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"  It&amp;#039;s the crack of dawn, and Iman\u2014muse to Halston and Yves Saint Laurent, model for Helmut Newton and Richard Avedon\u2014is peddling schmattes on what used to be the Home Shopping Network and is now called HSN. &amp;quot;This reminds me of going to France or something,&amp;quot; says the blond, heavily made-up hostess next to Iman, referring to the teal and magenta tunics they are both wearing with colossal faux jewels around the neckline. The garment quickly sells out\u2014Iman&amp;#039;s Global Chic is one of HSN&amp;#039;s best-performing lines. Next, the pair presents a collection of zebra-, tiger-, and giraffe-print luggage. &amp;quot;You can go anywhere with this and feel chic,&amp;quot; Iman says. And, looking at the bag hanging off her willowy arm, one can almost believe it is true. In the green room after her segment is over, Iman says, &amp;quot;Either you immediately connect or you don&amp;#039;t,&amp;quot; of the way HSN&amp;#039;s 4.7 million customers relate to her. &amp;quot;Here I was, somebody who was in fashion, married to David Bowie. You might think, `Would she understand what I need?&amp;#039; But somehow the connection was immediate.&amp;quot; Iman visits the HSN headquarters outside of Tampa 60 times a year for meetings with her design team and to appear on live television at all hours of the night and day. I ask if her husband ever accompanies her. &amp;quot;No!&amp;quot; she shrieks. &amp;quot;Why would he?&amp;quot; But a surprisingly cool assortment of people have materialized on the HSN campus to hawk their wares over the past five years. Since retail veteran Mindy Grossman took over as CEO in 2006, she has managed to enlist housewares designer Jonathan Adler, maternity queen Liz Lange, and octogenarian New York fashion icon Iris Apfel, who is doing a line of silk scarves and costume jewelry. She also got Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, and P. Diddy\u2014all of whom sold fragrances on HSN\u2014as well as chef-model Padma Lakshmi, who has a collection of teas and sea salts called Easy Exotic. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m at HSN because of Mindy. Period,&amp;quot; says Adler. &amp;quot;She knows brands, she knows the market, and she knows how to deal with temperamental designers\u2014like moi.&amp;quot; Perhaps most importantly, Grossman knew there were women with style and money who would be open to shopping sell-a-vision. The average HSN customer is now a female homeowner who makes more than $65,000 a year. The network&amp;#039;s biggest markets are New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Grossman has done the unthinkable: She has morphed HSN from a cheesy and weird guilty pleasure into a flourishing business energized by the talents of the fashionable. In 2005, the year before she arrived at the company, domestic revenue was at $1.8 billion; in 2010, it totaled $2.1 billion. Even in 2008, at the worst point of the recession, when retail was contracting across the country, HSN&amp;#039;s sales rose by 3 percent. There is something about the way Grossman does business that&amp;#039;s different. &amp;quot;It was nothing I was really contemplating,&amp;quot; Iman said of creating her line, &amp;quot;but once you&amp;#039;re with Mindy, she&amp;#039;ll make you do things you didn&amp;#039;t think about.&amp;quot;  The night before we met, Grossman won Ernst &amp;amp;amp; Young&amp;#039;s Corporate Innovator of the Year award. In 2010, the Financial Times listed her as one of the top 50 women in world business. And in 2009, Forbes named her one of the 100 most powerful women in the world. Six years ago, many in fashion were surprised that a rising industry star like Grossman was willing to step away from her position as global vice president of international apparel at Nike to take over a business that sold slow cookers and tea cozies to people watching television at four in the morning.  &amp;quot;When I joined the company, everybody said, `What are you doing?&amp;#039; They thought I had lost my mind when I left Nike,&amp;quot; Grossman says in her bright office at 1 HSN Drive in Saint Petersburg, overlooking the treetops and freeways of west Florida. &amp;quot;They thought I&amp;#039;d go run the Gap, something in that genre.&amp;quot; In terms of the Home Shopping Network, she says, &amp;quot;most people weren&amp;#039;t familiar, and if they were, they felt it was kind of d\u00E9class\u00E9.&amp;quot;  Grossman had a vision of modern, freshened sell-a-vision, with programming that was actually watchable and products worth buying. &amp;quot;What influenced me the most was cable network programming\u2014HGTV,&amp;quot; she continues. &amp;quot;Why couldn&amp;#039;t our culinary shows be as entertaining and educational as the Food Network?&amp;quot; In recent months, Rod Stewart and Randy Travis have both played live mini-concerts and sold their CDs on the channel; high-end beauty lines such as Stila and Lanc\u00F4me have offered viewers tweaked versions of their brands; and Oprah made a recent appearance to support a new hair care line her stylist Andre Walker did for HSN. (Winfrey personally called Grossman to make it happen.)  