By Amy Wallace

MAN or woman, every one of us has experienced the frustration that drove Rick Siegel to become an inventor. He would be in his clothes closet, running late, wrestling with the plastic bags that encased — and the twist ties that entangled — his dry cleaning. Surely, he thought, those twist ties would drive him mad.

“He’d freak out,” said his wife, Jennie Nigrosh, recalling the typical harried morning. “Scream is a good word.”

Familiar, too, is the guilt that Ms. Nigrosh felt when she tried to intervene. Her husband is 6-foot-4, meaning that if the artist Christo did an installation using the plastic film around just six of Mr. Siegel’s suits, he could easily wrap your garage. Ms. Nigrosh’s father ran a cardboard recycling factory when she was growing up, so a trip to the closet made her stomach clench: Where did all this plastic go?

Suddenly Mr. Siegel, who was once a Hollywood talent manager, and his wife, a marketing copywriter in the music industry, had an idea: a reusable bag to transport your clothes to and from the dry cleaner. After an initial investment of about $200,000, the Green Garmento was born.

“June 2008, we got our first prototype,” Ms. Nigrosh recalls of the Christmas-morning-like feeling she had when they opened it. Then came disaster.

“It ripped,” Mr. Siegel said, grimacing.

“Gi-normous rippage,” agreed Ms. Nigrosh.

“We went from heaven to ‘Oh, no!’ in five seconds,” said Mr. Siegel.

Two years and several design improvements later, they say they’ve sold about 40,000 Green Garmentos — priced at about $5 wholesale, $9.99 retail — and expect to sell an additional 300,000 more by July 2011. And in March, they got their first outside financing, other than $100,000 that’s come from friends: $350,000 from a small cap investment fund put together by the Progressive Asset Management Group, a brokerage firm that specializes in what it sees as socially responsible investing.

The fund, which Mr. Siegel hopes will eventually raise $900,000 for the company, promises investors a 30 percent annual return on their money until it is repaid — via the first 9 percent of gross revenue.

Just as important, Mr. Siegel and Ms. Nigrosh say, they’ve begun to alter how a very set-in-its-ways industry thinks about doing business. For the Green Garmento to succeed requires not just a customer base, after all, but also a cultural shift within the dry-cleaning world. After all, a reusable bag, unlike disposable plastic, must be kept track of and returned to its owner.

The Green Garmento is not the first reusable cleaner bag. There’s a nylon rival out there, for example, called the Converta Bag that Mr. Siegel says he didn’t know about until they were already committed to their bag. (The Green Garmento is made of polypropylene, a recycled product derived from oil sludge.)

Mr. Siegel, 53, and Ms. Nigrosh, 44, say they’re glad for the competition. They’re trying to do more than make money. They’re trying to change the world.

“Single-use plastic at dry cleaners has gotten a pass,” Mr. Siegel said. “We’re not so much selling our bag as publicizing the concept of the bag.”

According to an analysis of 2005 census figures by the Drycleaning and Laundry Institute, 1.4 billion pieces of clothing and other items are professionally cleaned in the United States each year. If you figure that most cleaners wrap no more than two pieces in a bag, that’s at least 700 million bags a year, or 131 million pounds of plastic gathering dust in the back of our closets. At 5 to 8 cents a bag — plus twist ties and the like — that adds up, which is why even nonenvironmentally minded dry cleaners may be open to making the switch.

That means opportunity, said Mr. Siegel, who says hotels and cruise lines are Green Garmento’s other target customers. “If we can make it the Q-Tip, Kleenex or Xerox of the industry,” he said, “ours will be a $10 million-a-year company.”

Here’s how Jason Lafer introduced the Green Garmento to customers of his Linders French Cleaners in Bernardsville, N.J.: Last November, he informed his 730 pick-up-and-delivery clients that they’d be receiving no more plastic on their clothes. Instead, in a move he called “Greenvenient,” customers received two Green Garmento bags emblazoned with the Linders logo (for which he charged them $7 a bag).

By AMY WALLACE

THE idea was never to try to supplant retail, says Fan Bi, the 22-year-old chief executive of Blank Label. Sometimes you need a dress shirt right now, and at those times, Mr. Bi says approvingly, “you can get it right now at Nordstrom.”

