Symposium Club meets

Posted: Tuesday, April 9, 2013 8:00 pm

The Symposium Club met recently at Bransford Place, the historic Victorian home of Mary Elizabeth Nohsey.
Martha Carole Nichols served a delectable chess pie with assorted nuts and coffee to the 13 members who were present. Vice president Linda Lu Harding called the meeting to order.
Charlotte Erwin chose for her program a story about the life of entrepreneur Roxanne Quimby, founder of Burt’s Bees, from Hoda Kotb’s book “10 Years Later.”
Ms. Quimby graduated from Harvard in 1974. She decided to move to the woods in Maine with her boyfriend instead of pursuing a business career. They married and had twins. After five years, she divorced and became a single mom with no job. In 1984, she met a bee keeper named Burt. She helped him display his honey in pretty containers and used his beeswax for making candles that she would sell at local county fairs.
Soon, she added natural ingredients to the beeswax and the business boomed. People would take her candles from the county fairs back to New York City.
In 1991, she reached a million dollars in sales. She incorporated and named the company Burt’s Bees. Then in 1994, she moved the company to Durham, N.C., because the state was more business friendly than Maine and had an ample labor pool.
Ten years later, in November 2000, she sold the company and netted $325 million. Thus the unemployed single mom who came from meager beginnings and who had started a company, Burt’s Bees, had become very wealthy. Ms. Quimby was a modern woman entrepreneur. She now lives in a small seaside village in her beloved Maine.
The next meeting will be April 18 in the home of Linda Jennings, with Mrs. Harding serving as co-hostess. The program will be given by Lou Joyner.

Published in The Messenger 4.9.13