Ace welcomes the First Lady of Nails

Las Vegas -- Ace's Women in Retail affinity group has been providing a forum for the co-op's female entrepreneurs for four years running. This year, at the 2016 Ace Spring Convention in Las Vegas, the organization was finally able to book a highly coveted guest speaker, who many people know as The First Lady of Nails.

Suzi Weiss-Fischmann, co-founder and artistic director of OPI Products Inc., provided a keynote address that was chock full of inspirational soundbites.

"OPI has graced the hands of women on their most memorable occasions, bolstered their courage when they needed it, and supported the causes they care about," she said. "OPI has come to represent female empowerment for women in over 100 countries around the world."

Weiss-Fischmann's story is a highly personal one -- she came to America from Hungary, and she caught the entrepreneurial bug from her parents, who owned a manufacturing business in New York.

But it's also a universal story of what it means to be a woman in the workforce, and to run a woman-owned business.

As Weiss-Fischmann laid out, there are over 1 billion women participating in the global workforce, and female consumers control over $20 trillion in annual consumer spending. In total, women represent a growth market that's nearly twice the size of China and India combined. The number of working women in the U.S. will soon surpass the number of working men, and over 40% of U.S. businesses are female-owned.

"Yet even with our remarkable increase in market power, we continue to view ourselves as under-appreciated at home, underestimated in the work place, and undervalued in the marketplace," she said. "Probably the most significant insight a company can address is that women everywhere struggle with a shortage of time. The typical woman plays many different roles in her life: employee (or employer), manager of the home, purchasing agent, spouse or partner, mother and caregiver to aging parents, and more."

The notion of having to be "all things to all people" resonated with many of the women in attendance, who asked Weiss-Fischmann for time management advice during the follow-up Q&A session.

Ace first partnered with OPI in 2014, when it launched an exclusive color palette by Clark+Kensington, Ace’s premium paint line.

Ace also announced the official launch of its Ace Women in Retail communications forum, which will provide further networking opportunities, even information, and more, in a format that's similar to AceNet.