But what about those times when you get a hankering not to wear the same thing that 10,000 other men are wearing? Or when you wish you could have the fabric, collar, pockets and lining you’ve always wanted — not what some fashion buyer has chosen for this season? What if you could design that shirt yourself and hang it in your closet for about the same price as a mass-produced button-down?

“The value proposition of customization at retail prices was a cornerstone of our company from the very start,” Mr. Bi tells me by phone from Shanghai, where Blank Label shirts are sewn to customers’ specifications and delivered anywhere in the world in about four weeks. But Blank Label, his Web start-up based in Boston, offers something else that off-the-rack doesn’t: “the emotional value proposition: how expressive something is.”

“People really like a Blank Label shirt because they can say, ‘I had a part in creating this.’ ”

Since last Halloween, when the company’s dress shirt design application made its debut at www.blank-label.com, Mr. Bi and his three partners — ages 19, 22 and 30 — have joined a small but growing co-creation movement that uses the Internet to let consumers have a hand in making the products they buy. Web ventures have already popped up that allow shoppers to customize granola (MeAndGoji.com), jewelry (gemvara.com), chocolate (CreateMyChocolate.com), handbags (LaudiVidni.com) and clothing for girls ages 6 to 12 (FashionPlaytes.com). There are also online competitors selling design-your-own shirts, while Brooks Brothers is one major retailer that offers the service on its Web site.

The upside for business owners is obvious: low overhead. At Blank Label, for example, the sew-as-you-go business model eliminates the need to produce shirts of every size and style. There’s no need to rent space to store inventory. There’s no storefront, no office other than a borrowed space at Babson College in Boston, where until recently Mr. Bi was an exchange student from the University of New South Wales — he grew up in Australia.

“We’ve focused on being very bootstrap, very lean,” says Mr. Bi, who says the business has sold about 450 shirts. Recently, it has seen a big bump in traffic, with orders of about 10 shirts a day. He says the company makes money on every shirt.

Once, Mr. Bi wanted to be an investment banker. In the summer of 2008, while pursuing his finance degree, he worked as a junior analyst at a Sydney bank. But the experience left him disenchanted. “Probably a product of my generation — I was too entitled,” he acknowledges. “I felt I’m just one very, very small ant in this massive firm. I’m not feeling very engaged. And entrepreneurships and start-ups became interesting.”

On a trip to Shanghai, where his parents grew up, he got an idea: a service offering custom-tailored suits to college students at a bargain price. He wasn’t thinking about an online business. He thought he’d hire a rep at every college in the Boston area and sell suits one at a time.

Then he met Danny Wong, now a 19-year-old communications major at Bentley University. Mr. Wong had applied to be a rep. Excited about “bridging the gap between consumer and manufacturer,” Mr. Wong remembers quizzing Mr. Bi about his marketing strategies, particularly on the Web. They teamed up and, several months later, Blank Label was born.

At first, Mr. Bi and Mr. Wong tried to raise venture capital.

“To be honest, we couldn’t,” Mr. Bi says. “We were two very young guys who had no track record.” So Mr. Bi financed the site with about $10,000 in savings, he says, recruiting a programmer and a Web designer and vowing to make leanness a strength, not a weakness.

One goal was to communicate directly with customers. The Web site commands: “Call us. We like to talk.” Depending on the time of day, Mr. Bi answers the calls himself. When he is awake, he also activates a feature that sends instant messages to customers who have been on the site for more than 90 seconds.

Need help? he asks. For several hours a day, he and his partners chat with customers about what they like and don’t like on the site.

The feedback has led to several site revamps and — I can’t resist — alterations. The company is on its third home page in six months, and the partners say they tweak the site every day.

A FEW weeks ago, before I had decided to write about Blank Label, I sat down and designed a shirt for my 13-year-old son. It was a striped button-down made of “Green With Excitement” — all Blank Label’s fabrics have hyperdescriptive names. I chose the cut, the size, the placket and the collar; I opted for single-button cuffs, no pockets and no epaulets.

For fun, and to test the ordering interface, I added a contrasting inner collar and cuff in a solid fabric called “Masculine Poplin Grey,” and added a monogram of my son’s initials on the cuff. For the inside of the collar, I made up a custom label, “Live Free or Die” — I was reading “Game Change” and had New Hampshire on the brain.

The whole process took 10 minutes. With all the bells and whistles, the shirt cost $72, compared with $45 for Blank Label’s most basic, no-frills model.

