Friday Entrepreneurs: Mimi Ting, Mingle

April 27 6 Comments latest by Michelle

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the poor customer service I received at a tux shop where I went to get measured. Today, I want to tell you about a GREAT customer service experience I had. I went into a store called Mingle to buy a shirt, and the woman at the register forgot to give it back. Two days later, I finally realized my credit card was missing, and I called them up to figure out a time to get it back. The woman, Mimi, owns the shop, and she apologized profusely. Then, a few minutes later, she called me back and offered to drive it to me wherever I was so I wouldn’t have to inconvenience myself. Eventually, she ended up opening early so I could pick up the credit card from her.

Now that’s great customer service.

And then I thought more about her store. When I went in there, there was a “Please Yelp me!” placard on her desk. I love companies that openly ask their customers to evaluate them, which means they’re listening and changing to what people are saying. And, no surprise, when I checked out the Yelp reviews for Mingle, they were almost all positive. (As Mimi says, “I am unsure why other stores don’t encourage their client reviews.”)

As I dug around online, I discovered that her store has a frequently updated blog and lots of things written about her. She uses the classic marketing strategy used by bloggers when they ask others to guest write: If someone else writes on your blog, they’ll link to it, ensuring more people visiting your site. Same for her — she carries lots of independent designers’ clothing, who of course tell people to visit Mingle.

Beyond that, her interview below tells how she found the space herself (through Craigslist), looked at other business plans before making hers, and how the hardest part is not getting a store up, but keeping it going. Running a retail store is a tough, tough business. Mimi runs her store on one of the most competitive retail streets in San Francisco, and she’s built up a great following from her customers and the designers whose clothes she sells. Check out her interview below.

What is Mingle?
MINGLE is a boutique that features the works of local and independent designers. By definition, mingle means “to mix or bring together in combination, usually without loss of individual characteristics”. Our store reflects a mix of styles and creations from many talents, but together, they tell a cohesive story. We offer clothing and accessories for both men and women.

How’s it different than other retail stores?
We are different than a typical retail store in that we primarily work with independent designers. Therefore, many of our merchandise are one of a kind or limited in quantity. Also, because many of our designers produce their own pieces, our price points are much more reasonable than that of other specialty boutiques.

When I went in your store, I noticed a placard that said “Yelp us!” Then I looked up your Yelp reviews and was surprised to see how universally positive the reviews were. What made you put up the placard? Why don’t other stores do this?
I became involved with Yelp two years ago and really loved the concept of “user based reviews”. As a consumer/user, it means I can obtain honest opinions about an establishment before I make a decision to patronize.

As a business owner, Yelp became an in integral way for me to obtain customer feedback. It is very important to me to know how our clients view our business. There is no better feedback than from customers who has had first hand experience shopping in our store. Yelpers are generally very generous with praises and definitely not shy with their complaints. Yelp reviews help us stay aware of what changes are necessary to keep up with our client’s expectations.

In addition to the Yelp Placecard, I also include a yelp link to our newsletters and encourage our customers to check out what others are saying, as well as giving us feedback through Yelp.

I am unsure why other stores don’t encourage their client reviews. Perhaps they are not familiar with Yelp or the benefits associated with it. Also, I believe that small business owners are often more involved with Yelp than major/chain business.

Your store is on one of the most expensive retail streets in San Francisco. How do you do it?
Lol, yes, Union Street is known to be “expensive” in terms of leasing space. There are various factors that dictate how “expensive” a space may be..i.e. sunny vs non sunny side of the street. which block you are located on…etc. I believe that we are in a great location and the size of our small boutique makes it manageable.

How’d you get started?
After college I spent about 5 years in the high tech industry doing various things from consulting to sales. I was enjoying the steady income but did not find my work gratifying. I didn’t quite know what I had wanted to do, or how to get started. However, I began visualizing doing something I love– something that challenges me to use all of my skills. Shortly after, I was introduced to someone who helped me get started financially. I applied the same visualization philosophy towards getting the store launched. I did not have any experience in retail or running my own business. However, I had a picture of what MINGLE should be, and I mapped out a plan on how to get there. This entailed doing research, identifying a location, creating a layout and theme for the store, and most importantly, bringing to together the designers/artist labels that represented MINGLE. I was so set on making MINGLE happen I didn’t believe in obstacles. Sure there were challenges.

