Kafka's Kool Ties

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http://www.kooltie.com/

Years ago, a friend presented Phoenix business owner Steve Kafka with polymer crystals that were used on golf-course grass to allow it to absorb nitrates.

But the turning point was when the friend showed Kafka how incredibly absorbent the material was when introduced to water.

"He said, 'If anyone can do something with this, you can,'" Kafka said.

Kafka and his wife, Pam, put their ingenuity and artistic creativity to work, sewed the polymer into high-quality fabric, fashioned it into a scarf and in 1991, Kafka's Kool Tie was born.

After the tie is soaked and the polymer crystals absorb the water, it stabilizes body temperature through evaporation when placed by the carotid arteries and major vascular networks, such as those at the back of the neck. It also stabilizes blood pressure.

Nearly 20 years and countless competitors' knock-offs later, Kafka's creation has gained a loyal following of medical professionals, government public-service departments and patients suffering from heat-related ailments.

The Kool Tie remains a popular item on the shelves at national outdoors store REI. The continuous cooling effect lasts up to three days, and unlike similar devices, the tie does not have to be frozen to be, two features that are attractive to hikers, said Chad Vincent, manager of the REI store in Paradise Valley. Vincent said the ties become more popular as Arizonans ease into the summer.

"It's not like a spray bottle where you have to be active in using them. It's an easy tool you put on and let it do its work. It's not something you have to put a lot of energy into to stay cool," he said.

When Kafka started Kool Ties, the Boston native was already a well-known artist whose pinstriping garnered international attention on the vehicle road circuit. He saw other freeze-and-wear products that were designed to cool down the body but instead resulted in iciness that often caused more discomfort or frostbite.

Pam, who is in charge of manufacturing and design, made the first 3,500 Kool Ties in her home sewing room. Professional athletes, weekend warriors, policemen and firefighters are among Kafka's regular clients.

Kafka says there are some poor imitations on the market, but he takes it in stride and focuses on making his product the best it can be.

"People say those things don't work . . . until they get one of ours," he said. "We love and feed off the calls and e-mails we get every day."

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[Via - AZCentral.Com]

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

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Spritit Hoods

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http://spirithoods.com/

Entrepreneur: Alexander Mendeluk, a sometime-actor with bit parts in the Twilight movies (he's the one Kristen Stewart kneed in the groin).

"Aha" moment: Mendeluk sported the bobcat to a Hollywood party in 2009. "The entire place just stopped," he says. Soon, a gaggle of girls began petting the hood and "I was, like, 'Ohmigod. This could be something cool.'"
What possessed him: In film school at the Art Institute of Portland, Ore., Mendeluk was looking for a way to truly stand out, so he and a designer friend came up with the idea of a bobcat hood. Mendeluk began making them for his friends and noticed how cool it looked when his crew all wore theirs at the same time. A tribe was born.

Startup: Mendeluk partnered with friends Chase Hamilton, Ashley Haber and Marley Marotta, and Hamilton put in $10,000 to create prototypes and pay for a booth at February's Pooltradeshow in Las Vegas, where the brand officially launched.

Payoff: Between the e-commerce site and 40-plus accounts in the United States, Canada and Japan, "we are moving thousands of units." The hoods' popularity has prompted manufacturing to expand from Los Angeles to include China. Seventeen styles are available, from a $69 brown bear ("brave, curious, gentle") to a $129 red fox ("adaptability, diplomacy, wisdom"), paws included.

2011 and beyond: A line of kid-sized hoods and a new tribe across the pond, when Mendeluk's brother, a former ad man with Leo Burnett, opens a Spirit Hoods office in London.

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[Via - Entrepreneur Magazine]

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide by Dan S. Kennedy

101 Businesses You Can Start With Less Than One Thousand Dollars: For Stay-at-Home Moms & Dads

Make Your Ideas Mean Business

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Young Millionaires

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http://www.modcloth.com/

Susan Gregg was 17 and heading off to Carnegie Mellon University, and she had a problem: a closet overstuffed with one-of-a-kind vintage shoes and dresses. The solution? Open an online boutique.

ModCloth.com was headquartered in her dorm room and run with the help of her high school sweetheart, Eric Koger. The two drove from Pittsburgh to their South Florida hometown several times throughout college to haul up stock. By the end of their senior year in 2006, ModCloth was getting 60,000 visitors a month, and plenty of them were asking for more.

