When was eileen fisher born

Fisher defended her simple clothing by saying that since she was an uncomfortable individual, she wanted comfortable outfits. The designer never did fancy parties, product launches or runway shows. She thinks that if the product is made right then money will follow and there remains hardly any need to go public. Eileen Fisher has two kids, Sasha and Zack. When Zack was born, it was a hard job to manage the growing business. Balancing work with family was tough for the designer.

It also made it easier to issue the petite line introduced in the fall of and the large-size line added in the fall of When its founder, who promoted from within and knew everybody by name, decided to move to the suburbs, she selected a site convenient to public transportation.

The company paid for the commute, and only a few staffers quit. Employees received 10 percent of the profits in the form of year-end cash bonuses. When a fabrics cutter developed carpal tunnel syndrome, the boss paid for physical therapy out of her own pocket because the firm's health-insurance plan did not cover it.

Fisher also encouraged community involvement. Even some employees who continued to live in Manhattan joined the Irvington volunteer ambulance corps, interrupting work to go out on calls. The company donated 3 percent of its pretax profits to charitable organizations, many of them based in Westchester County. Fisher herself promoted the county as a desirable business location in television commercials. Eileen Fisher hired a manager of social accountability in to address human-rights issues in the factories of its suppliers, including the ten plants in south China.

The company committed itself to meeting the guidelines developed by Social Accountability International for child labor, compensation, working hours, and health and safety. Fisher offered aid to her suppliers in meeting the SAI's certification standards. During the fall of Eileen Fisher introduced a limited line of gift-oriented menswear in the form of a Merino wool polo shirt and a silk herringbone classic shirt.

For the spring season it unveiled a higher-priced "bridge" line--the name given in the industry for goods priced just below designer level--featuring sweaters, sweater dresses, and jackets in doubleface wools from Italy, cashmeres, and silks, with a color emphasis on berry, burgundy, and purple. At the same time Eileen Fisher introduced a more structured knitwear look for the standard line.

You can pack five knitwear pieces in a suitcase, and you don't have to worry about them wrinkling. In an article published in the Toronto Star on the first day of , Fisher offered some style tips for the women her company typically served. She said that for relaxing at-home wear she started with a pair of slim pants with stretch fibers, almost always in black.

Then, she said, she usually added a turtleneck sweater on top. She recommended soft merino wool because it is not "itchy" and lets the skin breathe. Along with being generous to its own employees, the company tries to help the workers in the Chinese factories where most of the Eileen Fisher clothes are now made; there is a director of social consciousness, who oversees the inspection of those factories.

In addition, there is a director of sustainability, who is in charge of environmental exemplariness. The company tries to be as green as it can without losing its shirt.

For example, fifty per cent of the cotton it uses comes from organic farms that do not use pesticides, and dyes that are not toxic are preferred if not always insisted on. However, when Susan Schor arrived at the company, in , it was slipping away from Eileen. In , she had married David Zwiebel, who owned two dress shops in upstate New York and was one of the early buyers of Eileen Fisher designs.

After they married, Zwiebel joined Eileen at the company. Before the opening of the Madison Avenue shop, department stores had hesitated to take Eileen Fisher designs; now they saw the point of doing so. In the late nineties, the marriage ended, and Zwiebel left the company. It sort of reminded me of that situation with the Japanese boyfriend. Why do we repeat the same things? Deadlines were more important than the process that led to the deadlines.

Schor is a handsome, vivacious, articulate woman of sixty-seven. Schor was wearing Eileen Fisher clothes. Where the male C. Old, Rowe, and I followed her into a spacious room with a kitchen at one end and beige sofas and armchairs and side tables with books and magazines and attractive objects on them at the other. Two cats curled up on cushions completed the picture of pleasing domestic comfort. I noticed a third cat on the outside of one of the French doors that lined a wall—standing on its hind legs, its paws eagerly pressed against the glass—and asked if I should let him in.

She explained that this cat was never let into the house. He was the bad cat. He had once lived in the house with the other cats, but he had fought with the second male cat and peed all over the floor and when the housekeeper threatened to quit he was expelled from the house and now lived outdoors.

He was begging not to come in from the cold, Eileen said, but to be fed. A meeting was going on in the room where we had eaten, and I was led to an upstairs room, lined with racks of Eileen Fisher clothes, all in gray, black, and white. Eileen, again, looked beautiful and elegant in a black ensemble of trousers and scoop-neck sweater. She has gone to China and to meetings of the Clinton Global Initiative. In the studio, she spoke of another influence on her design that had almost the significance of the Japanese one: her Catholic-school uniform.

The school experience itself had been less edifying. It was always risky to speak at school. There was yelling. They would humiliate you and embarrass you. Eileen asked if I would like to drop in on the meeting downstairs. In the lunchroom, the long table had been pushed against a wall, and ten or twelve women wearing Eileen Fisher clothes were sitting on chairs arranged in a circle. They spoke in the same coded language that Eileen and Old fell into when they talked about the company.

What were they talking about? The meeting ended when an elegant older woman held up two bronze bells connected by a cord and rang them. Then an object, a sort of gilded gourd, was passed from hand to hand. Each woman said something as she received it.

The book proposes that organizations conduct their business in circles. You sit around in a circle. This eliminates hierarchies. Everyone is equal. Back upstairs, I asked two questions I had been somewhat nervously planning to ask. The first—yes, you guessed it—was about the cat. In the weeks between my visits to Irvington, there had been a spell of exceptionally icy, windy weather, and I had thought of him miserably huddled under the house in the low temperatures.

Had she relented and let him in? No, there had been no reason to do so. It was painful. Every time it would snow or rain I would feel terrible. One freezing-cold day, I thought, Oh, my poor cat, and picked him up.

On another freezing day, I let him into a stone entryway. I thought I would just let him be there, and he kind of walked around a bit and then he stood by the door so that I would let him back out. I asked my second question: Why were Old and Rowe present during my interviews with Eileen? I found myself babbling about the ethical dilemmas of journalism, about the risk subjects take when they let journalists into their houses and the pangs journalists feel when they write their betraying narratives, and saw Eileen and her colleagues looking at me—as I had looked at them when they talked about their company—as if I were saying something weird.

Biography Lists News Also Viewed. Eileen Fisher. The basics. The details from wikipedia. Biography Fisher grew up in Des Plaines, Illinois, the second of seven children.