Patricia Miller

Patricia Miller and close friend and neighbor Barbara Bradley Baekgaard were catching a flight in Atlanta in 1982 when they noticed how drab women's travel bags looked. Each borrowed $250 from her husband and went to work in Baekgaard's basement in Fort Wayne, Indiana making handbags out of floral quilted cotton. Their business became Vera Bradley, which now sells half a billion dollars worth of handbags, luggage and other accessories a year through 154 company owned stores and more than 3,200 other locations. Miller, who took a brief leave of absence in 2005 to work for the state of Indiana as the first Secretary of Commerce and the CEO of the Indiana Economic Development Corp., ran the firm as co-president until 2010, the year it went public. She retired in 2012 but she and her husband, Michael, with whom she shares the fortune, sit on the board. Miller serves as a director for the Indiana University Foundation and for the Vera Bradley Foundation for Breast Cancer. Vera Bradley was actually not the friends? first business. Together they started ?Up Your Wall,? a business selling and hanging wallpaper, in the 1970s. Bachelor of Arts / Science, Indiana University