Monday, August 30, 2010

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

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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Friday, August 27, 2010

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.

For more unusual ways to make money, visit this site.

[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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Thursday, August 26, 2010

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."

For more unusual ways to make money, visit this site.

[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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Tuesday, August 17, 2010

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.

For more unusual ways to make money, visit this site.

[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

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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Monday, August 09, 2010

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...?

For more unusual ways to make money, visit this site.

[Via - Springwise]

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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