The Pampered Chef: The Story of One of America’s Most Beloved Companies: Doris Christopher
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Christopher’s multimillion-dollar kitchen tools company, the Pampered Chef, was recently acquired by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway; her book documents how she turned a $3,000 initial investment into a thriving direct sales business that today employs tens of thousands. After a perfunctory foreword by Buffett, the book progresses more or less chronologically from Christopher’s initial idea in 1980 (to sell high quality tools by way of TV infomercials), through her business development and hiring her first employees, to her quick expansion into a large international company. Along the way, Christopher shares the lessons learned from her business, including tips on starting up, handling organizational growing pains, customer service advice and wisdom on how to treat employees. Yet while Christopher’s guidance is useful to aspiring entrepreneurs, her business advice is fairly basic, and written in a tone that is modest to a fault. Despite her tremendous business success, Christopher continuously downplays her own drive in favor of the assertion that her only desire was to put her kids through college and help her family. For those with other motivations, it will quickly become tiresome. (July)
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From Booklist
Starting from her basement, underchallenged housewife Doris Christopher built a billion-dollar business over a quarter of a century selling kitchen tools. So successful was Christopher’s enterprise that she eventually sold it to megacapitalist Warren Buffett. In this autobiography, Christopher describes her business’ humble beginnings and offers a road map for other entrepreneurs seeking to emulate her achievement. Christopher’s accomplishment relies on an army of “kitchen consultants” who demonstrate their wares to groups of potential customers in a pattern similar to that used by Mary Kay Cosmetics. This direct-sales approach creates company loyalties that sustain business for the long term. In chatty prose, Christopher describes how she helped her business grow and how she learned at each step to delegate duties, solve problems, keep employees motivated, and to make customers happy. She identifies crucial times of change and tells how she worked with her husband to overcome problems with suppliers whose vision fell short of her own prescience. Mark Knoblauch
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