Offline Niches
10 Pet Businesses to Start Today
The array of product and service businesses for pet owners is only limited by your imagination. Many people treat their pets like their children and, following that logic, most products that people want for themselves, they'll want for their pets. Just look at recent trends in the industry--organic foods, homeopathic products, luxury accessories--and you'll easily find they mirror counterparts for human folk.
For detailed description of these businesses, read
101 Home-Based Businesses for Pet Lovers or How to Start a Home-Based Pet Care Business
How To Make A Ton Of Money From Balsam
Wendy and her husband Jack moved from East Brunswick, New Jersey to Maine in 1979 with a dream of building their own home and have a simple, natural life. Wendy, then 24, even went back to college to study the newest methods of farming in anticipation of their new life because “that's what we thought we would do when we came up here.” Their hope was simply to lead a self-sufficient life. As she puts it, “we didn't want to become big farmers.” The reality, however, was not easy.
How To Build A Million Dollar Homebusiness
Tamara Carlisle left her successful career as an independent film and commercial producer to distribute videos for kids. She has found a niche distributing her own videos as well as those of other independent producers all over the United States. Success, however, did not come easy. Customers were slow to discover her wonderful videos. There even came a point that she had to call herself just to hear the phone ring.
Now, she ships a 44-page catalog featuring over 250 videos, software and audio products to a growing number of customers around the world. To complement her print catalog, she opened a web site in 1996. However, it was a dud. She did not know how to tap the Web for her business. Relaunching her site three years later, BigKidsVideo.com has become an important source of educational and fun videos for parents, libraries and schools.
How To Make Millions Destroying Something
Founded in 1986, Looney Bins, Incorporated is an award-winning, progressive, and rapidly growing construction and demolition (C&D) debris waste hauling and recycling company with locations in both the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County Recycling Market Development Zones.
Looney Bins found a market niche by contracting with local Hollywood movie studios to deconstruct movie lots containing wood, cardboard, metal, plastic, and other salvageable items; Looney Bins then sells and/or donates the recovered materials. Some of the uses promoted by Looney Bins have included providing wood to a company that makes reconstituted pallets; reusing Warner Bros. Studios' telephone poles for the Special Olympics; shipping reclaimed nails, screws, and other building materials to hospitals overseas; and helping a Southern California nursery reuse wood scrap for planter boxes.
How Unknown Designer Tricked Stars Into Taking Her Purses To Oscar
It was Friday afternoon, two days before the Oscars, and Lauren Merkin, a little-known New York handbag designer, waited inside her room at the swank Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel, hoping that the $31,000 she had invested in producing a collection of 65 one-of-a-kind "Red Carpet" bags for Hollywood's biggest evening was about to pay off.
Her dream: that a big-name star or her stylist would breeze through the hotel room and select a bag to carry for the Academy Awards. Bagging a celebrity endorsement is a marketing coup for any business, but a small shop like Ms. Merkin's can be catapulted to the major leagues if a star is photographed wearing the merchandise. In the frenzy of Oscar week, however, dozens of hopefuls -- from tiny shops to designers who are celebrities in their own right -- jostle each other for attention in hopes that a star will deign to wear one of their creations to one of the parties and events.
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Parking Lot Dentistry
LAS VEGAS — Samantha Taube stepped out of the MGM Grand into the bright sun to walk to the parking lot. After a short distance, she approached a trailer, entered, sat in a dentist’s chair and had her teeth cleaned.
“If you know Las Vegas traffic these days, you know what a benefit this is,” said Ms. Taube, who trains employees in the huge casino’s slot machine operations. After 20 minutes, she was back at work.
How Broken Arm Led To A $2 Million A Year Business
David Reynolds, a contractor by trade, had broken his arm while remodeling a bathroom in 1998. Keeping the cast dry proved to be very difficult, and when he tried looking around for a product to help, he was unable to find anything that was both effective and affordable. That's when the light bulb went on.
After doing a patent search for such a product and finding nothing, Reynolds, an inventor since childhood, designed a plastic covering with an adjustable fastening mechanism on one end to keep arm and leg casts dry. He enlisted the help of his longtime friend and fellow contractor, Marty Ceccarelli, to build Mar-Von LLC and the brand.
How One Doctor Sells $25 Million Worth Of Toothbrushes Every Year
Puneet Nanda was like many parents: He couldn't get his five-year-old daughter to brush her teeth properly. But unlike most parents, Nanda is a toothbrush manufacturer with an irrepressible entrepreneurial drive that his daughter was fascinated by her sneakers with flashing lights, he ripped the lights out of her shoes and put them on a toothbrush. That didn't work, so "I went to Disneyland that evening and bought everything that lit up," says Nanda, now 38. The second prototype was more successful. His daughter brushed for a good two minutes before asking: "Dad, will this ever stop, or should I brush my teeth off?"
How To Make $900,000 A Year, Selling Unicycles Online
Unicycling enthusiast John Drummond, a technical writer at IBM, decided it might be fun to sell a few cycles over the Internet. Seven months after unicycle.com debuted in 1999, Drummond, of Marietta, Ga., was so overwhelmed by demand that he enlisted the help of his wife, Amy.
The pair soon sped sales up from $150,000 in 1999 to $900,000 this year. No, there wasn't an inexplicable uptick in the clown population. They attribute their success to a straightforward Internet domain name.
