Makers Who Made It: 100 Stories of Starting a Business

2016

Dedication

To all the past, present, and future Makers we launch: thanks for your partnership and entrusting us to carry your precious story to the world.

To all Grommet supporters: a Maker story would be just the proverbial tree falling in the forest without your efforts to share it with your own friends and family. Every single comment, purchase, posting, and sharing matters to us and we see them all. Thank you.

Jules & Joanne

Table of Contents

Presidental Proclamation by President Barack Obama

Foreword by Mark Hatch

Introduction by Julia Kemp

The Making of The Grommet by Jules Pieri

2,000 Makers and Counting by Joanne Domeniconi

Meet The Grommet Team: Tori Tait

Tech

ChargeHub

KleverCase

Lumo Lift

miggo

Meet The Grommet Team: Katherine Klinger

Gadgets

Bedphones

Cord Buddy

eyn

COZY Touch Screen Gloves

Magwear

NEET Cable Keeper

Recoil Automatic Cord Winders

Zubits

Meet The Grommet Team: Kate McLeod

Tools

JunoJumper

Sugru

THEO POWER JUMP

Meet The Grommet Team: Ian Markowitz

Kitchen & Bar

Bee’s Wrap

BellaCopper

Bluapple Classic

Butter Mill

Cuppow

The Dipr

Fish Art / No Fuss Placemats

Food Huggers

Frego

GIR Ultimate Spatula

Livliga

Nomiku

Vestiges Kitchen Towels

Meet The Grommet Team: Jason McCarthy

Women

CHART Metalworks

Handbag Handcuff

Invisibelt

Isobel & Cleo

MagneButton

Picture Pendants

Zkano Socks

Meet The Grommet Team: Marcia Demirjian-Murphy

Travel

Bubi Bottle

GRAYL

The Travel Halo

Meet The Grommet Team: Alyssa Morley

Outdoor

1 Voice Bluetooth Beanie

IceMule Coolers

Matador Pocket Blanket

Meet The Grommet Team: Bobby McLaughlin

Fitness

FlipBelt

Ice Cold Towels

Transition Wrap

Turq Men’s and Boy’s Performance Sportbrief

Yoga by Numbers

Meet The Grommet Team: Meredith Doherty

Toys

Bilderhoos

Boneyard Pets

Build & Imagine

IKOS

PlayTape

Snappets

Meet The Grommet Team: Jon Conelias

Games

Colorku

Daytrader

Möbi

Meet The Grommet Team: Mimi Wong

Art, Decor & Stationery

Annie Howes Keepsakes

The Articulate Gallery

Design With Heart Greeting Cards

Guardian Bells

LovePop

Objects with Purpose

The Wallet Pen

Meet The Grommet Team: Lauren Joseph

Home & Garden

Adirondack Firelighter Kit

Annabelle Noel Designs

Natural Brew by Authentic Haven Brand

LOFTi

Yogibo

Meet The Grommet Team: Pam Crombie

Men

Vanguard Wallet

Hammer Riveted Wallet

Mission Belt

SCOTTeVEST

Meet The Grommet Team: Madaline Spinks

Pets

Litter One

Lilly Brush

NoClean Aquariums

Soggy Doggy Doormat

The Odin Dog Puzzle Toy

Meet The Grommet Team: Ryan DeChance

Beauty & Personal Care

Click n Curl

Dr. Fedorenko True Organic Bug Stick

Duke Cannon

Napa Soap

Pulleez Ponytail Accessories

Meet The Grommet Team: Natalie Jackvony

Baby & Kids

Constructive Eating’s Construction Utensils

HICKIES

MAX’IS Creations’ The Mug With A Hoop

SipSnap

Spuni’s First Latching Spoon

Meet The Grommet Team: Tim Renzi

Bed & Bath

BirdProject Soap

Hot Iron Holster & Lil’ Holster

Malpaca Pillows

Meet The Grommet Team: Michael Lovett

Cleaning

Alchemy

Gleener

iRoller

Toockies

Meet The Grommet Team: Al Brown

Food & Drink

Traditional Goat’s Milk Caramel Sauce

DIY Cheese Kits

Rumi Spice

Tonewood

Meet The Grommet Team: Charles McEnerney

Organization

ADK Packbasket and Market Basket

Everyday & Teacher Planners

Lay-n-Go

Five Tips to Get You Ready

The Grommet Team

Glossary

Further Reading & Resources

Presidental Proclamation

American ingenuity has always powered our Nation and fueled economic growth. Our country was built on the belief that with hard work and passion, progress is within our reach, and it is because of daring innovators and entrepreneurs who have taken risks and redefined what is possible that we have been able to realize this promise. Makers and builders and doers—of all ages and backgrounds—have pushed our country forward, developing creative solutions to important challenges and proving that ordinary Americans are capable of achieving the extraordinary when they have access to the resources they need. During National Week of Making, we celebrate the tinkerers and dreamers whose talent and drive have brought new ideas to life, and we recommit to cultivating the next generation of problem solvers.

