When Julia Duren arrived from Hamburg, Germany, at the San
Francisco Airport in 1982, she was a 30-year-old mother with two
children, ages 5 and 2. Her second husband, an American, was doing
life at San Quentin. She had almost no money and no friends, family
or contacts to speak of. But Duren knew something about leather,
and she had a dream.
That put her on the road to success. Today, she's the
largest shareholder of K.L. Manufacturing Inc., a Larkspur,
California, firm that had revenues of $1.2 million last year. She
has 24 employees, all of whom have profit sharing, 100 percent
health benefits, paid vacation time and all the other benefits
successful businesses can afford. But the ups and downs Duren
endured are perhaps better-suited for the trampoline business.
"I was scared as hell," Duren says of her arrival in
the United States. She had only a tourist visa that didn't
allow her to work or live in the country, despite her recent
wedding, and had to immediately apply for her green card. It's
easy to speculate why she would marry a man serving a life
sentence, but it was a real marriage, maintains Duren, who was
married for seven years before she sought a divorce.
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With two little girls to feed, Duren knew she couldn't have
achieved her career goals in her homeland. "I had specialized
in leather and was doing some innovative stuff," says Duren,
who was designing clothing for European musicians. "It was
very difficult back then to be an entrepreneur in Germany because
there were strict regulations as to what kind of degrees you had to
have to train other people. I knew I couldn't hire and train
workers if I needed them."
In fact, hiring workers would be a long way off. When Duren
arrived in America, she had $2,000, which was quickly eaten up by
her first and last month's rent in San Rafael, California, and
the purchase of "a very beat-up car." When she ran out of
money, Duren pawned two family heirlooms, a diamond bracelet and a
gold watch, for $600, and bought a sewing machine and some
leather.
The car died its final death after a month, and Duren and her
daughters had to sleep in one bed, but the family was going
somewhere: Keky and Leila were going to day care, while their
mother searched for clients for her handmade jackets. "I went
from store to store and pretended I was a rep, and got some orders.
Then I'd hop on the bus, pick up my kids from the public day
care and make the things," says Duren. "There was a long
period when I slept three and a half hours a night."
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