For example, I had been warned about difficulties of finding a retail space..especially at a place like Union Street. The commercial leasing agents I contacted did not seem eager to assist me as a small business. I began my own search and believe it or not found current location through Craiglist. There were no lawyers and no agents involved. I went to every local trunkshow/sample sale to seek out designers. I also revisited Craig list to help me enlist designers outside of the city. I found that the local fashion community is very tight and open to supporting one another. People were very generous with referrals and from concept to launching the store it took me about 3 months.

I’m really interested in your outreach. We talked about Yelp, but you seem to be one of the few stores that reaches out to its customers in different ways (a blog, etc) and local talent.
Yes, as a boutique, our primary focus is working with independent designers. We provide up-and-coming designers a chance to showcase their goods and provide a bridge between the designers and the general public. By the same token, we are able to offer our clients unique and cool things that can’t easily be found somewhere else. Our designers love working with us because they enjoy the exposure and feedback to help them grow. Throughout the year we host various trunk shows and “meet the designer” events so our clients can preview new collections and meet the faces behind the fashion.

What advice would you give to someone wanting to start a retail business?
Follow your passion and your instincts, then create solid plan on making it happen. I sampled other people’s business plans to get ideas but created one based on my own goals. Clear financial goals must be set and met. It breaks my heart to hear about wonderful retail establishments going out of business due to lack of proper planning.

I received a fortune cookie once, “It is easy to open a shop, the hard part is keeping it open”. I am not even joking—I can’t tell you how true that is. One may think that the biggest challenge of running a business with is getting one started. In my experience, the bigger challenge is to keeping a positive outlook and maintaining the passion despite the responsibilities and the ups and downs associated with running the business. I am very fortunate to have many great clients who are constant reminders that I am still having fun doing what I am doing

Now what? Check out the Mingle web page. Read other Friday Entrepreneurs, sign up for my newsletter, and submit yourself as a Friday Entrepreneur.

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Friday Entrepreneurs: Courtney Kingston, Kingston Family Vineyards

March 16 14 Comments latest by Enrique

Here’s a fun interview I did with Courtney Kingston, who runs a vineyard (not your typical web business). She went from being in a senior position at an Internet company to starting this vineyard. “The hardest thing about pursuing a dream is that it isn’t convenient,” she said, which strikes me as enormously perceptive. How many times have you heard someone saying, “I’m just waiting for the right idea” or “I’ll start my own thing when I save up $50,000″? As I’ve written before, it never gets easier than now.

Courtney also told me that people might read this and think, “Well, I don’t have a family vineyard in Chile or an MBA from Stanford or a…” You’re right, you don’t. So what? I wrote about this in Success and the Shrug Effect, where I noted that we often point to someone successful, identify their qualities that we don’t share (”A Stanford MBA”), and then shrug, saying, “What can I do?” That’s BS–don’t fall for it. Everyone starts, whether it’s a paper route at age 12 or a vineyard at age…something more than 12.

My favorite part of this interview is when she identifies a huge problem that you’ll encounter when you’re doing your own thing: the fact that you have a million things to do with no structure whatsoever. Her solution? Sticky notes. Read on to find out what I mean.

What is Kingston Family Vineyards?
Kingston Family Vineyards is my family’s winery based in Chile’s Casablanca Valley. We specialize in hand-crafted Pinot Noir, Syrah and Sauvignon Blanc made from our hillside vineyards. All our wines are produced and bottled in Chile, and then I import them and distribute from my California office.

Ok, honestly. How often are you drunk?
Actually, I taste and enjoy a lot of wine (sometimes before 9am if I have an early tasting appointment with a restaurant) but sometimes the job is less ‘intoxicating’ than you’d imagine. If you think about it, you can’t learn very much about wine if you’re not sober enough to remember what it tasted like.

How did you get started running a vineyard?
My family always had this ranch in Chile. My dad was born there. But when I graduated from college in the early 1990’s, it was mostly dairy and beef cattle (and some great mountain biking trails up in the hills). The idea of starting a vineyard was my brother Tim’s and my idea. Back then I was working in high tech in the Bay Area. I liked my job and worked long hours, and gave it everything I had.

Plus it was good for my lifestyle—I was single, loved living in San Francisco, everyone I worked with was my age with similar interests. But as I moved up in the company, my job became a lot of directing/managing/helping others get their job done. I became somewhat like a well-paid traffic cop, but I no longer felt I was doing anything tangible myself. I also started to burn out from the long hours. When I turned 30, I decided I needed a lifestyle change where I could enjoy a more balanced life. That’s when I took the plunge and started working full-time on developing our wine business. And coincidentally I met my husband Andy just six months later.