The site showed me a mock-up, which looked great. But when I went to check out, the order summary did not list the contrasting inner collar. No matter what I did, the inner collar was green and excited instead of masculine and grey. So I clicked on “Help” and sent a message. Soon, I heard back — from Mr. Bi himself. Notably, this was before he knew he would be in my next column.

On Friday, the shirt arrived. It was just as I’d designed it, just as Mr. Bi assured me it would be. If my son doesn’t like it, Blank Label policy is that I can return it, no questions asked. And here’s the best part: I sort of made it myself.

E-mail: proto@nytimes.com.

April 18, 2010
By AMY WALLACE

IN 2006, Frank Nuovo was 45 — “boom!” he says, “five more years to 50!” — and at the top of his game. Except for one thing: “I’d kind of lost my soul.”

As chief of design at Nokia, the world’s leading mobile phone supplier, Mr. Nuovo presided over a huge team that brought 250 products and accessories to market each year. Among many other things, he was credited with inventing removable face plates, those colorful accessories that turn a phone into a personal fashion statement.

A sought-after public speaker, Mr. Nuovo logged about 200,000 miles a year on planes and was often inter viewed by journalists, one of whom, in a profile in The New Yorker, called him “the Henry Ford — or at least the Calvin Klein — of cellular communication.”

But something wasn’t right. Everybody’s heard of the Peter Principle, the idea that organizations tend to promote people to one level beyond their competency. But what do you call an almost-opposite phenomenon, when a person is promoted to the highest heights and excels at that altitude, but is left feeling empty? Whatever you call it, that’s what Mr. Nuovo was experiencing.

“It was painful. Being chief of design at Nokia was a dream job, and I had so much invested,” he says, describing the creative crossroads at which he found himself. But when it came to hands-on design, he recalls, “I was talking about it rather than doing it. And I needed to go back to doing it before I talked about it anymore.”

So, four years ago, a few days after his 45th birthday, Mr. Nuovo stepped down — or up, depending on your point of view. Immediately, he set about re-educating himself, mastering new design tools, like Rhinoceros for modeling and Photoshop, that had become essential in the years he’d been busy with administration and corporate strategy. With Nokia’s blessing, he also became a full-time champion of Vertu, a subsidiary he had set in motion in 1998 and had been nurturing ever since.

Mr. Nuovo says Vertu, a maker of cellphones so high-end that he calls them “communication devices,” made him whole again.

Some may mock the idea that Mr. Nuovo relocated his soul by devoting himself to creating status symbols for the world’s richest people. Vertu phones, after all, are made of gold, platinum, titanium and stainless steel. Some are wrapped in hand-tooled leather and ostrich skin or set with pavé diamonds. Depending on their bling factor, most Vertu phones retail from $5,000 to $25,000. (Special editions start at $80,000; one sculpted gold-and-sapphire phone sold for more than $325,000.)

To ponder Vertu’s ruby bearings and laser-cut ceramic keys is to imagine Thorstein Veblen, the Norwegian-American sociologist and economist, thrashing about in his grave. In his 1899 book, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” he coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe how people, rich or poor, acquire cool stuff to impress and to establish a pecking order. To this guy, even silver flatware seemed like wretched excess. Veblen would surely have seen Vertu as too-too.

One tech blog could have been channeling Veblen when it declared: “Overkill, thy name is Vertu.” But Mr. Nuovo, an amiable Californian who lives in Bel Air and tends to wear black blazers over black T-shirts, rejects that critique. Beautiful objects are desirable, he says. And as objects go, the cellphone is increasingly more ubiquitous than those old lions of luxury, fancy pens and wristwatches.

Vertu won’t release sales figures, but Mr. Nuovo says the company — which has more than 80 boutiques in cities like Tokyo, Dubai, Milan, Las Vegas and London and is opening one on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills in May — is plenty profitable, even in these tight times.

“The watch is disappearing. And everybody in the world is walking around with these,” he says on a recent afternoon, spreading an assortment of cellphones — all of them Nokias or Vertus of his own making — on a table at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., where he was once a student.

By AMY WALLACE

JEN BILIK sells wit for a living.

