I said, “I'm not going to do anything to undermine you.” So he said, “Look, I tell you what, if you would get me out of your inventory. And get me dollar for dollar for your inventory -- I will not only give you my blessing, but I will – I know you are going to Hong Kong to do some business -- I will pay three weeks of the salaries of the place while you go to Hong Kong.

And then you come back and you can flip your thing – take all of the people you want – close the business – but you get me out clean.”

And that was the deal, and it was all up front and he was a great guy for that.

HATTIE: So the company you were in actually helped nurture the launch of Nicole Miller. Why was it so successful from day one?

BUD: Well, day one was not exactly day one. Day one was a change of name as far as the customers went. What we did was we had, in a three week period that my employer was paying the salaries and wishing me well, we had our sales people informing all of the customers that everything they had on order was going to be shipped as of June 1st, 1982 – they were going to get their shipments on time, just the way they ordered them – but the name on the label was going to be Nicole Miller. And they were going to get an invoice from Nicole Miller and they were going to pay Nicole Miller. We were just switching the names.

And there wasn't a peep.

Everybody went along with it because all they wanted was the merchandise – it was fine. Our first month we shipped $600,000. It was wild – we will never be that profitable again because we had absolutely no start-up costs - we had nothing. It was lucky in a way, but we had prepared for the luck. It was like – we gave luck a chance to happen.