www.andover.edu/intouch
The Class of 1990 had its own distinctive look at reunion. Dan Lennon manned one side of the banner for his class.
www.miniruby.com. Mini Ruby offers high-end contemporary children’s wear, featuring a wider selection than found in a typical brick-and-mortar children’s boutique. A busy mom, Susie came up with the Mini Ruby concept after spending precious hours scouring the Internet for unique styles for her two preschool-age daughters. Mini Ruby is Susie’s return to the working world after leaving a 12-year investment-banking career behind for adventures in motherhood. The transition to entrepreneurship has been tough but rewarding, and Susie is currently working toward doubling her selection and inventory for the back-to-school season. Hearing of Susie’s new venture reminded me to check in with a few other classmates who have taken the entrepreneurial plunge. Back in 2013, I mentioned Todd Lubin had started his own production company, Matador, after years of working on such reality TV hits as The Biggest Loser. Two years later, Matador has launched multiple series on seven networks, making enough waves that Todd and his partner are on The Hollywood Reporter’s Reality TV Power List for 2015. Matador’s latest show is the number-one hit Lip Sync Battle on cable network Spike TV. The show, hosted by LL Cool J, features celebrity guests such as Queen Latifah, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and Anne Hathaway lip-syncing with props, costumes, and backup singers/dancers. It originated as a recurring segment on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and has already been renewed for a second season. Not too long ago, Justin Lattanzio wrote in from the Sonoma wine region of California, where he is a winemaker. I asked Justin how he ended up in the wine business, and he wrote, “I became obsessed with wine and wine country while living in San Francisco back in the late ’90s. I used to drive up to Sonoma/Napa by myself on weekends to go wine tasting and just explore the area. In 2003, after about six years living and working in SF, I decided to quit my biotech job and move up to Sonoma.” That fall, Justin did the grunt work in the
Sharing smiles at their 25th Reunion were Gregory Djerejian, Andreas Buchanan, and Brian Bradford, all Class of ’90.
cellar during harvest. After a few years of “working hard, asking a lot of questions, and taking a lot of notes…I scraped some money together to buy a few French oak barrels and about two tons of pinot noir grapes. We made about 75 cases of Russian River Valley pinot noir for Lattanzio Wines [www. lattanziowines.com] in our first vintage. We’ve grown production a bit over the years but are still a micro producer, crafting about 700 cases per year.” If leaving a comfortable job in biotech to become a cellar hand sounds a bit daft, Justin’s parents “thought I was nuts,” he says, but they supported him nonetheless. “I wasn’t anxious at all. I had this very strange but comforting feeling that all of the pieces of the puzzle would come together... and they did!” At the time, Justin was 30 years old and had “no wife, no mortgage, no kids…it was now or never!” Mike Bor, on the other hand, decided the stakes weren’t high enough without them, so he waited until 2011 when he had the wife, the mortgage, and three kids to start CarLotz, a new kind of used car marketplace where private sellers are matched with buyers conveniently and transparently, instead of selling at a discount to a dealer or having to resort to Craigslist. Mike was a successful investment banker, opening offices for his firm in London, India, and East Asia, but in the back of his mind he had always known he wanted to be his own boss. During his many business trips, Mike would jot down ideas in a notebook and force himself to flesh them out over at least a few pages. Finally, he hit upon an idea that seemed to have legs: Shopping for another car for his growing family was like getting root canal, and Mike believed he could fix that. Four years later, CarLotz has six locations, and Mike and his partners are preparing to take it nationwide. CarLotz has also been nominated for this year’s Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award! Mike and his family have had to adjust their lifestyle, but he is much happier and actually more present in the lives of his three boys and wife Katherine. I asked Mike if he ever has doubts. “You
mean like when I wake up every other morning at 3 a.m.?” he asked. Those moments of anxiety are always pushed aside, though, when Mike and his family drive by a CarLotz. His boys can see and touch what Dad does for a living, and welcome him home for dinner every night.
1993 Susannah Smoot Campbell 301-257-9728 Susannah.s.campbell@gmail.com Jen Charat 619-857-6525 jcharat@yahoo.com Ted Gesing 917-282-4210 tedgesing@gmail.com Hilary Koob-Sassen +44 7973775369 hksassen@hotmail.com
We are 40! Or getting there, or over it by now, thank you very much. High school is a distant memory. So is college, for that matter. We notice that we’re less flexible, slower to heal, starting to forget words... OK, this is all just my feeling old. While I tackled 40 with the curmudgeonly charm of Diogenes in his ceramic tub, I hope that you, dear readers, blew out the occasion with the gala festivities it deserves. Perhaps because you were so consumed with your midlife birthday parties, you didn’t send us much news this time around. Here’s what I got. And keep in mind that it’s mid-May when I write this, so apologies for strange amalgams of future and past tenses. Susannah Smoot Campbell gathered a couple of updates: Ramona Gittens Morgan was expecting her second child this summer. Andover | Fall 2015
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