"Oh my gosh, Tom, I love your hat! Where did you get it?" Lucius asked me. I was wearing a one-of-a-kind black pointed hat with a gold border at the bottom.
"Um, I actually made it," I replied.
"Well, it's absolutely fabulous. You should sell them or something! Could you make one for me? I'll pay!"
"How much will you pay?"
"Oh, I don't know. Three galleons maybe."
That was more than I could expect. I wanted a few sickles at the most, but since he offered, I couldn't turn it down. "Sure, just give me a few days."
That conversation was the start of my success.
My name was Tom Riddle, but since that day, I'd been thinking about the idea of starting my own line of wizard hats. It seemed pretty far-fetched, but I went with it. After a week and a half of sewing, I had made twenty hats and sold them all to my friends. Soon people who weren't even my friends started asking for hats because they'd been such a hit.
After a few months, I graduated from Hogwarts. I seemed to be better at designing and sewing than at actual magic. With the small sum of money that I had collected from selling hats, I bought a small building in the back corner of Diagon Alley.
I didn't want to name it something stupid like "Tom's Hats," so I asked my friends for help coming up with a fake designer name. My friends and I used my full name, Tom Marvolo Riddle, to create the phrase "I am Lord Voldemort." From that, I named the store "Lord Voldemort's Designer Clothes."
The store was a hit. With the publicity from people who went to school with me, there was a line outside the store on opening day. I sold out within an hour and had to hire more people to sew my designs. My friends were incredibly helpful with that. I even opened up two more locations within the next three years!
Then everything changed again when a girl my age walked into the store.
"Hi, welcome to Lord Voldemort's Designer Clothes!" I said to her, as I did to every customer. "Let me know if you need any help!"
"Hi, my name is Ana. I actually have a suggestion to make more money off of the business, so could I please see the manager?"
This caught my attention. "Hi, I'm Tom. I'm actually the manager. I used an anagram to create the name Lord Voldemort out of my full name. What is your suggestion?"
"I grew up with muggle parents, so I've spent a lot of time in the non-magic world. You could create a line of clothes for muggles. They really love this style. You could become a lot more successful that way."
I thought about that for a minute. It sounded like a good idea, and this girl seemed to know what she was talking about. I grew up in a muggle orphanage, but I still didn't know about anything except magic and clothes, so I had to trust her choices. "What if," I said, "we work together? I could design and make clothes, and you could run business in the muggle world."
She paused for a moment before saying, "That sounds perfect!" as a large grin broke across her face.
A few months later, Ana and I were finally able to buy our own muggle store. We were filling out the paperwork, and I started to write, "Lord Voldemort's Designer Clothes" on the line that said "Store Name."
"Wait!" said Ana, looking over my shoulder. "I don't think that name would be popular with muggles."
"Really?" I asked.
"Yeah, Tom. They're not big fans of things that sound like evil rulers."
"The word Voldemort sounds evil?"
"Yeah, I think so. The 'Lord' at the beginning doesn't help either."
"What should we call it, then?"
She paused for a moment. "I think that we should keep the initials the same so that wizards would recognize it in the muggle world. I also think that it should be a real name. That's what all the popular designers are doing right now."
We went back and forth for at least an hour trying to come up with a good, nice-sounding name with the initials LV. The first name came easily. Louis. The last name took longer to think of. After much disagreement, we decided on Vuitton. Louis Vuitton. It sounded pleasant, it was easy to say, and it was memorable. "Louis Vuitton's Designer Clothes" was going to open in a few weeks.
All of that was five years ago. Ana and I are getting married next month (crazy, right?), and she wanted me to design her wedding dress. The business is going well. My Louis Vuitton clothing line is known around the entire muggle world, and the Lord Voldemort line is extremely popular as well. It's the only real fashion in the wizard world outside of school uniforms for Hogwarts students. In other words, I, Tom Riddle, couldn't be happier with how my life turned out.