My Administration is committed to spurring manufacturing, innovation, and entrepreneurship by expanding opportunities for more Americans to build products and bring them to market. Across the Federal Government, we are working to increase access to capital, makerspaces, and equipment to design, develop, and prototype ideas. By investing in regional manufacturing hubs, we are bringing together private industry, leading universities, and public agencies to develop cutting-edge technology and train workers in the skills they need for the next generation of innovation. To continue to build a Nation of makers, we are committed to engaging st udents at every level in the hands-on learning of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to inspire them to pursue their own passions and excel in STEM fields.

Last year, at the first-ever White House Maker Faire, I called on leaders around our Nation to join in sparking a grassroots renaissance in American making and manufacturing. Since then, more than 100 cities have stepped up, taking action to increase access to the tools and support that help today’s dreamers solve pressing local and global problems, launch their own businesses, and create vibrant communities. By making it easier for students to learn 21st-century design and fabrication skills and by broadening opportunities for making in communities across our country, we can unleash a new era of jobs and entrepreneurialism in manufacturing, transform industries, and usher the products of tomorrow to markets today. As the maker movement grows, I continue to call on all Americans to help unlock the potential of our Nation and ensure these opportunities reach all our young people, regardless of who they are or where they come from.

America’s path of experimentation, innovation, and discovery has been the hallmark of our progress. We are heirs to an extraordinary legacy of ingenuity—our country is home to pioneers who imagined a railroad connecting a continent, inventors who believed electricity could power our cities and towns, explorers who dared to leave our planet and travel farther than ever before, and innovators who brought us closer together through the Internet. This story is central to who we are as a people, and today, we have the opportunity to write the next great chapter. This week, let us renew our resolve to harness the potential of our time—the technology, opportunity, and talent of our people—and empower all of today’s thinkers, makers, and dreamers.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim June 12 through June 18, 2015, as National Week of Making. I call upon all Americans to observe this week with programs, ceremonies, and activities that encourage a new generation of makers and manufacturers to share their talents and hone their skills.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this eleventh day of June, in the year of our Lord two thousand fifteen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-ninth.

BARACK OBAMA, June 11, 2015

Foreword

Welcome to the revolution. The Maker Revolution. It is a social, economic, educational, and technical movement—and The Grommet is in the middle of it all.

Everything is changing. How you make, what you make, how you sell, promote, price, source, and consume is changing, is different, has changed. It is radically different.

What might happen if a local, small artisan had the same reach and influence of a Walmart or Apple? What might happen if your friends and family and their friends and family—and theirs to six or ten times out—could learn about you or the Makers you love?

And what if anyone could learn about the cool, sexy, fun, exciting, sustainable, reused, recycled, ethically-sourced product(s) that you or your network of friends found could be shared out six to 10 degrees of separation on Facebook or Pinterest?

What if the tools of production were democratized, the channels of distribution were democratized, the reach of media was democratized . . . how would that impact commerce?

Well, everything we thought we knew about the marketplace would be different—and IT IS.

Yes, everything has changed in the last decade. Access to markets (The Grommet), access to capital (Indiegogo, Kickstarter), and access to tools, production, and warehouses have changed.

Today is the best day to be a Maker and today is the best day to be a consumer/prosumer/co-sumer in all of human history.

I’ve known Jules and The Grommet for a few years now and I am convinced that she and The Grommet represent the future of product discovery. It is where Makers go to scale.

