About Lucinda Yates -- Changing the World, One Pin at a Time:

It takes courage to tell your story when that story involves difficult circumstances. Those who share such stories are, in my opinion, the bravest of the bunch. Lucinda Yates is one of these women.

"I made some pretty big mistakes in the 80s," Lucinda says. "It was not only my responsibility to own up to those mistakes but to find a way to better myself.” In establishing a multimillion dollar company, Lucinda Yates has certainly made a change for the better.

Following a divorce and a financial setback, Lucinda found herself homeless. "I sold all of my belongings and moved into my van. I thought it would be a short period of time before I was able to establish myself and find a place that my daughter could call home. In the end, this period of time lasted two very long years."

Eventually, Lucinda found a part-time job as a waitress. While she was able to make enough money to buy food, she also discovered what would turn out to be her passion: making jewellery. She learned the craft of making jewelry during the time she spent with other homeless people.

On her way to work one day, she experienced her Eureka moment. “I was walking past a frame shop when I spotted all sorts of scrap matte board in a trash can,” Yates recalls. “I took the discarded boards and started cutting them into elementary shapes. I put a rectangle over a square, and it looked just like a house to me. I heard this voice go off inside my head , saying, Wouldn’t this make a great fundraiser for the homeless?’”

She designed a set of "house pins" in her cramped attic, and sold them to a homeless shelter for $6 each. The shelter, in turn, sold them for $10 to raise funds for their operations. One fundraising project led to another and, within its first year, her new business grossed $89,000. “The next year,” she says, “I grossed $300,000--then $1.4 million, then $2.6 million. I had challenges beyond my wildest imagination. I had no experience running a company. I had never dealt with payroll or staffing issues. However, I realized that running a business wasn’t that different from running your life."

To date, Designs By Lucinda has sold over four million pins and has grossed over $24 million dollars. She has helped over 6,000 non-profits throughout the world raise awareness as well as funding.
“I sometimes wonder, if I hadn’t been homeless, would I have been looking in the trash can?” she says. “Would I have found such profound inspiration somewhere else?”

Her company now employs over 50 people, many of them women. Working Mother Magazine has named Designs By Lucinda one of the 25 best companies in the United States, and it's no wonder. As Lucinda puts it, "They go home at night knowing that what they did all day has gone to help somebody else out in the world." The motto: "Changing the world, one pin at a time".

Not only is Lucinda changing the world with her business, she is also a national public speaker. "We don't focus enough on connecting with ourselves," she says. Lucinda encourages her audience to "imagine your best self." She offers some key wisdom: "If you can't imagine yourself someplace else, guess where you're going to be? Right where you are."

You can find more information on Lucinda's company here:

Designs By Lucinda

News items on Lucinda can be found here:

New England Cable News

Maine Women's Journal - Out of the Box

Designs by Lucinda Pin

© Copyright 2007 Lia Grimanis all rights reserved