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Born entrepreneur Marcia Miller launched and built her first successful company — Super-calli-grahics, Inc.— out of an apartment while pregnant with her first child.
The national personalized stationery, catalog and invitation business, which she began as a wholesaler to mom-and-pop stationery stores, evolved into an international gift distribution company that designed more than 25 new products a year and sold trend merchandise to gift and party goods stores across the U.S.A. , Canada and Europe.
A University of California Berkeley graduate with a degree in Art, Miller quickly displayed a uniquely creative, trendy, quirky style that brought her respect and recognition within the tough, take-no-prisoners atmosphere of the gift industry.
Known for an intuitive ——— and strong ——— business sense for what makes fun, playful design, she won professional and popular acclaim for bringing her color consciousness into every product she created for the marketplace.
As a matter of fact, Miller became an internationally known product color expert and originator of a color palate known in showrooms around the world as “Marcia’s Colors.”
From Super-calli-graphics, Miller moved on to a totally new life experience:
owning and operating a 250-square foot retail candy store called I Love Candy in
one of Los Angeles’s trendiest Westside neighborhoods, hobnobbing with some of
Hollywood’s finest candy connoisseurs, including Meg Ryan, Steven Spielberg,
Sally Field, Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin.
After 25 years of product design, manufacturing, distribution and sales
experience, Miller was finally learning hard-core retail from the ground up –
on-the-job, so to speak. With thousands of different kinds of candy from all
over the world, ranging from 1-cent treats to the finest gourmet chocolate,
Miller, in her words, “learned what people buy, how they buy it, and what keeps
them coming back for more.” She promptly built the enterprise into what many
Los Angelenos called “the first destination kids' candy store in Southern
California.” Indeed, LA Magazine dubbed I Love Candy the “#1 Kids Candy Store
in LA.”
Miller noticed that the store catered to a captured audience of primarily female shoppers. In her quest to sell anything she could to maximize shelf space and revenue potential, she started placing colorful, well-priced jewelry displays by the cash register. Customers who originally came in for candy walked out with jewelry—soon her customers were purchasing more bracelets than candy and kept coming back for more.
Twenty-thousand dollars and a credit card later, the mother of two started I Love Bracelets (ILB) -- and was back to doing what she loved most in the world – having fun designing and manufacturing her own affordable, fashion-forward, top-of-the-trend, branded products.
And, naturally, Miller has brought her most intangible asset to the new enterprise: the gift and talent for understanding the metaphysics of color. Since its 2002 inception, ILB has sold more than 2 million bracelets, earrings, and necklaces, exclusively to more than 7,000 retailers, gift stores and fashion boutiques.
Marcia’s instinct for what is fresh and fun and her gift and talent for utilizing color became a metaphor for what she believed was lacking in women’s lives today. She understands the need to express and enjoy oneself in an era of multi-faceted lives and continues to design collections of jewelry that are worn by women of all ages.
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Marcia Miller - Founder -
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