On the day we meet, Grossman is wearing a low-cut black wrapdress and a wooden chain-link necklace with a horn charm that sits in her tanned cleavage. Her hair is carefully blown-out Floridian blond; her sandals are encrusted with beads, rhinestones, and big, black faceted stones. &amp;quot;I got the shoes on HSN,&amp;quot; she says cheerfully. &amp;quot;I got these on HSN&amp;quot;\u2014she shakes her wrist so the three giant bangles she&amp;#039;s wearing clank together. She puts her hands up to her earlobes, which are adorned with little gold bouquets of flowers. &amp;quot;These are...well, these are vintage Van Cleef,&amp;quot; she says, laughing. She is such an avid HSN shopper that she received a form letter from herself: the thank-you note Grossman sends to all her biggest at-home buyers.  Behind her desk, there are photographs of her with everyone from Flavor Flav to Hillary Clinton. She likes to connect, and she assumes her customers do too. HSN purchases made via mobile devices are the fastest-growing segment of Grossman&amp;#039;s business, and she recently introduced online games to attract the sudoku set to the HSN website. &amp;quot;I was in Palo Alto last week\u2014I had meetings with Facebook and Google,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s exciting for us is we are at an intersection to be taking advantage of technology.&amp;quot; She can envision a customer, she says, a busy, multitasking mom, watching a live streaming HSN segment on her iPhone at her kids&amp;#039; soccer game\u2014and of course, clicking &amp;quot;buy.&amp;quot; Colleen Lopez is the unrivaled queen of the HSN hostesses: Its top seller, she joined the company 17 years ago. She is so popular with viewers that she has her own HSN line now, Colleen&amp;#039;s Favorite Things. She has 6,000 Facebook friends and says a day doesn&amp;#039;t go by without her getting recognized by a fan on the street or in a restaurant. &amp;quot;It was a completely different culture 17 years ago,&amp;quot; Lopez says. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve gone from nerdy kid in class to, like, the homecoming queen! We have street cred. I&amp;#039;m working with J.Lo, Mariah Carey, and Martha Stewart.&amp;quot; In fact, she could be J.Lo&amp;#039;s big sister, with her caramel-streaked hair; long, pale pink nails; open-weave black sweater over skinny jeans; and nude pumps. Lopez was a local news reporter and talk show host in Minnesota&amp;#039;s Twin Cities before she started her ascent as an HSN host, and claims her research is almost as in-depth at her current job: &amp;quot;Lanc\u00F4me flew us to New York to meet every buyer, every head of every division, see the laboratories, everything,&amp;quot; says Lopez. &amp;quot;I feel like I&amp;#039;m always in college.&amp;quot; HSN hostesses are required to read WWD and keep abreast of trends; they do not use teleprompters, and they are expected to be able to talk about the products they&amp;#039;re selling for hours. &amp;quot;We really do know what&amp;#039;s going on; our customers look to us for education,&amp;quot; says Lopez, her smile blinding. &amp;quot;I want them to watch and learn, and eventually, hopefully, they&amp;#039;ll buy something.&amp;quot;  Grossman is very big on this kind of understated, low-pressure salesmanship. Sometimes when you listen to people talk about what they do at HSN, they sound like they believe they&amp;#039;re engaged in educational programming on PBS instead of selling stuff. One of the set designers who was busily preparing for a segment pitching makeup\u2014each brand gets its own customized backdrop at HSN\u2014told me, &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re approaching it as a story, as you would on the Learning Channel.&amp;quot; Bill Brand, HSN&amp;#039;s executive vice president of marketing, programming, and business development, says, &amp;quot;Our customer loves the Today show\u2014she loves information.&amp;quot; After nearly 20 years in business, the jewelry designer Ahmed Akkad began selling a range of creations on HSN just over a year ago. &amp;quot;One of the first things Mindy said to me is that this is a very knowledgeable customer,&amp;quot; Akkad says. &amp;quot;She knows how enamel should be applied, how stones should be set, what the price should be\u2014and having the Internet, she&amp;#039;s very vocal.&amp;quot; Akkad knows he&amp;#039;s being an effective on-air salesman &amp;quot;if the customer tells the story back to me.&amp;quot; If he says he&amp;#039;s based the squiggle on a piece of jewelry on, say, the laurel leaves he saw on an architectural column in Rome, and a customer mentions that when she calls in or writes an online review of his product, he&amp;#039;s won the game. &amp;quot;In regular retail, there is no story,&amp;quot; says Akkad. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s just your advertising or a sound bite after a show. Here I have five, six minutes to tell people why I made this. If it&amp;#039;s a good story and I&amp;#039;m able to communicate it in a way that&amp;#039;s very inclusive, the results are unreal.&amp;quot; The narrative behind the sale is something of a Grossman obsession. When she worked in retail, &amp;quot;I used to get so frustrated if the theme of our season is Tahiti, and I know what we did in the Ralph Lauren showrooms to make that come alive, and then I go to a store floor and it&amp;#039;s just racks of whatever,&amp;quot; she told me. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d say, `They&amp;#039;re ruining my story! How&amp;#039;s the customer going to know it&amp;#039;s Tahiti?&amp;#039; That&amp;#039;s why I love what we do. It&amp;#039;s unfettered storytelling.