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Muna Abboud is addicted to fabric; her Muna Couture office space is a veritable textile library. Massive wooden bookcases shelve bolt after bolt of the most expensive fabrics used by big name designers like Chanel, Oscar de la Renta, and Vera Wang, to name a few.

“I just have to touch it,” Abboud says of fabric, adding that she’d like to stop buying it but can’t help herself.

Ten years ago, the word “consignment” didn’t mean anything to Jenifer Gifford. But when she had her first son (now 9), her friends insisted that she start shopping consignment sales for children’s items. She took their advice, and before she knew it, she’d built a business around that once unfamiliar word.

Last month, Alice Emberton, DVM, had to look into a webcam and tell a 30-year-old Army lieutenant serving in Iraq that it was time to put her 20-year-old cat to sleep.

Jenny Piper loves East Nashville. She also loves ice cream. That’s why when she realized that her favorite Music City neighborhood was missing something, she was just one scoop away from opening the perfect shop.

“I love the ice cream shop, and I love the variety of flavors,” she explains. “We didn’t have it anywhere on this side of the river, so I was going across to 21st Avenue to get Ben and Jerry’s every other week or so. I thought, ‘I can’t be the only one who really needs this.’”

Full disclosure: I’m a Private Dick, a shamus, a gumshoe, a flatfoot. If you’re unfamiliar with the parlance of hard-boiled detective novelists the likes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, that’s “private investigator” to you.

To the uninitiated, the job conjures images straight out of classic crime fiction: old fedoras, a frosted office door, a chatty babe answering phones, and, most important of all, the client: a mysterious dame, long on trouble but short on cash.

Ashley Currie always knew she wanted to have her own business someday. She knew she wanted to blend her marketing skills with her love of people. So last August, she did just that when she launched iHospitality, an eco-friendly flatware and tableware business.   

For the past 300 to 400 years — since the time of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions — humans have thought of the body as a machine. You put fuel in it, perform routine maintenance, and the machine operates. But as the stress of living among our technological advances has become more intense and demanding, the desire to reconnect with an organic model of existence has resulted in an “updated” view of the human being as a natural organism. Instead of being composed of parts, it turns out, we are an interwoven whole.

Reading can be a pleasant escape, an imaginary journey that takes you down far away roads — but it can also be illuminating, a light for the path you’re already on. It’s a rare book that allows a reader to do both at the same time. For teacher and writer Cindy McCain, the classic novel Wuthering Heights is such a work. Written in 1847 by Emily Brontë, this tale of passion and obligation may be most familiar as one of those old books you had to read in high school.

It appeared as if she’d set up shop in the perfect location. After all, the Mall at Green Hills is always bustling, but after 23 years in two separate spaces at one of Nashville’s mostly heavily trafficked shopping hotspots, Nuhad Khoury decided she needed a change. She had something else in mind for the retail and luxury boutique spa originally called Nuhad Khoury Cosmetics & Perfumery, which was rebranded several years later as Tiba.

Recording artist Debbie Cunningham used it to launch her singing career. Danielle Griggs used it to transform an experience with her daughter into a business. And entrepreneur Whitney Ferré used it to turn an idea into a published book.