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Making her own luck: In business, Pixie Coyne puts it all together
Gloucester Daily Times, page 1, January 7, 2003
By RICHARD GAINES, Staff writer
Her name is Marilyn Coyne. But since childhood, everyone has known her as "Pixie." She is an entrepreneur.
She has the business vision, the drive, the capacity to engage others in her dream to make it grow, the love of risk and the self-confidence to bring it off.
She even has the penthouse, with a million-dollar harbor view, and the shop from which to sell and the van to transport merchandise.
That her penthouse is at the top of the sober house, Moore's Way, at the corner of Rogers and Duncan streets, that her shop is located temporary in the store front that was Empire clothing and next spring will be NavisBank, that her van was given to her by an altruist ... these, too, are parts of Pixie Coyne's business history.
As developments in the maturation of an entrepreneurial dream, they are the serendipitous events -- the meeting of good thinking and luck -- that mark the success of all up-from-nothing business achievements.
The business she has started is a consignment shop with personal service and hospitality. She named it Pix and the City. Like most entrepreneurs, she had the idea and worked around the capital.
She was experienced and talented in interior design, from her days in an earlier life at the successful The Lodge chain of youth apparel in the Boston area, Saks Fifth Avenue, Tommy Bahama and Esprit.
She knew how to entertain, how to dress herself and others. She had taste. She had a talent for making pretty in a general sense.
And she had a dream: "of Newbury St., high-end, classy, fur coat and Mercedes stuff."
She also had her demons. The demons worked to quell her talent, so moving to Gloucester and finding Moore's Place was the first and perhaps transcendent serendipitous event of her life. That was more than six months ago.
From then one, as often is the case in the science of serendipity, follow the others: in her case, the wreathes, the store front, the van and the prospect of a going business of her own.
In a way, Moore's Place itself was the product of serendipity.
Twenty years ago, contractor Geoff Richon bought the brick rooming house at 23 Duncan St. as an investment. He found himself with title to a building -- a traditional choice of single fishermen including Sterling Hayden -- with more than its share of substance abusers. So, he decided, instead of converting it into an office building, to create a sober house.
From any perspective, the inspiration served Gloucester's needs and made the business district a better place. "When I bought this building, the cops were here three times a week," he says. "Now they're here three times a year. People are a messy business."
Richon matched his residents with the job training programs at Action, Inc., the city's anti-poverty non-profit corporation, to create a production line from dependence to independence.
"We're a taxpayer factory," he says. "We're a business incubator."
The 19 residents at Moore's Way (named for a former resident) and the 11 in Richon's other sober house in mid-town maintain largely unregulated lives, save for the rigid sobriety requirement as they solidify and strengthen themselves.
"The residents are in charge," Richon says. "We'll put air in your tires, gas in the tank, but we don't steer. If you drive off the road, that's your problem. I can't help that."
Richon's selling hope instead of business space, he says, "because I'm a miracle junkie. There are a lot of people who've turned their lives around."
Pixie Coyne's is not the first business incubated on Richon's watch.
There was the successful bicycle shop that serviced and sold from the Duncan Street storefront for seven years until it closed this past August, as the founder moved onward and upward. The bike shop entrepreneur lived upstairs for a year and a half (average for Moore's Way). While there, he conceived the business, and with Richon's help, got it going.
He had an ideal location across the street from the Building Center -- and "an excellent business plan," Richon adds.
Coyne wasn't thinking high-end classy or of opening a business of any kind as this past holiday season got under way. She had finished a summer season as a hostess at the Gloucester House, and with less to do now, her frenetic energy got her thinking and making Christmas wreathes.
That's how her entrepreneurial career began.
At Moore's way, "they started buying them. Someone said, 'You ought to sell these.'" That flipped the proverbial light switch, which illuminated a clear path to make her own way.
She adapted one wreath with the logo of the nascent NavisBank as a gift to the bank, whose temporary offices were in the storefront of the Moore's Way building. NavisBank's founder, David Sidon, himself an entrepreneur, found her a deft marketer who did handsome work.
For the holiday season, he was looking to put to use the former Empire storefront that next spring will be headquarters for his new bank. "I mentioned it to Pix," Sidon says, pleased that he'd helped a business get off the ground before his bank did.
"She became the manager (of the storefront)," he says. "She took charge. She locked it up. We let her use the space."
Coyne effused energy to match the opportunity. She hired some Moore's Way residents to help her make and sell the wreathes and the first items of consignment, fine sweaters and dresses, she got her hands on.
Like that, with the non-financial backing of a bank-to-be, she had a capital-free retail business pre-startup, replete with work force and business cards, open at a prime Main Street address for Christmas shoppers.
Typical of the early days of most businesses, "I lost money," Coyne says. Her problem? "I paid people." But she isn't sorry.
She considers the start of Pix and the City "completely successful."
"I made the wreathes," she says. "People bought them and they liked them. I'm opening Pix and the City not to be rich, but just so I can work and live comfortably, pay the rent. My greed is gone. I wanted to do something I love."
Her modest goal was essential to her successful launch. Richon notes that other Moore's House residents were deterred by overly ambitious goals. He mentions a resident's dream of starting a restaurant.
"She'll be successful," Richon, who is founder and president of the Gloucester Maritime Heritage Center, says of Coyne. "She's a go-getter. She has all the right reasons to do what she's doing."
When Sidon moves into the Empire to open NavisBank, Coyne is set to change places with him and move Pix and the City into permanent quarters and pay rent to Richon.
Symmetry and serendipity, firm structure and fortunate coincidence, are often found together, as the story of the van illustrates.
Coyne's use of Sidon's Empire storefront were well known to the folks at Action, Inc. Having had Coyne in their business and self-sufficiency training courses, they were proud to have been a part of the success that the emergence of Pix and the City represented.
Action's good work was, in turn, well known to Jonathan Bayless, a modest philanthropist and former city treasurer. Bayless found himself with a van for which he had no use. So, he asked Bill Rochfort, Actions's long-time executive director if he knew of someone who might productively use it in a business.
Rochfort didn't, but Action staffer Patty Bongiorno -- who had worked with Coyne -- did.
So, between Bayless and Rochfort and Bongiorno, Pixie Coyne got an old van to move merchandise to and from her shop once David Sidon moves around the corner to start his bank and opens up space at the street level of Moore's Way, where she chose to live after she chose to move to Gloucester last April.
In the force of serendipity, dominoes never fall, they rise. And the game always starts with a smart move from clear thought.
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