Who Is Barbara Bradley Baekgaard? The Vera Bradley Icon at 87

At 87, most people have traded the office for early dinners and afternoon card games. Barbara Bradley Baekgaard is definitely not most people. 

The co-founder of Vera Bradley still shows up to board meetings, runs her foundation, and, in her own words, has zero interest in ever retiring. She sat down on House Guest with Kenzie Elizabeth to talk through her story herself, and it’s worth every single second of your time.

As a woman who turned a few quilted bags made on her ping-pong table into one of America’s most recognized brands, Barbara Bradley Baekgaard is proof that the timeline you’ve been panicking about is just noise. (AKA, that “I have to have my life figured out by 25” timeline!)

So we thought, who better to talk about Barbara Bradley Baekgaard’s story than Barbara herself? Here’s how she built Vera Bradley and the philosophies that carried her through every up and down:

Who Is Barbara Bradley Baekgaard?

Barbara Bradley Baekgaard is the co-founder of Vera Bradley, the brand she started in 1982 alongside her close friend Patricia Miller. She’s also a philanthropist, an author, a mother, a grandmother, and now a great-grandmother. And, according to Kenzie Elizabeth, she’s a dream podcast guest.

But as incredible as they are, Barbara definitely isn’t known just for her bags. She discusses her eye of color, the warmth that turned strangers into lifelong friends, and a whole philosophy of building something meaningful without ever losing the parts of herself that made it worth doing. She built a national brand from a kitchen-table idea, and she did it in her 40s. The rest of her story literally only gets better from there.

Barbara Bradley Baekgaard’s Early Life

Barbara grew up in Miami Beach as one of six, and describes herself as a freckled redhead. As she says on the podcast, “Redheads get pointed out, so they tend to get a sense of humor.” Clearly, hers stuck. But she also talked about how being a freckled redhead in sun-soaked Miami Beach wasn’t exactly the fast track to prom queen. 

Fortunately, humor aside, that didn’t dare touch Barbara’s confidence. She credits this skill to her close, loving family. In the episode, she shares a vulnerable story about how one of her brothers, Jamie, had cerebral palsy in an era when families were often told to “send children like him away.” 

Her parents kept him home. Growing up alongside Jamie gave Barbara an entirely new perspective on life: a pimple or a bad hair day was never the crisis it might feel like.

Barbara also admitted to Kenzie that growing up, she “couldn’t even draw a stick person.” Instead, her feel for color came from her mother, Vera, who had a natural sense of style and was able to make their homes beautiful without hiring a designer.

That passed-down trait is what eventually helped Barbara co-found the iconic brand we know and love today.

Life Before Vera Bradley

Barbara lived an entire full life before Vera Bradley ever existed. She married right out of college and had four children within five years. Her first two daughters were born exactly a year apart, and the family moved roughly every two years for her husband’s job. She tells Kenzie that she loved being a mom, even down to sewing her kids’ clothing herself. 

She was also entrepreneurial the whole time. When she lived in Chicago, she and a college friend hung wallpaper together under the name “The Paper Dolls,” fitting the work around school drop-offs.

After the family moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana, a neighbor named Pat Miller knocked on her door while she stood there holding a wallpaper brush. Little did either woman know that a simple knock on the door would transform into a life-long friendship and business partnership.

If you’re someone who can’t let go of that “I’m running out of time” mindset, Barbara’s the perfect reminder that, no, you’re not. And if you need a little extra reassurance on this, we definitely recommend reading “Starting a Business After 40.”

Building Vera Bradley

The lightbulb moment for Vera Bradley is actually much simpler than you may assume. When Barbara and Pat were heading back from visiting Barbara’s parents, they were sitting in the Atlanta airport terminal and noticed something. Every piece of luggage was… boring. It was a sea of black, white, and canvas luggage that lacked femininity, color, or the price that most people could even afford.

That acknowledgement sparked something. The next day, Barbara went to Jo-Ann Fabric, went to her basement, and cut out a duffel, a garment bag, and a carry-all on the ping-pong table. She sent them off to her daughters at college, just to get a call shortly after that everyone was raving about the bags.

