After eight rounds of chemotherapy treatment and a double mastectomy, Stephanie Seager was still working 10-hour days as one of the top loan closers at a title company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She loved her job, but it was stressful, and it took her away from her 6-year-old daughter, 5-month-old son and high school sweetheart of a husband. And after surviving one of the more aggressive subsets of breast cancer, the 35-year-old truly understood how short life could be.
During a visit home, she heard her aunt talking nonstop about a new beauty product called Baby Foot that she was distributing. An innovative foot care product that launched in Japan, Baby Foot makes feet as smooth and soft as a baby’s foot by exfoliating dead skin cells. After returning home, Seager called her aunt to see how she could get involved.
“She was starting at the ground level trying to get it going here, so I had her send me some,” Seager says. “People were buying it like hotcakes at my work. ‘There’s something to this,’ I thought. ‘This is crazy how people feel about this product.’ I got passionate about it quickly, too.”
Spirited, striking and strong, Seager had always been a natural saleswoman. When she worked as a server after high school, patrons would wait for hours for to sit at one of her tables, even if there were other seats available in the restaurant. Even in the midst of cancer treatment, she charming, confident and cheerful.
“Before cancer, I didn’t know what I was capable of, though,” Seager says. “I never had the courage to think I could do something like this.”
She served at the title company for 15 years — and lived two years cancer-free — before she resigned and became one of Baby Foot’s first sales consultants.
One of her first calls was to a health club that had recently opened in town. She spoke with a manager, told him about Baby Foot and sent him a few samples, but she didn’t hear back from him. Two weeks later, her phone rang. They wanted to carry Baby Foot nationwide. “Nationwide?” Seager asked. “What do you mean?” Unbeknownst to Seager, Life Time Fitness has more than 150 locations across the country.
Although anyone can benefit from the foot peel, some of Seager’s most passionate customers are cancer survivors. One of the side effects of targeted cancer therapy drugs is dry skin. Skin can become dry, brittle, itchy and scaly and may even crack open, especially on the feet.
“Using Baby Foot is really satisfying,” says Shannon Baldwin, a fellow breast cancer survivor. “Plus, it was something I could do with my girls. There are a lot of things you can’t do with your kids. But we’d sit there and do Baby Foot. It made us forget we were in the middle of cancer. It was a lot of fun.”
A national sponsor of the American Cancer Society, Baby Foot is donating 10 percent of proceeds from its limited edition pink boxes to the American Cancer Society during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
“This is going to sound crazy, but [getting cancer] was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Seager says. “Well, it was the worst thing but best thing because it completely changed my life.”
Now that Seager is self-employed, she has a much better work-life balance. “I’m so focused on my family,” she says. “I don’t stress in the mornings. I can make eggs and toast. I don’t miss any of my son’s stuff at school — I’m a homeroom mom! — or any of my daughter’s softball games. I’m making up for lost time.”
