She built a multimillion-dollar international business empire based on her expertise in the kitchen. She has been praised as one of the nation’s top businesswomen, has appeared on “Oprah,” and has been embroiled in a long-running lawsuit bolstered by high-priced lawyers.
No, she’s not serving time in a West Virginia prison. That would be Martha Stewart. This is Doris Christopher.
Doris who? You may be forgiven for asking. While Stewart rocketed to fame with her diva persona and self-promotional flair, Christopher — an equally successful magnate in the home-cooking arena — has kept an uncommonly low profile. Since 1980, she has quietly built her Addison-based company, The Pampered Chef, from a basement business into a corporation that rakes in annual revenues of more than $700 million.
Indeed, as Chicagoans have followed Stewart’s relentlessly public travails, many probably did not know they had a formidable kitchen guru in their own back yard.
With her gracious manners and tailored navy suit, Christopher, 59, gives the impression of a Midwesterner as solid as the American antiques that she and her husband, Jay, have snagged at fairs such as Sandwich and Kane County. “We’re not particularly into fine, European antiques,” she said, welcoming a guest to sit at the 19th Century oak dining table that serves as her corner office’s conference table. “What we love are the old American pieces, because usually they’re very simple, but solid and durable.”
Much like her company, which sells practical, decidedly unsexy products in peoples’ living rooms — a technique called “direct sales,” pioneered in the 1970s by companies such as Tupperware and Mary Kay. The Pampered Chef party guests can select from more than 270 kitchen tools, including a $1 “Quikut Paring Knife;” a device that quickly peels, cores, and slices apples and potatoes; a dipper that contains a warm liquid to make hard ice cream easier to scoop and multisize “Stainless Steel Scoops” — “great for evenly portioning batter, doughs, fillings and salads,” as described in The Pampered Chef catalog.
“My company sells tools that enable people to get food on the table faster,” said Christopher, a devout Christian whose dainty chin and kind eyes make her a ringer for Aunt Bee from “The Andy Griffith Show.”
But Christopher’s kindly manner belies her mother lion wariness of competitors, and her rise has not been without its rough spots. Over the years, she has been a party in more than one lawsuit, and she has yet to emerge from one that has been in court for more than a decade, on disputes ranging from idea theft to copycat cata-logs. (No insider stock-trading squabbles to date, though.)
Nevertheless, The Pampered Chef’s zero-debt balance sheet so impressed billionaire investor Warren Buffett that in 2002 he bought the firm. Adding it to the stable of successful companies in his holding company, Berkshire-Hathaway, he announced at the time: “We are extremely excited by The Pampered Chef. Doris Christopher” — who stayed put as CEO — “has created from scratch an absolutely wonderful company.”
And to think it began with a Ritz Cracker Mock Apple Pie.
As a high school student in Oak Lawn, Christopher — whose father owned two gas stations — found herself failing a typing class. She promptly dropped the course and transferred into home economics. Assignment No. 1: Whip up a Ritz Cracker Mock Apple Pie. It was love at first bite, and Christopher went on to the University of Illinois, graduating in 1967 with a degree in home economics.
Thirteen years later, she had married her college sweetheart, Jay, and become a full-time mom in River Forest. But as her two children, Julie and Kelley, approached school age, she began looking for a job that would bring in extra money but not encroach on her top priority: mothering her girls and creating a loving, stable home.
For a time, she taught sewing classes and demonstrated appliances at sales events. “None of these jobs gave me the flexibility,” she said, to be a room mother, chaperone her daughters’ field trips, or stay home when they were ill. “I wasn’t in control of my schedule.”
She held the answer, quite literally, in her hands. With her home economics degree, Christopher had an uncommon understanding, she said, “of the value of tools’ worth in the kitchen.” Indeed, whenever the Christophers entertained, her women friends gushed over her professional-grade knives, stoneware baking sheets and other utensils — most of which she bought at the Merchandise Mart, where she was able to shop because of her certification as a home economist.
“They’d say, `Where did you get this pan? Why don’t you pick up one for me next time you’re there?'” Christopher recalled.
That sparked an idea: Why not sell the tools her friends so coveted? And why not do it in peoples’ homes, like Mary Kay and Tupperware, which were flourishing at the time. Nervous about her dearth of business experience, “I immediately dismissed the idea,” Christopher said. But her husband, Jay — who managed franchisers — thought the scheme could work.
“He was very encouraging — and not in the sense of, `Oh, I’ll show you how,'” she said. “He really encouraged me that I could do it. And without that, I don’t think I would have been so bold as to take that step.”
But step she did, right back into the Merchandise Mart. She visited every kitchen-product wholesaler and stocked up on a dozen each of 71 products — everything from a round stone she used for baking cookies to a garlic press. She stored her new inventory on shelves Jay built in the basement.
