Entrepreneur's Startups Spring 2020

You’re really excited about your concept for a new product or service. But do you have a potential brand in the making? Unfortunately, it’s a question too many small-business owners ask far too late, or never ask at all—not a good idea in a world full of savvy consumers and big companies that have mastered the branding game. Great brands are all around us, and it’s no accident they make us think of certain things. Think FedEx, and you think of overnight delivery. Apple brings to mind cutting-edge computer products, must-have phones, music, and now TV and wearable devices. Even celebrities are brands. Would you describe Bradley Cooper the same way you would Jack Nicholson? Their differences—charming versus gruff, refined versus rough and rugged—helped define their particular acting “brands” and let the…

Baseball is a game of tradition, and Grayson Stadium is as traditional as they come. The Savannah venue was built in 1926, back when game-day radio broad-casts were a new thing. The Boston Red Sox held spring training here, leading Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, and Jackie Robinson to round its bases. For three decades, a local high school also took Grayson’s field for its annual Thanksgiving Day game against a military academy. And between 1984 and 2015, it was home to a minor league team called the Sand Gnats. This was all baseball in its classic form—orderly and staid, romanticized by purists. Now? Things are a little different. It’s the bottom of the second inning at Grayson Stadium on a muggy midsummer night this past August, and baseball is briefly on pause.…

What do you do for a second act, when your first act literally changed an industry? That was the question facing makeup powerhouse Bobbi Brown, whose simple line of lipsticks blossomed into the billion-dollar company Bobbi Brown Cosmetics. She left it in 2016 with no plans for what to do next; all she knew was that she was done with corporate life. (The company had been acquired decades earlier by Estée Lauder.) “It wasn’t freeing,” she says. “It was like, Oh, shit; now what?” But she’s since found an answer—expanding into new territories with a supplements line for Walmart (Evolution_18), an editorial site (justBOBBI), and a boutique hotel (The George), all of which launched in spring 2018. She also has a new podcast (Beyond the Beauty) and a film and photo…

Tariq Farid thought he had a lock on the word edible. For more than 20 years, his company, Edible Arrangements, was famous for its bouquets of fruit and platters of chocolate-dipped fruit, and customers had begun casually referring to the company as simply Edible. In 2013, Farid went all in—trademarking the name Edible by itself and dropping Arrangements. Then, in 2016, California passed Proposition 64, which legalized recreational marijuana. Farid read the text of the bill and was horrified: The word edibles was in there—familiar to any pot lover, and now enshrined into law to mean weed-laced food. We can’t let it happen, he recalls thinking. He tried to fight it—and as he did, he learned an important lesson: Sometimes the greatest threats are opportunities in disguise. This is an issue many…

No matter what type of financing source you approach—a bank, a venture capitalist, or your cousin Lenny—equity financing is the type that creates those $1 billion “unicorn” valuations for startups that have received so much hype these past few years. In equity financing, you receive capital in exchange for part ownership of the company. Equity financing can come from various sources, including venture capital firms and private investors. Whichever source you choose, there are some basics you should understand before you try to get equity capital. An investor’s “share in your company” comes in various forms. If your company is incorporated, the investor might bargain for shares of stock. Or an investor who wants to be involved in the management of the company could come in as a partner. Keeping control of…

Nobody really wanted to fund us,” recalls Alex Kubicek, a soft-spoken Midwesterner with a shrewd scientific mind. He’s thinking back to 2013. He was 25 and had already banked dual degrees in physics and electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, as well as a master’s in atmospheric science from top-tier UW–Madison. Then he’d created a hyperlocal weather observation company called Understory and landed it in the first-ever cohort of an accelerator in his hometown of Madison, which in turn sent him off on nearly a year’s worth of pitching to Wisconsin-based investors. But nobody put in money. Was his company the problem…or was it the stock of local investors? He decided it was the latter, and moved to Boston—where his fortunes changed. The local office of a hardware venture firm called…