How did you take that step of going from a safe job to doing something so unusual?
It was a tough transition. One of the biggest challenges for me was going from a job that was reactive (e.g. a highly scheduled day managing other people) to starting a business with a blank slate every morning. Every day, there were a thousand things that seemed urgent that I needed to do to get things going. It was a little paralyzing and I didn’t know where to start. My friend Rob gave me a great piece of advice: decide what *one thing* is critical to your concept’s success. Write “ONE” on a little yellow stickie, and stick it on your computer monitor as a daily reminder to accomplish one thing–no matter how small—that will get you one step closer to that goal each and every day.

For Kingston Vineyards, our biggest challenge in the beginning was finding a talented pinot noir winemaker who wanted to explore the new frontier of making pinot in coastal Chile. My “network” in Napa consisted of only two people when I started. And they weren’t even winemakers! But with that little yellow stickie reminder, every day I sifted through the thousands of urgent-but-not-important distractions to get one step closer to our goal of finding a winemaker.

What was some of the feedback you heard when you left your job?
On the surface, my work colleagues were encouraging, but I think they really thought I was nuts and believed they’d be interviewing me for an internet job within a year. While wine definitely has sex appeal, I was not pursuing a pre-IPO opportunity like everyone else was at the time. I left a job with 60 people on my team to go work by myself out of my San Francisco apartment. I cut my salary by more than half. I went from a known quantity—doing something I knew I was good at but that no longer challenged me—to something I wasn’t completely sure was going to work out.

I think most people thought I was taking a “break” rather than starting a real business. The hardest thing about pursuing a dream is that it isn’t convenient. Sometimes it’s more convenient to have your dream sitting on a shelf, neatly wrapped in a pretty package for you to look at from a distance., and always wonder “what if”. At least I could say I tried. I remember a professor of mine once saying “when you come to a crossroads, whatever you do, just don’t stop. Go right, go left, go straight. Whatever way you go…go forward.”

What are some of the interesting insights you’ve learned about doing business as a woman?
I can’t say doing business as a woman is harder, since I’ve never known anything else. I’ve had some challenges as a woman doing business in Chile, where the business culture is very male-dominated. Also, earlier in my high tech career, my straightforward/to-the-point approach was typical and expected. I was all about white boards and bullet points and optimizing the use of everyone’s time. And I was used to leading. Then there I was: a “gringa” in rural Casablanca where business is done differently. It took me a while to adapt and learn how to be effective in a completely different work environment.

How is Kingston Vineyards doing now?
I’m about to fly to Chile for our fifth vintage, which is hard to believe. Our wines are now on the wine list in some great restaurants across the U.S., such as Michael Mina and the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco; Masa, Jean Georges and Restaurant Daniel in New York; Spago in Los Angeles and the Four Seasons in Jackson Hole. A third of our wine sales come from our mailing list—where customers can buy direct and we ship to their homes. We’ve been fortunate to have a reputation for top quality wines with limited production, so the demand for our wines far outstrips supply. Wine Spectator recently said the Kingston Family Vineyards is leading the way, bringing excitement to Chile.

Oh—and since you live in San Francisco—I’m especially proud of the fact that our “Cariblanco” Sauvignon Blanc is by the glass at Hog Island Oyster Co. in the Ferry Plaza. Byron, our winemaker, loves to sit at the counter with his wife Mary for some fresh seafood after landing in SFO from Chile.

That’s right by my house. So…you know how it’s kind of impressive if you have a signed copy of a book? Well, what if I bought a bottle and got it signed by you? Is that absurd?
People actually do that…but no one has ever asked me. Maybe that’s when I’ll know I’ve really made it big…

What do you do on a day-to-day basis at the vineyard?
I ‘m actually based in the Bay Area, a long way from our vineyard in Casablanca. I used to fly down every other month, but since my daughter Annie was born last year, I now go about half as much. (We’re headed to Chile next week for Annie’s third trip.) My day-to-day job involves everything on the importing, sales & marketing side of the business. That means deciding the design of our wine labels , how much more pinot noir we should make in 2008, or how to adapt the financial model that forecasts when we’ll break even. But I don’t do it alone and we now have a small but mighty team based up here in the U.S. and flying back & forth to Chile.

