If you're lucky enough to get a lunch date with Toni Brattin, her hands will tell the story as much as her words, as the small town Oklahoma girl who made it big in the beauty industry narrates a life that somehow leads back to a dead possum.
First comes the firm handshake. Formed in the manners-minding Sooner State and forged over years of deal-making, the El Reno native and founder of Toni Brattin & Co. extends the gesture across a dining table inside the Gaillardia Country Club in Oklahoma City.
It's early March, the fairways are wearing their winter blonde, and Brattin, with her sunglasses set on top of her head and an elbow casually propped on the arm of her seat, has just returned home from Toronto, where the TV shopping channel star owned the camera and sold another haul of faux hair products.
In what would be a whirlwind week for other people is a typical calendar for Brattin, who is preparing for an upcoming QVC show. Millions of eyes will be watching her present her Toni Brattin Hair Fabulous line. She politely orders an iced tea.
Ask her how it all started, and her voice, rich with southern notes, rises above the tranquilizing classical music and genteel conversation at a nearby table. Confident and quick to laugh, Brattin isn't one to survey a room for approval.
Her hands begin to dance. Over the course of an hour, they rise in the telling of a big break, open in the spinning of a hometown yarn and jab with the authority of a successful entrepreneur who has trotted around the globe. They fold in humble reflection.
“I had seven minutes to change my life,” she says.
A girl called “Pie”
Born in 1960 in Oklahoma City and reared in El Reno, Brattin grew up in a family of six children, including four brothers. Her mother was a nurse, her father a railman for the Rock Island Line.
“Can you imagine the cars, with six kids and we're all so close in age?” she says. “And my dad's working on cars constantly. Our backyard was nothing except like a car lot. It was kind of ridiculous. I think about that all the time.”
Dad named her. He was inspired by an advertisem*nt for Toni Co., which produced home permanent-wave hair products.
“My dad thought that was so cute,” Brattin says. “And then here I am in the hair industry. It's just a crazy little coincidence. Very ironic when I think back about it.”
The name inspired several rhyming nicknames in her childhood, including “Toni Bony,” which Brattin still laughs about because “I was so scrawny.” Then there was the obligatory “Toni the Tiger".
But there's one nickname she still carries, and sometimes signs. From early childhood, Brattin has been a pie connoisseur. When grandma came over, she asked for pie. What to eat at restaurants?
“My dad just nicknamed me ‘Pie' because it was the first thing out of my mouth,” she says of her go-to order. “Still to this day my dad calls me Pie. I sign his birthday cards ‘Love, Pie.' Not that I'm as sweet as pie all the time, but definitely daddy's girl.”
Daddy's girl was a natural performer. She competed in pageants. She pantomimed and danced as "The Lonesomest Gal in Town" on the “Danny's Day” TV show, and on “The Ida “B” Show.” She was a cheerleader in junior high school.
Brattin also was a tomboy. Longtime friend Penny Joule recalls playing summer league and women's softball with Brattin, as well as their impromptu fishing trips.
They spent the summer of their first driver's licenses parking Joule's yellow Opel station wagon on the tops of hills, rolling the car, popping the clutch to get it started and cruising the back roads of Oklahoma.
Sometimes they toted a rod and reel. Brattin had a knack for knowing where to drop a line.
“Driving out in the country, she would say ‘stop right there, I know there's a fish,'” Joule says. “Sure enough, there she'd be, catching a fish. It didn't matter where we stopped or where we fished, she'd pull a fish out.”
Joule, who now lives in Seattle, says anybody who knows Brattin knows she is passionate about whatever endeavor she undertakes.
“Toni was always very competitive but not in a bad way,” she says. “She was always pushing herself to do better.”
Brattin considered pursuing fine arts at St. Gregory's University. A marriage and a baby interrupted those plans. Then, a divorce. All by the age of 19.
“A lot of life, a lot of learning experiences, let me tell ya,” she says.
Brattin attended nursing school, but with a new son to provide for she ended up taking a job in the accounting department of an El Reno oil company.
She wouldn't be the only new face for long. Pam Vrana worked there as a receptionist, her first job. More than 30 years later, Vrana now works as an office manager for Brattin's company.
“Nothing's really changed,” Vrano says. “Toni was quite the firecracker. She pretty much controlled that office.”
It was the early 1980s when, Vrano says, women didn't have much of a voice in the workplace. Except if you were Brattin. Vrano got a kick out of watching her new friend stand up to oilmen.
She stood up to them to the last day.
“I remember at one point they were laying off everybody and they told all the women to go ahead and go home, with no notice,” Vrano said. “The men got to stay two weeks. She called the home office — the big boys. And all those men had to walk out the door with us.”
At the time, Brattin had business courses under her belt and was venturing out on her own. Beauty trends were crashing across the United States. Tanning salons and products were all the rage. Actor George Hamilton wore a tan for the ages and Coppertone was as ubiquitous as big hair and acrylic fingernails.
Brattin saw the opportunity.
“You could open up different shops and really capitalize on what was going that was new, not just typical little hair salons or Betty Beauty salons," she says. "I sought those and branched out from there. And from there I saw really the potential for product development.”
Brattin worked with cosmetic labs in Dallas to create her own brand of beauty products. She honed her marketing skills. For years, she presented her products at trade shows, expanding her brand beyond Oklahoma.
