Joan Hornig
11/01/2007
Joan Hornig, 52, was a hedge fund manager who gave up Wall Street
to start a philanthropic business with a high-end product: her own limited-edition jewelry designs. Sales clerks at Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth
Avenue, and some-times Hornig herself, will engage browsers in conversation and
explain that the designs she describes as "powerful, not too
quiet"—including multistrand onyx necklaces, South Sea pearl drop earrings and
Lucite bracelets inscribed with messages such as "Philanthropy is beautiful"—are
accessories with a social mission. All profits go to a charity of the buyer’s
choice. For the undecided, Hornig has a long list of her favorite choices,
all organizations with some kind of educational initiative. Oprah Winfrey
and Laura Bush have bought her jewelry, and Hornig has raised more than $300,000
for some 170 charities since launching the business in 2003.Around the time I got out of college, I said that if I got what I wanted from life I would give 100 percent back by the time I was 50. Now I give that much and more.
I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland and went to a public high school. My father was a consulting actuary. He had been the number two actuary in the Truman administration, but he didn’t go into business for himself until he was in his 50s. My mother was a schoolteacher and all-around creative person. So my parents were not particularly affluent. But they were generous. They defined generosity as not being covetous of what you do not have. I was the first generation in my family to go to college back East. I graduated in fine arts—now called art history—from Harvard. After college I worked in development at Radcliffe, and then as the director of corporate relations in external development for Columbia Business School, where I was pursuing an MBA. I loved my development years, but the president of Paine Webber, who was one of my volunteers, recruited me for a job, and I ended up working on Wall Street for more than two decades.
My biggest risk was just disappointment. I would have been disappointed if it hadn’t worked. |
I also realized very early on that I was on a path where I could give away money without any great loss. Still, it was Sept. 11 that solidified it for me. I felt so lucky. I had my apartment, and my two daughters and my husband, and we were all safe. However, I did lose my former next-door neighbor, from when I lived on Long Island, a kid just out of college who had been over the evening before visiting us.
The other thing that alarmed me after Sept. 11 was that we started a trend of giving to disaster relief, which is wonderful, but philanthropists should be proactive as well as reactive, and give to causes that are small and quiet.
I was good at creative fundraising, so I decided that one of my obligations was to figure out a way to challenge people to give in a way that didn’t hurt. And I have always loved jewelry. I think of it as portable sculpture. It also involves an understanding of math and proportions. It has to rest well and look good when a woman is walking away. So I started a business making jewelry, with all of the profits going to charity. I get up at 5 am and work on designs on my bedroom floor. I get inspiration partly from paying attention to where people are going and what they’re doing with their money. If a lot of people are traveling to Africa, for example, then I know it’s a good time to incorporate an African aesthetic into my designs. I watch travel and leisure and economics patterns around the world.
Move Over Paul Newman
When I first started publicizing my jewelry, I sent out emails
that said: "Move over Paul Newman." Of course, Newman’s Own has Paul Newman’s
name on the brand, and it also makes pretty good salad dressing. I didn’t have
celebrity recognition and I have always found it difficult to do self-promotion.
That said, I’m hardly a wallflower; I have a salesman’s personality when it
comes to fundraising or the cash management and hedge fund products that I used
to sell, and I was willing to keep asking people until someone said yes. I would
stand up all day and stay alert through trunk shows, and because I sold enough
jewelry through my own channels, I was able to get Bergdorf Goodman to take my
jewelry and train the sales staff there. Still, even though I can stand up in
front of 750 people and tell them to give to a cause, it’s harder to stand up in
front of 750 people and say, "Buy my product," especially when it’s a product
that is my own creation.
But my biggest risk was just disappointment. I would have been
disappointed if it hadn’t worked, but you have to learn to live through
disappointment, especially when you have such a good life. I didn’t even have to
worry about going into debt; all I did was take my own money and use it to stock
up on inventory, hire a staff and set up the Joan B. Hornig Foundation, which
disperses the charitable gifts.
My business model is like Paul Newman’s in that it gives
profits to charity, but there is an important difference: He gives the profits
from the business, while I give the profits on each item. If a piece of jewelry
doesn’t sell, I’m eating all of the costs. Oprah is an even more interesting
model to me, though, in the way she seeks donors as partners through Oprah’s
Angel Network and the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls.
This idea is becoming almost like a movement. An artist who
bought my jewelry decided to have 100 percent of the profits from her paintings
go to charity. I made a speech in Nashville at a luncheon of the Women’s Fund of
the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee last year, and a gentleman in the
audience who had his own business came up to me afterward and said this had made
him start to think about philanthropy differently, and maybe we could work on a
product line together.
I would like to develop more products and give the profits to
charity. This is what I’m hoping to do with people who come to me with
partnership ideas. There should be some less-expensive products out there, but
still with high margins so that you get significant profits—small things like
bookmarks, kitchen items, maybe dog products. Certainly a line of cuff links for
men, and I would love to come out with a fragrance. After a disastrous tornado
in the Lincoln, Neb., area in 2004, local organizers were looking for private
aid. Someone there heard about me and asked me if I would donate something for a
benefit for them. They wanted something they could sell for only $10, so I
created a necklace that was a sterling silver ginkgo leaf on a leather thong.
That’s the kind of thing that I like people to reach out and ask me for.
Joan Hornig donates all profits from each piece of jewelry, such
as the leaf cuff bracelet (above).