Self-Rising Survivor
The president and cofounder of Boston-based Dancing Deer Baking Company, Trish Karter '77, is tugging at the collar points of her blouse, oblivious to the fumes of molasses, vanilla and cocoa spiraling up from the baking ovens on the floor below. I, on the other hand, find the aromas hopelessly distracting. The close proximity of the unwrapped Chocolate Espresso cake and an open sleeve of Dancing Deer's award-winning Molasses Clove cookies is especially seductive.
But Karter (pictured at right in photo)--celebrating her 25th Wheaton reunion in May [2002] with the college bestowing an honorary degree--stays focused on the question at hand. Just how did this stubborn high school half-miler with a passion for painting become president of a nationally celebrated all-natural bakery? How did she go from "cartwheeling across life" to shouldering the responsibility for a fast-growing company with 30-plus employees, over $3 million dollars in annual sales, while navigating the wake of a difficult personal and business divorce from her two co-founding partners, husband Ayis Antoniou and baker Suzanne Lombardi?
"I never expected this to happen," she said. "I expected to stay home with my two kids, renovate our beautiful farmhouse in Milton, and paint full time. At first, Dancing Deer was a sort of hobby business, launched by my husband, a strategic business consultant and a classic foodie, and Suzanne, a talented baker with wonderful recipes. Ayis and I put up the capital, but the two of them started the company, and I was involved in a very part-time way. Within a year, business began to soar."
The story could be mistaken for a standard variant of the "woman who falls into success" genre, but Karter is anything but hapless. Behind her words lie the stamina of a distance runner and the creative capabilities of a driven entrepreneur.
As a teenager in Old Lyme, Conn., Karter discovered that she was a born runner. "I just loved to run, and I was stubborn." It was the time before Title IX mandated that schools give equal weight to women's sports, so Karter ran with the boys. The coach, who Karter graciously describes as "a Neanderthal," assigned Karter the half-mile because it was the shortest event in which more than one runner could compete, and it didn't force him to choose between starting Karter and starting one of the boys.
"It wasn't such a big deal really, being the only girl on the team," she remembers. "But it was a curiosity, especially when we competed against other schools. During my entire high school career, I never lost a race. I didn't see myself as a ground- breaker; I just was chasing my own dreams."
When her coach forgot to send in her qualifying papers for the all-state girl's track meet, Karter was undone. "I didn't even know how to protest." In a broader sense, she also had exhausted the resources of the small school and was bored. Midway through the school year, Karter announced that she wasn't going back to high school. She was 16 and determined. Her parents were bewildered.
Elizabeth "Bunt" Whitman Karter '45, Trish's mother, quickly got into gear. Wheaton, where older daughter Jean Karter Gulliver '74 was enrolled, surfaced as an option, so Bunt negotiated a deal; if Trish agreed to finish the school year, she could go to Wheaton in the fall if she earned admission and a scholarship. She did.
"I thought I would be an artist," Karter said of her plan to spend her days at Wheaton perfecting her technique in the studio. She was surprised that she didn't fit in the artsy crowd. "I felt out of place. I had loved drawing from nature, and the preoccupation of those days was about abstraction, new materials and politics. More importantly, I was sure that I wasn't a genius and thought I had to be."
She instead declared a major in art history with a minor in ancient Greek. As a junior, she was offered the Jean McMorran Demos scholarship to study classics in Greece. "And off I went to Athens. I learned that the world was a big and wonderful place, and along the way I lost my interest in a future as a professor of art history. There seemed to be so much more to do in the modern world."
Karter came back from her year abroad to finish up at Wheaton, but stayed only one semester. Her idyllic re-entry was marred by the news that her father's company was in bankruptcy. Once again, she left school and went home to join him in his recycling business. They worked together 16 hours a day to turn it around. "I can still remember how we would drive around on these little secondary roads in his old Datsun just to avoid paying the twenty-five-cent tolls on the Connecticut Turnpike. It was a desperate time, but I believed in my father's vision. He was such a hero for me. He was optimistic beyond all reason."
In the end, her father's optimism paid off. Peter Karter became the dean of modern recycling, an early advocate of the now-familiar concept of the curbside boxes and collection channels that seem as normal a part of housekeeping as bringing in the morning paper.
In the process of saving the business, Karter learned much about the industry and, at the weathered age of 21, was recruited as a lobbyist by the glass industry. She was off to Washington and around the country giving speeches and lobbying Congress and governors. "I believed in what I was saying, and I had developed substantial credentials as an environmentalist. Then I realized that the industry didn't really believe what I was saying and they were just using me to fight mandatory deposit laws."
