People love to laugh, and that includes Micha Weinblatt. He launched his company, Crooked Monkey, in 2005, and he’s now one of the top young entrepreneurs to keep an eye on. The success of his shirt business has placed him in the spotlight, reports Voice of America.
Weinblatt and a friend launched Crooked Monkey at a bar near the University of Maryland, where he was a political science student.
“One of the main shirts that we sold that night was our ‘Never Leave College’ shirts,” he said. “We were seniors at the University of Maryland. We didn’t want to leave college and we knew a lot of our friends felt the same way. So this was a top seller that night and has continued to do well for us.”
The event was so successful that they decided to expand the company to include more T-shirt designs. Later, Weinblatt bought out his partner.
His parents provided the corporate headquarters – the basement of the home where he’d grown up in Potomac, Maryland.
Crooked Monkey shirts are sold on the company website, as well as in more than 500 stores in the United States and around the world.
“We’re sold in Guam, in Japan, in Saudi Arabia, in India, we have a distribution center in Canada and also in the Philippines,” said Micha.
Weinblatt says fierce competition in the T-shirt business is making him think more creatively. From its modest beginnings, Crooked Monkey is expected to make $750,000 this year.
The Program for Investment in Micro-Entrepreneurs, or PRIME, distributed nearly $8 million in grants Sept. 8 to 100 nonprofits around the country, including four with operations or headquarters in the Washington region.
Advocates say the program helps small-business owners in underserved communities get capital that they may not qualify for otherwise.
“To me it’s additional services to help entrepreneurs who don’t come with a lot of the financial literacy tools they need to start a business but have a good idea,” said Ann Sullivan, who heads the Association for Enterprise Opportunity’s policy team.
SBA officials identified PRIME as one of several that could have its funding scaled back or eliminated in a tough economic climate, calling it “duplicative” of other efforts within the agency.
Can a YouTube video get your business into Wal-Mart? If it goes viral, it just might. The NY Times has more:
On Tuesday, Provo, Utah-based Orabrush Inc. announced its flagship product – a tongue cleaner – would be carried in 3,500 of Wal-Mart Inc.’s 3,800 U.S. stores thanks to a social-media campaign launched two years ago.
Orabrush initially marketed its tongue cleaners directly to consumers with a TV infomercial in mid-2008, according to founder Bob Wagstaff, who invented the product. But the strategy didn’t perform well.
So they turned to YouTube. The rest, as they say, is history. Their first video is below.
Here is a diagnosis of what’s wrong with health care in America, straight from the horse’s mouth: There’s too much.
In a new poll of primary care physicians, nearly half of them said their patients received too much medical care and more than a quarter said they were practicing more aggressively than they’d like to.
That could mean ordering more tests, prescribing more drugs or diagnosing people with diseases, although they would never have experienced any symptoms.
