A region revitalized, a region re-imagined, striving, thriving, innovating, collaborating, elevating and accelerating, the greater Lehigh Valley is home to businesses that are booming and game changers that are forging the future.

This is Lehigh Valley Rising.

BSI Corporate Benefits is a proud supporter of Lehigh Valley Rising.

Additional support provided by St Luke's University Health Network and by Adam's outdoor advertising.

On this edition of Lehigh Valley Rising, we're highlighting pioneering women and women owned businesses who call the Lehigh Valley Home.

There's a lot to cover, and with only a half hour to do it, so let's jump right in.

In 1954, a young woman from Hanover, PA, landed her first Hollywood job working on costumes for the musical Brigadoon.

In 2022.

That same woman designed the costumes for the Netflix film White Noise.

In other words, Ann Roth's career spans from Gene Kelly to Adam Driver.

She's won two Oscars, most recently in 2020, and now at 91, she's still one of the top designers in the business.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

A little walk and talk.

These are both 1927 day dresses.

This is a dress Viola Davis played Ma Rainey.

These are shop girls, and they're so well-made, they better be.

They have to last eight performances a week.

Hold this for one second.

I'm a costume designer.

I am 91 years old.

I pulled some of these costumes from the show on Broadway Shuffle Along, which was my favorite project I've ever done.

I was born in Hanover, the home of six pretzel factories, and I had been painting every Saturday at St Joseph's Academy in Cherry's town, Pennsylvania, with Sister Demopolis.

It was one of the great pleasures of my life, and sometime I think in the fourth grade, Miss Hostetter said to my mother, You really ought to let this child go to art school.

This is Adam Driver.

Oh, and this is White Noise!

This is Natalie Portman in Closer.

She is a girl who's traveled all around Europe, sleeping on benches, etc..

This is a rotten coat that she wears.

I bought her a cheap purple wig on the street and we used it throughout the movie.

It was just this wild, cheap wig.

I went to school in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Tech.

It’s now Carnegie Mellon, more stylish.

I went to work for Irene Sharaff, one of the greatest costume designers ever, ever, ever.

She says, I'm going to California to do Brigadoon.

Would you like to come and be one of my assistants that paid like $54 a week doing all of the dirty and attractive jobs?

I did it for about two years, maybe more.

That was a dress that I made for under a coat for Noble Cecil's wife.

My first Broadway show was ‘56, and my first movie was The World of Henry Orient in ’61 or ‘62.

I first met Ann when we were making a film called Silkwood in Texas.

I fell in love with Ann because she's a blast.

She's just fun to hang out with.

And I've hung out with her for about 50 years.

I've done movies in London, in Paris, in Berlin, Greece, Romania.

and the Oscar goes to Ann Roth, The English Patient!

I met Ann when I came to New York, 1978, 79, when I arrived in the working world, she already had a name looking for a Midnight Cowboy.

That's Dustin.

I walk in here and walk in here.

When I did Midnight Cowboy.

Dustin Hoffman was playing Ratso Ritso, this grungy guy who slept on pool tables and had not a bath in two weeks, and I grabbed a dark red suit.

I threw in the Clorox and it came out the color that won the Academy Award.

Hey, that's all I got here.

Ann taught me how to change a garment.

You don't just throw mud at it.

You have to think about what happened to this garment, What did the character do in it?

And I have become apparently some expert in the business of aging clothes.

If you mention my name to people and oh, he's the ager or dyer.

We had frayed here and spots everything about it was something that a guy who slept on pool tabletops and just a rotten life would have.

Ay, wait up.

I do not work with movie stars.

I work with actors who have the skill to create another character.

Ann designs a character.

She serves the whole of the film.

She serves the story above all.

Oh, this is the hours and this is Virginia Woolf.

Kidman on the hours she was to play Virginia Woolf.

Virginia Woolf had a bigger humpier nose.

And I said, I'm going to have some guy there who can make clothes and we'll put it on the producer.

He said, I gave this woman $1,000,000 and now nobody knows who she is.

And it made all the difference in the world because it takes her out of herself when she's looking in the mirror.

She doesn't see Nicole Kidman anymore.

She's ready to become someone else.

Someone has to die in order that the rest of your life.

It's a beautiful process.

It's one unique to her, in my experience.

It absolutely happens in front of you that you come in.

I come in Meryl Streep, and I go out the character.

Do you have the papers?

Not yet.

And the world is a thought out process and nothing appears on that actor that doesn't support the character.

The question you should ask is why do so many directors want her on the set or regard her as almost a muse?

Because her ideas she's way out of her department sometimes, and ideas are wonderful.

I did a huge movie Cold Mountain, huge Civil War movie Huge.

I found this book.

This is 1862 Civil War and the Shape of the skirt is such a big deal.