Mass-market retail is certainly not dead, but it is changing. After the great recession, people want to buy things that come with meaning and a story, from people they know, are coming to know, or want to know. They want things that are produced with methods that reflect their personal values and that are bought and merchandised by people and brands they trust.

This is how products are created, discovered, and shared now. Everything has changed.

Anyone with a good idea, a little capital, and the guts to stick it out can launch a Maker business. Some will hit it big, others will make a living, many will supplement their income. But all will receive a deep satisfaction of producing and delivering things they have embedded with pieces of their soul and they will deliver it to people who value the craftsmanship, the joy, the pain, and the love with which it was made.

It is the next Industrial Revolution or Maker Revolution or Creative Revolution. I don’t know what to call it, but it is a revolution and this book is going to inspire you to join it.

So, welcome to the revolution. It’s time to join. The only question is . . . what are you going to do in it?

Introduction

The odds are stacked against small consumer product companies, but that doesn’t mean they can’t thrive. The Grommet exists to help emergent founders rise to the challenge.

Jules is the brain of The Grommet—visionary, strategic, and undeterred. Joanne is the heart. No one can articulate The Grommet’s reason for being better than she can. Her tireless commitment to discovering and championing new inventions is the lifeblood of the product launch platform. They work in synch with one another, energizing the team, and directing the company as it blazes its own path.

I was part of the Discovery Team, which searches for new and undiscovered consumer products—and I now work with Idea Paint, a company The Grommet helped launch in 2009. I remember the exciting adventure of the weekly meetings, where we would consider a new crop of samples and discuss the utility of each prospective Grommet. We would bring these products into our lives and test them in real-world scenarios. Does the product fill a true need? Does the product live up to its promise? Does it perform well? Commercial readiness is also an important factor, so is the company ready for high-growth?

Most surprising was how many creators had no background in product development. It was inspiring to geek out with Makers who are also dentists, gardeners, teachers, etc.—determined to figure it all out. They saw a problem worth solving, devised a better way of doing things, and pivoted their lives to create meaningful solutions. Their passion and purpose passed through the phone as they shared their story, which fueled us to bring the products to life on video.

Products on the shelf can’t talk, yet the most innovative and unfamiliar products require their story be told. That’s the challenge and opportunity on which The Grommet thrives. Find innovative products. Amplify their story. Connect makers to consumers and retailers. Expose buyers to independent, small-scale companies. Level the playing field.

Consumer spending drives the American economy—we vote with our dollars. The Grommet gives people options. With more information, people can practice more conscious consumption. Choosing to support independent makers and their creative products brings authenticity and soul into our shopping and our lives. That’s Citizen Commerce® at its best.

Photo: David Culton

The Making of The Grommet

A Glimpse Forward

The year is 2035. The main streets of Cambridge and Ann Arbor and Alameda have an eerie familiarity. There are the pleasant sounds of tinkling glasses and laughter wafting out of coffee shops and restaurants. Food stores feature tempting arrays of lush produce abundantly stacked near the entrances. Attractive people exit warmly-lit hair and nail salons looking refreshed and relaxed.

But look closer.

There are empty dark storefronts dotted like missing teeth, where local businesses formerly stood . . . the shops that sold hardware, sporting goods, shoes, books, kitchen gear, luggage, clothing, toys, outdoor gear, stationery, electronics, and pet supplies. Out by the highway, large big box retailers and department stores are also shuttered: their massive edifices are slowly returning to the earth, colonized by pigeons in the broken windows and weed trees growing out of cracking tarmac.

Those stores, so last century, faded to irrelevance when the large online retailer known as The Everything Store made it much more convenient to get anything the people needed straight from their mobile phone.

A rapid innovator and fierce competitor, The Everything Store made buying goods more cost-effective by eliminating the dual expenses of Main Street rents and employing people to individually curate products, stock and dust shelves, build displays, do community outreach and marketing, and take care of customers. They also made it cheaper by overseeing the market offerings in every consumer product category and forcefully setting prices for manufacturers.

