The 52 Year Journey From Bras to High-Tech

This is the story of a woman who has made millions in network marketing. She is currently building a successful high-tech network marketing business at the age of 80.

It was the early 1960s, and 30-year-old Sylvia Waiwaiole had just become a single mother in Hawaii, one of the most expensive states in the nation. Her husband walked away when their four children ranged in age from five to twelve. He did not provide them with support.

The family was destitute, and Sylvia worked long and hard hours to put food on the table as a dishwasher for a local airline. She often worked five days a week, from 3 a.m. to 3 p.m. She took every bit of overtime she could get at the airline to support her children. Despite her efforts, she could barely make ends meet.

“I appreciated the job because I could put food on the table,” Sylvia said in a recent interview from her home in Hawaii. “But I thought there had to be a better way to make a living here rather than washing dishes all night.”

Sylvia soon found a way, thanks to a phone call from her friend Betty. The topic? A bra. Betty told Sylvia she had an incredible bra. Did she want to buy one?

“I said, ‘Betty, are you kidding? I’m not only flat-busted, I’m flat-broke.’”

However, curiosity got the better of Sylvia. She went to visit Betty and discovered one incredible bra. It was called the Sculptress bra, and it was sold through network marketing.

While Sylvia was hooked on the product, she was even more enamored by the idea of selling these bras herself and earning some extra money. But, like many before her, she had her doubts that she could do well as a network marketer. She had no experience selling anything. She was shy. She had very little time, between work and her children. And she didn’t have the money for the $79 bra kit—a set of 12 bras used to fit women and to help them when ordering bras.

But something in Sylvia told her she needed to try this. She asked Betty to loan her a few bras she could use to get started. Then she went to see a few friends and effortlessly sold twelve $8 bras. She borrowed the bra kit again to sell more. Soon she had paid Betty back and was making thousands through her new career with network marketing.

The bra company came out with other products, from cosmetics to vitamins, and Sylvia enjoyed them all. While she thought at first she couldn’t sell anything, she found that she absolutely could sell, as long as she believed in the products.

When the airline she was working for folded, she devoted more time to her network marketing career. She started to make more and more money, and became increasingly successful.

“Things began to just grow,” she said. “Even though I was shy, I became incredibly successful with the company and built a very large organization that branched out to Japan and other areas.”

Sylvia remained with the company for 27 years—no small feat in any field, but one that’s nearly unheard of in network marketing.

“I was focused on doing everything I could to make it work and I wouldn’t even look at another product or company,” she said. “I just knew that there was something to these products that I was selling.”

Through her work, Sylvia was able to provide for her family and earned prizes including a home, cars, diamonds, and travels all over the world.

However, she was working 16-hour days. Her life became unbalanced as she focused solely on her business and detached from the family she was doing it for.

“I lost track of life. My boys ended up on drugs. One daughter was pregnant at 16 from a drug addict the other daughter was beaten up by a drug addict,” Sylvia said. She blamed herself for her children’s mistakes, believing that they turned to drugs because she had neglected them for work and money.

It took a lot of soul searching for Sylvia to diagnose the problems that had occurred in her life, along with the roots of those problems and how they could be fixed. It all came to a head at the house blessing ceremony she held at her new home, awarded to her as a prize for achieving $2.5 million in sales.

“I looked into the crowd and thought, ‘What good is all of this when my family is falling apart? I have lost touch with my children, so what do I do now? Do I just quit?’”

These questions weren’t easy for Sylvia to answer. She went into a deep depression, but she climbed out of it—not because things got easier or her problems resolved themselves. Sylvia just refused to give up.

This is how Sylvia is—she refuses to accept things as they are. Instead, she strives to make them the way she wants them to be. It was this passion that led her from her dish washing job to her network marketing career. Eventually, it was this same passion that helped her put her life back together and deepen her faith.

“I began to regroup my life. I got hungry for God. I started searching and searching,” she remembers. “I had achieved everything on the outside—a beautiful home, a beautiful car. I had a lot of friends, but I was empty inside. So for 10 years, I couldn’t do anything. I ended up living in my garage in that beautiful home I sold. I sold it because I just didn’t want to keep it. I hated money all of a sudden. I said, ‘If this is what money does, forget it.’”

Sylvia had no desire to ever sell anything again. Instead, she started working with a drug prevention program call No Hope in Dope, try to spare other families from ever knowing the heartache she had experienced with her own.

Then she received a bottle in the mail containing a potassium mineral supplement. An old network marketing friend had sent it, thinking it was time for Sylvia to “get back in the saddle.”

“I took a big swig of it,” Sylvia said. “Within 15 minutes, I don’t know if it was in my mind or what it was, but I felt this buzz. I thought, ‘Whoa, this is a powerful product. There must be a drug in it.’”

“It sat on my counter for a while and then I got a call from the friend who sent it,” Sylvia said. “He said, ‘Hey, Syl, you need to try the product. Just hold your nose. Take it. It’s good for you. It’ll help you.”

Sylvia, still very involved with drug prevention programs, was hesitant to try anything that resembled a drug. She was still trying to help her own children battle their addictions. She traveled to schools and talked to children about the dangers of drugs. She had no interest in a product that might wreak havoc on other families.

However, her friend and everything she read about the product proclaimed that it was a natural supplement, without any drug properties of any kind. When she finally decided that this new supplement was a product she wanted to sell, she decided it was time to get her family involved in her business.

She went to her oldest son with the product, asked him to try it, and asked him to sell it with her.

“He didn’t want to be involved,” Sylvia remembers. “He said, ‘Oh, Mom, it’s a scam. Forget it.’”

By this time, Sylvia had run out of the money she’d made before. She was just as broke as she was washing dishes for the airline.

