Member-only story
Not an Overnight Success Story…
Baby-boomer, Marla Wynne’s rise from out-of-work TV producer to hugely-successful fashion designer has been told and retold as a courageous Baby-Boomer reinvention story. It often sounds like Marla grabbed a sewing machine, pitched her creations to an investor and voila, a new line of clothing was born.
But the truth was a lot more complicated and the path to success more twisted than that, as I learned when I interviewed Marla for Out-of-Work to Making Money, 21 Comeback Stories Every Job Hunter Should Hear. Here is a fuller version of her entrepreneurial journey.
The story starts with Marla Wynne’s (Ginsburg) career in the entertainment industry ending when the writer’s strike began in 2007. Marla had been an Executive Producer of TV shows, Highlander, La Femme Nikita and “a bunch of shows you never heard of”
As Marla watched real estate values tank and her investments plummet, she tried to hide from her kids, age fifteen and twelve, just how bad the situation was.
She knew she needed a new game plan. “I always combined business with creativity,” Marla said. “I didn’t set out, oh, I want to be a designer. I set out thinking, my kids want to eat and go to college. I better figure this out.”
“I looked in the marketplace and I decided that there really weren’t that many brands in the marketplace for women my age. I knew the world of fashion and I knew that I wasn’t going to be a John Galliano, but really felt I could bring something to that woman who is forty-five — fifty plus, that was affordable and fabulous, and represented my taste and my sensibility. Because people, for as long as I could remember, people always loved the way I dressed.”
Marla bought a sewing machine, set it up in the garage and “cobbled together a collection”. She wrote a business plan for designing, producing and selling her line of clothes and took both clothes and the plan to an investor. He agreed to invest.
“I brought him clothes that I had made in my garage and he told me, ‘Now I need to see what you can do with a real factory and what you’re made of.’ He had factories in Peru and he said, ‘I’m going to fly you to Peru, give you ten days on the ground, and see what you can come back with.’ Now talk about Project Runway. I didn’t have…
