The Rockefellers and others funded the company to the tune of $1.3 million, and Collier and her partner eventually built the business to about $25 million in sales. By the mid-1980s, however, the pair realized that their ambitions for the brand and their financial resources were mismatched.
"Sophia recognized on her own that it was time to sell," says Jane Owens, Soho's longtime lawyer and now senior vice president, general counsel and secretary at Sapient. "Big companies like the Coca-Cola Co. and Anheuser-Busch Inc. were trying to get into the space, and Seagram wanted in as well." Soho was a familiar brand on Wall Street, since it literally fueled many 3 AM deals in the 1980s. Salomon Brothers represented the company despite its minute size and sold the brand in 1989 to Joseph E. Seagram & Sons for about $15 million.
Due to some unfortunate management decisions since Collier sold it, the Soho brand is now gone. Yet Collier doesn't regret having let it go. "When you sell part of your company to venture capitalists, you make a moral, if not explicit, promise that you will give them a chance to liquidate their investment at some point," she says.
After the Seagram transaction, Collier bought a 30-acre farm near Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a city that happened to have had the highest per capita sales of Soho in the country. There, she went into retreat to plot her next move and ponder why her first venture had gone so well. "You wonder if it was a fluke or a unique circumstance that allowed you to become successful," she recalls. With millions of dollars in the bank, Collier could well afford an extended period of soul-searching.
In some ways, however, her financial situation was precisely the problem. Indeed, she had described this very quandary in her book, Soul Rush: The Odyssey of a Young Woman of the '70s (William Morrow & Co., 1978), when she wrote about trust-fund kids who were her classmates at boarding school. That kind of money, she wrote, gives you "the opportunity to 'graduate from the upper class.' " Freed from the quest for material wealth, you become "free to pursue anything in the whole world that interests you, without regrets, questions, or doubts." At 33, Collier herself had only held one job since leaving the ashram -- which had taken up a quarter of her working life and then was gone. She could do anything she wanted for her sophomore effort. What would it be?
Collier spent a great deal of that introspective period buried in her books. "Because I didn't go to college, I've always been involved in trying to learn more things," she says. She built a huge collection of art books that now sits on shelves in her office suite. She spent months researching the personal-computer business and looked into starting a software company. She also investigated a number of troubled local banks that might have been ripe for a turnaround.
Upon further consideration, however, she realized that she couldn't ditch the itch to keep playing on a national stage. "One thing I didn't like about the banks was that they were regionally based," she says. "I realized that my favorite businesses are ones that have strong brands that can be sold nationally or internationally." She also wanted to preserve two important elements of her first venture: an ability to influence the business through good marketing and a social-responsibility bent.
As she struggled to find a place to park her assets, Collier happened on a business that satisfied all of her requirements. At the time, socially responsible investing was something of a joke. There were just a handful of funds, and they generally trailed the major stock-market indexes. Seeing no reason why she and others like her needed to sacrifice performance for conscience, Collier and a few investors bought a money-market fund from Working Assets in San Francisco for $3.4 million. As a gesture of faith, she put the majority of her liquid assets in the fund and then set out to launch new investment vehicles from that base. She christened her new company Citizens Funds.
The Citizens Core Growth Fund, which launched in 1995, quickly became the company's best-known product. It's a twist on the Vanguard Index 500, the world's most popular mutual fund, a market-weighted mirror of the Standard & Poor's 500 basket of stocks. Collier's fund is also an index, but it's a collection of 300 or so large-cap stocks that have passed the company's social screening process. Citizens avoids companies that harm the environment or get a large chunk of their sales from military contracts. "We also wanted to see at least one woman or person of color in an important position in the company," Collier says.
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