Since 2002, when she founded her gift and stationery products company, Knock Knock, with a $750,000 windfall from a Manhattan apartment sale, Ms. Bilik, a 40-year-old entrepreneur, has been churning out cleverness in abundance. There are the sticky notes saying things like “Useless Info” and “When Pigs Fly”; list pads titled “All Out Of” and “Things You Must Do to Make Me Happy”; flashcards for parenting, slang use and sex; and kits to aid in decision-making, dating, and even decision-making during dating.

She has also written “The Complete Manual of Things That Might Kill You” and designed a series of guided journals with names like “I Can’t Sleep” and “My Dysfunctions.”

Along the way, her annual revenue has grown to more than $6.3 million. Her company motto is, “We put the fun in functional,” but she acknowledges that the company’s voice is more confessional than practical.

“A core aspect of Knock Knock’s identity is justifying my own inadequacies, which has, I think, struck a chord in our customers,” she says, sitting in Knock Knock’s headquarters in Venice, Calif.

But oh, the lessons she’s learned. Like this one: “Great, creative inspiration feels so good. But translating that into a good business decision — well, it’ll probably take longer than your inspiration did.”

Ms. Bilik is a businesswoman who never planned to go into business — or, as she puts it, “an artist who looked at the guys with the polyester suits buying ‘Who Moved My Cheese?’ in the airport as such chumps” who then became a chump herself. (But she does wear all-natural fibers: “I put my foot down on the polyester.”)

She is also a funny lady who has successfully leveraged her sense of humor, but not without skinning her knees a few times. By her reckoning, she has made “a thousand and a half mistakes” and at least a few “über-mistakes.”

Notably, though, many of the very things that led to her mistakes also yielded her successes. It’s the old “your strength is your weakness” paradox: Ms. Bilik has been known to spend 20 hours writing a greeting card about the history of Valentine’s Day, for example, because it made her happy to do so. Without that off-center sensibility, she wouldn’t have anything worth selling.

And without that drive to create — a passion that, for her, borders on devotion — she wouldn’t have had the energy to start Knock Knock in the first place. But the fact remains: 20 hours spent on a card that will earn her company only $10,000 — “at most!” — isn’t smart business.

“We put so much into the products, which is part of the problem with our business model,” she says. “We put too much work into them for the amount of money we’re getting out of them. We’re really trying to address that right now.”

Knock Knock, whose products are sold in about 5,000 stores in the United States alone, has at least two philosophies that drive sales. One is aspirational organization, the idea that if you offer people a way to keep tidy track of their takeout menus or their home maintenance projects or their pets, they will enjoy buying it even if they don’t ever put it to use. One big seller is the Personal Library Kit, which equips the buyer with checkout cards and a date stamp to make sure that books they lend to friends will be returned.

Another guiding philosophy is that people enjoy having the last word — and will pay to do so. Knock Knock makes a self-inking stamp that says, “Deal With This,” followed by five checkable boxes: For Me, Now, Quietly, Correctly and Or Else. A “Complaint” sticky offers boxes for “Whose Fault” (Mine, Yours, Ours, Other) and “Desired Outcome” (Apology, Explanation, Litigation, Change).

An instant-apology pad lists types of infractions (Behavior, Words, Action or Inaction) and “Reasons for My Behavior,” ranging from “I forgot” to “I was drunk” to “I was traumatized in childhood.” A new set of fabric-bound books, “Lines for All Occasions,” offers suggested excuses, lies, insults, comebacks, pep talks, pick-ups and come-ons.

WHEN Vanessa Troyer and Chris Farentinos first hit on the idea that would change their lives, they were thinking big — a little too big, actually.

“It was a mail receptacle/guest house,” Mr. Farentinos jokes, describing an oversize, locking mailbox nicknamed the Elephant Trunk.

His wife agrees. “It was big enough to fit a small family,” Ms. Troyer recalls of their contraption, which the couple invented in 1999 to accept delivery of large packages and to keep the parcels safe and dry, no matter how long homeowners were away.

Back then, they were driven by the belief that as Americans ordered more and more merchandise online, particularly bulky computers, the Elephant Trunk would become a must-have item. It might have happened, too, except that while Mr. Farentinos and Ms. Troyer were still tinkering, the flat screen was born. Before the Elephant Trunk could even be tested and brought to market, its main reason for being — microwave-size computer monitors — became obsolete.

You might wonder why Ms. Troyer, 45, and Mr. Farentinos, 43, can giggle about this. Here’s the answer: From the ashes of their failed experiment arose two smaller products — the Oasis and the Oasis Jr. — that have put their company, Architectural Mailboxes, on the map.

