Credit: Ana Schechter
The best entrepreneurs see a gap in the market and fill it. Today, the start of Fashion Week in New York, is a good time to share lessons from Mona Bijoor, who spotted inefficiency in the fashion industry and created a company to fix it. With $2.25 million from Battery Ventures and angel investors, Bijoor, 34, is building an online marketplace for boutiques and brands to buy and sell contemporary women's clothes. Longterm, she wants JOOR to be an eBay (EBAY) of wholesale goods. Here's her story.
When I was a child, my mother would get out the telephone book and I would hide my face in the couch cushions.
"Mona, asking for help is not an embarrassment," she would say to me, unfazed.
She would dive into the Yellow Pages, pick up the phone, and dial the number of some random Indian family. Switching from English to Gujarati, she would ask, "What is the best Indian restaurant in the vicinity?"
With no Zagat or Yelp on the scene back then, my mom resorted to cold calling.
My parents immigrated together from India to the United States, where they became small business owners. Growing up with them exposed me to clever ways to tap unlikely resources, find answers, and solve problems really fast. My parents told me that you get what you want fastest when you find the shortest distance from A to B.
I'm not sure I took the shortest route to entrepreneurship, but I learned a lot along the way.
1. Find your true calling. "Why don't you become a dermatologist?" my mom used to say to me. "They have better hours than business owners!" Like a lot of first-generation Americans, my parents wanted me to become a doctor. When I arrived at the University of Pennsylvania, I chose business. After college, I went into fashion because I just knew it was what I wanted to do. The contemporary fashion industry is a large and diverse market: $80 billion, with thousands of brands. I studied it voraciously--the players, how they distribute, how supply chains work. Armed with a passion and a Wharton MBA, I consulted for brands like Elie Tahari, Chanel and Ann Taylor (ANN). My diverse experience, along with my passion, would lead me to a big entrepreneurial goal.
2. Do it, especially if you don't know how. In the early 1990's, in the suburbs of Buffalo, my parents had an investment property that wouldn't sell. The economy was bad; the real-estate market was treacherous. To test me (and the market), my dad asked me to pitch the property to two or three prospective buyers. "What have you got to lose?" he said, daring me. So I just…did it. I sold the property without my parents' help. I learned that with enough confidence and encouragement, you can do almost anything--even at age 12.
3. Work smarter. Like everyone associated with fashion, I used to daydream about having my own brand. But my inspiration came when I realized that I could do something to make a difference for every brand in this industry. For all brands, no matter whether the economy is good or bad, the difference between being in the red and being in the black is the cost of distributing your product. Especially in tough times, the costs of trade shows, outsourced sales reps, and third-party showrooms can put a brand out of business. I thought, What if I created a sales channel that brought the wholesale market together online, allowing brands to scale cost-effectively and boutiques to source the best product efficiently? That's when I put pen to paper to create JOOR.
We launched JOOR in March 2010, with 40 brands and 18 boutiques. These brands took a chance with us before we even had a functioning website. Now we have more than 300 brands and 7,500 independent retailers.
I now realize that my dad gave me the best advice: "It isn't how hard you work," he told me. "It's how smart you work."
And my mom--that lady with the Yellow Pages in her lap, dialing a random Patel or Gupta family—taught me to be fearless. By the way, she was right: An entrepreneur's hours are terrible. It's a good thing I love what I do.
Credit: maryannerussell.com
Sunday brought another glowing profile of Sheryl Sandberg. The Facebook COO, who is No. 12 on Fortune's Most Powerful Women list, is on a PR roll. Though being called "the Justin Bieber of tech" in the New York Times comes close, I think, to jumping the shark image-wise.
The Times article honed in on Sandberg's third "job" besides playing backup to Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and wife and mother MORE
Patricia Sellers - Feb 6, 2012 12:25 PM ET
Photo by Peter Bick
When I read in the New York Times last Sunday that Indianapolis won the opportunity to host the Super Bowl by sending a bunch of eighth graders to appeal to NFL team owners across the U.S., I wanted to know more about this tale of masterful persuasion. So I called Allison Melangton. the president and CEO of the Indianapolis Super Bowl Host Committee, and asked her if MORE
Patricia Sellers - Feb 3, 2012 12:03 PM ET
Who is Facebook's highest-paid executive? Sheryl Sandberg.
