I did it the other way.
TARA MARINO Founder, Elegant Femme
Most women build their business and then try to fit their life into it.
That decision, made in grief, refined in beauty, tested in fire, and now lived from a yacht named The Responsible Choice sailing through the Ionian Sea, is the whole story of this brand.
And it is the story I am going to tell you here.
It began in the
darkest place.
And then, not quickly, not neatly, something shifted.
I was 26 years old when my firstborn son Mason died at six days old.
I will not rush past that sentence. It deserves to be honored.
Before Mason, I was a woman who worked hard, believed in herself, and was doing everything right. After Mason, I was a woman who questioned whether any of it meant anything at all.
That year I relied on Ambien to sleep and Xanax to relax. I numbed myself with alcohol. I hated myself for what I felt, the rage, the envy, the grief that did not end cleanly and move on. I hated women I passed on the street with healthy babies in their arms. I blamed the doctors, my husband, the universe.
I stopped asking
“Why did this happen to me?”
I started asking
“How can I still choose when I feel like everything I wanted was taken from me?”
And it changed everything.
That question did not come from strength. It came from the bottom of something. But it was the first true question I had asked in a year.
I did not know I was building an 18-year company. I was just trying to find my way back to the woman I was before grief took her.
From that question, The FemmeTypes were born. Not as a framework I designed at a whiteboard. Not as a brilliant business idea.
As a living truth I was navigating in real time, finding my way back to myself through the darkest season of my life.
Being. Enjoying. Allowing.
The Indie. The Frenchie. The New Yorker.
Truth first. Then desire. Then command.
What I discovered is that the sequence that brought me back from the lowest point of my life is the same sequence that has brought me forward through every expansion since.
The FemmeTypes are not a program. They are timeless. They expand as we expand. We never outgrow them.
And then Paris.
My dream had always been to live in France, from the time I was fourteen years old. I had convinced my mom to drive me a half an hour to high school, just so I could learn the langue.
My boys, Dominic and Nicoli, were four and seven. My husband Dave did not speak a word of French. We went anyway.
Dave is the kind of man who moves to France because his wife's soul is calling her there. He has always been that. The man behind the vision, holding the logistics, the operations, the structure that lets me lead from the front. He is the COO of Elegant Femme and has been from the beginning. He is my consigliere. The masculine in this brand. And I would not be where I am today without him.
And then it happened, a few years after starting Elegant Femme, I moved my family to France. We actually went on vacation and never came back.
In France, Elegant Femme came alive in a way I had not expected. The business grew by over 500%
(not a typo.) I was living my dream and women could feel it.
In France, Elegant Femme came alive in a way I had not expected. The business grew by over 500% (not a typo.) I was living my dream and women could feel it.
So I stepped into my next dream, I was accepted into fashion school in Paris.
I went live every day, sharing what it felt like to study at a Paris fashion school, to be fully expressed, to be a woman pursuing something beautiful and not apologizing for it. The women inside the community followed along. It was alive. It was real. It was me without editing.
And then the threatening letters came.
The fashion school believed I was copying them and trying to start my own school. The letters were not kind. Students called me in the middle of the night. I remember one line exactly, "You call yourself an elegant femme." They never looked at my videos, they only assumed. I felt so misunderstood and criticized, it hurt.
So I did what intelligent women do when the cost of being seen feels too high.
I quieted myself.
I dimmed the part that was too much, too visible, too certain of what she wanted.
It worked. The calls stopped. The letters stopped.
And a piece of me went quiet with them.
I want you to know this because every woman I have ever worked with has her own version of this moment. The moment the cost of being fully seen felt too high. The moment she made herself a little smaller so the threat would pass.
That quieting has a price. And it is always paid in wealth.
That quieting has a price.
And it is always paid in wealth.
That quieting has a price.
And it is always paid in wealth.
The fashion line.
The following year I launched TARA Paris, a fashion collection that was entirely, unapologetically mine.
Two runway shows in Paris. Tags sewn into every garment that read I AM BEAUTY. A standing ovation from the Parisian press, in 2014, when everyone in my industry told me that spirituality and fashion do not mix.
They mixed. They always mix. Beauty and truth were never meant to be separated. That is the soul of everything I do.
