When I was a freshman in college I came back home for the summer and my dad and I started a business selling chia pets. We made them in our garage and shipped them to stores around California. Actually, they weren’t Chia pets (because that’s someone else’s trademark) so we called them Green Heads, but they were essentially Chia Pets. We bought pantyhose from Target, filled them with saw dust from a lumber mill close by and grass seeds from Home Depot and then sold them to gift shops. It was fun and it made us a few hundred bucks. I also learned a lot about retail and manufacturing.
My senior year in college I started a comic book shop with a couple of friends. Actually, to give credit where credit is due, my friends did most of the work since they weren’t actually in college but I helped with everything from manual labor to business relations. It was pretty rough but doable with a minimum of resources and a lot of hard work. The store did well and you can still find Alternate Realities in the Lincoln Mall in Rhode Island (thank you Sue and Howie so very much for the wonderful experience). Again, it was a learning experience for me and I came out of it with a healthy respect for the power of accounting and inventory management. [Read more...]
