Tess Padmore Accountant turns Survivor turns Swim Cap Entrepreneur-New York|Alaska|Montana

So how are you? 

I'm doing pretty good. Just a little busy, but you know, that's just what life is right about now.  I'll tell you, I'm doing all this stuff and I'm trying to move cross country and everything else. So yeah, it's a bit crazy. 

Where you are now and where are you trying to move? 

I'm upstate in Rochester, New York and I'm moving to Montana. I'm going west. 

That's a big change. How did you decide to go to Montana with, I guess it's nature and openness.

I was born and raised in New York City.  So I'm a concrete jungle baby.  But I'm also a nerd.  I have always been a nerd.  And when I was a little girl, I read tons and tons of books.  And I'm a movie buff and watched tons and tons of movies.  As result, I always wanted to see places and things that I read about.

When I was about six, I decided I wanted to go to Alaska and I wanted to go to Montana.  I went to Alaska in '82 and lived there for 15 years.  Over time I lived in other places, but I eventually came back to New York, upstate New York from Alaska and kind of got stuck here for 30 years, the longest I've ever lived any place.

I went to undergraduate school in Philadelphia and I still go back and forth.  That's my home away from home, I love Philly. 

And I finally got the opportunity to go to Montana-spent most of the summer there and now I'm packing and I'm hoping to be there by November. 

Is it what I imagine in terms of nature, outdoors and wilderness or is it the cities that attract you? 

I'm going to Billings.  And Montana is called Big Sky Country.  What drew it to me was seeing it in films.  I wanted to see the Missouri Breaks and I wanted to see the mountains.

Initially, when we were driving to Alaska, we actually went across to Montana so that I could see the mountains.  But at that time, we just stayed briefly driving en route up through Canada and on to Alaska.  So that was 40 years ago.  Recently, I met someone who's from Montana who was taking classes with me here in Rochester. And I told him about my experience back then. And he said the Montana back then is not the Montana that it is now.  So I spent most of the summer there and it is very different from my first experience.

It has a very high elevation.  The air is clean.  And it's spread out. Billings in particular, has a natural formation that encircles the city that is actually dirt.  It looks like rock, but it's dirt. And it's called Rimrocks.  The Rims surrounds the city.  And then there's the Beartooth Mountains.  So when I get there, I'll finally get to visit the Missouri Breaks, which is kind of like wilderness.

I am not an outdoors person. I'll be very clear about that. But I do like the wide open space and the peacefulness of it.  When I lived in Alaska, I called it my sanctuary. And when I get to Montana, I feel the same way. 

Demographically, it's not very diverse, which I understand.  But the people that I did meet of color, I asked all of them...what's it really like?  Just so, but not that this would have necessarily stopped me.  And I've met people from across the board including a nurse from from Ghana, who said, well, it's not very diverse, I don't necessarily like the cold in the winter, but it is peaceful. 

Every person of color I met, came for different reasons.  Some for their kids-just to get a better education and a safer environment. But across the board they all said the same thing-it's just so peaceful and it's clean. And so the people, generally speaking are very nice and pleasant.  Everyone says hello. I didn't have any incidents. I didn't get any looks.

There was a black guy I met from Compton and we talked for a while and he owns a Mexican restaurant downtown. And he decided to move there because he wanted his sons to grow up there. So, you know, people were coming from different places for different reasons.  But, you know, I'm okay with it.  I'm okay going by myself because, you know, you take yourself wherever you go and you find your own happiness. So you know, I'm good.  And I tend to go where people aren't going, if that makes sense.

And what about your upbringing on the East Coast? 

I am proud of the fact that I was born and raised in New York City because of the diversity; growing up around different cultures and different languages and different experiences. It's a place that no matter what you want to do, no matter what time of day, you can do it.  And the saying goes, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. 