If a foreign knock-off of a successful product appeared, The Everything Store quickly displaced the original company’s offering. It was more important to offer everything and serve the busy consumer, who would never miss that product anyway as it slowly faded to oblivion with no store clerks to explain its virtues. Archaic Main Street Retailers, who supported those manufacturers because they had interdependent relationships, refused to carry cheap knock-offs. But that was just naïve and they deserved to fail. Had those Retailers been wiser, they would have been more focused and nimble—and would not have invested in frivolous things like testing products, funding holiday lighting on Main Street, and sponsoring irrelevancies like local concerts, Little Leagues, parades, or college scholarships. A Retailer’s job was simply to deliver things fast and cheap.

In 2035 Judy Jetson could finally push a button and have her every desire delivered by drone.

Let the government take care of Main Streets, summer employment for teenagers, and financial aid.

Or not.

What if The Everything Store just pushed its monopoly and its burn and churn policies so far that manufacturers could not earn a decent margin or pay their bills? What if these consumer product companies retrenched to only produce older items where their costs were recouped, no longer able to afford innovating and advancing their product lines? What if those companies were slowly killed by unsustainable margins and their only source of distribution, The Everything Store, promoting counterfeit copycats?

What if Judy Jetson’s job at one of those suppliers—a technology-driven consumer electronics company with an expensive research and development capability—dried up? And her company stopped paying taxes. What if Judy’s teenage son could not get a summer job, with so many kids competing to work in the few local businesses in their town? He wouldn’t be buying those expensive electronics anyway.

What if The Everything Store slowly rolled through every industry and every town, inadvertently destroying the lifeblood of its very own business—the healthy vendors paying their employees a living wage?

Or, what if Judy could have had a crystal ball today to preview this dystopian future?

What if today, or 20 years ago, she could have a look behind the scenes at a vibrant economy forming in her own back yard? An economy of small Makers and local Retailers who only need a progressive-minded community to care about them and help them grow? Judy is busy building a career and family, but she cares about the world she is creating for her three sons. If someone could just use that special glimpse to organize people to reverse the marching course of this dystopia.

I was, and I am, Judy.

The Birth of The Daily Grommet (Though I Didn’t Know it at the Time)

I saw this bleak world forming in a conference room in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. It was 1997. Meg Whitman, the then-President of Playskool, had brought me in to help reimagine the flagging, venerable brand and aging product line. Meg and I had done similar work at Keds and Stride Rite and I relished the chance to dig in again on a turnaround, alongside my mentor and friend.

The scene: kids were aging out of toys ever more rapidly—displaced by electronic options—and the competition of a fluid global economy was also taking a toll (i.e., cheap knockoffs as well as access to new exciting international toys in every market).

My tenure in that Playskool assignment was a brief two years, but in that time I saw our product line shrink by half. Even accounting for the headwinds to the business, the product line reduction was very dramatic and it puzzled me. Playskool had a world-class R&D capability, coupled with the serious marketing might and the backing of its large parent company, Hasbro. These factors should have better protected the company, by my reckoning.

But every time I asked about the disappearance of a promising concept or prototype, I was told one of four answers: Walmart [or Kmart, Toys R Us, Target] didn’t want it. My more experienced colleagues explained to me that in the toy industry, as with every other product category, new products had historically depended on specialty retailers to get shelf space and find early adopter customers. Those smaller chains and Main Street independents were superb at taking calculated risks on new items because that was where they got their competitive edge over larger competitors. As mass merchants were enjoying a couple of decades of growth, the independent Retailers were disappearing, and thus Playskool had nearly lost its whole farm league for new product launches.

This simple fact hit me like a ton of bricks. My reaction was very similar to the righteous outrage I felt welling up in me when my eighth grade Civics teacher spooled out the stats about the anemic representation of women in government leadership positions. I remember the air went out of the room as I, for the first time, faced the burden of my gender. But whereas I blamed someone else for the terrible underrepresentation of women, I had to look in the mirror in regards to these seismic shopping shifts. In my prior job at Keds, I had carefully studied the growing power of mass merchants for pressuring suppliers. I knew it was hurting Keds and yet I had barely bent my own shopping habits around supporting local Retailers. But the first time you hear something it can feel like a blip. Now, seeing the effects on a wholly separate industry, this trend felt like a tidal wave.

