Please pardon me for going all the way back to 1974, but thatÍs when the seed for Moving Comfort got planted. It was the year of my radical transformation from Smoker to Athlete. This was one year after I graduated from college. I was seeing the doctor for a bad cold for the second time in six months. He suggested simply that I cut back on smoking for a few days. If heÍd lectured me about quitting the habit, my anti-authoritarian tendencies might have driven me in a different direction. Instead I walked out of his office and called my older brother to declare that I was quitting smoking and wanted to start running with him.

Harry had the decency not to make fun of me or to doubt my commitment. He invited me to meet him at the local Y where he was running indoors on a tiny track suspended above the basketball court. 22 laps to the mile.

I suffered with tender, sore ankles for weeks as I fervently jogged every day on the carpeted track with its steeply banked turns. My ankles might have hurt, but, boy, was I feeling smug. Now I was AN ATHLETE. I was not a SMOKER. I was obsessed is what I was.

In 1974 I was 23-years old and in my first post-college job as the Girl Friday in the Philadelphia BulletinÍs Washington bureau. My boss was the BulletinÍs White House correspondent. This was when Richard Nixon was being invited to take early retirement, and we were getting all the news first and fresh.

In late 1974 I unsuspectingly followed international headlines when I took a job as director of public relations at Georgetown UniversityÍs Kennedy Institute, a think tank on biomedical ethics. It was during my year and a half there that Karen Ann QuinlanÍs irreversible coma sparked passionate debate about the right to die.

I left that job in 1976 to become a volunteer in the Carter presidential campaign. He won and I moved on to what would be the last job I would have to dress up for in the office of Congressional Relations at the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development.

By this time I was running 70 miles a week. Many of those miles happened during my lunch break.

A fellow HUD staffer and marathoner introduced me to janitors who were kind enough to let me shower in their locker room. (This was many years before the agency got its full-fledged fitness center.) By this time, I was truly possessed. And I was getting increasingly irritated that this job was interfering with my marathon training. I was all of 26 years old.

In the meantime, over many, many miles of training runs, my friend Valerie Nye and I fantasized about other ways we could earn a living. At other times our subject was running shoes. Or running clothes.

Any new product or tactic that might help our performance was worth spending many miles talking about.

It didnÍt immediately occur to us that the fit problems we had with the clothes had to do with who they were being made for. We "knew" for sure that if we were skinnier, the clothes would work. When the light finally went on, we realized that it wasnÍt our bodies at fault---the clothes were made for skinny men. With the convergence of three key elements, a business was born:
1) We pretty much hated our jobs.
2) We loved running.
3) No one else was bothering to make running clothes for women... So, we did.

First we had to attend to the all-important part of starting a business: Choosing a name. That decision ate up a lot of miles. We werenÍt exactly famous, so our own names werenÍt going to sell product. I hit on Moving, Incorporated. Valerie suggested we replace ïIncorporatedÍ with ïComfortÍ. And in true collaborative style, we had our name. A name that did nothing more than describe what the clothes were supposed to do.

On March 13, 1977, Valerie and I put $75 down on a Singer sewing machine and began taking custom orders from friends in the running community.

Welcome to our life on the lunatic fringe. We had no business plan. Not even unwritten, short term strategy. And no capital. But we were lightening-rod quick in reacting. I wrote an article for the May 1977 issue of a newly launched magazine called Running Times. The Publisher offered us ad space instead of money, so Valerie & I slapped together a statement about our little business.

Within several weeks of the May issueÍs release, we got letters from five retailers requesting our catalog. I wrote back immediately and told them what would quickly become the truth: The "catalog" was in production and would be sent immediately upon completion. Valerie did some quick drawings of products we could make if we got orders for them. We did get orders. We were the only company making womenÍs running clothes. What choice did a retailer have? Running stores were popping up all over the country with names like The Human Race, Marathon Sports, Track Shack, Foot Works and Fleet Feet.

They were owned by business people just like us: Running demons determined to spend all our waking hours absorbed in the sport.

By the summer of 1977, our direction was established: Our distribution would be through specialty retailers.

By the Fall of 1977, my business partnership with Valerie dissolved. You may recall that I said earlier that Valerie and I were fantasizing about ways to earn a living. Well, we werenÍt earning a living. We paid ourselves nothing, as a matter of fact. This was not an acceptable situation for Valerie. I was blithely content working and working out and not much else. I had some savings and a small inheritance to keep me going. Valerie, on the other hand, had a husband and young son--and Moving Comfort living in their apartment.

So Moving Comfort and I had to move out. But first I had to have a 24-hour nervous breakdown.

The next day, I traded in my efficiency apartment in Arlington for a one-bedroom unit in the same building and gave Moving Comfort the bedroom.

Skipping all the ridiculous details about me with no garment construction knowledge trying to work with a home sewer to refine patterns, IÍll tell you about meeting my current business partner Elizabeth Goeke. Elizabeth was working as an apprentice tailor at the now defunct Woodward & Lothrup Dept. Store and was dating Paul, a man I had dated several years earlier. Paul gave her a pair of Moving Comfort shorts for her birthday.

They didnÍt fit very well, so she returned them to Racquet & Jog for a pair of Adidas shorts. On a double date with my younger brother & his girlfriend, Elizabeth offered her critical opinion on the shorts: They didnÍt fit very well.

With encouragement from my brother, she said sheÍd be happy to give me some help if I wanted it. I called her within minutes of hearing her offer.

By March 1978, after six months working weekends and evenings, running together to wear test patterns, and getting the final product into relatively mass production at a tiny new sewing factory in South Carolina, Elizabeth quit her job and joined me full time as an equal partner in the business. And our wonderful partnership continues. Which is now an enduring partnership of three: My cousin Andy Novins joined us in 1982. He was a CPA and a banker who initially served as our consultant to automate our accounting systems. We quickly appreciated how much we needed his expertise in-house. He thought it could be an exciting challenge. So he and his family moved from New York to Washington.

Moving Comfort grew rapidly along with the running boom. By our third year we had over $1 million in sales. With the frenzied demand came the suppliers. By 1983, there was waaaay too much supply. Many companies that were strong competitors in the early 80Ís arenÍt here today: International Sports, Another Dimension, Women on the Run, Pantera, and MarathonHer/Sir. And the Frank Shorter and Bill Rodgers brands have changed hands and scope a few times.

We faced a market flooded with closeout product, making it nearly impossible to sell product at a survivable margin. We were on the verge of bankruptcy for several years.

I can speak for all three of us partners when I report that it was the most frightening, tense, miserable period of our lives. Through attrition (abandoning a certain-to-sink ship was more like it), our staff went from 21 people to 10. That cut our overhead significantly. We stopped spending any money on advertising. We re-negotiated with our bank on key terms & conditions of our loan. We dropped our office cleaning service and cleaned the toilets ourselves. The truth is we didnÍt know how to go out of business, so we didnÍt. We returned to profitability in 1986.

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