However, I told my mother when I was a kid that as soon as I was 18, I was leaving New York.  I didn't plan to live there all my life. So I was going, it didn't matter. You know, I was going no matter what.  And when I got accepted into Drexel University that's when I went to Philadelphia. That was my first stop out, you know, but I just fell in love with the city.  My friends from there don't understand why I love the city, but I love, I still love that city. 

Why do you like Philly so much? 

I like Philly because one of the things it has for me, it has this passion for music and after-film.  Back then, I mean, when I got off the plane in the airport you'd hear T.S.O.P. and all the music is playing, it felt like coming home.  When I was in college back then, that's when Frankie Beverly and Maze were just starting to perform at clubs there.  And the same for Patti LaBelle & The Bluebelles. They hadn't hit it big yet.  It was just a different, it was a different time.

Philadelphia is where I experienced a lot of my firsts.  You know, it was my first move into independence. So to this day, I still go there and see concerts and plays.  I have friends that are still there from college, so it's my home away from home. And the New York that I grew up in doesn't exist anymore. It just doesn't exist. So going home to New York, isn't really going home, you know. 

To this day when you go downtown, they've have placards on the sidewalk of all these historic musicians from the area.  What's also amazing about it, going there was my introduction to jazz.  What they did musically on the radio stations, they played all genres of music all day long and all night.  They didn't just play contemporary music.

You know, like now here in Rochester, all they do is play rap music all day.  If you want to hear anything else, you have to listen to it at two o'clock in the morning.  But radio Philadelphia at that time played all genres of music all day long.  This meant the kids were exposed to Jazz, R&B and Rock & Roll; all that all day long.  So that was one of the things that I really liked about it.  Then going to Drexel was an incredible opportunity for me because it was the first time I was given intellectual freedom without the barriers of public school teachers preventing you from learning with an open mind. It was a tough school. It is still a tough school, but I did it and I was comfortable as a nerd.  So each step fed my spirit and those things were nurturing my nomadic mindset.  I eventually went back to New York, got my graduate degree from NYU. And as soon as I got back, of course, I was ready to leave again.  It worked for a while then I left and I went to Alaska, sight unseen.

What was life like living in Alaska?

The experience was really good.  When I arrived in Alaska I was situated in the Capitol in Juneau.  Having travelled with a friend, we went sight unseen with no jobs.  But I did have my education and was one of two MBAs in my field.  In Alaska, it was culturally and professionally diverse and this was with no DEI initiatives back in those days. It's the only place in my professional career where I was paid what I was worth and I was treated with respect. And to all the people who said, why would you want to give up your career in New York and move to Alaska, it was because I learned more there professionally.

A lot of my coworkers from Arthur Anderson, they're starting to retire now, but they were just getting to the VP level and the treasurer level.  And I had done that back in the early 90s. And because the state is small, I had the opportunity to work with the state attorney generals.  I was appointed by four governors and the legislature that was there.  I learned how politics worked and it was a huge civics lesson.   I worked on the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council as administrative director before I left.  I was assigned to help audit their $900 million settlement when only $300,000 had been received as disbursed, to determine where the other money would go.  This was in my last year living there and I had to figure out, well, where would all that other money go. This required drafting the first financial statements and then the budget for the next year for the person coming in after me.  I would never, ever have gotten any of the opportunities that I got in Alaska if I'd stayed in New York.  So I don't regret it.  I still have friends for life living there from this experience. 

Funny enough, it was all the friends that didn't come to visit-now they want to go.  And it's not the same anymore, because now everybody wants to go there.  My friends have told me nobody even goes downtown anymore because there are too many tourists.  Further, the glacier in the town is melted. There's no ice on it anymore.  At the time when I went, the population in that town then was 19,000.  When I left, it was about 36,000.  So everything was at the right time, the right place and everything happened the way it was supposed to.  All of that fed into the person I am now.

So let's talk about your swimming caps.  Where and how did this come about?

What happened with the swim caps?  First of all, in going to Drexel you had to know how to swim in order to graduate. So that's when I learned how to swim.  As a result, I was always in the pool doing laps and always wore my hair short and natural-no longer than two inches.