This dawning realization hit me harder because of the nature of our products as well. Whereas it was not a particularly high-minded cause to get Keds shoes on the feet of women and children (as much as I loved and respected the company), it seemed criminal to allow Retailers to decide which developmental needs and play patterns of babies and toddlers were important. Playskool’s designers, researchers, and engineers had become nearly irrelevant in the face of ever-growing mass merchants with their extremely limited shelf space for our toys. Even Toys R Us, with its specialty focus, was radically changing its product mix to match the competitive pressures and price wars of discount mass merchants.

I was . . . mad . . . discouraged . . . even fatalistic. On one hand, I had experienced the positive effects of the free market growing up in Detroit, when the pressures of sharp Japanese competition made the Big Three car companies wake up from their complacency. As painful as it was locally, this was the free market doing its work. Competition is healthy. The big get bigger . . . and Playskool would survive. I did not know it at the time but this was the beginning of an entirely new product direction in which Playskool heavily adopted licensing to create its product line. The company used its size to compete in securing promising (but risky) movie and TV character licenses to give its products a must have edge. They could draft off the massive marketing might of Hollywood. I distinctly remember the excitement in the halls when we secured the Teletubbies license (OK, I could see the relevance to babies) as well as the celebrations over signing NASCAR (huh?).

On the other hand, I worried about my colleagues and the inevitable decimation of our sincerely dedicated R&D talent. I was even more worried about the smaller toy companies I used as inspiration for my work at Playskool. They would not suddenly shift to paying royalties to Disney or Pixar to gain shelf space. These progressive brands created the toys I often used to teach and entertain my own small sons. As much as I valued Playskool, I did not want a world where inventors and entrepreneurs could not gain traction for their clever new games, developmental toys, and play sets. Or a home filled with licensed characters wrapped over everything my three boys used.

I did not see any evidence of a reversal for this increasing stranglehold on product distribution by fewer and fewer consolidated Retailer powers, but I had hope. A diversity of retail did remain in the 1990s. Malls, with their relative breadth of shops, had not yet keeled over. Online commerce was embryonic, but it represented the possibility of interesting, new distribution channels.

But then the malls started their real decline. One mass merchant after the other died, and retail accelerated its ugly race to the bottom, narrowing almost every competitive tool down to a single factor: lowering prices. Meanwhile, the predatory Everything Store was focused, well-funded by Wall Street, relentless, operationally excellent, and it started vacuuming up one industry after another in the face of this chaos. They (and those of us, including me, who bought from them) flattened the five independent bookstores in my picturesque New England town, and ultimately the camera shop, several gift shops, and the sporting goods store.

Exciting, worthy new products had fewer and fewer places to gain a healthy start. Retailers were fighting for their lives and stopped being merchants sourcing special products and instead became risk-averse historians and bankers, repeating the past and squeezing vendors to eke out a little profit and live another day.

It’s a fair argument to say uncompetitive or old-line Retailers deserved their fate. Some certainly did. One could speculate that having fewer but bigger, physical and online retailers might hurt our streetscape, but it’s awfully convenient for consumers to have the best choices at the lowest prices.

Here is the rub. A big retailer like Home Depot is so pressured on prices from Amazon and its few other big competitors that it makes 90% of its operating profit acting more like a banker than a merchant. It makes its money from the float it gets between the time it sells a product and the long delay it enjoys before it pays the product manufacturer, not on the product margin. Those precious months of delayed payment, alongside relentlessly discounted prices, put tremendous pressure on its suppliers—and only the very biggest brands can handle a Home Depot account.

And Home Depot—and Walmart and most retailers—are like choir boys compared to Amazon, which makes no sincere effort at partnering with manufacturers. Its algorithms automatically dial prices up and down (and down) to knock out competition. Retailers are never as diversified as Amazon, but it’s not the first time that a monopoly has threatened core values of our economy. You just have to play it out to the logical extension of its current ambitions, practices, and market dominance. Amazon controls market prices for every product it stocks, which covers virtually every industry.

So, what happens to all the little guys? What happens to even the bigger brands that can’t command sustainable prices because their retail partners are in a fight for their lives, using discounts as their competitive defense?

What happens is 2035, as described above.

I saw it at Playskool, to an extent. I saw it more vividly in 2007 when I started forming The Grommet. As an industrial designer and executive working in a range of technology and consumer products companies, I knew the importance of the 70% of our economy represented by consumer spending. Consumer products and services represent the majority of our GDP growth and the lifeblood of our economy. A healthy economy enables entrepreneurial renewal in enterprises that pay a living wage for honorable, dignified work.