Tell me a little bit about yourself.
I was born in Princeton, New Jersey; nowhere near as glamorous sounding as Casablanca, Chile. I also went to Princeton for college, and studied international affairs & public policy. I was convinced I was going to move to Washington, DC and “make policy,” until I realized I’d probably have to be a politician and run for office to do that. I moved to Northern California in 1992 for a “year off” before getting a real job on the East Coast but have been here ever since. Along the way I got my MBA from Stanford. That was enormously helpful in giving me the tools to help me start my own business. My husband Andy and I live in Portola Valley with our daughter Annie and our loveable 90-pound, oaf of a dog, Harley.

You’ve worked in big companies, small companies, and now you’re doing your own company. Can you tell me about some of the core differences?
I think the great thing about working in big companies is that you can specialize. You often only need to focus on your piece of the pie, and you are often supported with more infrastructure. I miss the free office supplies (all the yellow stickies I could ever dream of!) and Friday afternoon happy hours. And I especially miss being able to call IT support without getting an invoice!

But the bad news with a large company culture can sometimes be lack of ownership, and a pass-the-buck mentality. In a small company, you really have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and the buck stops with you. There’s no IT support. No free pens. But you can build something you’re proud of, and the diversity of your day is amazing. I love the fact that today I poured wine at a favorite restaurant, worked with a consultant in Chile to develop winery tours (you should come for a visit!), updated our distributors on recent excitingreviews from Wine Spectator and Wine & Spirits magazines, and got to give an interview to teach others how to get rich! (Can we talk again when the winery actually breaks even?)

Do you think everybody should do their own business once?
Not necessarily. Not everyone’s dream is to start their own business. I think everybody should figure out a way to follow a dream. Go right, go left, go straight. Just make sure you go forward.

Now what? Check out the Kingston Family Vineyards. Read other Friday Entrepreneurs, sign up for my newsletter, and submit yourself as a Friday Entrepreneur.

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Friday Entrepreneurs: Aaron Foss, WingDipper

February 20 28 Comments latest by Aaron

(I know, it’s Tuesday, but I was out of town over the weekend. Now back to Friday Entrepreneurs.)

Some of you imagine me as a knight in shining personal-finance armor, riding around on a white horse with golden hooves, correcting financial injustice and pointing out hypocrisy and inaccuracy in an unfair world. But sometimes I deign to do normal activities, like a couple weekends ago.

I’ve written about my love of Taco Bell, pens, and ironing on this site. But on Super Bowl Sunday, I went on a buffalo wing crawl, proving once and for all that (1) I hate sports and (2) I will out-eat anyone in a spicy-food eating contest. Also, I may not have that much class.

Have you ever heard of a pub crawl? It was like that, only with buffalo wings. My friend and I love them so much that we have been systematically trying out buffalo wings from all over the Bay Area. On Sunday, we went to 5 different places, ate their wings, and photographed and analyzed them. I honestly have no idea what this has to do with personal finance or entrepreneurship, but I want to show you some of the absurd things we discovered. Oh yeah, and today’s Friday Entrepreneur is a buffalo-wing nut connoisseur.

Beautiful presentation (note the classy mimosas + wings) and great texture, but BBQ sauce is not spicy or good:

Don’t ever try to pass anorexic chickens off as wings to me:

A little better, but nothing great:

Unsatisfied after these wings:

The funny thing was that everyone was watching the Super Bowl, and we were the only two people in there with our heads down who kept getting up and leaving in the middle of the game to go to the next place. I will continue updating you with my quest to find the perfect buffalo wing.

* * *
Anyway, today’s Friday Entrepreneur is Aaron Foss, inventor of the WingDipper.

As you read, note a few things in the interview:

• I LOVE his unorthodox marketing strategies. He hired chickens to protest his product! Who else would have done that? Being a small player calls for being different, not the same.
• He actually built a physical product, which is different than most of the other Friday Entrepreneurs I’ve featured. Check out how he did it (and his profit margins).
• This product hasn’t succeeded yet, but the idea alone challenges the “why would people need that–they could just use a bowl?” mindset. This product isn’t something you need, it’s something you want. Below, I ask Aaron about other industries where the products are “good enough” and then someone comes out with a product people really want.
• Finally, the reason I love this interview so much is that he took a weird/obscure passion and did something with it. How many people take what they really love and try to do something entrepreneurial with it?

You’re one of the first Friday Entrepreneurs to have a real-life physical product. What is The WingDipper?
It’s the perfect cup for dipping Buffalo wings. Have you ever tried to get dressing on your Buffalo wings? It’s impossible because they just don’t fit in a round cup. The WingDipper’s unique shape is designed to get dressing only on the part of the wing that you eat. There’s a round section for the drumette and a long section for dipping the flat. A picture is probably the best way to show how it works.