“I went from earning over a million dollars and a house down to nothing,” Sylvia said. “So what do you do? What do you do at that point of your life?”

There are probably a lot of things people might do at the point—giving up being a primary one. Instead, she called a friend named Bob, a network marketer who might be interested in the potassium supplement. Bob was a tennis player and Sylvia pitched it to him as something that could help him with his game.

She took him “an old broken down kit.” Two weeks later, an excited Bob called her and volunteered to sell the product.

“Literally within four months, I was earning $25,000 a month selling this product,” Sylvia said. “You see, being that product-driven person, I don’t touch anything unless I feel it in my heart. So I became so successful I was one of the 10 top people in the company. I was nominated as one of the 10 top network marketing women in the world at that time. It’s amazing how things happen.”

Sylvia really enjoyed her success the second time around. Articles were written about her achievements and her amazing story appeared in a book dedicated to successful home-business entrepreneurs.

But as quickly as success can come, it can also slip away. People started to sue the parent company of the product, claiming they were harmed by it. Then allegations made it into the media about illegal drugs being in the product. While independent tests found the supplement to be drug-free, the damage was done.

Sylvia, however, isn’t one to give up. She hopped a plane to Seattle, and began building a business with the potassium supplement there.

“I didn’t give up because I believed in the product,” Sylvia said. “See, it’s all about the believing. I built such a business that I became the licensee and CEO of the company in New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom. I worked very hard to build these businesses.”

But there were more problems in store. Sylvia borrowed money to get her companies started, then she lost her license to the product. Soon she found herself near bankruptcy and broke again. This time, it wasn’t just her own fortune she had lost, but the fortune of friends who had believed in her. This gave Sylvia even more of an incentive to pick herself up, dust herself off, and find a way to get back the money she had lost.

It was a very tough time for Sylvia, but eventually she found a way to get back in the game. While visiting a friend in Arizona, she got a call from a woman in Canada who was using the potassium supplement on her horses with great results. Sylvia had heard of other people doing this, but she had never considered it an opportunity until that moment.

The Canadian woman had a lot of great information and testimonials about the product, but it was all on a website. Sylvia had no idea how to access it at the time.

“I said, ‘Are you kidding? I don’t even know how to turn on a computer.’” But with the help of family, Sylvia not only accessed the site, but built her own site for horse owners who might want to try the supplement. Her magic touch worked well on the internet, and soon she was able to pay off her debts and her investors and support herself.

Unfortunately, her fortunes were tied to a website company that was about to go belly up. But, by now, Sylvia was used to picking herself back up and jumping back in.

Then came a new challenge that was unlike all of her earlier ones. She got cancer. For many people, this might be an end. But Sylvia was a fighter. Not only did she beat cancer, she found a way to come out of the ordeal with something useful.

“I met a wonderful doctor in Arizona,” she said. “He put together a product for the immune system which I made public.”

She made some money, but again found that she was losing some of her faith in God and falling out of touch with the most important aspects of her life.

So Sylvia began attending Bible college. This helped her satisfy her hunger for God and filled her with optimism and faith in herself and her abilities.

“I loved it. I was around vibrant, positive-minded, young people,” she said. “I was able to help them and mentor them.”

Sylvia also sat on the board of the college for six years, eventually getting involved with fundraising for scholarships. On her first foray into fundraising, she raised $75,000. She also started to serve on other public boards and commissions, giving back to the community that had given her so much, time and time again.

“I wasn’t making or earning any money, but I was happy,” she said. “I knew that there was something more to life than just money. I’m not against money, believe me. I have been there. I made millions, but I lost millions as well.”

However, while making and losing millions, Sylvia learned a lot of hard lessons about commitment, perseverance, diligence, integrity and resilience. She now sees this whole period as a major part of her growth process. Sylvia was in her 60s at the time—an age when most people start to wind down. But Sylvia was just truly getting started.

“I had a Ph.D.,” she joked. “I was Poor, Hungry and Determined, and I had a story to tell.”

“When God sees that you’re beginning to learn some lessons, all of a sudden things begin to happen,” she said.

Sylvia, the woman who could barely turn on a computer a few years before, was introduced to a technology company called IWowWee. Thankfully, by this point, she had learned to turn on a computer, and also to send a few emails. However, she was hesitant to get involved with the company when she didn’t really understand what it did or how its product worked. Remember, this was a woman who always based her success on her belief in what she was selling.

“But when I saw the company and met the owner, I knew I was in good hands,” Sylvia said. “I saw his heart. I saw the humanity in him and I wanted to be involved, so I began to learn about this technology.”

And learn she did. Now Sylvia is video chatting with people all over the world who have lost faith or who want to give up on themselves or their endeavors. She motivates and encourages them, sharing the benefit of her life’s journey and the wisdom she has learned along the way.

“There’s a scripture that says God restores what the locust has stolen. Now, through internet technology, I am enjoying the fruit of the labor and the relationships that I have built throughout the years,” Sylvia said.

Today, she looks back on the ups and down of her life and sees nothing she would change. Through each success, she learned something. Through each failure, she learned something else. Sylvia doubts she would have arrived where she is now without each of those lessons.

“I don’t regret my life,” she said. “I thank God every day because I learned lessons that cannot be bought.”

Today, Sylvia is very comfortable with life. She still lives in Hawaii, now on a lake in a house that she loves. Her relationship with her children is much better. One of her daughters is in business with her, serving as her right hand. She even resolved her issues with her ex-husband, and was able to host his memorial service after he passed away at her home.

As she approaches her 80th birthday, Sylvia is involved in her community and gives to charities. And she is still involved with network marketing.

“I’ve never done anything else since I left that job as dishwasher,” she said. “I went through my ups and downs, but I hung in there. I never gave up and today I am reaping the rewards of hard work, doing things right and living life in right perspective—with God and family first.”