It was early 2001. I’d been working for high profile technology companies in Silicon Valley since 1973, and a single mother of four for the preceding 10 years. The last of the kids got squared away in college and I felt like I’d crossed the finish line of a marathon. I walked into my boss’s office at Cisco the very next day and quit! I had no idea what I was going to do, but I knew it wasn’t going to be that anymore!

Emancipated for the first time in almost three decades, I traveled to Florence to attend a friend’s wedding. The bride asked me to take Polaroid photos of the guests at the wedding, scotch tape them into a gorgeous Italian leather bound scrapbook and have the guests write something to she and her groom. As a single guest, it was a great way to mingle with a purpose, was a fun activity for the guests, and a wonderful instant memento of the celebration for Clare and Michael.

A few days later, on a train from Florence to Rome, I reflected on the wedding and the whole experience of putting together this instant memento for my friends. The only problem was that it was time consuming (and ugly) to scotch tape the pictures and when it was finished, it was lumpy and homemade looking. I thought, “There has to be a better way to simplify the process and make the final product more elegant”. Then right there in my Italian travel journal, right alongside all the things I’d never want my kids to read, I sketched what would soon become the Adesso Album.

When I got home, I called a business associate whose creativity I’d admired over the years and asked him to help me get the ball rolling. In the meantime, I headed back to Italy to write my business plan in the country that inspired me. That’s where the name Adesso came from, it means “now” in Italian.

I knew absolutely NOTHING about manufacturing an album, but did know a lot of people – designers, printers, other business associates – and I talked to anyone that anyone referred me to. Contacts led to more contacts and before I knew it I had a prototype and a manufacturer. Also, thanks to these generous contacts I had enough funding to launch, I was ready to go!

With so many uses for an instant photo guest book I was in imminent danger of focusing on too many opportunities and diluting my time and energy. So I made the decision to focus on the market that had inspired the idea to begin with – weddings! The market was huge (2.4 million weddings a year in the US alone) and so were the budgets (over $100B is spent annually. So we set our sites on brides, and hoped they would spread the word for us. It worked!

I spent a lot of money and wasted a lot of time on sales and marketing folks that didn’t deliver – too much experience, too little experience, too big a firm, too small a firm – I never got it right! So I stopped hiring out for a couple of years, rolled up my sleeves and got creative. Here’s one example:

Kate’s Paperie is a high end retail location in NY that I really wanted to get into. I’d called and left messages, sent emails, even spoken with the buyer and left samples in person. Nothing. So I got creative… I sent a list of the “Top Ten Reasons for Kate’s to Sell Adesso Albums” and the last four were represented by a picture of my four kids with the caption “Come on Cynthia, we don’t want to support her!” Kate’s is now carrying our albums in all four of their NY locations!

Now, almost seven years after that wedding in Italy, Adesso Albums is an international company with over a million dollars in revenue last year (50% sequential growth over 2006) and are on track to repeat that in 2008. Of course, we LOVE that, but the best part has been surprising... We get cards, letters, emails, pictures, even videos from our customers everyday telling us how Adesso Albums have touched their lives – and in so many ways – both personally and from a business perspective. From the couple who just got married and looked at the album every day of their honeymoon to the military family who used an album to chronicle what happened while the dad was on tour for a year, to our international distributors who each used the albums at their weddings and have since quit their day jobs to sell Adesso Albums in their part of the world – its’ all very humbling. So, that’s my story and I’m hoping it in some small way inspires other women to take that first leap and try something new, something that they really love. There is nothing like it!

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