sdbj.com: Linda Byerline hates to admit that her business experience is self-taught. She was a stay-at-home mom with a nursing background when she posted an image of an extra cloth diaper she had made for her daughter on eBay.
Four years later, Byerline runs Happy Heiny’s, which provides cloth diapers online and in retail stores across the world.
“It completely caught us off guard,” she said of the immediate success of the company.
Byerline is planning to open her first “brick-and-mortar” store in El Cajon later this summer after moving the business out of her home this year.
Entrepreneur Profile [sdbj.com]
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Threadless Tees
CNNmoney: Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart were fresh out of high school seven years ago when they had the idea that would make them millionaires. After entering an Internet T-shirt design competition, the two Chicagoans thought maybe that was the way all T-shirts should be made.
Most stores print a bunch of shirts and lose money on the ones people don’t like. Instead, they figured, why not let customers rank designs ahead of time and then print only the winners?
The idea grew into an online store called Threadless that struck a chord with Web-savvy designers in Chicago and beyond; last year Nickell and DeHart sold $16 million worth of T-shirts.
The key to their success? High profit margins — the shirts cost as little as $4 each to make and sell for $15 and up — and a business model built on the care and feeding of an online community.
‘Project Runway’ for the t-shirt crowd [CNNmoney]
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Go Green
Inc.com: It may cost them more, but small-business owners seem increasingly willing to make environmentally conscious business decisions, according to a new survey.
Of 600 small-business owners nationwide, two-thirds said they would pay more for environmentally friendly goods and services for their business, according to the latest Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index poll.
At iLite Technologies, a Chicago-based technology company that designs and manufactures lighting systems for commercial markets, president and CEO Sean Callahan found that despite the higher cost, using environmentally conscious lighting materials actually results in a better finished product — not just a greener one.
Entrepreneurs Willing to Pay More to Go Green [Inc.com]
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Small Brand Advantage
Inc.com: Whether it’s quality, selection, product knowledge, or customer service, small retailers can leverage a stronger brand identity to take on big-box competitors. For far too many large corporate retailers, their primary strategy is to build sales through low prices, to leverage their sheer size into economies of scale that drive down their costs and allow them to offer the lowest possible prices. Their entire business model is built on volume, and the primary tool of choice in their toolkit is price promotion. Sales, circulars, coupons, special events — however the promotion is structured — the offering is built around price.
Building brand equity for your store is a critical element in maintaining pricing integrity, protecting margins, and assuring long-term profitability. Building brand equity requires clarity of purpose. When customers think of you, they will focus on the one thing at which you excel. Focusing yourself and all of your people like a laser beam on that one thing, whether it be quality, selection, product knowledge or customer service, and building everything you do around that core mission, is the key to building retail brand equity.
Building Brand Equity [Inc.com]