Research is everything to me, and I'm very sorry about perfect, but I want it perfect.

We'll meet up with Ann again later on in the show.

One thing Academy Award winners are very familiar with are all the complimentary gift bags and boxes handed out during awards season.

That's where gifts for the good life comes in or GGL.

It was founded by two women who say they're best friends, soulmates and coincidentally, sisters.

Welcome to GGL Creative.

We're coming to you from our studio in Pennsylvania.

Gifts for The Good Life specializes in client gift experiences.

We are a creative agency.

We do everything from mailers to gifting on site gifting experiences for pop ups for large corporations.

What we do is create experiences.

So now we're upstairs at the studio where we have our kitchen.

We have a dining room table where the staff can eat all together.

It's just a really fun, open, bright space that is conducive to brainstorming and thinking of good ideas.

And actually, when Susan comes and hangs out here for Thanksgiving, she likes to take pictures in my office like a little sister would of her messing with all of my things.

Susan and I are four years apart.

I really dreamed that I would have a sister.

I think she willed me into existence to be her her collaborator.

We work really well together.

We finish each other's sentences, but we also have a different view.

We always were thinking about ourselves as a unit.

We work with Target, we work with Coca-Cola, we work with college football playoffs and NASCAR, Disney fairytale weddings.

A lot of properties like sandals and beaches and Hilton.

And then we do some of some charity work where we've worked with a corporation or a company called Dazzle Africa, IMDB and other production companies.

One of my favorite projects has been the work that we've done for Target and their partnership with St Jude.

We created three different projects of gifting, gifting to all of the families and the patients that are there at that particular time, which is about 260 families, and it's just meant to brighten their day.

This is celebrating the Knots 25th anniversary and this box tells a story.

Everything from small capsule that has all kinds of swag to View-Master with all of their covers or some of their most famous covers and cassettes.

And also underneath is the magazine, the current episode issue and backpack.

And in the capsule, branded shoe laces, tattoos, stickers and nineties candy.

So it's surprises on every layer that tell the story of what it might have been like to be a bride in the nineties.

We did a really great one for The Twilight Zone where all the different pieces came together and it played the music.

As you opened the box.

So now we're in our production space and this is really where the magic happens.

So we're currently working on illustrations for a project at Sandals Dunn's River.

These are custom illustrations that we've been working on that will become postcards of their merchandise and parts of the gifting.

Here we are with Nate, who's our engineer here at GGL and our third partner, and he's making a platform so that everything in this box sits perfectly, especially during transit.

When we think about how someone experiences something, we think about how we're going to package it.

A lot of GGL is packaging.

So welcome to our shipping and receiving area.

This is where we receive all of our shipments.

About 100 to 800 boxes go out every week.

The artist that was here before was an amazing artist who built lots of really huge metal work.

So everything the walls were all very dark because she was doing a lot of metal sniffing.

But it was we could just tell right away that it had a really good vibe and that it was the right kind of place that had a good sense of flow.

So we completely redid the interior spaces.

We made it our own.

We got our start about 15 years ago when somebody came to us with an idea for a corporate promotional item, and it got us thinking that there really isn't anything great in that arena.

So we thought, How do we marry our background of art and product and Heather and I and Nathan all have an experience with that.

Working with Susan and Heather, my wife and sister in law, is the best.

Heather and I, we met at Syracuse University.

We were both in the printmaking book Arts, but we found that we collaborated amazingly and for 30 years we've been collaborating.

We had our studio in Jersey City, taught professional workshops, and one of our students was a professor at Cedar Crest College, invited us out to teach her class for a week.

We stayed out here.

Heather loved it.

We moved our studio out here first to Easton and then over to here to Pen Argyl I feel like we do our best work when our clients trust us.

So if they're creative and they have a vision and they're looking to do something a little bit different than what everybody else is doing, that's really where we like to live.

Every one of GGL’s gift boxes tells a story, and you could say the same about the treat you'll see in our next segment.

Danielle Cunha didn't set out to invent a whole new way of baking nor attract the praise of pop stars, comedians and The New York Times.

But that's exactly what happened.

She's the founder of Bethlehem's Own Vegan Treats, which is now fast outgrowing their little shop on Linden Street.

Vegan treats is a bakery, but we're actually the first vegan bakery to ever exist anywhere in the world.

I'd say the vibe of vegan treats is hip, upscale, definitely trendy, but not in a flash fashion kind of way.

Obviously, plant based lifestyles and diets have been catching on.

My inspiration for vegan treats was to satisfy my own sweet tooth.

I went vegan on a whim and within 24 hours I craved dessert.

And at the time, no vegan desserts existed.

So I put it into my own hands and figured it out and basically didn't stop until I started making amazing vegan treats.

Welcome to Vegan treats.

I'm Danielle.

