Believe IT by Jamie Kern Lima

Author:Jamie Kern Lima
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2021-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

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IN 2009, WHILE we were running IT Cosmetics out of our apartment living room in Studio City, California, Jacquie and I met for coffee one day and I shared with her how passionate I was to change the conversation about beauty. To change the way women look in the mirror so that instead of seeing what’s wrong, they see what’s right (which is everything). I explained to her how sick and tired I was of seeing all those images we’re told are “beautiful” that just make us all feel bad. And she could totally relate and was as passionate about it as I was. She told me that if we could pay her at least enough money for her to eat and cover her bills, she would quit her way-more-secure and better-paying job with benefits to come help us make this dream happen. She was six months pregnant at the time. In the beginning, we couldn’t even afford to offer her benefits. But she truly believed in the mission and wanted to help do whatever she could to be part of it.

Jacquie was soon to become a mom and was unsure what lay ahead with her boyfriend at the time, who was also her son’s father. I knew that nothing would mean more to her than being able to give her child a better life, filled with more opportunities than she was given. Her faith in the potential for IT Cosmetics to give her a bright future filled me with both incredible gratitude and also an incredible sense of pressure and responsibility. I didn’t want to let her down. If you’re an entrepreneur, you know how hard it is the moment you realize you have employees depending on you to pay their bills and counting on you for their families’ security and future. And Jacquie was so much more than an employee to me; she was like family.

She officially joined our company on full payroll with the goal of a long-term career. Every day she came to work in our living room, and, like me and Paulo, she wore every hat. Like us, she tackled tasks she had no idea how to do and did her best to figure them out. When we launched on QVC, she worked every single show with us. And in our early years at QVC, when it was our primary revenue stream and when we didn’t know how long the success would last, Jacquie, like us, often spent more nights in that greenroom than she did at home. She was living with her boyfriend and their son and she was the primary breadwinner of the household.

For the first seven years of her son’s life, Jacquie worked the same hundred-hour weeks that we did. And, sure, she believed in our mission, but I know in my heart that her bigger WHY was her son. And his future. I saw her cry her eyes out more times than I can count driving to and from QVC, because she was missing him so much.

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