Emily Spivack doesn’t think of herself as an entrepreneur. Mention her name, and her friends are more likely to ask, “Did she have on one of her crazy outfits?” than “Did she tell you about her not-for-profit?” Her mother, Marcy Spivack, while praising her daughter’s business acumen, added the caveat, “But can you see her at the Wharton school?”

As much as Ms. Spivack might base her self-image on other interests – such as film, fashion, or art – she is, most of the time, a businesswoman. Four years ago, when she was 22, Ms. Spivack started Shop Well with You, a not-for-profit organization that, according to its mission statement, “helps women with cancer improve their body-image and quality of life by using clothing as a means towards wellness.” Note: clothing, not fashion. “We don’t use the word fashion, really,” Ms. Spivack said, “because that’s not what we’re about. It’s about clothing as a wellness tool.”

If clothing is a means toward wellness for her clients it’s a means of expression for Ms. Spivack. A collector of crinolines, unusual shoes, and vintage hats and dresses, she creates unique outfits for herself every day. But Ms. Spivack also knows from personal experience the effects clothing can have on women recovering from cancer. Her mother has fought the disease four separate times, undergoing a combination of chemotherapy, radiation treatment, surgery, and reconstruction. During her mother’s recoveries, Ms. Spivack would help her feel better about herself by finding clothing that could accommodate the discomforts of the illness – weight fluctuation, hair loss, and new scars – and allow her to maintain her dignity. The senior Spivack confirms that the strategy worked. At her sickest, she said, “it was even more important that I look together because I wasn’t together.”

Shop Well with You started as a personal shopping service, a way for Ms. Spivack to help women in New York the way she’d helped her mother at home. She quickly found, though, that the one-on-one sessions placed too much emphasis on buying new things and did little to serve women outside of New York. Now she’s restructured the organization to provide information resources nationwide – at no cost.

Central to SWY’s services is the organization’s Web site (www.shopwellwithyou.org), the Internet’s only comprehensive collection of links to books, articles, and beauty services dealing with cancer and body image. The site also features a cancer-specific database of clothing tips where a woman can find, for example, styles compatible with mastectomy scars, colostomy bags, or lymphedema (swelling of the arm that sometimes results from lymph node removal).

Women with specialized inquiries can submit a request to SWY and receive a customized information packet within a week. One woman, for example, called about her daughter’s forthcoming wedding. She’d had a mastectomy and could wear neither a bra nor a low-cut dress, but wanted some thing red and short. SWY found her a suitable dress, which she was about to buy when she found something in her closet that she realized would work just as well. This discovery, Ms. Spivack said, was ideal. SWY, she said, “should not be about consumption, finding the latest styles, or defining oneself as a ‘special needs’ person who will never be able to dress normally again. Rather it’s about finding ways to work with the things you do already have in a way that’s more suitable to your situation.”

“When you’re so tired, any extra thing you have to do seems like an impossible task,” said Jeanne Benzel of Pittsburgh, who had a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery two years ago, at age 33, “and if you can find someone else to do it you’re so relieved and grateful.”

Here in New York, Ms. Spivack holds free Fashion Your Own Sense of Self outreaches at New York hospitals and support organizations several times a month. There she can help as many as 20 women at a time learn how to work with clothing and accessories they already own – participants learn which fabrics are least irritating during radiation treatments, for example, or the effect a brightly colored scarf can have on complexion and mood.

Shoshana Krell, a professional personal shopper who was among SWY’s first group of volunteers, describes the outreaches as opportunities for women of all ages and types of cancer to focus on wellness and feeling good rather than treatments and disease. The sessions provide a bit of fun in what can be a pretty dismal time in a woman’s life. Ms. Spivack runs the outreaches herself, and, according to Ms. Krell, connects immediately with the women she helps. “She knows the right things to say, all the treatments, all the lingo. People relate to her, they feel comfortable. They open up to her immediately.”

The endeavor has been learn-as-you-go for Ms. Spivack. She developed the business plan in the Brown University Entrepreneurship Program, a competition that awards start-up money each year to the most viable business models. Among aspiring dot-coms, coffee shops, and construction companies, Ms. Spivack was the only woman, the only one-person team, and hers the first not-for-profit proposal the program had ever considered. Professor Barrett Hazeltine, who directs the program, recognized her leadership skills. “Emily combines the personal with an ability to make something work,” he said. “A lot of people her age have ideas but not all of them can make things happen.”

Ms. Spivack won the competition’s second prize and the further support of the New York-based Business Incubation Group, which gave her free office space and administrative assistance. Glamour magazine voted her one of its “Top 10 College Wow Women 2000,” a selection of young women “driven by their compassion and their passion to make a difference in the world.”

Since its creation, SWY has caught the attention of corporations looking for smaller organizations to help. With its mission of building women’s self-image through clothing, the organization was a natural partner for socially conscious fashion designer Eileen Fisher, whose own mission emphasizes empowering women to feel good about themselves. Eileen Fisher has held several in-store fund-raising events for SWY, and also promoted the organization by featuring Ms. Spivack in its Spring 2003 “Women Change the World Everyday” ad campaign. The campaign featured 15 “real women” who, as the company describes, “in their diversity and commitment to the world create small and large miracles every day.”

For all her doubts, Ms. Spivack is an entrepreneur, although, as her mother says, Shop Well with You “has Emily written all over it.” It may be precisely her lack of interest in business for business’ sake that makes her so successful.

For Ms. Spivack, the goal is to help women like her mother, a self-proclaimed “breast cancer victor,” survive a disease and its physical and emotional side effects in the best way she can. “She has tremendous empathy towards these women because she’s lived it,” Marcy Spivack says, “and this is her way of giving back. It touches me to my core that she’s doing this.”