The retail sector has always changed through time, from general stores to the Sears Roebuck catalog, nickel and dime stores like Woolworth’s to department store chains, but having choice was and is ultimately healthiest for the consumer. As in any industry, having too much power consolidated in the hands of too few companies ultimately gives us fewer choices, as they can then call the shots.

A vibrant society is one in which those same companies support positive values of sustainability, preserving handcraft, job creation, equal access to opportunity, inventing new technologies, and social and community enterprise. Small community builders like holiday parades and larger impact initiatives like funding higher education matter to those companies and they need to have access to a customer willing to pay a fair price for their goods and services.

The consolidation of retail and the acceleration of the Everything Store threaten this. That is why I started The Grommet.

It’s Time to Inspire

That is also why, seven years later, we’ve interviewed 100 of our Grommet Makers, and compiled some of our own team’s insights gained from launching and investing in the success of 2,000 Maker partners. It’s a kind of civic duty for our community to share their wisdom and experience with a wider audience. The Grommet has played a central role in what many call the Maker Movement—a movement that is truly capable of reversing the march of destructive forces as described above.

In case you are just learning about The Grommet, in brief, we are a mission-driven, for-profit company. We describe what we do as a product launch platform. The problem we solve is that, in the last 20 years, the progressive retail ladder facilitating the market entry of new products broke. The lower rungs are fewer and the top rungs are higher than ever. Because of that, some of the very best products and companies never last long enough for you to meet them. And even when these enterprises do manage to survive their early fragile months and years, it is a very expensive and inefficient endeavor for them to find the retailers who would love to sell their product. They spend a heartbreaking number of years struggling to find their market and cobble together enough capital so they can gain scale economies and become sustainable.

The Grommet’s community is largely early adopters and early majority consumers and supporters. They are people who are looking for innovative consumer products and products with a social purpose or mission. They know they could buy less innovative products at a local big box store, but they respect and admire the craftsmanship and thoughtfulness from the Makers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Our community would rather purchase well-made, quality products on the cutting-edge than buy another mass produced product that will likely fall apart or break long before its time.

We call what we do at The Grommet Citizen Commerce®, because we believe that one of the simplest yet most powerful acts we all take every day is voting with our hard-earned dollars. That act has become even more precious with the general flattening of earnings in the U.S. for the last 40 years. But at The Grommet, we take it many steps further than purchasing power in that we engage our thoughtful and curious community to submit potential Grommets. Our website and social outreach therefore gives everyone in our community a chance to directly influence which products we launch. And further, each person who watches a Grommet video, reads or shares a Grommet story, submits, comments on, or buys a Grommet, is shaping the core backbone and fabric of our company. And it is a company at the epicenter of what the Wired magazine founder and influential thinker/author Chris Anderson is calling the next industrial revolution.

While it never has been simple to create and launch a consumer product, we are now living at a time when developing consumer products has never been easier. Technology has enabled individuals and small businesses to take an idea and prototype, manufacture, market, and distribute products around the globe. This changes what consumer products are now available to the buying public; we are no longer limited to what products happen to be available at the local big box store or mall. The potential impact this can have on the world is limitless.

Design: The New Entrepreneurial Superpower

In my career as an industrial designer for technology companies, President of an education nonprofit, executive for several large consumer brands, and leader in three startups, I have learned that business is the most nimble, resourced, and powerful entity to shape the world. Although design will always be my first and enduring professional love, business is my craft. Business trumps government, nonprofits, and educational institutions as a vehicle capable of expressing our values and seeing the change we want and deserve. And we must change the awful trajectory of the decimation of small business, U.S. manufacturing, Main Street retail, and the right of workers in retail and manufacturing businesses to earn a living wage. For a couple of decades we’ve unknowingly given up our voice and power in the pursuit of convenience and cheap products.

I’m heartened that the latest positive trend in entrepreneurship is the founding of technology startups by other designers rather than technologists. Airbnb, Pinterest, Instagram, SlideShare, Mint, Behance, Lynda.com, and Vice Media were all founded by designers. Because designers begin all their work with a focus on the customer, we are used to asking, How can I help? We are used to working holistically, juggling competing constraints, commercial competition, and predicting the future. A blank screen does not scare us. We respond with confidence. We are trained to understand how the intersection of behaviors and technologies creates new product opportunities. It is a very short step to extend that ability and discipline to see white space and create new business models.

