Defying the Odds: Sharing the Lessons I Learned As a Pioneer Entrepreneur

Publishers Weekly

Israel-Curley, founder of Judy's, a successful women's retailer, opens her memoir with her doctor telling her the tumor in her lymph nodes is malignant. Facing an uncertain future, Israel-Curley realized she wanted to tell the story of her 40-plus years in business. This inauspicious first chapter quickly gives way to the wonderful tale of a self-made American woman. During the Depression, when Israel-Curley was a girl, her father abandoned the family, and her enterprising mother moved her daughters from their upstate New York farm to Manhattan. While her mother worked as a janitor, Israel-Curley excelled in school, especially in business subjects. After high school, she moved to Los Angeles, lured by the help-wanted ads she saw in Women's Wear Daily, and found a job as a buyer for a small department store. When her boss went on vacation, Israel-Curley was left to figure out the intricacies of buying. She was a natural. "Our sales volume tripled in my first year," and her boss referred to her as his "little genius." When she married, she continued to work-a radical idea for 1947-and soon took one tiny storefront and opened the first Judy's (so named because the sign was only large enough for five letters). Israel-Curley captivatingly recounts how she built her business into a publicly held company with 104 stores, interspersing brief peeks at her personal life among detailed business anecdotes. In addition to offering practical advice for entrepreneurs and managers, this is an engaging first-person account of building a business from the ground up. Photos. (Oct. 7) Forecast: Israel-Curley's book is the latest in a string of recently published and upcoming businesswomen's memoirs and biographies (after Mary Wells Lawrence's A Big Life in Advertising [Forecasts, Apr. 8] and Eleanor Dwight's Diana Vreeland [Forecasts, June 24]). Expect to see feature articles in women's and business media in the coming months. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The history of Judy’s, the young women’s clothing chain, along with tried-and-true business advice, from the force behind the operation.

From its start as a storefront in East Los Angeles in 1948 to its current superstore status, encompassing 104 stores, Judy’s was the inspiration of Israel-Curley, who set the tone and guided the business for 42 years, until she sold it in 1989. It was nearly unheard of for a woman to be running an expanding business in the 1950s, but Israel-Curley was successful by dint of her intuitive business sense—she welcomed her employees into an extended family, treated them fairly, offered them advancement, had impeccable timing for big moves, and worked like a dog (juggling family and work throughout)—not to mention that she had a flair for innovation. She is the first to say that the eye of the customer dictates fashion, yet it was her fashion sense that resulted in shortening sweater sleeves, introducing a certain pink, and bringing jeans and Keds to the fore. In a style that thrums with the obvious energy she brought to her work, she explains her guiding principles: that the aim is to sell a great product at good value; that fear is incompatible with creativity and ambition (but that worrying keeps you attentive to details); that the product comes first, then the location; that it’s not location location location, but customer customer customer. ("Be attentive to your customer and never help another at the same time without the consent of the first.") She is frank about her unhappiness with unions: she feels she treats her employees better than a union would, and is, admittedly, a control freak; then again, she was one of the first to hire African-Americansaleswomen. Her chapter on rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous can be disregarded entirely.

Folksy, and too humble by half: Israel-Curley was a rare bird, and it paid off handsomely. (128 b&w photographs)