Gregg--a double major in German and business, and now married to Koger--knew what to do. First, she raised the capital: $50,000 in credit card debt, plus loans from Koger's uncles, student loans and a second mortgage. Then she hired designers to create an original, vintage-inspired collection. "I Googled, 'Where can I buy wholesale clothing?'" Gregg-Koger recalls. She found the Magic Trade Show in Las Vegas, wandered the booths, asked questions and found her designers.

These days, as co-founder and chief creative officer, Gregg-Koger, 25, still handpicks all the clothes, shoes and accessories featured on the site (most sell for less than $100) and seeks out designers who fit ModCloth's aesthetic. Koger, the CEO, oversees the technical side. The site gets around 2 million visitors every month and is on track to surpass $50 million in sales this year. They've raised $20 million in new funding to open up offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles this summer, and employee numbers are close to 150, and rising.

Gregg-Koger says ModCloth's biggest advantage is the fact that she is ModCloth's ideal customer: "Other companies might say, 'We need to get on this social networking stuff,' whereas it was intuitive for us. If I have a Facebook account, and my friends do, my business should."

ModCloth's future is "social commerce," she adds. That is, in developing a site that involves customers even if they're not actually buying. ModCloth recently introduced a "Be the Buyer" program, which lets customers choose which styles go into production, and a "Name It and Win It" contest. The idea is to leverage crowdsourcing and encourage customers to share and comment--and get excited about clothes that will be available in a few months.

"But that's like version 0.5," she says. "There's a lot more coming."

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[Via - Entrepreneur Magazine]

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide by Dan S. Kennedy

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Pro Swing

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http://www.proswingbaseball.com/

Ten-year-old Brady Miller couldn't hit the ball right.

So his dad, Rick Miller, made a training tool that gave him clues about how to swing the bat.

Two years later, the RBI Pro Swing is manufactured in Irving, packaged in Fort Worth and sold in sports stores across the country. It has become the full-time job of the 49-year-old Colleyville resident and the inspiration for his Fort Worth-based company, MSportsLLC. The company hopes to sell 1 million Pro Swings by 2013.

The Pro Swing looks like a long plastic cuff and slides onto the top half of a bat. If the player swings correctly, the tiny steel beads in the weighted plastic cuff make a quick "swish" noise.

"We had a great product, but we didn't have Nike on it or Rawlings on it," Miller said.

"But we've gotten to the point where we go out to the field, and people say 'Yeah, we saw that on a player's bat; we saw that on the Internet.' We are seeing the momentum build."

Miller is an avid Texas Rangers fan and coached both his sons in baseball. He previously worked for a manufacturing company but took a risk after inventing the Pro Swing and spent about $400,000 up front to make product molds, design a website, create promotional videos and hire the first few staff members.

He showed off his product to former Texas Ranger Rusty Greer and Yankees hitting coach Kevin Long, asking them whether they saw value in the product and would recommend it to others. The Pro Swing was a hit.

The company began selling the training tool in June 2008, along with distributing other sports products. He expects the company to double in size from six employees to 12 in the next 18 months.

RBI Pro Swing is sold by about 400 dealers – stores like a Southlake Sports and website stores. About 25 stores sell them in Dallas-Fort Worth.

"I stay away from a lot of the training stuff and leave it to coaches, but the RBI Pro Swing, it stands by itself," said Southlake Sports store owner Robbi Vincent. "You can give this to a kid or a high school player or a college player, and they can work with it."

The company has sold more than 18,000 RBI Pro Swings so far. The product's suggested retail price is $29.95.

Now Miller is thinking about creating a product for his other favorite sport: golf.

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[Via - DallasNews.Com]

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

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Urban Orchards

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http://www.notfarfromthetree.org/

It's right about this time of year that those with fruit trees and gardens in the Northern Hemisphere tend to get overwhelmed by homegrown abundance. We've already featured Giapo Gelato's effort to claim some of that locally grown produce for use in its ice cream, and recently one of our spotters alerted us to Not Far from the Tree, an even more ambitious effort in Toronto.

