Tag: startup

That’s Jimmy Sansone (BSBA’10), in the photo above with his brother Lan. Jimmy is the founder of The Normal Brand and Lan helped him start the company. The brand is barely two-years old, but creating quite a buzz. As part of Olin’s holiday Shop-A-Thon, Jimmy is generously offering a 10% discount on orders for WashU alumni.

Use the code WASHU at checkout at https://thenormalbrand.com/

Sansone founded The Normal Brand in 2014 when he saw a need for a “normal” shirt, something he could wear from downtown St. Louis into the country after work. For Sansone, “normal” doesn’t mean mundane or average, but instead it means something personal and understandable: something you know and get.

The Garrett Weekend Bag

The brand has grown to include women’s clothing, hats, backpacks and even dog beds and leashes that all aim to “celebrate life in the middle.”

In 2015, The Normal Brand received an Arch Grant and, this year, Sansone was named one of the St. Louis Business Journal’s “30 Under 30.”

Although the fashion world typically operates on the coasts and trickles to the Midwest, Sansone is proud to be creating a standard that starts in the middle and trickles to the coasts.

Photos courtesy of The Normal Brand

When we asked Olin entrepreneurs to help us out with last minute holiday shopping, they responded with discounts and freebies like this one from Fresh Prints – the t-shirt company that got its start right here at WashU. Fresh Prints Co-President Jacob Goodman, BSBA’15, is generously offering free t-shirts and wants to hear from students interested in summer internships!

Fresh Prints Promotion: The first 15 WashU students that email jeremy@freshprints.com saying “gimme free stuff” with their size and shipping address get a free Bella + Canvas t-shirt sent to them.

Goodman

More good news from Fresh Prints’ Goodman, he says, “Fresh Prints had it’s largest year-over-year growth in company history in 2016. We’re now at over 100 Campus Managers nationwide, and we’re working towards being at all 2,500 four year universities around the country.

We’re hiring quickly, and so shoot me an email (jacob@freshprints.com) if you’re graduating and think you’re a good fit, or you want a summer internship!!”

Congratulations to the whole team at Fresh Prints and thank you for being part of the Olin Holiday Shop-a-thon!

Read more about Fresh Prints on WashU Fuse.

Recent Fresh Prints T-shirt creations:

Photos courtesy of Fresh Prints.

Janji founders Mike and Dave (BA’11), in the 2012 issue of Olin Business Magazine.

We remember Mike and Dave when they were on the WashU Bears Cross Country team and had an idea for a startup back in 2012.

Their business plan for Janji (Malaysian word for ‘promise’) was created in The Hatchery. The idea was to manufacture running apparel featuring emblems of developing countries with profits going to clean water projects in those countries.

The runners became social entrepreneurs with the motto “Run for Another.” 10% of each sale goes towards constructing, implementing, and maintaining clean water projects.

When in Boston, visit the new store,
328 Newbury Street
Boston, Massachusetts – 02115

Four years later, the e-tailers are branching out. Mike Burnstein (Urban Studies major/Entrepreuneur minor’12), writes, “2016 has been an exciting year at Janji– it saw the opening of our first flagship store in Boston. Most importantly, we raised over $50,000 towards clean water initiatives around the globe.”

And as part of our Olin Startup Shop-A-Thon, Janji is offering a generous discount to members of their alma mater community: use Janji Promotion Code: WASHU for 20% off at http://runjanji.com/

Here are some samples of Janji style:

When Chris Fetter graduated from Olin’s PMBA program in May of this year, he was already off and running with his startup called Unfettered Socks – performance socks for business professionals. The founder and CEO is offering a 25% discount to the Olin community during the holidays (see below for promo code).

Chris shared this company news via email:

“Unfettered launched two new sock styles in 2016. We are thrilled to announce that, through a collaboration with 4 Hands Brewery, we have donated just over 450 pairs of socks to St. Louis Homeless Shelters.

“Our business is beginning to blossom outside of St. Louis as more and more people are finding us online and sharing their stories of when they wear their Unfettered Socks.

We are now on generation 3.0 – the new sock design wicks away moisture and avoids erosion at the toes better than ever!

“Thank you so much to the Olin community for supporting us and sharing the Unfettered Story with your friends… Stay tuned for some awesome new styles this Spring!”

Use Promo Code “WASHUSOCKS” for 25% discount at https://unfetteredsocks.com/

Left to right: Tim Fetter (MBA’13), is CFO of Unfettered Socks, Sarah Haselkorn, (EN’13), is CTO, and Chris Fetter, CEO

Related blog post

Photos courtesy of Unfettered Socks

“The classes, professors, the student body and, I think, the skills that I learned have definitely translated to a lot of what I’m doing today,” says Chris Ferguson, BSBA’01. “It’s funny to see that those classes are applicable.”

Chris Ferguson

Ferguson, who studied marketing and finance at Olin, is founder of Bee’s Knees Food Co. launched in the summer of 2011 with a snack food line of spicy peanuts targeted to shake up the boring salty offerings at most bars.

Two years after the global financial crisis, Ferguson was looking for a change of pace. After a decade-long career in commercial real estate, he began considering a move to another industry.

