She Became A QVC Star in Two Years

But while vacationing that summer, Boehler found a new direction. On a sweltering July evening, as she sat shivering in an air-conditioned restaurant, she watched Rich pull out his reading glasses and thought, wouldn’t it be great if I had a wrap that was small enough to fit into my purse, like a pair of spectacles? All her life, she’d had ideas for inventions (a board game to help people with aphasia remember words had earned her $15,000 in royalties). But most of her ideas went no further than the journal where she jotted them down.

The wrap was different. She mentioned the concept to her oldest son, Adam, then 26, who was in France visiting a friend whose family owned a pajama factory there. The family offered to introduce Boehler to some French designers and fabric suppliers in the area. Three months later, she was sitting at a conference table in the bustling French city of Lyons, surrounded by mannequins and young, hip designers. “They were drawing sketches and asking my opinion. I had no idea what I was doing,” she says. “The whole thing was hilarious.” On the third day of her visit, she scoured Lyons’ textile district for materials, but they were all either too bulky or too flimsy. When she sat down in a street café for a break, a cyclist rolled up wearing biker shorts. Boehler took one look at the shiny, stretchy microfiber and knew she’d found her fabric. It was light enough to fold into a small purse, warmer than silk, shiny enough to dress up an outfit, and, best of all, it was wrinkle-resistant.

Boehler returned to the U.S. with a design, a prototype and a name for her wrap: the Chilly Jilly. Then she began trawling the Internet for a manufacturer close enough to her home in Baltimore (where Rich had taken a new job) so she could build a personal relationship with the owner and make last-minute changes, if the need arose.

To her surprise, producing the wrap was not her biggest expense. The first batch of 200, each folded into a small matching pouch, came to $1,400. But legal and marketing costs soon added up (see “Running the Numbers,” at left). Boehler borrowed $25,000 on plastic and withdrew $45,000 from her son Jordan’s college fund. (Later she took out a loan to cover his tuition.) Even though her family was supportive, Boehler didn’t like using their money in this way. “We aren’t far from retirement,” she says. “I knew my failure could change our lives.”