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66 | GRAVITAS MAGAZINE GravitasMag.com investing in the company for 15 years without geing a penny back. When we sold to Liz Claiborne, he made a ver y healthy profit, but he was patient. What has been your definition of success, both as a designer and artist in your career? I think that first you must define success. It can be monetar y success; it can be notoriety worldwide and name-recognition. We had 54 Sigrid Olsen boutiques across A merica and in most major department stores. We had an office filled with 150 employees. I loved building the company. I think my ability to adapt is the key to how I define success now. I am ver y grateful that I can be creative and make a living doing it. ere are plenty of creative people that don't get that opportunity. What lessons did you struggle with as a businesswoman? I didn't really understand investing and what it meant to have a return on investment and lines of credit. I learned ever y thing ver y quick ly, from manufacturing in Asia and understanding the lead times, to shipping and selling to department stores. As the company grew, we hired people that were experts in those areas, leaving me to manage the design team. Unfortunately, when your company grows that big that fast, and you're the creative director, the job becomes less and less creative and more executive, like meetings, which I hate. Half of my job became informing ever ybody what my creative ideas were with concept boards and sketches and prints and pads. So that was frustrating. I k new from the moment I went to my first corporate meeting at Liz Claiborne, that it was going to be a problem. It wasn't any one person's fault; it was just the nature of the beast. ere are just so many people that have to interconnect and ever yone has a different agenda. What were some of the challenges you faced as a female designer when you first started out? I think the biggest problem honestly wasn't gender specific, but I didn't have that person that I could lock arms with and unite. e men went out and had drinks together. I didn't because I was home with my k ids. ey had a lile boy's club going on and I was just the creative one. I was so busy all the time because I had this huge team of people to manage and I think they respected the fact that I held up my end. How did you balance being a single mother, an entrepreneur and a creative designer at the same time? It was wonderful, and yet it was really difficult. I was a single mom, aer being in business for only a few years. When my company formed in 1984, my daughter was three years old and my son was five years old. ey remember it as fun time. I think I made it look a lile too easy. I had an apartment in New York and went back and forth. My k ids were in boarding school. I think I set a good example showing them that you can do any thing you set your mind to do and it can be fun and wonderful. We are extremely close now, I love my k ids. ey are like my best friends. Today, I am a grandmother, and I am a much beer grandmother than a parent. What saved you mentally when you closed your company? My creative work and the fact my husband at the time and I were doing a retail store together. I found another way to satisf y the essentials of what I was missing by opening two art galleries, one in Gloucester, Massachuses and the other in Sarasota. I was missing my community, so I created a new one through my yoga retreats and relating to women. You were diagnosed with breast cancer at the same time your company was closing. How did you manage? I never expected to have ever y thing go wrong with me. When I got my mammogram, I had put it off for a long time. When they wanted to see me again, I thought it was nothing. What happens when you are diagnosed with breast cancer, is that it doesn't happen all at once. ere are so many diagnostic procedures you have to go through. It's amazing how many decisions you have to make, and at the time, I was still work ing. For me, the first few months of it were a nuisance more than any thing else. I was fortunate Sigrid with her art and her family.

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