That chapter of the fashion line is paused. It is not over. The woman who received that standing ovation in Paris still has more to say in that room. But what she built there, the proof that a woman can stand in her full creative authority and be received, that lives in everything Elegant Femme is today.
The “work”
For nearly two decades I have sat with women in the most private conversations of their lives.
The fear of outgrowing a spouse while the revenue keeps climbing. The million dollar decision that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with whether she trusts herself. How to feel sensual and alive while being the one who holds everything financially. How to lead from God when the board wants data. How to want more beauty, more pleasure, more God in her life without feeling like she is betraying her ambition.
They are the conversations that determine everything else.
This is the level at which Elegant Femme operates.
Not the conversations they have in boardrooms or on stages. THE REAL ONES.
And it changed everything.
The Yacht Life.
Our boys left for college and something unexpected happened.
Season one: the south of France to Turkey. Over three thousand nautical miles. Nights under the stars. The Ionian Sea. Me writing my second book while the water moved beneath us. Dave and I falling more in love than we were in our thirties.
Dominic and Nicoli fly out and spend weeks with us now. They did not lose their parents to a sailing life. They gained a front row seat to what a marriage looks like when two people choose it, consciously, repeatedly, without performance.
I recorded The Soul of Beauty audiobook over the Ionian Sea last year. It had not been formally published and had already created multiple six figures. That is the unconventional way we do business here. Beauty moves before the launch. Truth does not wait for the strategy to be perfect.
Dave and I looked at each other and made a decision that very few people would understand from the outside.
Instead of the traditional empty nest, the quiet house, the new chapter that looks more or less like the old one, we bought a yacht and sailed away.
Dave named her The Responsible Choice.
Because we believe, truly, in our bones, that following your dreams is the most responsible thing you can do.
Elegant Femme is...
Spiritual Elegance
It is not a productivity brand. It is not a spirituality brand that avoids the reality of money, ambition, and results.
It sits at the intersection of real-world wealth and feminine embodiment.
The "work" is precise, grounded, and deeply personal.
At its center is The FemmeTypes framework, the living architecture through which a woman returns to herself. Three expressions. One sacred sequence.
Elegant Femme is a Soul Led leadership and lifestyle brand.
The INDIE — Being
She returns to truth. Still, devoted, uncompromising.
The FRENCHIE — Enjoying
She honors desire. Sensual, unapologetic, led by what she actually wants.
She leads from command. Decisive, clean, unavailable for over-efforting.
The NEW YORKER — Allowing
When the sequence is broken, even with the right strategy, the right effort, the right everything, she exhausts herself.
I have watched this for 18 years. In thousands of women across six continents. And in my own life, again and again.
This is not theory. It is the map I have been living.
When a woman lives these in sequence, truth first, then desire, then command, her life reorganizes without strain. Her wealth responds. Her relationships deepen. Her ambition stops costing her herself.
What I believe.
Tout est possible. Everything is possible.
Not as a slogan. As a lived reality.
Tout est possible. Everything
is possible. Not as a slogan.
As a lived reality.
I believe desire is direction. Not indulgence, direction. The impulse toward something beautiful, something true, something larger than where we currently stand, that impulse is not vanity. It is the voice of God in the feminine.
I believe a woman does not lose her power when she softens. She finally stabilizes it.
I believe wealth is not the reward for suffering. It is what happens when a woman stops abandoning herself to earn.
And I believe, as I wrote in The Soul of Beauty, that when a woman remembers her beauty, she remembers her wholeness.
That is why this brand exists.
Not to teach women how to be more productive. To return them to the truth of who they already are, and show them what becomes available when they lead from there.
I have built an eight-figure brand. I have sailed three thousand nautical miles with the man I love. I have watched a book generate multiple six figures before it was published. I have raised two sons who choose to spend their holidays on a yacht with their parents.
None of this required me to harden. None of it required me to abandon beauty, peace, or God. None of it required me to perform.
It required me to lead from the sequence. Every time.
That is what I am here to show you.
If you are new to Elegant Femme, start with the Femme Design Assessment, a short quiz that shows you which FemmeType you are currently operating from and where your greatest reservoir of untapped power lives.
Or begin with Femme Flow, the daily process that has been the foundation of this work for 18 years.
The right door is the one that feels true.
Begin here.