Their smallest locking curbside model is available at Costco.com, Target.com, Lowe’s and about half of Home Depot’s 1,900 stores in the United States. To date, the couple estimates that they’ve sold more than 150,000 of their newfangled, secure letter drops, which cost $97 to $258. They expect to sell 50,000 more this year.

This mom-and-pop success story — the owners qualify because they have two daughters — seemed the perfect way for me to kick off this monthly column about summoning creativity to achieve innovation.

It is often said that there are no new ideas, but Ms. Troyer and Mr. Farentinos turned that cliché inside out. By correctly anticipating how the high-tech future would change the way we shop, they updated one of the most low-tech items around: the repository of snail mail, the trusty mailbox. Along the way, they responded to a growing concern — identity theft — that established mailbox suppliers had failed to address.

“Identity theft was at the top of consumers’ minds. And the mailbox industry was dominated by some large players that just didn’t have an answer for it,” says Rhys Jones, the Home Depot executive who first stocked the Oasis line in 2005 because it met “a need we needed met.”

What was so special about an Oasis? Well, for one thing, thieves couldn’t get their hands past its patented Hopper door — a hinged opening that functions much like those on the Postal Service’s big blue mailboxes. Also, it wasn’t ugly.

“Typically, some of the best innovations come from the small guys,” says Mr. Jones. “They’re more willing to take a risk and they see things that others don’t.” The Oasis was “safe and secure, aesthetically pleasing, do-it-yourself friendly and a great price for the value.”

Oh, and it had something else: a pitchwoman who was unwilling to hear the word no. “Vanessa,” Mr. Jones notes, “is very passionate about her product.”

Ms. Troyer, who handles marketing for the company, first buttonholed Mr. Jones at a trade show. She’d been trying to get into Home Depot for months when he walked by her booth.

“I saw the orange lanyard all the Home Depot people wore, and ran up to him,” she recalls. (This is a signature move for her: she introduced herself to her husband of 20 years in much the same way).

Mr. Jones recalls that when Home Depot first agreed to test the Oasis Jr. in 50 stores, Ms. Troyer helped pick the locations — she had kept her own records of where the product had sold best. “She knew what consumers wanted,” he says, “and where.”

Consider, too, the way she typed the name of Jeff Bezos, the founder and C.E.O. of Amazon.com, into Google and clicked through 58 pages until she found his phone number. She called and, saying that she wanted to send Mr. Bezos a birthday card, also got his address.

Originally appeared in More Magazine February, 2010

BY: Amy Wallace

Ground zero for Meg Whitman’s campaign for governor of California is a suite of rooms modestly tucked into a colorless cookie-cutter office park—all sprayed stucco walls and fluorescent lights. I’m ushered into a conference room so unadorned there is not even a campaign poster on the walls. Whitman sits at the head of a white meeting table, and as I sit down beside her, two handlers pull up chairs as well. The space offers no clues to Whitman’s personality, and she doesn’t reveal much herself. In her black suit and black-and-white sweater, the former CEO of eBay, now 53, is still the picture of a put-together corporate titan. And her approach is all business. Seeming energized by an earlier discussion of the state budget with her campaign staff, she tosses numbers around with confidence. When I ask where she’ll find the votes to win the race (the primary is in June, the general in November), she breaks down the research in a tone so self-assured that I can almost see a thought bubble forming over her head: Statistics may scare some women, but not me.

Over the months that I reported this article, I often heard the candidate and her staff say that they want people to know “the real Meg Whitman.” Jillian Manus, the chair of Whitman’s women’s coalition (dubbed MEGaWomen), told me, “Everyone knows what she’s done. I want to let people know who she is. To feel her, get her, touch her.” But Whitman is hard to know, much less touch. She’s quiet, understated and more wonky than ebullient after a career spent largely in Silicon Valley tech circles—in all, not the type that seems born to storm the political stage. Unlike Sarah Palin, Whitman doesn’t wink or quip or let go with unscripted rants; unlike George Bush, she doesn’t give people funny nicknames; and unlike Bill Clinton, when she tries to show she feels your pain, she sounds a bit wooden. Forget your pain; she seems at times not even to feel her own.