One of the speeches Karter gave during that time was to a convention of Coca-Cola bottlers. As a result Coca-Cola recruited her to implement deposit initiatives in states where the legislative battle had been lost. "It was incredible to me. I was a kid. I had no corporate business experience, no MBA, and I was speaking to the upper echelons of Coca-Cola." Karter discovered that the Iowa market--dominated by Pepsi--was a disaster for Coca-Cola. She suggested to regional managers that the local Coke bottlers in Iowa use the bottle bill as a marketing opportunity to reintroduce Coke and improve trade and consumer relations by being proactive in implementing the law.
"I might as well have been at the Vatican suggesting that I had a better idea for a religion than the Catholic Church," Karter remembered. "Coke didn't see itself as a brand that had to be reintroduced. It was pretty revolutionary, but it was also perceptive."
The powers that be thought it was perceptive, too. They listened to the young upstart from Connecticut, and picked up significant market share in the process. "They were blown away, but I hadn't really done anything; it all boiled down to bottling one more case of soda pop. I was ready to move on."
Karter's next stop was the Yale School of Management, where she earned a master's in public and private management, in 1982. There she met Ayis Antoniou, a Greek-born physicist, and married him at age 24. The two were married for 20 years. She returned to the corporate world, working in satellite television, commercial real estate development and consulting. "I had an interesting career," she said, " but I knew I wasn't doing the thing that would make my heart sing."
Karter stumbled back into art--once her great love--in the mid-'80s in a search for more meaning in her life. In 1990 she became a full-time painter, raising her two children, Eleanna and Dimitri, and winning commissions. "When I was younger, I left art because I didn't see myself as a success in it. Years later I returned just to find the pleasure I had once known in the act of drawing and the satisfaction of creating something of beauty. I very reluctantly let go of a successful business career with no expectation of conventional success in art." Letting go of her comfortable MBA identity was a process of getting to know herself.
While renovating the family farmhouse in Milton, Karter and her husband met a housepainter whose wife--Suzanne Lombardi--was baking out of a rented kitchen facility at night. In 1994 the couple decided to back her and Dancing Deer was founded. Karter came on board in 1995 only to "help out" for a few months, as the business had outgrown itself. She had every intention of returning to the studio after putting some systems and people in place.
"The first day I went to work at the bakery, I left an unfinished portrait on my easel. It's still there," Karter muses.
Karter and Lombardi formed an incredibly productive and creative operating team and the "temporary help" turned into years of building the business together side by side, with Antoniou contributing financial and strategic know-how in his spare time. Dancing Deer thrived, achieving staggering benchmarks. It made strategic decisions to eschew the unbranded food service business and concentrate on wholesaling packaged baked goods to retailers and catalogues. Business grew, with revenues escalating from the hundreds of thousands to the millions.
Dancing Deer had become an institution, with major accounts at influential retail outlets, and prominence in the Williams-Sonoma catalogue. "We had style, we had visibility, and we had great packaging. The press loved us," Karter explains. Within just a few years, Dancing Deer became a real company, with support from the city of Boston to help them build a state-of-the-art plant in Roxbury and provide much-needed jobs. Their reputation was sealed in 1999 when their Molasses Clove cookie took top honors at the annual Fancy Food Show--the food industry's equivalent of the Oscars--in New York. Many other awards for product, design and business practices followed. The three founders were flying high.
However, Karter's personal life at the time was failing. Her marriage was unhappy and untangling. The personal and professional intersections proved to be excruciating. Such a scenario would kill most small business. Nothing unfolded in a way that Karter had predicted. The losses were big; it turned out to be a double divorce.
"I wasn't ready to move on in my life until I was ready to let go of all the things that I might lose, but I never dreamed I would lose Suzanne. She was a wonderful partner and I loved working with her. Divorce is a strange and difficult beast." Somehow Karter managed to put her feet on the ground every morning and make sure the cookies got out the door and her children were safe and happy. The same optimism that likely kept her in a marriage too long also enabled her to make the best of each day.
Karter eventually restructured the company, bringing in new investors and a new operating partner.
Since 2000 she has been running the show at Dancing Deer with long-developed skill and rugged determination. Her company has survived, sales are skyrocketing, her employees are loyal and happy, and, most important, her children are growing up and prospering. "Right now, my life is my kids and work. Back and forth, that's pretty much it. I am exhausted, but both sides are hugely rewarding.
"I stayed upright," Karter said as she looked back on the process. "I never did anything that I ethically regret and I am proud of myself for that. My parents are very proud, too. That matters. Maybe someday I will have a studio again. I have stolen away just a few times in the last several years to catch a sunrise with my paint box. I have never met a sunrise that wasn't wonderful."
Louisa Kasdon Sidell is a Boston-based freelance writer. Her last piece for the Quarterly featured physician and researcher Mary Ellen Avery '48.
