He lifts his head and delivers a look that Nicola figures, if she had been standing, would have made her weak in the knees. “Drive me home?”
She laughs and reminds him that she doesn’t have a car.
“Walk me home, then.”
“I have my bike!” she protests.
His eyes stay on hers for an indecent amount of time. Then his lips land on her clavicle and an actual jolt goes through her. Against her better judgment she says, “Anyway, shouldn’tyoube walkingmehome?”
“Okay. I’ll walk you home, Nicola. Or I’ll jog gently beside you while you ride your bike.”
“What about your Achilles?”
He brushes that concern away with his hand. “My Achilles will be fine. But you might be sorry you asked. Because if we make it to your place I might never leave.” His smile is so wide and so white and so beguiling she can see why the TV cameras love him—she can see why everyone loves him.
He doesn’t jog; they both walk, the bike between them like a toddler. And once they get to her house, he doesn’t leave until the next morning.
Forbes 30 Under 30 Alumni Profile
Juliana George: The Leader with a Future So Bright
When we included Juliana George in our 30 Under 30 Class of 2020, the founder of online fashion portal LookBook had built the fledgling brand into something to, well,watch. Now, with an IPO rumored to be on the horizon, George stands to become a multimillionaire less than a decade after an angel investor helped her get started with $500,000.
LookBook is an online retailer and fashion technology company that aggregates and metasearches discounted items from major fashion brands as well as luxury discount retailers (think Rue La La or Revolve) and sorts curated products into “looks” that customers search for, filtering by specific occasion, geographical region, size, season, and price range—ending up with the perfect outfit for up to 80 percent off retail.
George first envisioned LookBook in use on college campuses after some of her own experiences as a scholarship student at Boston College. “Low-income students can often feel socially excluded when they land at some of these prestigious institutions,” she told us in 2020. “Maybe you need a dress or a suit to wear to a social occasion, and you don’t know where to start. Maybe you have an interview for an internship, or you’re a first-generation student at a school where Greek life is important, and you can’t even begin to prepare for rushing.” It has since expanded far beyond the campus. “I mean,resort wear?What does that mean to someone who’s never been to a resort but now has to dress for a work off-site? We take the shame out of not being prepared.”
George’s entrepreneurial spirit was born out of necessity and fueled by her experiences. Before college, George was shuttled among various foster homes in her native Lawrence, Mass., a citytwenty-five miles north of Boston in which residents live below the poverty line at almost twice the national rate. She watched one foster family go through a particularly tough time when both parents lost factory jobs simultaneously during the recession of 2007.
“Not all foster parents are good,” she says. “But these people were good people trying to do their best, trying to help me,and others like me, and their lives became more than they could handle. When you have control over your work life, control over your income, you have control over your whole life.” At that moment she knew entrepreneurship was the path for her. “People might outsmart me,” says George. “People might have better ideas. But nobody—nobody—is going to outwork me.”
After graduating summa cum laudewith a degree from the prestigious Carroll School of Management at Boston College, George had a brief foray into management consulting in New York City. There, working with apparel clients in the operations division, she saw how often major fashion brands discount excess inventory but don’t use the power of merchandising they lavish on their full-priced items to make them appealing to potential customers. Soon after launching LookBook, she discovered that customers were clamoring for the service far outside the quad.
Without the full scholarship she received to college, George contends she’d be lucky to have a good job, never mind a thriving business. “That scholarship changed everything for me,” she says. The same yearForbeschose George as one of its 30 Under 30 awardees she started a foundation, Girl/Power, to help low-income girls like herself. Each year, the foundation fully funds a four-year scholarship to a private or public college or university for a first-generation female college student who is interested in studying business. Along with the cost of tuition and room and board,the scholarship includes a generous stipend for living expenses. Girl/Power does not make this amount public, and according to a foundation spokesperson it varies based on the recipient’s particular circumstances. This add-on to tuition money, according to George, is almost as important as the tuition itself, and it serves the same goal as LookBook. “Money for dinner out with friends, Uber fare, a dress to wear to a formal: those things that seem like small extras to some people are a really big deal to others. We want to erase the shame that comes with not having.”
In addition, Girl/Power provides ten scholarships of $10,000 for first-generation students in the University of Massachusetts system, earmarked for girls interested in becoming entrepreneurs.
“The thing I’m most proud of is my foundation,” says George. “Building a great business, seeing how LookBook has captured so many imaginations, that’s amazing. But helping other girls from backgrounds like mine to reach for the stars? That’s everything to me.”
Nicola
On the last Saturday in June, Nicola rides her bike by the land that Buchanan Enterprises is developing in the heart of the island, with Great Salt Pond to the north, the airport due east, and undeveloped woods to the west. She did her research online: Buchanan purchased fifteen acres, including a former equestrian facility and a home (demolished to make space for the new construction), for around six million dollars; when finished, each of the four homes the land is now zoned for will sell for at least five million. Each home is going to be 4,500 square feet with the option to add more: finished basement, finished attic, finished bonus room over the garage.
Nicola isn’t the only Peeping Tom on location that day, as it turns out. An older gentleman whom she first mistakes for a member of the construction crew pulls up in and heaves himself out of a pickup truck not too far from where she stops her bike. The site is a beehive of activity, with equipment—cranes and bulldozers and, she doesn’t know, maybe a backhoe? She’s no expert—lined up in an orderly row alongside the driveway. Men (maybe they aren’t all men, she can’t tell from where she is) in hard hats are calling to each other or standing in line for one of the porta-potties or carrying long pieces of lumber over their shoulders, two men to a piece, like a builder’s version of Noah’s ark. The four houses are partially framed.
“My buddy used to own this place,” the pickup truck guy says. “Fact, I helped build one of those stone walls right over there.” He points in a general westerly direction.
“No kidding,” she says respectfully, even though whatever stone wall he’s referencing is out of her line of sight.
“You shoulda seen this place in its prime,” he goes on. “The barn had a tack room, a farrier station, the whole deal.”
“What’s a farrier?”
“Guy who puts the shoes on the horses.” He looks at Nicola, appraising. “Or gal,” he adds eventually. “My granddaughters tell me not to assume the gals can’t do the same jobs the gents can do these days.” Nicola guesses his granddaughters would also tell him to go easy on his use of the wordsgalsandgents,but he seems like a man who’s just trying to get along in a world he finds occasionally bewildering, with new rules and admonitions cropping up every day, so she keeps the thought to herself. He’s probably a wonderful grandfather. He probably keeps a cupboard full of packaged snacks he offers on an unlimited basis when the parents aren’t looking. “They live in Wellesley, Massachusetts,” he says, as though that explains everything.
“Ah,” says Nicola, because maybe, in fact, it does.
“I don’t know who’s going to buy these houses,” he says.
