A picture-perfect life after law?
I know I'm supposed to be inspired, but cheery stories about former lawyers-turned-successful entrepreneurs with picture-perfect family lives are getting on my nerves. More annoyingly, in the accompanying photos they are always striking one of those "Look, I'm successful personally and professionally" poses.
October 13, 2010 at 09:37 AM
3 minute read
I know I'm supposed to be inspired, but cheery stories about former lawyers-turned-successful entrepreneurs with picture-perfect family lives are getting on my nerves. More annoyingly, in the accompanying photos they are always striking one of those "Look, I'm successful personally and professionally" poses.
Recently, I came across such a picture in Working Mother magazine, which showed a woman with her four beautiful children and beaming husband (what else?) in some Eden-like setting. It's a first-person account by Sarah Davis, a California lawyer, who managed to turn her love of designer handbags into a multimillion-dollar business.
This is Davis's breezy account of her success:
"I got the idea for my business while out shopping. A woman was buying a stack of clearance blankets for $17 each. She said she'd sell them on eBay for $40.
"EBay was something I thought I could do. So I started selling everything in our house that wasn't nailed down and that was easy to ship.
"I soon began selling my own handbags. I've always loved fashion, so I came up with fashionphile.com as the name of the business.
"These days I sell high-end bags like Louis Vuitton and Gucci that have been preowned. If someone buys a Chanel handbag for $1,000 and gets tired of it, we sell it for her.
The upshot – Davis was doing so well that she decided to call time on her legal career. "I was making $30,000 a month on the bags. I paid off my school loans," she writes gleefully. What's more: "I opened a high-end boutique in Beverly Hills in 2008, because that's where the bags are. We had 12 employees. So I was operating online and offline."
Then there's the ultimate point of the story, which is that you can have it all: money, success, home and hearth in one magical mix: "My work is all about family. I get to spend more time with my kids – Izzie, 12; Aerie, 10; Ike, 6; and Zoie, 4."
"My work is all about family"? What does that mean, anyway?
Sometimes I think we are overselling the idea of the perfectly balanced life – particularly the fantasy that home and work mesh wonderfully once you hop off the legal or corporate track. Dare I say this seems to be a women's magazine obsession?
The Careerist is a blog by American Lawyer Media.
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