Marketing and identity
For A People United, Payzant created brand identity with her wholesale clothing collections, "Tribe", "Sweater Girl" and "Yoga Toga". A former editor herself, she garnered much editorial support by marketing partner/husband Robert Gruber as good guy out to save the world and themselves as a happy couple. With the addition of the tuition scholarship program for the children of garment workers--also her idea, and the catalog--also her concept and development, from casting to set direction to layout, a style which five years later is now standard in both retail and wholesale industries (i.e. Banana Republic, full shots on white seamless, landscape), and paying a recent graduate from the business college at Loyola a salary more than the couple made to tidy up the operations, the sales skyrocketed, and Tribe became the largest export line from Nepal to U.S.  Since selling her interest as divorce settlement, Tribe and Sweater Girl sales have plummeted 85 percent. "I'm not happy about that, not at all, but that was like firing Henry Ford, the man and the machine, from Ford Motor Company. We were GREAT business partners. And that was the best job in the world for me--I created every fiber, every fabric, every pleat, tuck, hem, armhole, button, seam, concept, coloration, nuance, linking metaphor, while anticipating health, lifestyle and environmental trends timely," says Payzant. "I never bought the Brussels color previews; they were in the beginning too expensive for us," she notes. "I just study women: what their colorations are in skin, hair, how to make them light up, even in a business setting. And funny, I always had the Brussels Report colors in my palette.
The designer on sabbatical designs retail Payzant still holds right to Yoga Toga, one fiber she used for Snow White sweater collections, and one shirt body: a classic she calls the Great White Shirt, "a men's pirate shirt with a thousand shell buttons that makes men look like swashbucklers or choirboys, and makes women look either sexy or conservative. Its just a timeless, well rendered Great White Shirt sold to Art & Artifact ten years after its design, and which I should sell to Disney."
    Until such time as she is ready to pursue designing an entire collection and launching it again, she would like consulting work with stores like Anthropologie and Under Armour. Dream job? "Ford truck division interiors," she says.
"Retail has been an incubator for me meanwhile, and though, along with furnishings and gifts and jewelry,  I have had to sell Other Peoples' Clothing, I have gleaned a renewed sense of marketplace. Many women my age lack a style unless they have to wear a banker's look. What I am great at is being frank, because let's face it I take over the set with professional models, and THEY are great at persona. So I like to take the Banker's look into jeans, for one thing. And active wear is a category of much interest to me, since it is hard to become overweight with form-fitting clothing, and it implies the need to stay healthy and fit.  I do love dresses, and have a great eye for selecting them, but I am not seeing any like I had in Yoga Toga--jerseys that move and flatter, roll up and wash out, go from daytime to dinner, yet are priced well.  Mine were in fact 1950s silhouettes I boxed out and pegged in, so the ladylike metaphor was there, underneath it all: Motown, Jackie K.
SELF PROMOTION
"A Bit of Zen" has not gleaned the editorial support I channeled for A People United; this bothered me because in fact starting anew is harder than anything I have done in my life, being just one, a single mom, no business partner, in truth reinventing my career.  It is fairly brave. I should have hired a marketer to do what I did for Robert and A People United: I was too busy to do it for myself. I've put everything I have into it.
    Even without editorial support,  A Bit of Zen has a following and a name. However it's been difficult to manage buying, training, operations, personnel.  Payzant considers selling the brick-and-mortar store to someone more adept at the daily operations side of retail.
MORPHING TO WEB LAND AND CATALOG
"At fifty-two, I have to remind myself why I came to Maryland in the first place, fourteen years ago: to work as a not-for-profit development writer. To support worthy causes. And that my main skills are editor/buyer and product developer/marketer. My entrepreneur never rests.  My favorite things are writing and photography. So how to bring it all in, to make it one? It's time to get back to my dream, of making a funny, informative travel lit magazine with products from all over the world in it." Payzant has had her catalog mocked up for four years now.
"I desire an educated volunteer, who understands and is on board with the vision and mission of A BIT OF ZEN.org. Otherwise, people have no idea you owe your soul to the company store, and make hay. I really am here to select beautiful things from far and wide as well as locally to show you, to give it meaning by telling you a story about its manufacture or history, to support artists and artisans worldwide, to celebrate the threads that connect us. I believe at some core Pollyanna level that music, art and dance--as well as uncensored documentary photography--can stop war as we know it, because when we understand our similarities--our need for structure, food, water, safety, clothing, beauty, ritual, celebration, meaning-making we all share, we are home."