2012 NAFE WOMEN OF EXCELLENCE - OUTSTANDING ENTREPRENEUR AWARD

Entrepreneurship award winner Donna Pepe has spent her career largely focused on women’s health. She started her own strategic marketing company Communications Strategies nearly 20 years ago, working at the kitchen table. “My husband never knew who was going to be there when he came downstairs in the morning,” Donna says. With a one-year old and another child in school in 1993, she decided to leave her 10-year career at Johnson & Johnson, where she had built the company’s first in-house marketing communications department and became the first woman vice president , sitting  on three of the company’s management boards ,with worldwide responsibility in J&J’s pharmaceutical sector.

Her first J&J project she describes as “updating people’s perceptions about oral contraceptives,” because as dosage levels decreased and cut side effects, women needed new information. Prior to J&J, she’d worked at PR giant Burson Marsteller, where she was responsible for educating women about a then-unknown medical condition—osteoporosis prior to the hormone therapy drug  Premarin’s approval for that indication.  “While it is hard to believe now, nobody knew or cared about osteoporosis back then,” Donna recalls.  She wishes she now had a dime for every time someone mentions the word.

When her new company landed its first big product—Claritin—within two lightning weeks, she had moved out of her kitchen and into an office with computers and a staff of women. (Her only male employee has been her CFO husband.) She applied her signature approach—education—to the new project, working to get people to understand the underlying medical factors of allergies and focusing on women as the gatekeepers for family health. Later undertaking a project for Pfizer, she worked to educate women about heart disease prevention, developing many of the educational messages that are at the core of the American Heart Association’s Red Dress campaign. She also was part of a small group of women who spearheaded efforts to create a women’s health research division at the National Institutes of Health to ensure that, for the first time, women were included in clinical trials.

Donna dedicated eight years to get the emergency contraception known as Plan B on pharmacy shelves—and she very nearly succeeded. Now age 60, she has begun downsizing her $5M company “because I need to play more and work less,” she says. Playtime includes working to get women trained for elected office through a new chapter of Emerge America in New Jersey, serving on boards related to women’s reproductive health, and considering starting another business. It’s hard to downsize innate entrepreneurial energy.

Photo: Lifemosaic Photography.com/Christina Nuzzo