But with her high-level Republican connections (she counts Mitt Romney and John McCain as friends) and her jaw-dropping personal fortune ($1.2 billion, by a 2009 Los Angeles Times estimate), Whitman is a candidate no one can ignore. Having left her job at eBay in 2008, she is now pursuing politics as a second act and at this moment is in mid-leap—committed to her new calling but, with no experience running for elected office, uncertain of her odds. Her political future boils down to this: Will she persuade voters—especially women—that the talents she parlayed into a billion bucks can guide California through the recession’s perfect storm?

If only every voter Whitman is courting could meet her mother. While the candidate seems all discipline and reserve, Margaret Whitman, 89, does not, and the stories she tells about the young Meg hint at what lies beneath the candidate’s cool. “When she was little, she was extremely determined. Whatever she decided to do, she was going to do,” says Margaret, recalling that swim meets in particular brought out the competitor in her younger daughter. “Meg was a pretty good swimmer. But at meets, I had to be there, because if she wasn’t at least first or second, she’d be screaming with rage. There was no second best for her. She has always loved to win.”

During the summers, while Whitman’s father stayed behind at his financial services job on Long Island, her mother took the three kids—Whitman and her older sister and brother—on cross-continental adventures. They traversed the western U.S. one year and Alaska the next; on that trip, they drove the desolate, partially unpaved Alcan Highway. Whitman was only six, but the image of her mother lashing four spare tires to the roof of the family camper, just in case, stays with her. Whitman recounts how in the 1940s, before having kids, her mom volunteered to be a war mechanic in New Guinea. “She’d never looked under the hood of a car or fixed anything with a wrench,” Whitman says. “But she knew that’s where the critical need was and where she could make the biggest contribution. The learning curve didn’t stall her. In fact, it fueled her.” To Meg Whitman, the parallel is clear: “I am my mother’s daughter.”

Originally appeared in Elle February, 2010

BY: Amy Wallace

What, you were expecting peace and quiet,muchachas? Cesar Millan may be known as the Dog Whisperer, but in his kitchen on a recent afternoon, there is not a moment of silence. When Millan and his wife, Ilusion, aren’t taking turns bobbling a friend’s baby on their knees or admiring their youngest son’s new braces, they are talking excitedly. Often at the same time.

It’s a Latino thing, Cesar explains: “Everything is so loud.” Ilusion agrees: “I’m naturally a loud person. It can be a bit overpowering. I’m just sharing my feelings, you know?” Her husband, looking trim in a V-neck sage-colored T-shirt and faded jeans, continues, “I feel like I’m regulating the volume of my wife’s intensity. Like—”

“That’s so true,” interjects Ilusion, vibrant in a hot pink sleeveless turtleneck and pants ironed to a sharp crease. “He’s like, ‘Honey, okay, we understand. But there are neighbors!’ ”

Yes, that’s right: When the Dog Whisperer talks to the woman he says domesticated him—call her the Man Whisperer— he’s lucky to get a word in edgewise. “When we’re in a restaurant,” the D.W. says, “and she gets into that, you know, stage, I have to say, ‘I’m right here. Look! I can totally hear you.’ ”

The M.W. nods, smiling. “We’re both very animated,” she says.

“Let me tell the story,” the D.W. says in the same calm, assertive tone that he uses with the unruly dogs on his weekly hit TV show (now in its sixth season on the National Geographic Channel). And at first, the correction seems to take.

“I’m sorry, baby,” the M.W. responds, her voice warm like she means it. A beat later, though, that’s out the window. The M.W. has something she just has to say.

So it goes, for more than two hours: Cesar, 40, and Ilusion, 34, jabbing and parrying, cross-talking, even bickering. What other couples might see as exhausting, however, the Millans, perched side by side on tall stools, treat as a blessing—because there was a time they had trouble communicating at all. Today, more than 10 million viewers a week hear the D.W. repeat, mantralike, that he rehabilitates dogs and trains people. What few know is that before he became the Dog Whisperer, his wife rehabilitated him.

“She gave leadership to the relationship,” the D.W. says, recalling the dark day 15 years ago when Ilusion—fed up with her husband’s harsh indifference—moved out with their infant son.

“He was having a hard time loving me, because of his past, because he just wasn’t a people person,” Ilusion says, leaning forward so her knees almost touch her husband’s. “He was afraid to love anybody.”

“I didn’t do it with humans, that’s all,” Cesar says, matter-of-factly. “I was there in my heart, but my heart was blocked.”