What Does The Grommet Do? And What Can We All Do?

The world needs a robust technology-enabled community to solve this problem of leveling the playing field for new products. It needs to be done by curating the sea of new goods and companies, to shine a spotlight on them, and to let that large community support the companies that represent and express the values we care about. For too long that decision was predetermined by a narrow set of retail buyers and today Amazon is steamrolling right over them, and us, in the name of its own dominance and profits.

The outcomes of the new products we, together, discover can be very much determined by The Grommet’s community, which comprises a substantial number of one in 50 American households as well as overseas supporters. We are known for having discovered and launched FitBit, IdeaPaint, Bananagrams, SodaStream, GoldieBlox, OtterBox, Sugru and 2,000 inspired products. 25% of what we launch comes out of crowdfunding communities. Some Grommets, like the aforementioned, are already household names. We promise every day you’ll discover a new item . . . you’ll discover what’s next. We call products that we launch Grommets. And every day we make sure they are worth your time and attention.

We are based in Somerville, Massachusetts where every weekday we launch a rich, inspiring, informative, or entertaining story about a Maker and their product you should know. But you simply can’t cover some of the more detailed experiential insights we’ve gleaned ourselves or from each Maker in a mere 90 seconds of video. This book does that. It’s assembled for any existing or aspiring entrepreneur, and especially those who take on the challenge of creating a consumer product business. It’s here for students of any age who want to understand what entrepreneurship really looks like, so they know they, too, can become an entrepreneur.

These stories brought me back to the very formation of The Grommet because we have shared so many similar experiences in building this company of 55 people. In fact, I am writing this introduction in the middle of a particularly challenging set of business and personal circumstances (life keeps on going on, no matter what happens in the office). Like usual, I renew myself in the comfort of family, through simple domestic activities (I just made a Miso Caramel Sauce, in fact) and through the centering of the company of good friends. Thus it was comforting and familiar to see more than 50% of our Makers say that their top source of support was either friends, family, or both.

The Road Can Be Brutal: Believe Me, We Know

I could also relate to the very blood, sweat, and tears shed that you will read about in every Maker’s story. At The Grommet we’ve shed plenty of those same bodily fluids. We launched at the very beginning of the financial crisis in the fall of 2008, just as the doors to capital slammed shut, thus beginning our four long years of surviving in the face of terrible headwinds. In addition to the economic crisis, we had another major problem: we were ahead of our time.

We are a happy, optimistic business that revolves around entrepreneurship and the continual improvement of the human condition. At that time of fear and chaos, investors were so scared and profoundly negative that they routinely told me we should be more like Groupon and just do deals. They truly believed that the future of commerce was just in overstocks. They feared we would run out of great new products and companies to launch. I quietly retorted (or forcefully, depending on my mood and rapport with the person), We are betting on the collision of human creativity and the new access to amazing technologies for creating physical products. It is an extremely good bet. We see it every day.

The process of carrying the company on a journey where death threatened us daily took its toll on all of us. We did the work of 40 people—with just 10 or so brave individuals—for four long years. At one point in the middle of this I was scheduled to undergo anesthesia for a minor medical procedure and I genuinely looked forward to being knocked out for an hour of true escape from the pressures of keeping The Grommet going.

In the next section of this book, you’ll hear from one of the most important persons by my side for all of this: my Co-founder and our Chief Discovery Officer, Joanne Domeniconi.

When I had the loosest of ideas for starting The Grommet, Joanne was my Phone a Friend first choice. Joanne and I met when I was hired into Keds and we worked on the same team, reporting to Meg Whitman. Joanne was senior to me as Vice President of Product Development, a position she had gained in the most old-fashioned of ways: earning it. As head of the most critical function of a $380 million brand, her work was pressured, global, and always highly visible. After all, in a fast moving and high volume business like sneakers, if you don’t have the right ideas, at the right time, at the right price and quality, then the rest of the Keds teams might as well stay home.

