When her youngest daughter started school, Pampered Chef founder Doris Christopher had a problem.

She wanted to work again so she and her husband could afford their two daughters' college education.

At the same time, she wanted flexible hours so she could be home when Julie and Kelley left for school and returned. She didn't want to work holidays, weekends or nights, and she wanted to have time to do volunteer work and to care for her daughters if they got sick.

Her husband told her that the kind of job she wanted didn't exist; her requirements to own her own time made her unemployable.

Faced with this challenge, Christopher realized what she had to do: She cooked up her own business, one in which she could work on her terms and from home.

Christopher had a bachelor's degree in home economics and had taught in schools and through county extension offices. She enjoyed cooking and realized that many of her friends didn't know about or have the kind of tools that made cooking fun, plus quick and easy.

She wanted to help her family, but she also wanted to help other women enjoy mealtimes with their families as much as she did.

With $3,000 borrowed from a life insurance policy, she bought kitchen tools and aimed to show other women how to use them through home parties — following the direct sales model.

At first, she stored all her inventory in her basement, and most of the home parties took place in basements of other homemakers.

From those humble beginnings in basements all around suburban Chicago, The Pampered Chef was getting warm.

That $3,000 in 1980 was the first and only outside cash infusion to the business. As it turned out, that was just chicken feed. By 2002, when Berkshire Hathaway bought the company, The Pampered Chef's sales were over $700 million.

Christopher's vision was cooking lessons to demonstrate products she was selling. Along with the lessons came free recipes.

In that way, The Pampered Chef differed from many direct sales companies. Christopher didn't want to put a lot of pressure on her customers to buy. She preferred to let her products do the selling for her.

"Although I had attended direct-selling parties, I had never worked for a direct-sales company," Christopher wrote in her autobiography, "The Pampered Chef: The Story of One of America's Most Beloved Companies." "I had been a host only once, and it was a bad experience — I was embarrassed by the pressure put on friends to book a party.

"I really had to create my own home party the way I wanted to do it, or not do it at all."

Christopher wanted to emphasize quality tools at her Kitchen Shows, and she quickly found signature items. Pizza stones heated products evenly and helped create a nice crust. An apple wedger cut apples into eight uniform slices at once.

At first, Christopher sought out special tools and offered her customers the convenience of finding them all in one place. Eventually, as her firm's sales volume grew, Christopher was able to find manufacturers who could make items she wanted to sell to her specifications. Now The Pampered Chef sells stoneware cookery in many shapes and sizes, not simply the pizza stone.

When the company started, Christopher was the only salesperson. Now 70,000 independent consultants put on Kitchen Shows globally. Many of the consultants are women like Christopher who want to make money while staying at home.

Although Christopher didn't have a business background to draw from while her business was growing, she had a husband, Jay Christopher, who did. He offered advice, but she knew her customers and products better than he did, and she always had the final say in her business. Even the initial paperwork lists her as 51% owner to her husband's 49%.

The Pampered Chef's sales reached $1 million in its seventh year of operation. Three years later, sales hit $10 million. By 1991, sales surpassed $20 million. And that was just simmering.

At a time when sales at many direct-sales companies were stagnating, The Pampered Chef reached full boil. In 1998, annual sales topped $500 million.

The growth did come with risks. Christopher had to be careful about making sure customers as well as her sales force of independent consultants stayed happy. They wouldn't be if products took too long to get into their hands. So she made a tough call: rein in growth.

"We were growing faster than our distribution system, and we had to make a hard decision to put a temporary freeze on recruitment," she told IBD in an e-mail interview. "We quickly took action to reinvest in the business to keep pace with our growth and upgrade our operational efficiency — from computers to vendors. And in just five months, we were able to begin signing up new consultants and support the increased sales volume."

Christopher, 61 and chairman of The Pampered Chef, is proud of how her firm changed — even upgrading its logo and moving from the basement of her Victorian house in Elmhurst, Ill., to bigger storage and distribution facilities in nearby Addison — as it gained weight.

Beyond her company, Christopher has advised other firms on balancing work and family and on honorable business practices in the direct sales field. She is a former chairman of the Direct Selling Association, and The Pampered Chef has been a member of the group since 1986.

"She has shown a long-term commitment to ethics and integrity in this business," Neil Offen, president of the DSA, told IBD.

She and her husband also contributed $11.5 million for a building and to create an endowment for the Family Resiliency Program at the University of Illinois, her alma mater.

Then there's this: "In addition to her business success," Offen said, "she's one of the nicest people you'd ever want to meet."

That trait spills over into the company. "We are committed to enhancing the quality of family life," she wrote in her autobiography. "That was my intent when I gave my first Kitchen Show, to teach people easier and better ways to prepare food for their families and to provide them with the kitchen tools to do it."

BY KATHLEEN McKERNAN