Catching more flies with vinegar: when their stockbroker jobs soured, partners turned to the art of the dill.

• Author: Archer, Katherine
• Position: FEATURE

Yucca--a whole lot of vodka mixed with fresh-sliced lemons and a dash of sugar--is not named for its taste. It's named for the way it makes you feel the next morning. But in June 2009, as she sipped some from a gallon pickle jar while sitting on the beach at Sea Island, Ga., Jenny Fulton felt good. The sun was bright, the waves aquamarine, her skin brown, and her children were at home in Winston-Salem. She was starting to feel warm, and not because of the sun, when her phone rang. It was Ashlee Furr, her sales assistant in the Greensboro office of Morgan Keegan & Co.

"I'm packing up my desk," Furr said.

"You've got to be kidding."

"Laid off."

Fulton looked at the friends with her on the beach. "I'm going to throw up." She ran to her room, vomited and cried. She wallowed in her bed for two days. Fulton saw the writing on Wall Street. She had been a stockbroker for 16 years, the last four with the Memphis, Tenn.-based firm, but the industry was in turmoil. She knew it wouldn't be long before she, too, was let go. On the third morning, Fulton got up, showered and asked her husband: "What am I going to do?" Bo Fulton replied, "You make really good pickles. You have land at MawMaw's. You could grow cucumbers there." It was true. She made good pickles using recipes her grandmother taught her as a child. And she preached their power, drinking the brine to cure hangovers and men-strial cramps. Still, the idea of turning pickles into a viable business--especially with no experience--sounded laughable.

Little more than three years later, Fulton walks into the bathroom of a warehouse in Kernersville. A month earlier, she had received another fateful call, this one from a producer at 60 Minutes. Taking her husband's advice, she and Furr had started Miss Jenny's Pickles in late 2009. Jars are now sold in more than 500 stores, including Matthews-based Harris Teeter Supermarkets Inc. and some 40 others in China. By year-end, sales will have increased nearly tenfold since 2010. Putting together a segment called "The Life and Death of Asheboro, N.C.," the producer wanted to spotlight Miss Jenny's as evidence of the Triad's resurgence.

Applying blush, mascara and lipstick before the taping, she tells her image in the mirror, "Breathe, Jenny. You've got this. Pickle up, baby. This is your one shot." Wearing a pickle-green shirt, she takes her place across from CBS Evening News anchor and 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley inside her company's 5,000-square-foot warehouse. "What's made us successful is the same thing that's made every American successful, and that's hard work," she says. "And not taking no for an answer. If...