“I used to cook with my dad when I was younger, and I really started enjoying the craft beer industry and food here in Chicago,” he says. “I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I just knew I liked that space.”

In 2010, Ferguson left his job as a vice president at Cohen Financial and traveled to New Zealand and Australia. While there, Ferguson was impressed with the pairings of beers and bar snacks, leading him to wonder why such high-quality bar snacks — such as flavored popcorn, snack mixes, chips and nuts — were not common in America.

When he returned to Chicago, Ferguson went into the kitchen to create the type of bar snack he felt was missing stateside. He started out tinkering with different possibilities, including popcorn, but flavored nuts gelled first.

“It took 20 to 30 different versions to get to where we are,” says Ferguson about his chipotle and lime peanuts. “That was our first flavor when I was working on recipes.” After getting the peanut recipe just right, Ferguson launched Bee’s Knees Food Company in 2011.

“I’ve always loved the expression, Bee’s Knees,” Ferguson says about the name. “It’s kind of retro and means ‘the best,’ but it’s absolutely nonsensical.”

Bee’s Knees specializes in gourmet nut mixes that pair well with craft beers (there are even pairing suggestions). Currently, the company offers five flavors; in addition to chipotle and lime, there are Mexican hot chocolate almonds, curry curry peanuts, Szechuan roasted peanuts and salted honey lemon cashews. Ferguson has created each one.

“I start by looking for flavors that I personally enjoy,” Ferguson says. For the popular chipotle and lime roasted peanuts, Ferguson “tried to capture this essence of being on the beach in Mexico, eating a taco and having a nice drink — a warm, spicy flavor with lime undertones,” he says.

The salted honey lemon cashew was born out of collaboration with a brewery from Michigan. At Chicago’s Craft Beer Week, Ferguson found that people loved the flavor.

In 2012, the company was nominated for a Chicago Innovation Award, and its products are carried at bars around Chicago, as well as at Whole Foods, Zingerman’s, and Dean & Deluca. Customers can also buy products online.

Bee’s Knees is not Ferguson’s first foray into creating a business. In 2005, he and a partner founded Madison-LaSalle Advisory Group, a commercial real estate company for small- to medium-sized businesses.

Ferguson has advice for entrepreneurs: “Expect challenges. Whatever your path is, there are going to be speed bumps. If you care about it, don’t give up and work through it. Use that WashU education to solve the problem,” he says. “Being an entrepreneur is more mental than anything else.”

Guest blogger: Cassie Hwang, The Source

The Problem: The nursing home market is facing unprecedented growth as the 76 million baby boomers across the United States start to enter retirement. Surprisingly, the majority of these facilities have not sufficiently modernized to meet the challenges brought on by this newfound demand. Specifically, over 50% of nursing homes still use a paper-based system to manage the care of their patients and store their health records. Meanwhile many of those who have switched to an electronic system are tied down by un-intuitive programs with bulky and expensive in-house servers run by companies whose customer service often parallels that of the heavily maligned cable industry.

A Solution: In 2012 BlueStrata EHR was founded as a cloud-based solution to this dire problem. BlueStrata’s digital SaaS (Software as a Service)-model system allows nursing homes to dump their paper systems and expensive servers. The platform enables homes to conveniently access their patient records, medication information, and reporting from anywhere and was built from the ground up with an easy to use interface for nurses and other home employees. Most significantly, BlueStrata is dedicated to delivering best-in-class customer service with on-site on-boarding and implementation, a 24/7 live client support desk, and an online suite of webinars and informational documentation.

The Consultants’ Challenge: Despite BlueStrata’s numerous benefits, marketing and sales dollars are limited. In order to determine how the firm can most efficiently utilize their resources to most effectively reach the largest amount of potential customers, the company has enrolled our help. We are a team of multidisciplinary graduate students from the CELect course at Washington University in St. Louis. CELect is a unique class where students perform consulting projects for start-ups in the St. Louis area as a method of experiential learning while also giving back to the community.

Our group – Robert Bailen, Rachael Lin, Michael Foland, and Tarun Sengar, are working directly with Tony Coco, BlueStrata’s president, to help advise on how to best leverage the benefits of their ERP (enterprise resource planning) platform in a targeted multi-media marketing campaign. Working alongside Mr. Coco and the BlueStrata team has been a great opportunity for us thus far. We have not only been able to witness first-hand how BlueStrata helps homes manage their workflow, but also how they save homes significant amounts of money through increased insurance reimbursements and reduction of human error.

BlueStrata is one of the recent success stories of St. Louis’ burgeoning entrepreneurship scene, which has been driven in large part due to Mr. Coco’s leadership. Mr. Coco was the former director of marketing services and brand management for Victor Technologies, a cutting and welding equipment provider. Victor Technologies was acquired in 2014 by the Maryland-based industrial firm Colfax Corp for $947 million. BlueStrata, meanwhile,  raised $1.66 million from the life science fund of St. Louis venture capital firm Cultivation Capital in August 2015. They’re continuing to grow at a rapid pace and just recently moved into new offices in Creve Coeur to house their increasing number of employees as they continue on their path to help nursing homes nationwide.

Team: Robert Bailen, MBA; Rachael Lin, PMBA; Michael Foland,Law; Tarun Sengar, MBA