Entrepreneur understands how to redefine herself.

What do Knorr Soups and Lourdes Figueroa (BBA ’85) have in common?

Both had a great product but a false start in the market.


Lourdes Figueroa
“In a marketing class in the College of Business Administration, we looked at a case study about Knorr Soups—a powdered product that was a huge seller in Europe but was doing very poorly in the United States,” she said. “Then, the company discovered through a housewife that when the soup was mixed with sour cream, it made a great dip. Instead of having to pull it from the market, they repackaged it as a condiment.”

For Figueroa, the product that needs repositioning is a set of sophisticated self-improvement programs for women, touching on fashion, posture and poise, voice and speech, and etiquette called UdefineU. She is founder and CEO of UdefineU, LLC. The programs and her firm grew out of her own need to redefine herself.

“I quit smoking, gained a lot of weight, and was approaching forty,” she said. “Even after I succeeded in losing weight, I was still me... and I wanted to make myself over.”

She couldn’t find any product that met her need, so she decided to create one. She already had plenty of business experience having held various sales and global sales management positions at Reuters in both Miami and New York. As vice president of the Strategic Business Group for Instinet—Reuters’ electronic equity trading broker/dealer in New York—she’d managed the global trading relationships of the firm’s largest banking clients. She’d had an entrepreneurial bent since high school, and she had her college degree in business administration with a major in marketing from Florida International University to help.

Teaming with a partner, whose skills in legal, finance, and operations complemented her strengths in sales and marketing, she secured financing, then entered the world of production for the next year. But when the product was ready, the market wasn’t there.

“Consumer marketing is the hardest because it’s very difficult to know who the customer is,” she said. “There are many variables, and you have to try to create a message that appeals to all. Despite four infomercials and some success on QVC, the sales weren’t there and there wasn’t enough data to identify the problem.”

It was time to go back to basics. Figueroa met with consumer marketing experts in New York City who perceived the program was “too much work, even though we thought we were offering value because everything a woman would need was right there in one place,” she said.

They suggested that she break up the product, lead with fashion, and consider including the rest of the set for free. At the same time that she got this advice, she realized that she had an overlooked market.

“Beauty pageants were writing to me about the value of UdefineU,” she said, “but I wasn’t paying attention.”

Based on these eye-opening experiences, UdefineU altered its original business model and is now targeting, marketing to—and effectively selling into—the beauty pageant business. Though this lesson—and her four-year investment of time—could have been painful, Figueroa is optMIStic.

“Twenty years after my graduation, I still recall the case of Knorr Soups over the countless cases we studied,” she said. “That one example has given me the inspiration to find the parallel situation in my own business and chart a new course, knowing success is possible if one is agile enough to adapt to unexpected circumstances.”

For more information about UdefineU, as well as Figueroa’s personal journey to become the person she wanted to be, visit www.udefineu.com.