See? You dip the drumstick in the middle of the cup, then the flat part of the wing lengthwise.

Are you a huge weirdo?
Well, I guess I’ve always moved to the beat of my own drummer. Maybe it’s because I’m an only child. I’ve never really let other people stop me. I find that when you get to the outer edges, you find people with genuine passion for whatever they do. I think that’s where I am.

Once you realized this massive hole in the market, what did you do?
As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. I was eating wings at a bar here on Long Island and I just snapped. Of all of the problems that are in the world, I said, “I can’t get any #$% dressing on my $#%$# chicken wings.” In a split second, my brain had the following thought process:

Q: Why can’t you get dressing on the wing?
A: The cup is a bad design - round is the wrong shape.
Q: How would you fix it?
A: You need 2 shapes to dip the different parts of the chicken wing.
Q: But 2 cups? That’s silly.
A: Right, so here’s where they intersect.

Boom. The WingDipper design popped into my head and I could, literally, picture it on the bar. Like Doc Brown in Back to the Future, I guess.

I laughed and pushed it to the back of my mind. But Monday morning I couldn’t shake it. Luckily I have a friend who’s a patent attorney. I called her up and said, “I’ll tell you my idea but you can’t laugh.” When she stopped laughing she said, “Actually, that is a very patentable idea.”

That same day I registered WingDipper.com and sent over a draft of my idea to my childhood friend and business partner, Mark. We’re kind of like sounding boards for all of our ideas. I think this is really important in business and in life. You need somebody who isn’t afraid to tell you that your ideas stink. Surprisingly, he was totally into the idea. He said it seems like one of those things that if it hit, might be big.

I filed the papers for the patent but I didn’t really have a plan after that.

I think a lot of people imagine they could build something like this, but how did you get attention for your product?
A few days later, I saw a blog posting talking about a new show called ’American Inventor.’ I figured it might help get some free publicity for the WingDipper. I looked at the coverage of the other auditions and noticed that no one was doing anything different or fun. You saw a whole bunch of people waiting patiently in line. It seems that everyone forgot that they had to make good TV.

So, I called Mark and we started to brainstorm some ideas. I came up with the following idea: I would play a Matthew Lesko-esque character being followed around by protesting chickens. The idea was that the chickens knew if the WingDipper was chosen for the show, people would be eating chicken like there was no tomorrow.

Both Mark and his sister Lindsay agreed to dress up. I went and got two chicken costumes and started to decorate a lab coat with pictures of chicken wings, carrots and celery. As I’m ironing them on, I’m really starting to question my own sanity. Thinking about it now, any really good marketing campaign is a mix of uncertainty, bravery and stupidity. If you’re not nervous it won’t work, you’re probably not taking enough risk.

The New York audition went great and a few weeks later I got a call that I had made it to the semi-finals in LA. My first reaction was, “What about my chickens?” They said, “Yeah! Bring the chickens!” So off we went to LA.

The four judges were really supportive. Ultimately, they said it wasn’t right for the show (they were looking for something that could be sold at Target or Wal-Mart) but that I should make some contacts and do it on my own.

That seemed like a good advice. When I got back from LA, I did some research and decided to exhibit at the National Restaurant Show in Chicago in May. This is the major tradeshow in the foodservice industry. I figured I had about 8-10 weeks to get everything ready. How tough could it be to get some prototypes made?

Now, you have to realize that I knew nothing about plastic manufacturing. Nothing about the restaurant industry. This was all new to me. I wanted 5,000 cups, at most. Most manufacturers didn’t want to talk to you unless you wanted 5,000,000 cups made. After Googling a few places I found a company in California that would do a small initial run.

Next up, I have to put together a trade show booth. First thing I did - brainstormed with Mark. Like all good ideas, this one started with a joke. I was looking at how much stuff costs from the trade show company. 100 sq ft of carpet cost over $300. I said, “For that price, we can get wood floors.” Then the idea hit - let’s make the booth look like a wing joint - wood floors, a bar table, crazy chicken crap on the walls. Like American Inventor, I wanted something that would stand out in the sea of boring
booths.

And stand out it did. At the show, the booth was mobbed. 4 days of non-stop excitement. All the restaurants that we spoke to wanted to buy it as soon as possible. Everything was going great and I figured it would be smooth sailing from here out.

What were the roadblocks you faced?
Roadblock 1- At the show, I learned that take-out wings are a big part of the industry. In order to do this, they need lids. I found out that the company that made the prototypes didn’t have the expertise to engineer a lid and the volume I needed was too much for them to handle.