These are our vegan butter fingers we make by the thousands.

Kenny is whipping up some delicious brownies and cookie dough bars.

Hey, Casey.

How's it going?

Oh, what are you working on?

Nice.

The heartbeat of vegan treats is the creativity that comes out of this building.

Is this the lemon pistachio cake that we talked about?

Turned out beautiful.

She can really master any color.

It's amazing.

Like, I don't feel like I could get these shades.

That's why those were hard shades.

Thinking illustrators, designers, sculptors, painters, cake artists, bakers like it.

I could not do this alone.

I am so grateful.

I have such an amazing team.

I absolutely love the people I work with.

We have so much fun.

See, we're also making wedding cookies, right?

Actually.

And we'll make divorce cakes, too.

I have to be honest with you.

I do not have a passion for baking.

I never imagined that I would pioneer an entire vegan baking movement or that so many other vegan businesses would exist because of my desire to save animals.

So here we are.

I would say that the most popular thing our bakery makes are these all black heart boxes for Valentine's Day.

And every year that same theme changes.

But they're called Fatally Yours.

So this year it was like skeletons with their skeleton dog.

We did one one year that was a severed hand that says I love you to pieces.

And when you open it, it's full of body parts.

So she started the whole Fatally yours thing, which kind of spiraled into the cakes versus just the chocolates.

We do a lot of crazy and weird cakes.

We're kind of known for our all black anti-valentine's cakes.

We're making some birthday cakes right now.

You're not dead yet because I don't know about you, but good ones.

Happy birthday.

It's not just like the gothic kids that you think would want the, like, more macabre side of things.

It's surprising people sometimes just, you know, moms and dads, girlfriends, boyfriends.

We just kind of like to have fun with it.

It's not a niche thing for sure.

And I think with true crime kind of trending right now, people love to just get into the dark side of things.

There's a traditional feeling to it, but it's always a little edgy, always a little dark, I'd say.

But definitely fun and creative.

When I first started experimenting in my home kitchen, it quickly moved to a bakery down the street, and that was in about 1998.

That was only wholesale.

So I started baking for a restaurant in New York City, and within a few months of that first endeavor, the New York Times started calling.

And I was like, Oh, my God.

Like what?

What is happening?

Before you know it, I was delivering to, you know, 30 or 40 restaurants in New York City and Philadelphia.

And for the first ten years of this company, it was my mom baking everything and me decorating.

And it wasn't until we opened this first retail store in 2004 that I got my first employee, and now we have 70.

I'm always grateful when there's any press about the bakery, and it's always really cool when, like BBC World News is calling you to talk about your chocolate box or to have like a three page colored spread in The Washington Post and they've never featured anything vegan.

Like, it definitely feels like something I'm really proud of and that the hard work has paid off.

MM hmm.

So there's people who spend five or $600 on just chocolates.

And we do have a lot of celebrity clients and it's really cool.

And most recently we had the weekend get some desserts from us.

I love John and Tracy Stewart.

We send out, like, Christmas treats for them every year, and they're really close friends.

But like, truly my favorite I've ever bake for was Jane Goodall.

I feel like I've modeled my life after her and she's been such an inspiration.

So that was really cool.

With our shipping, we actually get some really big orders for that New Zealand.

Australia.

Finland.

Japan.

Russia.

The U.K.. Canada loves vegan treats.

Yeah, we have a lot of like high profile clients, which is cool.

But ultimately I feel like my favorite client is that we're saving animals worldwide.

Like that to me is like what really matters.

What's next for vegan treats is that we're really at a crossroads.

We can't produce more in this current location.

And the next step for us is manufacturing.

The ideal space for vegan treats would be someplace where everyone can come and meet and hang out with like minded people.

And that just means people who like eating and treats definitely someplace much bigger than this, where people can stay and hang out.

If you want to see what sets our recipes apart, I think it's the fact that you would never know it's vegan.

It just tastes amazing.

In fact, American Express named this one of the top ten bakeries in the world.

Not vegan bakeries, top ten bakeries.

So I think that the desserts speak for themselves.

And if you want to see what sets them apart, you really have to stop by and try something.

In some ways, the women behind Bloom are like any other successful entrepreneurs.

They identified a problem and they set out to fix it in the best way they could.

In their case, the problem was one of the biggest human rights issues in the world, and their fix involves compassion, empowerment and a sense of community.

My sister's closet is a women's resale boutique.

We accept donations of gently used women's clothing.

That's in style.

And then we sort through it and prepare it for sale.

With all the proceeds going back into our program to survivors of sex trafficking and exploitation.

Human trafficking Is the sale of another individual.

It's modern day slavery.

When people hear that these things are happening, it's hard for them to believe.

But it is.