Tools of the trade
At her first in-home party, or “Kitchen Show,” in October 1980, she demonstrated to a small crowd of friends and neighbors how the tools could make cooking meals easier. “It was revolutionary,” recalled Kathy Anderson, who lived in River Forest and attended one of the first shows. “Back then, you couldn’t get these tools at stores. A self-cleaning garlic press — no one had ever heard of that. I used to take a toothpick to clean mine.”
The party netted Christopher $175 worth of orders and bookings for four more parties at the homes of other women, who received a free product or discounts for acting as a “host.” “She got you through your stomach,” Anderson said. “She cooked, demonstrated the products, it smelled wonderful — I knew [the company] would be successful.”
Successful enough to make Christopher a future regular on Working Woman’s list of America’s most successful businesswomen? The signs loomed: By the spring of 1981, the Kitchen Shows were in such demand that Christopher began recruiting others to sell her wares.
Dubbed “Kitchen Consultants,” they earned a percentage of sales from each show and discounts on products. More than 20 years later some 71,000 Kitchen Consultants work in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain and Germany, putting on a million Kitchen Shows a year. The company’s products may lack the sex appeal — and high price — of, say, Sur de Table’s $80 pepper mill, a veritable objet d’art of wood and stainless steel, reproduced from an 1879 design. But The Pampered Chef’s accounting books indicate that for many women, plain-Jane products — such as its top-selling, $28 plastic manual food chopper — are just as appealing for their function and low price.
Christopher’s success is partly due to the care and feeding she provides her Kitchen Consultants, who work as independent contractors and are, in effect, The Pampered Chef’s sales force.
Many are mothers who, like Christopher, yearned to stay home with their children. Laura Teele, a Schaumburg mother of two, is typical. “In today’s age, you just need two incomes,” she said. “I was sadly resigned to that.”
After Teele and her husband, a database administrator, had their first child in 1995, she forged on at her 40-hour-a-week job as an administrative assistant. “[After a year] I said, `I cannot do this anymore,'” Teele recalled. “`I want to stay home with my son.'”
In July 1997, Teele took the steps to become a Kitchen Consultant. She lined up six friends to host Kitchen Shows and sent in her $90 check; the company sent back a training kit with $350 worth of demonstration products and sales forms, and a training videotape on conducting a successful show.
At her first Kitchen Show, Teele grossed $610 in sales. Because of her commission structure, which varies based on past sales revenues, she took home 30 percent, or $183. Plus, four guests at the party booked her for future shows. “After a couple months, I realized that this could work for me — that if I worked one night a week, I could make $300 to $400 a month,” she recalled. The extra income enabled Teele, who was pregnant again, to buy a mini-van for her growing family.
Last year, Teele made $27,000 working two nights a week. “My income isn’t as much as when I was working,” she said, “but I’m not driving an hour to work, and I don’t have to wear high heels and nylons!”
On a cloudless afternoon at The Pampered Chef’s sprawling headquarters, sun shone through soaring glass walls into the visitors’ waiting area. Nearby, display cases created a small museum that included early “dud” products such as a fly swatter with an attached bin into which the dead bug could be swept. “That was my dad’s idea,” said Christopher’s daughter Julie, the company’s spokesperson, rolling her eyes.
Cooking up a hit
Down the hall, the company’s four test kitchens buzzed with specialists experimenting with a brownie recipe. The sweet smell of chocolate infused the kitchens, which are the engine of the company: 18 home economists, chefs and dieticians scurry among 12 ovens, 8 microwave ovens, 13 dishwashers and 6 refrigerators, developing some 35 new products for the new fall catalog. The new products include everything from a “Kid’s Cookie Making Set” with measuring cups and laminated recipe cards to the “Jar Opener,” a device designed to replace husbands for freeing those too-tight container tops.
Upstairs in her office, Christopher looked forward to a future in which she’ll slowly step back from closely managing the company. With The Pampered Chef safely under the wing of Berkshire Hathaway, she said she’ll spend more time with her husband at their country home in Wisconsin and casita at Canyon Ranch Spa in Tucson, Ariz.
She’ll also continue to pursue her passion for strengthening families. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, ground has broken on a building that will house the Family Resiliency Program, a university-run program studying what makes for healthy families. Not surprising, the Christophers and The Pampered Chef have combined to fund the building’s construction and, for five years, the cost of the programs.
“Clearly my belief is that one of the things that is important for families is to sit down and have mealtimes together,” she said. “And I think that’s something we’re losing because of all the hustle and bustle. So for us to be aligned with a program that is looking at how to make families strong, it’s just a natural extension of who we are as a company.”