Not Far from the Tree operates a residential fruit-picking program that aims to prevent locally grown fruit from going to waste. Toward that end, it sends teams of volunteers to harvest the fruit on trees whose owners are not inclined to do so themselves. Of the resulting bounty, one-third goes to the owner, another third goes to the volunteers for their labour and the final third is distributed via pedal power to charities and community organizations in the neighbourhood. The project harvested more than 3,000 pounds of residential fruit back in 2008, followed by more than 8,000 pounds last year; so far, close to 2,000 pounds of cherries, mulberries and plums have been picked this year. Coming this winter from the nonprofit group is a like-minded pilot project to tap residential maple trees and then boil down the sap into maple syrup.

With benefits for landowners and urban dwellers alike, Not Far from the Tree seems to have found one of those rare concepts without any visible downside. One to emulate in the residential gardens in your neck of the woods...?

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[Via - Springwise]

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IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

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Sauceaholic

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http://www.sauceaholic.com

The barbecue sauces, salsas, mustards and rubs are on the shelves. Now the owners of Sauceaholics just have to hope for business.

They opened the small shop in Lakewood last week. It's a simple operation by most business standards - one employee and 900 square feet of jars and bottles for sale in a shopping center. But they still face the same obstacles every new business does.

The U.S. Small Business Administration reports that about 650,000 businesses opened and another 575,000 closed each year from 2004 to 2008, the most recent data available.

The biggest problem facing most new businesses is lack of access to capital, said Janice Donaldson, regional director of the Small Business Development Center at the University of North Florida.

"Some people have all the money they need and good for them," she said. "But most of the clients we deal with have to borrow money from conventional banks. But that's dried up."

The investment in Sauceaholics has been modest.

The three partners - Don Smith, Sandra Hazen and Jack Gibney - have invested $7,500 each so far. How much will that rise to down the road?

"I'd say $10,000," Smith said. Then he paused and added, "No, make that $12,000."

They didn't have to borrow any of it. But they signed a 16-month lease at $1,900 a month, so they're committed.

"We're flying by the seat of our pants," Smith said.

The idea started last Christmas when Smith went online to buy salsas for his partner in their CPA firm.

"The further I went, the more this exploded," he said. "There's a whole cult out there of people and their salsas."

He ordered a bunch, put together a couple of gift baskets, but it continued to stay in his mind.

"A $30 order might cost $15 in shipping," he said. "So wouldn't it be nice to have a store that had all that salsa? And then it grew into sauces, marmalades, hot sauces. And you talk about a cult, look at hot sauces."

He talked to his wife about it. She talked to Sandra Hazen, a longtime friend, about it. Smith talked to a neighbor, Jack Gibney, about it. And they decided to go for it.

The process was simple: Search the Internet for makers of the products, e-mail them and ask about wholesale prices.

They created a corporation, got a credit card and started ordering. They order mostly in cases of 12, with most costing them $80-$150.

"Our competition," he said, "is who we just bought it from."

Generally, he prices the items a little higher than the manufacturer's retail price and generally a little more than twice what they paid, but there's no shipping. Prices run $3-$10.

"We didn't want to be that sauce place that opened up but their prices are way too high," he said.

A bigger problem with specialty retail shops, Donaldson said, is the obvious one: They compete with the big stores.

"There's a lot of sauces in Publix," Donaldson said. "The same is true with wine shops or anything else you can get at the big boxes. Specialty shops may think they have an advantage, and maybe their sauces taste better than anything anywhere else. But how do you communicate that with the customers?"

Sauceaholics has about 200 different products, and Smith said if they find out a grocery store carries it, they probably won't.

"We can't compete with them," he said.

The trio didn't talk to any small business experts, didn't seek out any advice. And they don't have retail experience.

But Smith is a CPA who has seen the books for lots of small business. Both he and Gibney, an attorney, run their businesses and Hazen owns a bed and breakfast in Vermont.

So they know about rent and overhead.

"If you haven't worked retail," Donaldson said, "it's a grueling experience. Most people who start up don't have a lot of money. So they work it, and their relatives work it. That's why a lot of people quit, because it just isn't as fun as they thought it'd be."

The sauce partners brought in Hazen's son Stephen to run it. He didn't invest but will get a share of the business in return. He staffs it during the week, the owners work on weekends.

The trio don't have a complex business model. Smith figured out the basics of overhead and markups. He figures that they need to sell about $7,000 worth a month before they start making money.

But they haven't figured out a point where they might pull the plug on it if it doesn't go well.

"It depends on where we think we are in the evolution of the company," Smith said. "If we can't think of any new things to try, if we think we've got the best products we can have there, then it might be time.

