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The Fashion Industry Fits This Daughter/Mother Team Just Fine
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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.
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