The Facebook COO received a base salary of just $300,000 last year, but Sandberg's total comp turned out to be $30.8 million, according to Facebook's pre-IPO filings. Meanwhile, her boss, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, got $500,000 in salary and some $1.5 million in total comp. (Don't feel too sorry for Zuckerberg. The 27-year-old boss owns more than a quarter of the company he co-founded--a stake MORE
Patricia Sellers - Feb 2, 2012 11:53 AM ET
Photo by Jack Hutcheson
Her daughter Susan is the most powerful woman at Google (GOOG). Her daughter Anne started 23andMe, a company that dissects your DNA makeup. Her daughter Janet is a PhD anthropologist and epidemiologist.
You have to figure that Esther Wojcicki taught her daughters pretty well.
The mother of Silicon Valley's well-known Wojcicki sisters is, in fact, being honored today, Digital Learning Day, as one of a small group of "great MORE
Patricia Sellers - Feb 1, 2012 9:06 AM ET
When I ran into Glenn Close at the Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA) annual meeting last spring, she told me that the movie she had just completed, Albert Nobbs, was one of the most challenging projects of her career.
This morning, Close got an Academy Award nomination for her offbeat role in the film: Close plays a woman posing as a man in order to get a job and survive in nineteenth-century Dublin. MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jan 24, 2012 10:47 AM ET
Lisa Suennen is one of the few big-deal venture capitalists in health care. Not that this distinction makes her happy or proud.
Suennen, whose Psilos Group has $577 million under management, would rather see more of her kind in her industry, as she wrote today in a Guest Post on my colleague Dan Primack's Term Sheet. Attending JPMorgan's Healthcare Conference last week in San Francisco, Suennen noticed that only about 10% MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jan 17, 2012 2:39 PM ET
Chelsea Handler showed us a new side of her media brand-ness last night on the premiere of the NBC (CMCSA) sitcom Are You There, Chelsea? The standup comic/late-night TV host/best-selling author/rising-star entrepreneur plays main character Chelsea's pregnant and proper sister on the show.
Let's be clear, this is not Handler's fantasy life. At the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in October, Arianna Huffington tried her best to convince Handler of the MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jan 12, 2012 11:23 AM ET
Clara Shih is an early achiever. At age five, she arrived in the U.S., from Hong Kong, with her parents. With no access to bilingual education, she was initially placed in special classes for kids with speech impediments and advanced so rapidly that she scored a 1420 on her SATs -- in eighth grade. She started her company, Hearsay Social, at age 27, made Fortune's list of Most Powerful Women MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jan 11, 2012 10:22 AM ET
What companies did Warren Buffett put on his wish list for Santa Claus?
The secret is out.
The Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA) chief sent a photo of himself, perched on Santa's lap, and named several companies that he apparently believes will be great stocks to own in 2012.
Under the header, "Santa - 2011," Buffett listed Exxon Mobil (XOM), Wells Fargo (WF)--both companies in which he already owns shares--and Google (GOOG). No public records MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jan 4, 2012 10:35 AM ETPattie Sellers has written some of Fortune's most talked-about cover stories, including "Oprah's Next Act," "Can Meg Whitman Save California?" "The $100 Billion Woman" (Melinda Gates), "MySpace Cowboys," Martha Stewart ("I cannot be destroyed"), Ted Turner ("Gone with the Wind") and Oprah Winfrey ("Oprah Inc."). Since its launch in 1998, Pattie has helped oversee Fortune's "Most Powerful Women" cover package.
A specialist at dissecting larger-than-life personalities, she has also profiled former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Morgan Stanley chairman John Mack, and countless CEOs.
Pattie co-chairs the annual Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, the preeminent gathering of women leaders in business, philanthropy, government, academia, and the arts. She started at Fortune in 1984, covering the big brand companies.
In Pattie's blog, Postcards, she provides insight into the lives of super-achievers through commentary, career advice, and Guest Posts by CEOs and other leaders.