There’s nothing like a story about a self-made female billionaire to remind me that ‘Hey, I might not be eating two minute noodles for the remainder of my life’.
I have always found women like Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx who built a company worth $1.04 billion after years of selling fax machines door-to-door, extremely inspiring.
I don’t come from wealth. I didn’t go to a private school. And despite the huge dent admitting this will make on my likability index, I’m quite ambitious.
I don’t need to – or even want to – become a billionaire in my later years, but success stories are all the more sweeter when they come from women who started with depleted bank accounts and beat-up cars.
Enter: Carolyn Rafaelian.
Admittedly, Rafaelian had a private school education – she attended the Prout Memorial High School for Girls in Rhode Island – which her parents worked hard to secure for her and her four siblings. Aside from that, the American-Armenian’s life was utterly middle class.
Rafaelian spent her afternoons after school working for her father’s small jewellery business, attaching small pieces of cardboard to the backs of dainty earrings. It’s a time she described to Forbes last week as “torture”.
She would go on to study at the American College in Los Angeles, before moving to New York at 22 and, eventually, creating her own jewellery line to be sold under her father’s label in her Tribeca apartment.
“I created what I wanted to wear,” Rafaelian told the publication. “I wanted cocktail rings. I wanted sterling silver.”
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Before long, the entrepreneur was married at 23, pregnant at 25, and a mother-of-two by the time she was 27. After relocating back to the more family-friendly Rhode Island, Rafaelian’s small line was struggling to stay afloat with far cheaper, larger Chinese competitors.
When she looked down at her daughters, “Alex was in her high chair, Ani was probably in a bouncer,” the idea struck her: she would branch off from her father’s business, to establish her own jewellery brand.
The name? Alex and Ani.
But this wouldn’t just be a jewellery business. It would be a lifestyle business. One that has a conspicuous message: ‘We will empower, inspire and protect the wearer.’
Top Comments
She mustn't have been eating any avocado toast..
Why - she didn't 'save' the millions she is worth, she worked hard and earned them!
Don't worry, I wasn't being serious.