In 1996, a product hunter was on the lookout for the next big thing in beauty. He found Brattin's new self-tanner in a trade publication.
“Next thing I know, we're getting a call from a gentleman in Philadelphia and he wants to know where I'm at in marketing the product — would I be interested in creating a two-minute commercial,” Brattin says. “Next thing I know, I have a meeting with HSN.”
The shopping network gave her a seven-minute slot to reach millions of viewers.
The childhood performances. The business courses. The trade shows. It would all have to come together. Brattin had 2,500 pieces to sell.
Five minutes into her sales pitch, the producers cut her off. In the exhilaration and confusion, Brattin left the stage, thinking she hadn't yet reached the best part of her presentation.
She didn't need to. She'd already sold out her supply.
“By the time I got back to the green room, there is a party going on, everybody's high-fiving each other and they tell me we blew the telephone lines up, and it was all gone just like that, in five minutes,” she says.
The segment launched Brattin's products into major retailers across the country. And it launched her around the world.
“I had executive platinum status with American Airlines within six months,” she says.
Brattin wasn't an overnight success by any means. But hard effort over many years brought her to one big moment. Among the riches earned from those five minutes is a wisdom that not only applies to business, but also to life.
“You get one shot at this and you don't get any do-overs,” Brattin says.
From Oklahoma, with love
Those who've known Brattin for decades say she's the same as she's always been — driven, generous, compassionate and a riot to be around.
“I've always called her ‘Ellie Mae,' raised in El Reno, and living the big life,” Vrana says.
Vrana has travelled the globe with her friend and boss, working hard and playing harder. In Germany once, they worked shows around the clock. Between the merchandising there wasn't much shut-eye.
“We would be there for five nights, and maybe out of five nights got 15 hours sleep,” Vrana says. “We knew every pub in Germany.”
During the wild transformation of her business, Brattin's personal life took more turns. A second marriage that lasted 14 years, and another son.
She recently celebrated her eight-year anniversary with current husband, Tom Casso, a former executive vice president, general manager and co-owner of Bryson Inc., an Anheuser-Busch beer wholesaler. He also previously served as executive director of the Catholic Foundation of Oklahoma from 2005 to 2009.
Casso, a father of three, is the executive vice president and CEO of Toni Brattin and Co.
Brattin says they came together at a good time in their lives. For her, she was accustomed to bearing the weight of a business alone. When she met Casso, he was in a position to assist with the company.
“He was just like, ‘you know, you have such tiny little shoulders,” she says. “‘I want you to look at the size of my shoulders. Why don't you let me take all of this — the bad and the ugly — and you just do all the good. I can carry all this weight on my shoulders for you.”
Part of the good is keeping up with beauty trends, learning to adapt, and evolving with the market. Trial and error, success and failure are part of the game. So is keeping a steady vision, and the belief in one's self.
Brattin has mastered those lessons, and would impart them to a generation eager to grab fortune and fame.
“Everybody wants everything fast,” she says. “I think it's wonderful if it happens fast, but I think people need to learn to be patient, because truly it's all about the ride. If you experience things too fast I think you miss so much of life's pleasures. And you have to expect the downs, whether it's the lawsuits, the losses, the loss of business, the recovery to figure out how to come back.
And I think a lot of people, they think everything's just supposed to stay rosy. I wouldn't change a thing about any of it, because even as bad as some of it was, it always led to something better. It always was such a valuable lesson, and it was always, to me, you can always look back and know that had those things not happened, you would have never been or gained or ended up in the place where you were supposed to have ended up. I now can look at the bumps and enjoy the bumpy ride because I know it's going to be good on the other side.”
The other side is grounded in Oklahoma. People often ask Brattin why, with her success, she hasn't left the Sooner State for the coasts, or other places where the rich or famous land after taking flight from small town America.
The roots of family and friends run deep here. Real estate is relatively cheap. There's an airport that can get her to exotic lands. The Sooner State is the nation's best-kept secret, she says.
“I was from Oklahoma, and I'm still from Oklahoma,” Brattin says.
If she ever forgets, Dad will remind her. He's in his 80s now and “ornery as ever.”
Her hands begin to wave. Within moments at a table in the refined Gaillardia Country Club — built to resemble old Normandy French-style chateaus — Brattin will overflow with joy as she mimics a swarm of flies. And a pitchfork in action.
She tells the story of calling her father from Florida after a big infomercial shoot. She had her own dressing room. Treated like a queen, she says. Brattin raved about the studio, the TV equipment and the glamour of it all.
Dad was sitting outside on his farm in Hinton.
“That sounds really good,” he told her. “You just have fun. I'll see you when you get home.”
Brattin lived across the road from her father. When she arrived at her farmhouse, she found a note from Dad:
“You might wanna take care of your problem out on the west side of the house. Welcome home. Don't ever forget where you come from.”
On the west side of her house, she discovered flies buzzing around a dead possum.
In the telling of the scene, Brattin hits her southern notes. She takes a pitchfork to the “little dead varmint,” and gives it “the heave-ho” far away from her home.
“I'll never forget that,” she says. “And he's like, ‘so now while all your people over there just thought you were all of that-that-that, you might want to let 'em know — you took care of your dead possum when you got home.' And I just thought ‘oh gosh Dad, you're just killin' me. You're just killin' me.' But he had such a sense of humor that he always grounded me. Still does. Still does.”
