Two years later the 47-year-old former stockbroker is savoring the smell of success as a go-between for others in similarly prickly predicaments. Just select the party's offense—buddy with bad breath? cologne-drenched coworker?—at her year-old Web site, gentlehints.com, and, for $12 to $16, Ford will mail him or her a delicately worded letter and a remedy: mouthwash, unscented soap, a nose-hair trimmer. "All the letters begin, 'Someone who cares wants you to know,' " Ford says. "The last thing [customers] want to do is hurt someone."
More than 5,000 orders have poured in (top complaints: flatulence, halitosis and body odor), prompting the divorced Ford to quit her job as a Bankers Trust vice president to work full-time from her Encino, Calif., home, where she has so far grossed about $54,000. (Two friends helped her start the business, but she now works solo.) One TV-ad producer says Ford's service proved "a perfect solution" to a client's bad breath: "The next time we were in the studio, he was popping mints."
Ford remained friends with her ex-beau, who lives overseas but buys the deodorant she recommended when in the U.S. "He tells me, 'I have six bottles in my suitcase!' "
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
