Never Too Old to Get Rich

CHAPTER 18Design from Within

Linda LaMagna, 341 Interior DesignCourtesy of Faye Sevel Photography.

Linda LaMagna, 54, of Fort Mill, South Carolina, had said she was going to retire when she was 50. “I always added, when I say retire that doesn’t mean I’m going to sit home and eat bonbons, but go on to the next phase of my life,” LaMagna, who is single, says. But as the milestone began to approach, “I started to laugh. What was I thinking? That was a joke,” says the owner of 341 Interior Design (341interiordesign.com).

For more than 25 years, LaMagna’s career had been a whirlwind trajectory, with stretches of living overseas in Germany and the Netherlands. She was vice president of global marketing and strategic planning for Spiracur, a medical device start-up founded out of the Stanford BioDesign Innovation Program. She worked in a variety of senior management positions for ConvaTec, a $2 billion medical device company, including being the general manager for all German-speaking markets.

“I have lived and worked all over the world and loved it,” LaMagna says. “It really was my passion to be in the corporate world working on the sales and marketing side.”

Her final corporate post: senior vice president of sales and marketing for the wound care/vascular division of BSN Medical, where she ran all the sales and marketing activities for the lymphology, wound care, and phlebology ...