Book excerpt: "Influence: How Women's Soaring Economic Power Will Transform Our World for the Better"

As college basketball players at Yale in 1981, Missy Park and her teammates had to wear men’s basketball shoes and uniforms. Even though girls and women had flooded into this arena since the passage of Title Nine in 1972, a federal statute guaranteeing girls and boys equal access to sports, the companies that made athletic wear hadn’t caught on.

High-performance sports clothes for women athletes didn’t exist. “I was lucky my feet were a women’s size ten. That’s a size they offer in men’s shoes,” Park says. Another teammate wasn’t so fortunate. She had to scour the boys’ department to find the right fit. Grumbling to one another, the players vowed to change things some day. “We all said we wanted to graduate and create the women’s Nike,” Park recalls. After college, she moved to Berkeley and worked for outdoor gear company the North Face, and then Gary Fisher Mountain Bicycles. But even in the heart of Northern California’s active outdoor culture, Missy couldn’t find workout clothes she loved, so in 1990, at age twenty-six, she launched Title Nine, a catalog company selling attractive, functional athletic wear for girls and women.

“I just saw this hole in the market place. Not because I did a lot of market research, but because I was there at the start of this,” she recalls. She dug into her savings, bought a two- line phone from RadioShack, put up a merchandise rack in her garage, and started talking to apparel makers. As a tiny start- up, she had a hard time convincing big suppliers to ship merchandise to her. One company asked her to fill out a credit application. “I didn’t even have a credit card,” she recalls.

But she soon found a handful of suppliers who had no choice but to deal with Title Nine—like- minded women who were launching women’s sports lines, like Jogbra. “They were on the leading edge and were looking for people who got it,” Park says. “They were still trying to sell to old school sporting goods stores. I came along and they figured I was as good a bet as anybody, because they really didn’t have anybody else to bet on.” These women agreed to ship her relatively small quantities and Park launched her catalog. That was 1990. By 1997, the company’s revenues were $10 million a year. In the past decade, her revenues have quadrupled.

At age forty- seven, Park still looks like the long, lean athlete she was in college. But today she has no problem finding sports clothes she loves. She and most of her two hundred employees test all the products that they carry in their catalog and in their twenty retail stores. That’s one reason why Title Nine’s 1.2 million customers are fanatically loyal: Any employee who deals with customers wears the products and therefore knows them intimately. That loyal audience has helped the company grow even while big corporations, including Nike and Gap Inc.’s Athleta, have caught on to the women’s sports market. By understanding women’s needs early and jumping in, Missy Park built herself a powerful lead. “I could see the market,” she says, “because I was the market.”

Women Are the Market

Title Nine is a shining example of a basic fact that much of the business world has been missing. Women are the market. Not just in apparel, but in virtually every sector.

“Women have been the primary buyers for just about everything for a long time,” says Marti Barletta, author of Marketing to Women: How to Understand, Reach, and Increase Your Share of the World’s Largest Market Segment.

Consider. Women are responsible for 83 percent of consumer purchase in the United States including • 62% of new cars • 92% of vacations • 90% of food • 55% of consumer electronics • 93% of over- the- counter pharmaceuticals • 80% of health care spending • 99% of home furnishings

In addition, women hold 89 percent of bank 51.3 percent of personal wealth in the United States and have a purchasing power of about $5 trillion in consumer spending, which, as I mentioned in Chapter One, is larger than the entire economy of Japan.

“Anybody who has any brains should be focusing primarily on women,” Barletta told me. “And they’re not.”

From "INFLUENCE: How Women's Soaring Economic Power Will Transform Our World for the Better." Copyright © 2010 Maddy Dychtwald. Published by Hyperion. All Rights Reserved.