The Egg Girl

Diane Irvine grew up on a farm, which provided the ideal experience to prepare her for her future job… Selling diamonds as CEO of Blue Nile.

By Ann Bauer | January 2010 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

Photograph by Hayley Young

When Diane Irvine was in grade school, her father left his Chicago-area cement company job and moved his family to Harvard, Ill., to start a farm.

"I think about what a risk he took," says Irvine, now 50. "He had a wife and five kids, and he went into a business that was completely subject to the weather. You can't buy insurance for cold or rain, so basically you just have to believe and pray."

The second oldest of the children, Diane was in charge of the eggs from a very early age. Their farm had 5,000 chickens, she explains, laying an average of two eggs every three days. That meant approximately 3,800 eggs daily had to be collected, washed, "candled"-inspected with a light for defects, fertilization or cracks-and sorted according to size.

"This was my after-school job," Irvine says, looking anything but rural in a 1940s-style tweed suit, Jennifer Aniston layered haircut and sparkling diamond studs. "I was the egg girl."

And as paradoxical as it seems, this work may have been the ideal training for a woman who would go on to become chief executive officer of Blue Nile, the largest online diamond retailer in the world.

There could be no more wholesome way for such a powerful woman to begin.

Irvine went from the farm to Illinois State University, where she intended to major in journalism but took an accounting class in her sophomore year and discovered she had a knack for numbers. She graduated from college with a B.S. in accounting and promptly sat for the CPA exam. Then she went to work for Coopers and Lybrand (now PricewaterhouseCoopers) in Chicago, focusing on taxation, and began working on her master's degree.

She met a nice young man from Wisconsin on a ski trip and married him two years later, around the same time he was transferred to Seattle. They spent their honeymoon on Interstate 90 driving out from the Midwest.

They meant to live only a couple of years here, then head back, Irvine says. But then their children were born (Laura, now 18; David, 14; Jessica, 11) and the family settled in. Irvine left Coopers and Lybrand-where she had become a partner-to join Plum Creek Timber Co. in 1994.

"I loved what I did at Coopers, but I thought this would give me more responsibility and exposure to strategic planning," she says.

She departed from the