Well, now I was back at square one. More Googling. As luck would have it, there was a plastic manufacturer a few miles away from me. He put me in touch with a designer and we were able to design an improved cup and lid as
well as a reusable version.

Roadblock 2 - I still have a day job. I still have day-to-day clients that have projects to complete. Making time for 2 full time businesses gets challenging sometimes. This on top of having some sort of personal life is a very delicate balance that I don’t always succeed at.

What happens now? What’s your marketing strategy?
The official launch is March 4, 2007 at the New York Restaurant Show in New York City. Then it’s off to Chicago again in May. In the meantime, I’ve been getting WingDippers into as many hands as possible. To steal a line from Seth Godin, I’m trying to unleash this ideavirus in the wild.

If you had to do it over again, what would you do differently?
I looked at the Chicago show as though it was the introduction of the product. I should have looked at it more as market research. I was telling people that they would be available by the end of the summer. I was making promises based on guesses. In reality, it took 6 more months until I was able to get them out the door. I think that made me look more like a crazy inventor and less like a real business. I should have told them that I would let them know when I went into full production. I wouldn’t have talked to them again before I was able to deliver product.

What is your favorite type of wings? Why?
I go old school - The Anchor Bar wings in Buffalo. They invented the Buffalo wing so I have to give them respect. If you’re ever up in that area, stop in - it’s well worth it. They sell their sauce in bottles too and it’s just about as good.

What was the biggest surprise in doing this?
I thought it was going to be easy. I figured that everyone would see the WingDipper and be throwing money at me. I really thought that the idea alone would be enough. What I realized is that even if you have a great idea - you need to spend a lot of time getting the word out.

Also, I was amazed at how willing people were to share their knowledge with me. At the show, I didn’t hide the fact that I was new to the industry and that I didn’t have any experience. People with 20 or 30 years experience just shared a massive amount of knowledge with me.

From your experience, can you tell us 3 myths of creating a physical product?
1 - You can’t do it on your own
You can. There are lots of places that will work with you to design, manufacture and distribute your product. With outsourcing, it’s pretty easy to run a business from your desk.

2 - It’s easier to sell a physical product than attract people to your site. The grass is always greener on the other side. It’s just as tough to get people to buy your product as it is to get them to come to your site.

3- You can’t make money on small profits
We’re talking about a small piece of plastic that sells for pennies. I have to keep costs down and compute margins on tenths of a cent. For me, this is a game of inches.

Why build the Wing Dipper? Aren’t bowls good enough?
I guess this comes from my programming/design background. When I program, I make sure I do it right the first time. If I don’t do it right, I’ll pay for it later. Good design is valuable in more ways than you can see initially.

That being said, it’s equally important to look at the business side of things. Buffalo wings have this fanatical following. Bars and restaurants pride themselves on their wings. Entire chains have been formed that serve only wings. People have wing nights with their friends.

Putting this product together with those kinds of these people was the real important part. If I designed a cup for dipping asparagus, I don’t think it ever would have gotten out of the initial idea stage.

Can you think of other product examples where everyone says the state of the art was “good enough” and then something better came along?
The best example I can think of is Aeron Chairs from Herman Miller. Before these came out, people thought a chair was a chair. If you’re an executive, you spend a lot of time in your chair. You need to be comfortable. You become fanatical about your comfort and productivity. So, yes, a kitchen chair is good enough to sit in. But there is a segment of the population that will pay a premium for the best.

Same thing with Starbucks. They turned a .50 cent commodity into a $4.00 premium beverage. As you have said before, it’s all about executing on ideas. It’s not about waiting for the big idea. It doesn’t have to be earth shattering to have an impact.

Do people think you’re nuts for your wing obsession?
I’ve found that people respect other people that have passion for what they do and are confident in their ideas. When I tell people about the WingDipper, I see that skeptical look on their face. But then they see how it works - they try it out - and I can tell when they ‘get it.’ That’s when I feel really good.

Can my readers get a sample of The WingDipper?
Here’s a special offer for your readers. Go to http://www.wingdipper.com/purchasefnf.php and you can get a special Party Pack. It’s 12 disposable and 2 reusable WingDippers for $12. That includes shipping. And, if you haven’t signed up for Google checkout yet, they’ll give you a $10 off coupon so it’ll cost you $2 bucks to try it out.

Now what? Check out the WingDipper web site. Read other Friday Entrepreneurs, sign up for my newsletter, and submit yourself as a Friday Entrepreneur.

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