Katie Porterfield

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.’”

In the beginning, Diana Stewart did what most mothers would. Desperate to soothe a rash on her newborn daughter’s skin, she launched a mad search for a cream that would do the trick.

“Even as a child, I was a compulsive label reader with an aversion to chemicals,” Stewart says. “[When my daughter was born,] I just couldn’t find products that wouldn’t aggravate her skin — everything contained artificial fragrances, dyes, and parabens.”

Even before Lena Levendoski and her husband Geoff set foot in Baptist Hospital on that 20th day of July, 2007, to give birth to their precious baby boy, they knew that he’d passed away in the womb. Levendoski was 36 weeks pregnant when an ultrasound revealed that Strick’s heart had stopped beating. No warning. No explanation. Just the excruciating pain of losing a child before they even got to say hello.

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.

Sweaty bodies in 105-degree heat (40 to 60 percent humidity) working their way through a series of postures intended to deeply stretch muscles, reduce stress, rid systems of toxins and above all, help harness inner strength. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but talk to those who practice hot yoga regularly, and they are absolutely, positively hooked.

In 1989, Callie Birdsong noticed that her hair was thinning. Marcia Bryan remembers children making fun of her “fine” hair as early as the first grade. Barbara Childs was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2008 and began losing her hair after starting chemo three weeks later. And ultimately, they all turned to Sheryl McCaleb and her team at Nashville’s Hair Prosthesis Institute (HPI) for help. And that’s exactly what they got.