&amp;quot; There are moments, however, when one is hard-pressed to find a pretty story behind the product pushing, and HSN seems like exactly what you think it is: a forum for convincing people to buy things they don&amp;#039;t need. When I was speaking to Lopez in her dressing room and hearing about the intensive quality control all the HSN products go through, and the way she interacts with her fans on Facebook every day, and the way Grossman has made the brand chic, I looked up at the television tuned, as every monitor on the campus is, to HSN and noticed what they were selling: a clear plastic &amp;quot;fat tape&amp;quot; you use to keep your rolls from slipping out of the openings between your buttons.  Grossman says, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t care what we&amp;#039;re quote-unquote selling; we&amp;#039;re about inspiring people through storytelling.&amp;quot; But there really are no quotes about it: The S in HSN is for &amp;quot;shopping.&amp;quot; What they believe, though, is that if you are selling without a store, you need to attract customers by entertaining them. When Eat, Pray, Love came out, HSN did a cross promotion with Sony, selling products from Italy, India, and Bali. Bill Brand, Grossman&amp;#039;s first hire, had been the vice president of programming and production for VH1. Initially, &amp;quot;I said absolutely not,&amp;quot; Brand says. &amp;quot;First of all, I&amp;#039;m not leaving L.A. to move to Florida. And I can&amp;#039;t throw away my career to work in TV shopping.&amp;quot; But Grossman has almost mystical powers of persuasion, it would seem; she convinced Brand that she was giving him a unique opportunity to create a new kind of narrative commercial television: &amp;quot;I remember she whispered in my ear, `Tell me you&amp;#039;re ready for anything.&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; Grossman grew up on Long Island, the adopted daughter of a homemaker and a father in the produce business. &amp;quot;I was like the great white hope,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;First person in the family that was going to college.&amp;quot; Being successful &amp;quot;almost felt like it was a responsibility,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s why I finished high school in my junior year.&amp;quot; At George Washington University, she got engaged to her high school sweetheart. She was on track to become a wife and a lawyer, when something snapped. During her last semester of college, &amp;quot;it seemed like I woke up one morning and had an epiphany. I thought: I cannot do this. I do not want to get married. And I&amp;#039;m not going to law school\u2014it just doesn&amp;#039;t excite me. I&amp;#039;m not wasting anybody&amp;#039;s money. I&amp;#039;m going to move to New York.&amp;quot;  This was not a popular decision. &amp;quot;My parents were like, Oh my God, when I said I was going into fashion\u2014they pictured me with a rolling rack on Seventh Avenue,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;Six years later, I think I got a VP title somewhere and they finally stopped asking me when I was going back to law school.&amp;quot; As she proved again when she ignored the disapproval of her colleagues about her new job at HSN, Grossman is not easily dissuaded when she believes in something. She credits her interest in democratic fashion to one of her early bosses, the legendary designer Willi Smith, who rose to prominence in the &amp;#039;80s designing audaciously colorful clothes for everything from a Spike Lee movie to a Kennedy wedding. &amp;quot;He was amazing,&amp;quot; Grossman says. &amp;quot;He really was the first designer to say it doesn&amp;#039;t come from here down: Fashion comes from the street up. I&amp;#039;d be in that showroom when he was doing collaborations with Barbara Kruger or Keith Haring or instead of doing a fashion show one year, he did a film on his clothes with the Senegalese National Ballet. He believed in the democracy of affordability, but you couldn&amp;#039;t say that Willi wasn&amp;#039;t fashion.&amp;quot; Throughout her career, Grossman has maintained a loyalty to accessible brands. At Ralph Lauren, she helped launch Polo Jeans and revamp the Chaps line. She thinks of Nike as &amp;quot;a very aspirational brand, but it&amp;#039;s accessible. I like that\u2014that&amp;#039;s why I&amp;#039;ve never gone into the luxury business.&amp;quot; She thinks of herself as an &amp;quot;agnostic&amp;quot; shopper: &amp;quot;I get as excited walking around a CVS as I do walking around in Bergdorf&amp;#039;s.&amp;quot; This, she asserts, is typical of her customer, who &amp;quot;really does like to shop. She finds it a diversion; she finds it engaging; she likes to discover new things. If you stopped a woman coming out of Bergdorf&amp;#039;s and you said, `Oh, I like your coat,&amp;#039; she&amp;#039;d go, `Thank you,&amp;#039; and keep walking. You stop one of our customers and say, `I like your coat,&amp;#039; she will stop in the middle of the street and she will want to talk to you about it for 15 minutes.&amp;quot;  Recently, Grossman met with Lady Gaga about developing a line for HSN. &amp;quot;I go in and she had the most amazing hair I&amp;#039;ve ever seen\u2014I thought it was a hat but it was her hair,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I walk in the room, and she says, `You have the coolest job.&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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