When Cesar was growing up on a farm in Culiacán, Mexico, his affinity for canines earned him the nickname El Perrero, or “the dog man.” It also got him teased. He was that weird kid who related better to animals than to his own species. Plus, he was dirt-poor. So from early on, he believed that people could hurt you, but dogs—never! Determined to become the world’s best dog trainer, Cesar crossed the border illegally at age 21. Arriving in Los Angeles, he washed limousines while trying to build a clientele.

From the moment a 17-year-old Ilusion saw Cesar in a crowded ice rink, she says, “I knew this was the guy for me.” Cesar, then 23 and living in a one-room apartment with six dogs, wasn’t so sure. When a friend told him he could go to jail (and surely be deported) for dating an underage girl, he broke off their fledgling romance. He was blunt, Ilusion says. “I came to the door and pressed the bell, and he said, ‘I can’t see you anymore.’ It killed me.”

But it didn’t deter her. There was something about Cesar’s focus, his drive, that made her feel safe. The day she turned 18, she showed up at his door again, and soon they were inseparable. When, a few months later, she discovered she was pregnant, Cesar immediately proposed. Before their wedding, which he paid for, he washed the limousine they’d ride in himself.

Originally appeared in the New York Times on 10/11/2009

BY: Amy Wallace

IT’S a miracle. That’s what the humans believe, more often than not, after watching this compact, 40-year-old C.E.O. do his work. He enters a room purposefully, his chest thrust forward and a smile on his face. “How can I help?” is his standard introduction, and the way he says it — calmly, assertively — indicates that your problems are about to be solved.

It’s unbelievable. That’s what the humans say when they see what Cesar Millan, the “Dog Whisperer,” can do. And the dogs? To a pooch, they appear to be thinking: “Thank God, help has finally arrived.” To prompt a visit from Mr. Millan, these dogs have exhibited seemingly irrational fears (of motorbikes, toasters, linoleum floors) and strange obsessions (biting rocks, ankles, tractor tires).

Their owners, meanwhile, have told poignant, if at times ludicrous, stories. One couple sought out Mr. Millan after their two pit bulls, hell-bent on killing each other, forced them to live apart. Another hadn’t slept in the same bed for months because their Yorkies wouldn’t allow it.

If you have a television, you may know Mr. Millan from “Dog Whisperer With Cesar Millan,” whose sixth-season premiere was on Friday on the National Geographic Channel, a cable network piped into about 70 million homes. Nearly 11 million Americans tune in each week. You may have stumbled upon his new glossy magazine, Cesar’s Way, or his four books, the latest of which, “How to Raise the Perfect Dog,” went on sale last week. His first three books, all New York Times best sellers, have cumulatively sold two million copies in the United States and are available in 14 other countries.

Partly because he is based in Los Angeles, the epicenter of the entertainment industry, Mr. Millan has become something of a cultural icon, a Latino man who commands respect wherever he goes. He has helped scores of movie stars and moguls — among them alpha dogs like Oprah Winfrey, the actor Will Smith, the former Disney chief Michael D. Eisner and the director Ridley Scott — become pack leaders in the one place they fail to rule: their homes.

No wonder Mr. Millan’s reputation as a fixer — he says he rehabilitates dogs, but trains people — has been immortalized in pop culture. “What is the ‘Dog Whisperer’?” has been a winning answer on “Jeopardy.” An episode of “South Park” featured the mom of Eric Cartman, the spoiled, foul-mouthed brat, hiring Mr. Millan to discipline him. A New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell quoted scientists and dance experts analyzing how Mr. Millan’s bearing instills confidence. The conclusion: his fluid movement communicates authenticity better than words could.

Not bad for a once-poor native of Culiacán, Mexico, who crossed the border illegally 19 years ago with nothing in his pockets. (He became a United States citizen this year.) When he talks about transformation, in other words, he’s living proof that it’s possible.

With his wife, Ilusion, he runs Cesar Millan Inc., the center of a constellation of businesses that coordinates all things Cesar beyond the show, including speaking engagements; executive leadership seminars; a line of organic dog food, fortified water, shampoos and toys that sells at Petco; and the charitable foundation financed by an undisclosed percentage of the company’s revenue.