You know, we have all the roads coming through here, 33, 78, and you've got New York City not far away, the Poconos, Philadelphia, even Washington, D.C. is not far from here.

So it is happening.

I mean, I live in Bethlehem and I know it's happening right down the street.

Bloom taught me I'm worth more than where I was.

I know what it feels like to start in this program.

I feel like it's a calling to tell these things, like, you can absolutely do this.

There is nothing stopping you.

Bloom for a women's mission is to provide sanctuary and a continuum of care to heal, empower and employ women.

Survivors of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation.

And we liked that.

It represented flowers, new life and kind of an unfolding.

We believe it's what happens to a woman's life when she comes to our program.

Bloom was birth date of a vision to provide safety for women.

I was a foster parent, and through the many women that I met in that experience, they were moms who, of course, wanted to parent their kids.

But life had turned out to be unmanageable.

And one of them in particular was trafficked here in the Lehigh Valley.

And the more I learned about her story and how there was very, very limited resources, I felt I wanted to be part of the solution.

And that's how I learned about Thistle Farms.

Thistle Farms is no ordinary business.

It's a nonprofit staffed by women who have battled addiction, sexual abuse or trafficking.

Thistle Farms launched their program 25 years ago in Nashville.

In 2014 They invited people to come and learn about the remarkable success they were seeing in the lives of the women that came there to heal.

And I was there with a friend of mine.

Thistle Farms told us they would help us and we said yes.

Welcome to Mountain Laurel House, Bloom’s Newest Program for Pregnant and Parenting Moms.

I'll take you into the living room where ultimately we will have furniture in here to make this a home.

Mt.

Laurel House is really a dream come true.

It is going to create a whole new life for the women who come here.

This is one of our bedrooms where one of the women and her small child will be living.

This project included inviting several designers from the Lehigh Valley to come in and pick rooms and proposed designs.

We currently employ two of our participants at my sister's closet, and it's a great place for them to build their retail experience.

It's also a great way for us to engage with volunteers in our community.

We have about 30 volunteers that help my sister's closet be what it is.

So we really, really wanted to be able to hire our participants because we know that if they come to us and they're able to get a safe job and if they can stay with us, then they're going to stay longer and they're going to do better.

I was once a participant in 2018.

I was given the opportunity to come back and work as a residential support.

So I've really watched this program develop from the first house to now the fifth house.

So the people in your house are going to love you until you can love yourself.

And that sounds a little silly, but it's the truth of it.

You know?

What a powerful story of hope.

Now let's head back to the costume shop where producer Melody Bradford met up with Ann Roth to look at some of her most fascinating costumes up close.

You've traveled all around the world Italy, Greece, Romania.

Why live here?

It's a perfect place for me here.

I like my house.

I like my neighbors.

I like Easton.

My daughter went to Moravian in Bethlehem, but I have never traveled for fun.

I worked in London a lot.

I've worked in Paris.

I worked in Germany.

I've done two movies in Berlin.

I love working in Berlin.

But I can commute from here to New York.

But I love where I live.

I love the market in Downtown Easton because a bunch of us often meet there on Friday nights for half price off oysters.

I love it.

I love where I am here in Tatamy.

What's next for you?

I'm retired.

I have been asked to do a couple of things, but I honestly physically don't think I can.

Working as a designer is very hard.

After you do the 200 drawings, you then have to find the fabrics for each and every one.

And those fabrics are not here in Martins Creek or Easton or Bethlehem.

And the truth is that most designers are very secretive about where they get their stuff.

They don't want other designers to find it.

Do you get that?

You never tell.

Never.

So you search it out yourself.

And you are sort of selfish about all that.

If there's a woman watching and she's wondering how to achieve career greatness and how she can shatter the glass ceiling and do it all.

What advice would you give her to be a costume designer?

You have to want to design and help the actor Put on the clothes of the character that he's doing.

That's what a costume designer does.

And as far as breaking ceilings go, if you get good enough at it, you are invited to do it.

I actually never thought of myself as any different than the next guy or girl.

You have to have a knowledge of clothes.

I say You have to know how to draw.

But today that's a joke.

They don't.

You don't anymore.

You can become the designer of any television show by going in the back door of Macy's or Saks or something and buying it.

And I've done that.

Was there anyone in your career that told you you couldn't do something because you were a woman?

Do I look like the person who's somebody come out and say, you can't do this?

No, No, they don't.

Nobody says that.

I've never said it to anybody.

I'm a costume designer.

I might be a rotten one.

Or I might be.

But nobody says don't be one or you can't be one.

How would that motivate or stop you?

I would probably turn my back and walk away.

Go away.

And that'll do it for this episode of Lehigh Valley Rising.

You can watch this and every other episode at our Web site, PBS39.org or on the PBS app.

From all of us, I'm Grover Silcox.

Thanks for watching.