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FORTUNE.COM // JANUARY 2020
ate passes at me. I saw what the world was like
without a college education and decided to re-
turn to Denmark to focus on school. I finished
my degree in finance and business in three and
a half years.
While going to college, I worked part-time
at Carlsberg, where I met my husband, Henrik,
in the brewery. He moved to the U.S. to help
introduce Carlsberg there, and when I finished
school in 1988, I followed him to New York.
Carlsberg sent a number of Danes to the
U.S. to work with Anheuser-Busch, but when
I applied for a sales job, Carlsberg told me
women couldn’t sell beer. I thought, “I’ll show
them!” So I left Denmark, and Anheuser-
Busch hired me to be Miss Carlsberg. They
needed someone to attract attention at fes-
tivals around the country. I’d put on a green
sash, and people would take pictures with me.
Back then, it was fashionable to give
watches to your employees for Christmas.
So while I was traveling as Miss Carlsberg, I
started representing a Danish company that
sold premium watches that could be custom-
ized with a company’s logo. Absolut Vodka
was my first customer.
When I wasn’t traveling, I’d walk the streets
of New York, pick buildings with names of big
corporations, and go looking for marketing
managers to sell our watches to. Sometimes I
got thrown out, but sometimes they saw me,
and it would lead to an order.
I wanted to do a watch for the Guggenheim
Museum and kept calling the marketing man-
ager. He agreed to see me, but when I walked
in, he was so irate. He got within a centimeter
of my nose, saying, “You’re so pushy!”
Two days later, I called him back, and he
ended up giving me an order. When he moved
to the Whitney, he continued to buy from
me. I built the business by continually calling
people and being pushy.
My time as Miss Carlsberg ended when
I became pregnant with our first daughter.
Henrik continued working for Carlsberg for
a while, then also quit, and we were left with
very little money. We bought a car for $300
that didn’t always run, and we had no health
insurance. We couldn’t even buy a crib for the
baby. She slept in a drawer in our bedroom,
and we ate bread and ketchup. But we were
determined to make things work.
The watch business did well enough that I
decided to take some samples to a trade show.
There, the owner of a small retailer named Sil-
ver Square said the watches were so beautiful
that if we took the company logos off, he could
sell them. So Henrik and I de-
cided to do just that. We named
the company after Skagen—
a fishing village in northern
Denmark that gets more sun-
shine than anywhere else in the
country. We took out a $10,000
loan on our Long Island house
and ordered 200 watches with
our own logo and design.
We took the money from that
sale to make 400 watches, sold
them, and used that money to
make 800 watches, and so on.
We reinvested everything.
Sharper Image became our
first big retail customer in- That year, annual rev-
enue was $800,000.
Since Nevada had lower state
taxes, we moved to Lake Tahoe
in 1993, and we had a second
daughter. It was still just the
two of us doing everything.
We’d sit down to dinner, and a
truck would arrive with boxes of
watches. We’d stop eating to unload them.
At first the department stores didn’t want
us, so we concentrated on small, local design
stores and became a cult brand. But then
Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Saks, and Macy’s
became customers, and we attracted the
attention of Fossil. It approached us every
year for 10 years, wanting to buy us. In 2010,
we were ready to spend more time with our
family, and I wanted to compete in dressage
at the Olympics, so we agreed. We were the
last company that Fossil didn’t own in the
watch bay at Macy’s. It took a year and a half
to close the deal. We both cried when we told
the employees.
After selling, I started training on my
horses and got skin cancer. Doctors told me to
stay indoors. But I started researching materi-
als that would protect skin from the sun so
that I could ride again. I began designing rid-
ing wear with UV-protective fabric that had
a Danish, preppy point of view and started
Kastel Denmark in 2012. Annual revenue was
$1.5 million in the first year.
In 2016, I placed 10th in the World Cup
Finals, and I aim to try out for the U.S. Olympic
team. I’ve had one recurrence of skin cancer, but
now I’m in the clear. At horse events, I do trunk
shows and sell our line to tack stores. I’m not as
aggressively ambitious as I was with Skagen, but
I won’t ever give up selling. It’s too much fun.
BEST ADVICE
CHARLOTTE JORST
COFOUNDER OF
SK AGEN AND FOUNDER
OF K ASTEL DENMARK
Be careful whom you
do business with.
One of the biggest
mistakes we made
in the beginning
was selling a lot of
watches to a retailer
who then declared
bankruptcy. We didn’t
think to check his
credit and lost about
$6,000, which was a
year of salary for us
back then. After that,
we started checking
people’s credit and
literally didn’t eat for
a while.