His Web site, cesarmillaninc.com, grosses annual sales in the mid-seven figures, according to a company spokesman, chiefly from DVDs, books and merchandise like the Illusion Collar, designed by his wife to help control challenging dogs. Nearly 400,000 visitors are on the site monthly. Then there’s his Dog Psychology Center, a 43-acre mecca he calls a “Disneyland for dogs.” Under construction north of here, near where he and his family live, it will be the first of many such centers nationwide, he says.

According to MPH Entertainment, the production company that is Mr. Millan’s partner in all its many offshoots and co-owns the TV show with the producers who discovered him, he will be a $100 million business in a few years. And he says he’s just getting started.

Bankruptcies Jolt a Ski Haven for the Superrich

Jeff Minton

Originally appeared in the New York Times June 14, 2009

BY: Amy Wallace

RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. – Nine days after declaring personal bankruptcy — again — a barefoot Edra Blixseth pads excitedly around Porcupine Creek, her 30,000-square-foot estate here. Guests are coming, probably 125 in all. They’re due any minute. The zipper on her sternum-baring cocktail dress is jammed. Do you think it’s too tight? Can somebody help her?

Porcupine Creek is lavish, with a 240-acre private golf course and a pool guarded by bronze lions. Many visitors have seen all that, plus the automated fountain that splashes at the end of her 1,700-foot driveway.

But so far, only Ms. Blixseth’s good friends have wandered around the private space inside: the prayer room, the gym, the beauty parlor, the wet room, the cozy massage alcoves and the private theater adorned with murals; then there’s the 18th-century French furniture, the Italian stained glass, the bedroom suite from the Vatican, the ancient Tibetan Tankas. Until this day, she has never hosted a charity event inside her home. Given the circumstances, though, it’s the best she can do.

“I can’t write a check this year,” she says, referring to her usual gift to a shelter for battered women. Her Gulfstream IV has been grounded. Her jewelry, mostly sold. To help pay the bills, her boyfriend even had to sell his Bentley.

Edra Denise Blixseth, age 55, is tiny, barely 5 foot 3, but she is at the center of a huge financial mess. According to personal bankruptcy papers her lawyer filed in March, she owes $500 million to $1 billion and has assets of barely half that, almost none of them liquid. Earlier this month, the court approved the sale of one of her most prized possessions — the private ski resort in Big Sky, Mont., known as the Yellowstone Club — to the private equity firm of one of its members for $115 million. Just a year ago, that same buyer, CrossHarbor Capital Partners, had been willing to pay $400 million for the club.

The Yellowstone Club, a 13,600-acre playground 20 miles north of Yellowstone National Park, may be the world’s lone members-only ski resort. Its pristine natural beauty and remote location have attracted wealthy skiers who prize their privacy, including Bill Gates of Microsoft; Barry Sternlicht, the hotelier; and Peter Chernin, president of the News Corporation.

In one of the signature, fin de siècle moments of our passing Gilded Age, the Yellowstone Club filed for Chapter 11 protection last November; four months later, Ms. Blixseth followed suit — a club and its doyenne, sucked into a financial downdraft that has wounded even once-untouchable elites.

Marketed with the phrase “Private Powder,” Yellowstone is the anti-Aspen — luxurious, sure, but discreet and child-friendly. Ask members what makes it so special, and more than one offers this simple fact: There, and nowhere else, the family of the world’s richest man can ski without bodyguards. One club member — who, like many Yellowstone members, requested anonymity so as not to be seen as violating the club’s tradition of not blabbing about one another — recalls Mr. Gates’s saying that his family once tried Vail but their need for security “made us look like jerks. Here, we don’t need it.” That’s because the club has long been kept safe by former Secret Service agents, and who can put a price tag on that?

“Once you ski there, you never want to go anywhere else,” says Burt Sugarman, a Beverly Hills businessman who with his wife, the “Entertainment Tonight” host Mary Hart, was among the club’s first members.

Steve Burke, the chief operating officer of Comcast, has a place at Yellowstone. As do Todd Thomson, the former head of Citigroup’s private banking unit; Robert Greenhill, founder of the investment bank Greenhill & Company; Greg LeMond, a Tour de France winner; Annika Sorenstam, the Swedish golf star; Frank McCourt, the owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers; and about 250 other low-key rich folks.

Membership has its price: a minimum of $250,000 to join, plus the cost of a $5 million to $35 million mountainside home, plus annual dues of about $20,000, according to members.