Thornhill businesswoman leaps from heels to steels
        Decision to leave South Africa paved road to success
Flamenco dancer, business mentor, cosmetics executive, university lecturer, newspaper columnist, inventor. Whenever Chips Klein digs in her heels and goes to work, success goes along for the ride.

Can a flamenco dancer from South Africa, with the Irish name of Colleen, find happiness as a Thornhill business dynamo, buying and selling steel all over the world?

The answer is a definite yes.

Even if the question sounds like a story line for a soap opera.

And don’t bother calling her Colleen; she’s been known as Chips for so long, even her own mother has trouble getting her to react to her given name.

Better known as Chips Klein, this vivacious Thornhill resident is best known in the world of business as the driving force behind Step Up, an Ontario government program created in 1991 to assist women who were already successful in their own business ventures but needed help expanding them.

Protégés were matched up with carefully selected mentors who could best help them learn the skills necessary to expand their business.

Chips Klein, modestly referring to herself in those days as the Grand Mentor, was instrumental in making this women’s networking organization, and its offshoot programs, a huge success. But how did she end up in Thornhill?
Ms Klein was born in Johannesburg. Like many young girls, she had visions of becoming a famous ballerina.

Unlike many young girls, she was taken to see a single performance by a world-renowned Spanish dancer and was hooked immediately.

Goodbye Swan Lake, hello Antonio & His Spanish Ballet. She had obviously found her terpsichorean niche – by the time she was in her twenties, she was performing in South Africa and in Europe as a professional flamenco dancer.
She performed in cabarets and stage shows, in addition to operating her own dance school and studio. It was during this time that she acquired the name Chips. Her friends and colleagues had taken to calling her Chiquita Chips, a popular South African brand of potato chips, and she simply shortened it to ‘Chips’ – in deference to bananas everywhere. Chips it was and Chips it has stayed.

When she was still a teenager in Johannesburg, our salty-snack inspired heroine first met the love of her life, Paul Klein, now a metallurgical engineer. They dated. They fought. They broke up. They got back together. They broke up. In fact, Chips didn’t meet Paul again until many years had passed and she was attending the graduation of her late brother.

Separated by five rows of uncomfortable auditorium chairs, their eyes met. Then they met. Again. True love works in mysterious ways to get the right people together, doesn’t it?

Here they are, 35 years later, still married. Still in love.

But let’s back up a bit. After they were married, Chips continued her dancing career while Paul Klein pursued an engineering career in metallurgy. Eventually, he was offered a transfer to Canada.

The timing for the Kleins was perfect because the political climate in South Africa had already turned their thoughts to emigration and this job offer made the decision to leave a fairly easy one. They left in 1975. The riots started in 1976.

Moving to Canada actually meant moving to Guelph – a place whose name they couldn’t even pronounce. In 1991, they pulled their feet out of the sucking mud and moved to Thornhill.

As a flamenco dancer, Ms Klein had always used lots of make-up to highlight her facial features on stage.

During a performance, a flamenco dancer’s face tells as much of the story as does her body and the make up serves to add nuance to her eyes, lips, and cheeks.

When she left the stage, Ms Klein became involved in the cosmetics industry, working behind the counter at pharmacies doing customer make-overs and in front of the counter on the manufacturing side of the business.

Like many professional performers, she had always found it difficult to put on her own make-up as easily as she could apply it to a customer sitting in front of her.

She immediately realized the problem. When she was applying make-up to another person, she was working with a three-dimensional object. When she was applying make-up to herself using a single flat mirror, she was working with a two-dimensional object.

Someone had to invent a mirror that was capable of reflecting three planes of the face at once.

Well, Chips Klein didn’t have the patience to wait for someone to do that, so she invented the mirror herself. It was marketed as the Eye Maker – The 3-Way Make-up Mirror.