It takes a lot of ingenuity and persistence to make a mark on practical fashion. These are the traits that people like Victoria Tane has, when she created the popular HeadBenz and later Jewelbenz line of accessories. Her lines have made millions because of their fashionable and comfortable style and oddly enough, handy design.
Tane’s creativity was apparent early on when she received awards for her work from the Springfield, Massachusetts high school for creative writing and illustrating. After high school she began traveling and studying abroad in Israel before returning to get her bachelors degree in special education. However she seems to have gained more from her time at the New York University, studying the arts.
Spending a lot of her youth attending sewing club meetings after her mom purchased a sewing machine for the family, she was encouraged by her mother and began sewing her own clothes and creating her own designs. She later showed a smart business minded attitude when she began a door to door business selling her clothes. After starting to make her own jewelry at the age of eight, it seemed destined that she would become a name in the fashion industry, because she never stopped making fashion oriented accessories and clothes..
Tane began making her jewelry not just as a hobby anymore, but as a side business while she taught school in the daytime. She became frustrated when strands of her hair would fall in her face and distract her from the delicate work she was doing. Since her hair was not long enough to put into a functional pony tail, she quickly made herself a contraption of wire and beads that served as a headband. Little did this unsung inventor know that her quick fix creation would become a fashion sensation in a little matter of time, and that it had other very handy and fashionable features as well.
Having accidentally created an adjustable yet stylish headband, she discovered that she could squeeze it to the appropriate level of tightness with a tiny bit of effort. If it was too tight, all she had to do was pull it apart and tighten it to the right fit. This was only the beginning of the discoveries she made about her new invention. Later, falling asleep with the headband still on, she awoke to find that she did not have the headache that usually accompanies such a mistake. Further still, the headband when adjusted a certain way, quickly became a necklace.
It was at the ArtBeat Festival that she brought her jewelry to sell. In a short amount of time she found that she had sold every single headband, and was even talked into selling the one she was wearing. She knew she had a hit and immediately set about patenting it. After a while she was contacted by QVC, the home shopping behemoth to sell her wares on television. Her final albeit pleasant shock came when she sold over one hundred thousand units in a very short amount of time. She was invited back fourteen times by QVC.
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