The Lustre Story. How--And Why--We Did It.

By Karen and Erica

We are often asked why and how we started Lustre. Here’s the story.

We both had long careers as corporate lawyers—careers we loved and wished would go on forever. But they didn’t. One day, we found we were retired.

We had been on top of the world. Suddenly overnight, we were nowhere. Invisible. Our skills and experience worthless. Our offer to do projects for non-profits, for free, rejected. Our friends and families, fearing we would morph from hard-charging, independent women into feeble, dependent leeches, panicked.

Eeeek! What was going on???

We had given no thought to retirement or age. We realized now we had figure it out. So, we did what we knew how to do. Research. We eventually learned one key thing—we are new.

• First, we probably have a thirty year runway—decades longer than when retirement was invented. That has huge implications for how we choose to live and how we manage resources.

• Second, for the first time ever, most of us will remain in good mental and physical form throughout, combining experience and sentience as long as we live. That’s revolutionary.

• Third, very few people know about points one and two. Too many—including many of us—still think that humans over 65 are old and done and should be sidelined for their own good—a media stereotype that may never have been true and is surely behind the times today.

So we decided, as we sat on a park bench eating sandwiches one sunny day, that we had to do something. We would challenge the stereotypes and show everyone who we really are. How would we do that? With a blog. How would we start a blog? We had no idea. So we came up with a plan—to get help and move forward one step at a time.

First, we needed a place to think. An office. We got one in a WeWork that used to be the HQ of Goldman Sachs. It was party time all the time. We moved to a place more conducive to work—though still with a ping pong table in the lobby. We raised the tenant average age considerably. (Unfortunately, we have had to give up the office, for now. We’ll be back soon.)

Then we needed to get a website. We talked to designers, mostly young men, who told us their mothers would love what we were doing, and together we created a blog to convey the message.

Once that was done, we agonized over the name. We agonized over the look. We agonized over the content. We knew how to write briefs, but not much about writing for regular people, let alone how to create images to support the message. And we had no clue about social media—another new frontier. Some savvy young women helped us on that front, excited for their mothers!

In the middle of 2016, we launched. Scared as could be, with a small coterie of friends and family dragooned into being our first subscribers.

We realized we had a few foundational ideas

• We are are the forefront of the first large cohort of women who worked straight through to retirement.

• Our cohort is large, and growing every day. 

• We have substantial resources.

• We have lived lives that we shaped to suit ourselves.

• We do retirement differently from men.

• Few, if any, images circulating in media or society show us as we are—vibrant and lively.

• Many images show us as we are not—feeble, needy and vacant.

• Post-career, we have no role models, just as when we entered the workforce. Once again, we have to be the role models.

• Retirement, as it was invented in the 1950s, is completely outdated.

• Retired career women need to reinvent the post-career picture.

We started Lustre so we could show our demographic as we really are--active, engaged with the world, with money to spend, places to go, things to do. We addressed image, and identity, and prejudice, and stereotypes. We talked about style, and travel, and home. Lustre gave us contacts and entree to lots of people—people like us who felt as dislocated as we did, and other people, including many men, who liked Lustre’s message.

Has every moment been blissful? No. We are doing a lot of things, like bookkeeping and proofreading, that we would love to direct our staff to do. But we are the staff! And we have made any number of mistakes. Luckily, we know mistakes are not the end of the world.

Overall, the enterprise has been extremely fulfilling. We have watched Lustre grow, and we have been excited to meet the many women who tell us fabulous stories of their own post-career journeys.

We have many goals still to meet, but a movement is underway. We’re not sure how the story ends. But we are surely enjoying the ride.

Thanks for joining us.