Suzanne Jonsen Co-Owner/Founder:  With over 20 years of sales and marketing experience for large companies I decided it was time for me to go small.  I received my degree in communications from Colorado State University and headed to Chicago to pursue a career in advertising. I worked in Chicago for the next 16 years at ad agencies including Foote Cone and Belding, Wells, Rich and Greene and Target & Response for clients such as SC Johnson, Coors, Midas, Sunkist, Proctor and Gamble, ADT Security Systems, and Sears Roebuck.  In addition to my agency experience, I also worked in national and local radio and TV for CBS, Infinity Broadcasting, and ABC/Disney.  I entered the dotcom world in the late 90’s and was one of the first 20 employees at FastWeb.com, now a Monster.com company, where my responsibilities included traffic acquisition, sales, marketing, and content. 
I spent most of my childhood in Colorado, so I am able to horrify my children by pointing out which chairlifts I kissed boys on in high school.  The call of the Windy City took me back to my original Midwest roots (a proud cheese-head at birth). After a 16 year emancipation in Chicago the call of family brought me back West.  I married Steve, the boy (now man) I went to Homecoming with, after we re-met at a high school reunion. I love being his wife and a mother to our three awe inspiring kids, Drew, Blake and Hannah, and Raz the big brown dog (go Greyhound Rescue).  Tell Me Girlfriend is my fourth child, and it lets me pursue my passion for family, for shopping and for connecting with other like-minded women. My favorite fictional girlfriend is Harriet The Spy, because as an 8 year old girl was there anyone cooler than Harriet The Spy?

Alex Hill Co-Owner/Founder: I was brought up in a very small town in Ohio along with two sisters and a brother. Although my lovely parents have both died, they taught me many lessons. Just a few of these lessons were an insistence on good grammar, the fact that February is pronounced with two Rs, and at a party, never to put the liquor in a room with only one entrance.

I left Ohio and went to Bryn Mawr College, the best college I could possibly have chosen.  If you are trying to convince your daughter to consider single-sex education, feel free to ask me for an impassioned promotion of the advantages of an all-women’s college.

I was rudely thrust into the real world after college.  I began my career in very large companies, which I hated.  I realized that I needed to make a major change in my career path, so I took the time-honored step of ditching everything and going back to school.  I went to Harvard Business School and got my MBA, which I used as a stock analyst for an investment bank and later as a management consultant.

I married HB, the Wonder Man. A few years later, to my own utter surprise, I found myself choosing to be a stay-at-home mom when our first child was about two. HB and I added two more delightful children, bringing the total to three delightful children, Brad, Chris and Mary Alice.  That’s all there are – it isn’t as if we have others who are not delightful. 

Of course, every life has its challenges. My biggest have been my two bouts with breast cancer. I was first diagnosed in 1995, when my son Chris was a year and a half old and Brad was five. I had a lumpectomy, chemotherapy and radiation and it was awful. Fortunately,  I was so out of things that I really remember very little of it. I had a localized recurrence in 2002. I decided that I had been more than patient with my breasts, so I had a double mastectomy. So far, so good, but with breast cancer you really don’t know it is not going to kill you until you die of something else.  My friend Monica pointed out that that is really delayed gratification!

So here I am, battle-scarred but still upright, moving into the next phase of my life. I am “the analytical one” in this partnership.  I am hugely excited to be working on something that is going to be my own, that I find interesting and that I truly believe will be useful to other women.  As my buddy Drew so wisely put it, “if you’re going to work for a (jerk), you may as well work for yourself.”