The early 1990s was no time to break into the world of investment banking. That’s the way Cinda Sherman remembers it. She had just lost her job as a financial analyst in Jacksonville, Fla.; the market was tanking; and all around her, banks and brokerages weren’t hiring, but instead laying off workers.

Things got so bad that when a few friends offered her a basement to live in until she got back on her feet, she took it.

“It was literally concrete floors — no bathroom,” she said. “I had to go in with candlelight.”

It was during that down-and-out period that the ’86 grad hatched a plan that must have sounded crazy to some: launching an arts and culture magazine in a Florida market that was practically void of the material she wanted to cover.

But the business major with a love for the arts went ahead, founding her “Arbus” magazine in 1995. Today, the arts and business publication has grown with Jacksonville’s blooming arts community and counts as many as 100,000 readers an issue.

To top it off, two years ago Sherman won the Women in Business award from the Women Business Owners of North Florida. She won primarily because she had started the magazine without any money, help or knowledge of the publishing business.

“I about fell out of my seat when they called my name,” she said. “It was really quite an honor to be recognized after all those years of hard work.”

Sherman grew up in an artistic family. Her father, Michael, was a Flamenco guitar player and an associate professor of sociology at Flagler. She crafted her own appreciation for the arts into her concept for “Arbus,” which also partly stemmed from her own experiences with the few galleries that did exist in Jacksonville. She found them intimidating and a bit elitist. As a student at Flagler, she visited a gallery where a woman followed her throughout the gallery, peering over her shoulder the entire time.

“I just remember how much I hated it,” she said, “and I swore that I would never try to have the magazine come across that way — as though you were being looked down upon.”

Sherman said the magazine struggled for three or four years before really taking off.

“It took a long time for ‘Arbus’ to kind of get its own skin and create itself,” she said. “I’ve tried to let the community and the magazine create itself based on what people are looking for and what they are interested in.”

When the magazine first started out, Sherman said there were a lot of naysayers. Some even told her that it wouldn’t make it more than two years. This only made her work harder to make it succeed.

She believes the magazine fits well with the thriving arts and cultural scene across the First Coast, which she says now attracts people to the city and “gives it a heart and a soul.”

Sherman attributes her education at Flagler with the idea for “Arbus.”

“If I didn’t have that liberal arts background — that love for studying art and then the business side of it — I don’t think this would have ever come about,” she said. “It was the catalyst when I was looking for a way to get out of that hole or that basement, if you will. I hope one day to be able to have a legacy that I can leave behind with the magazine.”

Visit Arbus online at www.arbus.com.
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But that’s exactly what Amy Waers (‘06) has been doing while working as an assistant buyer in Wal-Mart Stores’ stationery department, a position that has her traveling overseas to China on buying trips.

“I actually got it [the position] through SIFE,” Waers said about Students in Free Enterprise, the entrepreneurial organization that has a chapter at Flagler. “We were at the national competition my junior year presenting, and I was recruited after one of our presentations by the senior vice president.”

Waers accepted the position and, upon graduation, moved to Bentonville, Ark., where the corporate office is located.

A highlight of her job has been the three trips she’s taken to China to buy stationery products. Waers said the location of her travels is based on which products she is responsible for purchasing and where they are made. Products like copy paper, envelopes and photo paper are predominantly manufactured in Asia.

Waers said she has embraced the many cultural differences she’s found between China and the United States.
“[The differences] became very real to me the first time I went over there,” she said. “It was like, ‘Whoa, yeah.’ … I absolutely love it.”

Waers said the business world is becoming a much smaller place. “Especially the way the economy is today,” she said. “It’s just becoming more and more global.”

China has topped headlines lately with products like food and toys being recalled for poor quality standards, and that fact isn’t lost on Waers, who says quality is critical.

“It’s one of the hardest things about importing products — the quality control issue — because in China they have different standards than we have in the U.S.,” she said. “So, it’s just really making sure that we communicate our standards and that the factories and the companies that we’re working with overseas understand how important it is to us.”