Issue link: http://tcnj.uberflip.com/i/1545320
28 The College of New Jersey Magazine president of membership, she was tasked with the responsibility of devising a way, in her words, "to keep the love circulating." She immediately thought of the beaded bracelets she'd made in high school, but with a twist: When she and her sisters no longer needed a bracelet — when they'd conquered a fear or achieved a goal — they'd pass it along to someone else who needed a boost. Carrig calls that concept her "X-factor." That idea transformed a basic piece of jewelry into something charged with meaning. She started selling the bracelets online and at street fairs and enjoyed the process of getting a business up and running — so much so that she began to reconsider her plan of heading to law school after graduation. So she made herself a deal: If her LSATs were high enough to get into Harvard Law or another top-10 option, she'd go to law school. When that didn't happen, she says, "I took it as a sign to go full-bore with the business." She invested $5,000, money she'd saved while working retail at Anthropologie and Ralph Lauren. When she broke the news to her parents that she'd decided against law school and would be, as she says, "beading bracelets in their basement," they simply asked how they could help. She wasn't surprised. Her mother, a Mexican immigrant, moved to the U.S. at 18 entirely on her own; whenever Carrig left the house, her mother would send her off with the words "Querer es poder, or If you want it, you can achieve it," says Carrig. "It was the first line of my college application essay, and it was just ingrained in who I am." In those basement-beading days, Carrig was sustained not just by her belief that she'd succeed but also by her parents' support, both emotional and physical. Her mother would work on the bracelets with her, filling in faded letters with a Sharpie, and her father would lug boxes of bracelets to the post office. Both her parents would Little Words bracelets, made from crystal and stone beads, can be found in stores nationwide. Thecompany'sexpansion tobrick-and-mortar shopsdelighted consumersandcaught the attention of Disney.