EnTrends

Laura McCann and her mother, Leah
Poller, are leading the way towards a new trend
in family-run businesses. Instead of the typical
family run business, where a father passes the
chain of command to his son, at Zweave.com,
Laura McCann asked her mother to come work
with her. McCann is the CEO of Zweave.com, a
business-to-business collaborative design,
product development, and bidding and
sourcing exchange for the fashion and apparel
industry. Her mother is the company's COO.
Together, the two have a fascinating personal
and professional histories.

After divorcing in the early 70's, Leah Poller
was living on a reduced income and decided to
move to Paris, France with her three children in
search of better opportunities. She felt that the
rich European culture would lead to a well-
rounded education for her children. Once
there, she found that her social status and
having children helped a great deal. She was
introduced to people who helped her fill out
the proper paperwork to gain employment and
she began working in the movie industry. She
later went on to be trained in the art field,
dealing art, running exhibitions, and
representing Euro talent in the U.S.

Before leaving for France, Poller had urged her
seven year-old daughter, Laura, to join an
acting class. After the family moved to Paris,
Laura continued to act and was put into
commercials and small roles. In 1980, she was
nominated as best actress for her starring role
in "La Petite Sirene" at the Venice film festival.
She had come a long way from her acting class
in Florida.

However, by age 19, McCann decided that
acting was not the career path she wanted to
pursue. So, she moved back to the United
States and went to school at Parsons School of
Design in New York. McCann says that
growing up as a teenager and shopping in
Paris sparked her interest in fashion. She had
also become familiar with the vocabulary that
goes along with the fashion industry.

Years later, after starting two large
companies, Fashion Express World and
IPO, McCann decided to start
Zweave.com in January of last year. As a
fashion and apparel portal, Zweave offers
global fashion content and news, as well
as dynamic communities. As an
Applications Service Provider (ASP),
Zweave offers integrated design tools,
fashion and apparel workflow
management, industry specific hosting,
and image archival and retrieval systems.

Zweave's services are focused on the
designer community. Zweave's founding
team is a "worldclass team of
entrepreneurs, all past CEO's of their own
companies." They have banded together
to create a founding team with strengths
similar to those of incubators. The
company's current focus is developing a
service for an industry in the beginning
stages of technological change.

Zweave's site and products are multi
faceted, innovative, and bring together
leaders in the fields of image sorting and
archiving, as well as hosting. Some of
these leaders have focused their attention
on military and other high level projects in
the past. McCann says that the apparel
industry is a perfect landscape for testing
worldclass solutions.

Both Poller and McCann's backgrounds
have helped to shape the people they are
now and how they live their personal and
professional lives. Poller says that her
experience as an artist is beneficial to her
work as an entrepreneur with her
daughter.

In order to create art, Poller says that
one must have a vision. Then one
must shape that vision while
respecting the dimensions of time,
space, and the emotional aspects of
people. The same applies to a
business. One must know how the
business will affect people and if they
will buy a product.

EnTrends asked Poller and McCann
about their personal lives as
entrepreneurs and what success has
afforded them. McCann says that,
more than anything, she enjoys the
freedom that being an entrepreneur
allows her. She has been successful
enough to have an apartment in
Manhattan for her children, three
dogs, and a nanny.

She enjoys spending time with her
children when she is not at work.
They like to play, go to movies, and
enjoy cooking. Some of her favorite
designers are Donna Karan and Max
Mara. She loves to shop for antiques
and decorates her home with them.
Her job allows her to travel
extensively to places in Europe and
Asia.

McCann sits on the board of the
international Young Entrepreneurs
Organization and was formerly the
president of the New York chapter.
She is on the Clubcorps advisory
board of strategic alliances, the
Kauffman Center For Entrepreneurial
Leadership, and Fordham University's
"incuteam."

McCann's mother loves to work in her
studio when she is away from work. It
cleanses her mind of all the
administrative duties and allows her
to balance her right and left brain
activities. She has a loft in Soho
where she loves to collect pieces of
art. Sculptures and paintings
constantly flow through her ever-
changing home gallery. Because of
the twenty years she lived in Paris,
she speaks four languages fluently.
She loves to travel and her work has
brought her to Asia and Africa also.