling." She posted a dittie Diary, a serial novel with installments that come out once every 28
days.
Then she got on the phone and started selling even before the first tampon rolled off the assembly line.
"Hi, Im Barbara Carey," she would begin her pitch to the mostly male store buyers, "and I was wondering if youd like to see my ditties."
Shes using her own money, and her Formula, for the venture and hopes some day to see a whole line of dittie products for things people often feel uncomfortable buying: pads for adult incontinence, condoms.
"I want to kick taboos to the curb," she says.
Right now, shes selling her products only in California at Target, Longs, Albertsons and Kmart stores but just won a deal to sell them at Fred Meyer stores in Oregon and plans to spread into the rest of the U.S. in the fall.
"At first blush, I was a little concerned" about the venture, says Careys investment banker Anne Vrolyk of San Francisco. "It was a tough market with some huge players.
"But as she unfolded her concept, the more I realized how fun it was."
Women, Vrolyk says, have been trapped by traditions that are hundreds of years old. They would jump on something that was new.
Carey says she expects dittie sales to reach $40 million to $60 million in two to three years.
In three years to four years, shes projecting a $100-million company.
But, says Carey, she doesnt do any of it for the money.
Retire?

Theres no reason for Carey to have to work.
Carey and her husband own a sprawling, mid-century modern home in Orinda, a cabin on the Russian River and a beach house in Santa Cruz.
She drives a custom Mercedes and Porsche, favors designer clothes and has enough money in the bank to retire.
Retire?
"My mindset doesnt work that way," says Carey. "To me a life of retirement would be the worst thing in the world."
Carey is happiest when shes doing a project, says her mother in a phone interview from her Orinda home. "I think she never stops thinking outside the box. It make look like shes doing nothing, but her mind never stops.
Shes looking for things to create all the time."
"Shes very engaged in the world and driven by the sheer fun and pleasure of her work," says Vrolyk, the banker. "Its not a matter of Barbara needing to acquire riches. I think she likes to solve problems, to
find creative solutions."
Which is exactly what Carey says sitting in the kitchen next to a vase of pink carnations and her car magazines.
She likes finding the holes in markets and finding a way to fill them. She likes the idea of creating a product that will take some of the stigma and shame away from menstruation.
She likes the idea that a tampon or pad will help a woman feel good about herself, instead of feeling like shes got the plague.
Shes even planning to set up a marketing program for young woman in connection with her dittie line. Its to teach women the things shes had to learn the hard way, she says.
"I put everything I own into (dittie)," says Carey. "I really believe in the dittie concept."
Standing out by her car with its sign proclaiming "Premium Feminine Protection" in big white letters, Carey watches as a woman in a Suburban pulls to a halt in front of her.
"Feminine protection?" the women calls out from the window.
"Im not talking AK-47s," says Carey.
The woman laughs.
"Yeah, I need one of those too," she says and drives off.
Its what Carey likes, that kind of one-on-one sales job, the new customers she makes.
Shed hate it, she says, if she had nothing to do.
Making a difference, not money, is the measure of success. she believes. 
"Money," she says, "can really mess with your head. It can be very evil." 
She sits back at the kitchen table talking about her life and her 18-year-old son who is headed off to college to play football and the five-mile runs she takes along the ocean whenever shes in town.
When you ask her whats next, she just grins.
"I want to remake Porta-Potties," she says.
And you think that if this woman can make a tampon seem fun, she just might be able to do something about portable toilets too.

Contact Peggy Townsend
at <a href="mailto:ptownsend@santacruzsentinel.com


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Barb - Article in Santa Cruz Sentinel - June 27, 2004

Barb - Article in Santa Cruz Sentinel - June 27, 2004

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