Thereafter, I had a brain aneurysm that erupted two times when I was 48 back in 2001.  They didn't think I would survive, but I did.  And I worked for five years after that at 53, which was really hard until finally my doctors all said-you're done.  Even as I was trying to work on my doctorate in education for another year after, then they continued to say-you're done.

So at that point, two things happened. One, being told that you can't anymore.  I had defined myself by my brain, being I was a lifelong learner. I went to school, all those things.  I felt like because of the traumatic brain injury that resulted and blood clots in my lungs and all the complication, I was being thrown away.

And I had to figure out, what was I going do I do.  I had a choice.  I could lay down and be sick, or I could pick myself up and figure out what I'm going to do with the rest of my life.  So I decided I wasn't going to be sick, being sick was easy.  I decided, because I couldn't walk very far because of respiratory problems, to go back to the pool.  I couldn't do laps anymore, and chose to do aqua aerobics. 

My hair had gotten really long at that point.  I bought a regular swim cap which lasted for about two weeks and then one time while doing aqua aerobics it flew across the pool-and we all laughed about that.  I came home that night and I went on Google looking for larger swim caps, but all I found was other people looking for larger swim caps-this was back in 2011.  So I drew a picture and took it to my tailor and I said, can you make this?  And she said I can make anything you want, just go get some fabric.  I went and found this material that they use to line diapers from this she sewed a prototype-which I used for two years.

I did my research.  I started doing research about what kind of fabric would work best and stuff like that, when someone told me, you need a contract sewer, which I didn't know about.  I eventually found someone, a small woman owned business in California whose niche was catering to small businesses that needed small quantities of production.  And it so happened, it turned out that she also made children's wetsuits, which was the material I was going to use-neoprene. She then made three prototypes based on the one I had. I chose one and I started, I just went with it.

At the same time, as part of my rehab to keep living, my doctor had said to me, there was psychological impact to that.  He suggested, that I write as part of your recovery.  And I thought to myself, who would want to read what I write?  But I tried anyway,  and now I've written two children's books and am working on a third.  I found my voice and I am also working on a memoir.

So that's how the swim cap started, because I needed one.  I knew enough from my professional background to get an attorney and to get an accountant. And we just went for it to get it patented, the design got patented.

I would say after the first year of people buying my cap, you started seeing other larger caps coming out.  Not in my design, but you started seeing more. The other thing I realized in doing my research, black children and brown children have the highest drownings rates.  I didn't know that and this added a special social aspect to it.  I took the position as a company, I would not exclude anyone. I didn't care what texture the hair had, what length, any of that.  They didn't even have to have hair. 

My tagline is, all you need is a head.  I sell caps to bald men. I sell caps to people who are going through chemotherapy-which is a whole different mindset in terms of fabric and the psychological implications of losing all your hair as you're going through this chronic illness.  I'm a survivor, not of cancer, but I'm a survivor of and I know the psychology of being a survivor of a catastrophic illness.  So my objective is not to exclude anyone.

In the process, I've learned through the years that people in Italy and people in Ireland have the same problem. They have a whole lot of hair just like ours and they can't find a swim cap.  So this opened, it gave me a purpose to make sure that the needs of every ethnicity are being met.

It gave me a purpose and it was beyond the origin story has to do with the illness, but it has to really do with feeling as a disabled person, feeling as if I were being discarded. Like I didn't matter, that I couldn't contribute to society anymore. And so I said, no, you're not going to throw me away. I'm going to do something. And so that's how that's grown.

Underpinning it all is children. The drowning rate is an issue. Now even, the drowning rate among senior citizens is an issue, which I wasn't aware of which is a new and growing issue.  And there's that population of people that I also want to serve.

Concluding...in my little promotion I want people to go to Eggheadsoques where you can see all of the different headwear offered. I don't just sell swim caps.  I have expanded the line so that there's just about anything you want to do, with those caps-you can do.