The Pampered Chef: The Story of One of America's Most Beloved Companies [Hardcover]

Doris Christopher (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 5, 2005

The Pampered Chef is Doris Christopher’s extraordinary account of how she turned an innovative concept and $3,000 investment into a business with annual sales approaching the billion-dollar mark. It is packed with real-life lessons and inspiring insights for small-business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs.

In 1980 Doris Christopher, a former home economist and teacher, was itching to get back into the workforce after an eight-year hiatus as a stay-at-home mom. Drawing on her personal and professional expertise, and determined to make cooking easier and more convenient for families, she started selling high-quality kitchen tools through cooking demonstrations to groups of women in their homes. Today, the company she started in her basement, The Pampered Chef, is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary and has grown into a corporation (now owned by Berkshire Hathaway) with tens of thousands of independent Kitchen Consultants who present more than a million Kitchen Shows a year, attended by more than 12 million people.

The Pampered Chef is the story of the vision, energy, hard work, and chutzpah that drove Christopher and her company to the height of success. She describes her early days as a “one-woman show,” chronicles the company’s gradual expansion, its challenges and growing popularity, and the process, offers invaluable advice and sound strategies on how to found and grow a business, including:

• Hard learned lessons for start-up entrepreneurs

• How to create a business concept and set your priorities

• Knowing when to expand and when to slow growth so that demand doesn’t overwhelm your operations or supplies

• How to counter the naysayers and deal with adversity

Today, as at the company’s founding, achieving a better balance between work and family remains central to The Pampered Chef’s mission. The Pampered Chef brings Christopher’s recipe for success to women, and men, everywhere.

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)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday Business (July 5, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385515359
• ISBN-13: 978-0385515351
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #150,297 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Book of the Year, July 14, 2005

By 

Elinor Marks (Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Pampered Chef: The Story of One of America's Most Beloved Companies (Hardcover)

I highly recommend this book to anyone starting a business with limited financial resources. Doris Christopher started her business with only $3,000, which she borrowed from her husband's life insurance policy. "The Pampered Chef" explains in considerable detail how to overcome obstacles along the way. Ms. Christopher teaches by example--she doesn't pull punches--she puts it all on the table. The author isn't shy when it comes to talking about her self-doubts that she had in the early stages of her business. She is very specific about telling how she nearly quit before making her first sales call. This is what I loved about this book. It's so easy to relate to because Christopher comes across as one of us. And like one of us, she had her share of anxiety; still, she pushed forward because she so strongly believed in her mission: she wanted to simplify preparing family meals so more families would dine together. This, she strongly believed, promoted a healthy lifestyle and was good for America.
Christopher was driven to serve her customer first and concurrently take good care of her employees, and if there was a profit at the end of the day, that was okay too. She wasn't driven by money--only to serve others. But as her book well illustrates, if you do this, the money will follow. And did it ever for Doris Christopher. This business philosophy has made her one of America's five most successful women.
While there are many lessons to be learned in this book,what I thought was the most valuable one--if you have a mission--and a passion to achieve it, and this is combined with doing good for others, you will eventually do good for yourself. Christopher is living proof. She is the perfect role model for anyone thinking about starting a new business, or for that matter, any small businessowner who is struggling to make ends meet. Follow her advice, and you'll do well. And perhaps like Christopher, succeed beyond your wildest dreams.

While there are a lot of self-help books that give good advice, most of them are poorly written. This book is exceptionally well written, so much so that I had trouble putting it down. I found myself highlighting its lessons that I wanted to apply,and by the time I finished reading this book, I don't think there's a single page that isn't marked up. I plan to read and reread it, and most importantly, apply its valuable lessons to my own career. To get the most of this book, I advise you to read it with a highlighter--there are dozens and dozens of gems in it that you can use--each explained in detail and with examples demonstrating how the author did it.
If you only read one book this year, make sure this is that one book!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Inspiring!, July 28, 2005

By 

Joanne Bluze (New Jersey) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Pampered Chef: The Story of One of America's Most Beloved Companies (Hardcover)

I couldn't put this book down! It's a must read for anyone in direct sales, considering joining direct sales, and all start up entrepreneurs. Great advice, ideas and realities. And backing from the premiere business man himself, Warren Buffet!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Business Basics 101, July 28, 2005

By 

Jill Peterson "library" (Iowa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Pampered Chef: The Story of One of America's Most Beloved Companies (Hardcover)

Doris Christopher has given many people the opportunity to earn a living and to be their own boss. I know because I'm one of them. Even though I have been with the company for 12 years I learned so much from this book. It tells how she started the Pampered Chef with very little money and has built it into a business now owned by Warren Buffet. And if you know anything about Mr. Buffett, you know he doesn't buy unsuccessful companies. Yes it is a how-to book for starting your own business....but it is also a beautiful life story. Doris is a very humble person and this IS her story.