This Week’s Intimate Discovery: A Woman’s Needs Inspires a Lifestyle Boutique in Canada.
It’s one week before Thanksgiving and reminiscing about holiday preparation all I can think of was the intensity of the selling floor when I was working 12 hour days, 6 days a week as a department manager in the early years of my career. It was all about key item intensification as we set our sites on the best gifting merchandise. … Read More
Eat your hearts out fellow northeasterners: I flew out of New York Saturday in front of a surprise snowstorm that dropped 8+ inches of snow on our autumn landscape. I am very happy to have escaped to my favorite getaway, Los Cabos, Mexico; where I am relaxing in the sun enjoying the comfort of the balmy sunshine and light ocean breezes. The temperatures at home were precipitous, edging down to the freezing mark for … Read More
I wasn’t much of a football enthusiast in college; I never really grasped the devotion of these obsessed fans. But then my son, in his sophomore year at Boston College managed to persuade us that tailgating was a rite of passage and we, as his parents, should take responsibility for abetting this tradition. So for several years, we motored to Boston to take part in the home game revelry nurtured on campus by a contingent … Read More
I flew to Paris from NYC on one of the first flights out after September 11, 2001. Many of my colleagues opted not to travel and I understood. But for me, I have always lived by the credo that when a bully strikes, it’s important to stand tall. Taking off from JKF, we flew over the still smoldering destruction in lower Manhattan and turned east around The Statue of Liberty. There she stood, … Read More
This week’s intimate discovery: A Fresh New Boutique Offers a Great Escape
From the first day I started my retail career, the mantra “location, location, location” was drummed into my head. So when I was in 
Boston last week and decided to take a side trip to Cambridge to visit Forty Winks, a wonderful lingerie boutique located in Harvard Square, I knew exactly why this store has been so successful in its … Read More
Architecture that challenges perception has always been a source of creative inspiration for me. Last year, while traveling in New Mexico, I happened upon the Miraculous Staircase in the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe. Built to solve the everyday problem of how to access the choir loft without interfering with the space in this tiny Gothic church, the carpenter accomplished a feat of engineering that boggles the imagination. Turning 360 degrees twice this construction has … Read More
My father was a gentle man, very fastidious, very reserved. He never raised his voice. I never heard any ultimatums. There were just expectations, very high expectations. No matter what I wanted, there was always a goal before I could have it. He was always raising the bar. He taught me that I was my only true competitor. His was a perfectionist whose standard for quality and performance were a constant objective. I remember … Read More