"The upside is that this is successful and we could open more stores, and that's far, far greater than the downside. I didn't have to mortgage my house. I'd take a hit, but it won't change my lifestyle."

"The downside," Smith said, "is, yeah, we've lost some money. But we've got everyone's Christmas present for the next year or two."

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[Via - CNNMoney.Com]

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide by Dan S. Kennedy

101 Businesses You Can Start With Less Than One Thousand Dollars: For Stay-at-Home Moms & Dads

Make Your Ideas Mean Business

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Just Us Hens - Meet The Chickensitters

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http://justushens.com/

PORTLAND, Ore. (CNNMoney.com) -- You've heard of cat-sitters, dog-sitters and, of course, babysitters. But chicken-sitters?

In Portland, Ore., a city known for its deep do-it-yourself streak and poultry-permissive laws, two backyard farmers have stepped up to meet an unusual need: watching hens when their owners go on vacation.

In May, Rhonda Piasecki, 43, and Sharon Rowland, 35, launched Just Us Hens, which they believe is the nation's first chicken-sitting service. The business partners, who each boast a full roost of laying hens (four for Piasenki; eight for Rowland), met last year working at Portland's Urban Farm Store.

"At the store, you'd just talk people's ears off about chickens," says Piasecki, who is also a drummer for Klickitat, a local jazz-rock band.

But the seed the store sells started to aggravate Piasecki's asthma, right around the same time that Rowland decided she wanted to spend more time with her 3-year-old, chicken-loving son Sterling. A friend suggested that Piasecki become a "chicken consultant," while Rowland's husband floated the idea of seeking out hen-sitting gigs.

So the women teamed up to offer a slate of services: $15 per visit for hen sitting, $25 for hen health house calls and $50 an hour for consultations on urban agriculture. In late May, they launched a blog, followed by a full website in early July. They also publicized their services at Portland's online chicken chat group, PDXBackyardChix, which has more than 1,000 members.

The fledgling company has only a handful of customers. But as word passes through Portland's substantial population of urban hen keepers, they hope Just Us Hens will take off.

There's certainly an audience for it. Chickens are all the rage in Portland, where longstanding city regulations allow residents to keep up to three of them -- but no roosters -- without a permit. Even Mayor Sam Adams has a brood: three hens, all named Alma. (Adams let his chief of staff's daughter, Alma, pick the names.) Hundreds of chicken enthusiasts will turn out on Saturday for Portland's seventh annual Tour de Coops, a self-guided stroll through 25 backyard hen houses, including the mayor's own.

One of Just Us Hens' first customers was Renee Wrede, a nurse in Southwest Portland who worried about what would become of her new flock when she and her family took a beach vacation. Rowland signed on to watch "the girls": two barred Plymouth Rock hens, one Ameraucana, one Blue Laced Red Wyandotte and one Welsumer.

During daily visits, Rowland fussed over Poppy, Hyacinth and the other chickens, holding and petting each one. After she fed and watered them, she emailed Wrede to report on how the birds were faring in her absence.

Wrede was thrilled and says the service exceeded her expectations.

"We do have a house-sitter, but she has no idea about chickens," Wrede explains. Rowland, on the other hand, was hard-working expert: "She even scooped the poop!"

The proprietors of Just Us Hens pride themselves on creative problem-solving. "We welcome weird situations," Rowland says.

Piasecki has developed a homegrown solution for a common poultry problem: hens plucking their own feathers. She located a chicken-loving seamstress in Arkansas, who she claims is the nation's best source for chicken aprons. The aprons run $7.50 apiece and can be draped over the chickens' problem areas. "They fit perfectly!" she says.

Just Us Hens isn't the only chicken-related business to take flight in recent years. Katy Skinner, of Yacolt, Wash., runs The City Chicken, an online clearinghouse of chicken-keeping wisdom.

She's seen entrepreneurs make money selling prefabricated coops or coop blueprints, as well as giving classes and lectures. But hen-sitting? Even for a seasoned chicken guru, that's something new.

"This is the first I've heard of a hen-sitting service," she says. "I hope they get a lot of business!"

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[Via - CNNMoney.Com]

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide by Dan S. Kennedy

101 Businesses You Can Start With Less Than One Thousand Dollars: For Stay-at-Home Moms & Dads

Make Your Ideas Mean Business

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