While making more, Barbara told Kenzie that she quickly realized, “I shouldn’t be in the basement sewing. I should be out marketing.” She put an ad in the newspaper for seamstresses, those seamstresses would take the fabric home to sew something up and bring back the next day, and Barbara and Pat would inspect it. Before they knew it, the business was booming.

As a founder, Barbara admits that she’s always known her strengths, one being what she refers to as “knowing what she doesn’t know.” She doesn’t have a business degree or marketing degree, but she knows how to hire people who do! Instead, she’s earned the role of “chief tweaker,” the one who looks at a design and has the final say.

That eye for color, inherited from her mother Vera, is why the company carries her mother’s name. What began as a small idea around a kitchen table in Fort Wayne eventually transformed into a publicly traded company with thousands of employees.

Her Philosophy on Success and Confidence

Take this line she got from Barbara’s father: you sell yourself first, your company second, your product third. This is the advice Barbara took herself, and it’s how built everything on being real. 

For example, when she walked into a fabric company years ago hoping to buy 50 or 100 yards just to learn that the minimum order was 5,000, the executive asked how she even got in. She laughed while telling the story, saying “through the door!” 

They stayed friends until the day he died, and Vera Bradley eventually became that supplier’s single largest customer.

That confidence, she insists, was never an act. It was just her, deciding that when she decided to do something, she was doing it. A few of her core beliefs from the conversation include:

• Know what you don’t know. Hire people who are better than you at the things you can’t do yourself, then let them run that section of the business.
• Stay open to the forks in the road. She has a dozen stories where a tiny, random moment led somewhere enormous, and the throughline is always that she said yes and stayed curious.
• Don’t always marry plan A. Some of her best outcomes were plan Bs that beat whatever she had originally imagined.
• The joy is in the creating, not the finishing. She loves building far more than crossing the finish line, which is why she’s kept building for four decades.

That last one is the same instinct we get into in our piece on how to start taking risks. When you chase a single trophy, you leave disappointed and searching for the next best thing. But when you build around the work itself, you never lose momentum.

Philanthropy and Giving Back

Giving back isn’t just a side project for Barbara, it’s a meaningful part of who she is. After losing her best friend Mary to breast cancer at 50, she knew exactly where and how she wanted to give back, and the Vera Bradley Foundation for Breast Cancer Research was born.

She told Kenzie that she wanted good to come from that loss, and she wanted accountability, so the foundation partners with Indiana University and channels donations directly into research. Over the years, it’s given tens of millions of dollars, and Barbara speaks with real hope about how close science is getting to FINALLY having answers.

Barbara Bradley Baekgaard Today

At 87, Barbara is still very much involved. She sits on the Vera Bradley board, runs her foundation, and recently opened a hotel, The Bradley, in Fort Wayne, Indiana! Retirement is off the table entirely. As she tells Kenzie on the show, Barbara said: “I went to a fortune teller one time and she said ‘I see you working till the day you die,’” to which she followed up with “That’s what I wanna do.”

But if you want to spend a day in Barbara’s life now? She wakes up around 8, turns on the news, has her coffee, and usually has an english muffin with honey as she checks in with her kids. She says that sometimes she goes to the office, and other times, she spends time in her “Palm Beach hot tub,” a hot tub that she surrounded with faux palm trees and beachy decor, doing water aerobics!

Her life is a beautiful blend of self-care, female entrepreneurship, and enjoying every little thing that comes her way.

Listen to Barbara’s Full Interview So You Don’t Miss a Thing

As much as we’ve seriously loved telling Barbara’s story, there’s something about hearing her tell it herself that just hits different From the fabric-company cold call to the string of “forks in the road” that somehow all connected, you can hear the entire conversation on the episode of House Guest with Kenzie Elizabeth. It’s easily one of those listens you seriously feel like you can’t get enough of.

And if this is your kind of conversation, you’re in luck! Dear Media is home to over 100 top-rated pop culture, entertainment, and lifestyle podcasts hosted by today’s most talked-about celebrities and creators, so there is always another rabbit hole waiting.