The Grommet’s Tall Order: A Brilliant Product, a Functional Business, and Meaningful, Sincere Values Behind it All

It is the same with Makers. A beautiful business built around a weak product is not sustainable. Thus, having seen Joanne’s work ethic, product savvy, and personal character, I knew I could trust her both as my partner and with the precious products and businesses of Makers. She doesn’t like it when I tell people she is relentlessly dissatisfied, but it is a compliment. She would never expose Keds customers to flawed product or to any deliberate corner cutting by her team—and she is the same at The Grommet. Her Discovery Team evaluates 300 potential Grommets a week and we only launch and direct our precious community’s attention (and devote our own precious resources) to 3% of the ideas we see each year. The testing and curation behind that outcome is prodigious and our central gift to the Maker, inventor, and entrepreneur economy.

Even though I have worked side by side with these companies in building The Grommet, seeing their stories concentrated so powerfully has even deepened my resolve to build a company and a community that understands its own power and its responsibility. Our vision is that within a few years the world will understand what this community is already doing: that a Grommet launch is both a cultural phenomenon and an economic one. It is a cultural event because Grommets represent the values we’ve learned people crave to support:

· Made in the USA

· Tech & Innovation

· Sustainable Living

· Handcrafted

· Independent Maker

· Social Enterprises

· Philanthropy

· Underrepresented Entrepreneurs

· Crowdfunded

It is an economic event because within an hour of launch we know what America thinks of any previously unknown product. The social shares, feedback on our live conversation with the Maker, and sales are like gold to these eager and worthy Makers. They learn what people really think—and they use that information to both advance their products and to present them to retailers who will then support them because a Grommet launch is instant credibility.

Trust: The Most Precious and Rare Asset

Every week I remind our team that we have worked hard to build trust with our community and it is a brick-by-brick process. It is slow to earn and all too easy to destroy. It is why we work the midnight hours and push quality as far as possible, even when no one is looking. This trust is what our Grommet Makers borrow to build awareness and interest in their businesses.

The layers of the process to launch a Grommet create the trust. Once we gather our typical 300+ ideas submissions a week, we kick into action with everything from a thorough discovery process, to vigorous testing, to the extensive discussions in our Thursday pre-launch production meetings. Once a Grommet is selected for launch, there is a great deal of heartfelt, idealistic, and serious thought and effort contributed by more than 20 of our Grommet team members over the course of several weeks. We cover how to position the product, how to write about it, how to photograph it, how to tell the story through video and then finally to launch it. You can’t help but take this work seriously when you know it will reach more than 2.7 million people every week. We aren’t just throwing things online and hoping for the best. We are endorsing the most worthy products and putting all our energies and reputation behind them. With so much information now vying for our attention, being launched as a Grommet means something to our community . . . they know it is worth their time and attention to take a look.

For our community, quickly discovering the story behind a company is a little like going to a factory floor, scientist’s lab, artist’s studio, or a farmer’s market. You can meet the people behind a product you are buying. You can assess your interest in supporting them and the values they represent for yourself.

Our community enjoys the chance to meet these Grommet Makers in the daily live discussion board we launch at the same time we launch with the product. They can ask Makers the questions you would ask if you met them in person. They give Makers feedback on product features, pricing, production methods, manufacturing and technical issues, and especially the values behind each product.

The 10% Maker Pledge

Whether you are an aspiring entrepreneur or Maker, or you simply enjoy learning their stories, you can directly have an impact on our economy. While much of our incomes are devoted to the essentials like housing, education, and transportation, I challenge each of us to allocate 10% of our precious budgets to supporting the companies whose values we embrace. Just imagine what we can do with this simple powerful act.

At The Grommet we Discover What’s Next. We do it for thoughtful people who want to Buy Differently. I hope you enjoy the many wonderful stories in this book. And whether you are an aspiring Maker or simply a consumer enjoying learning their stories, I urge you to realize that you can directly have an impact on our economy.

Next Stop: Inspiration

Behind each of these chapters and stories are the women, men, children, and families—people ranging in age from eight to 84—that are pioneers in the third industrial revolution. They have navigated obstacles and solved hundreds of problems in order to bring their products and companies to life. I hope these stories engage you, help you better understand the Maker Movement, and maybe even inspire you—or someone you love—to launch your own consumer product.

And for those who are ready, be sure to take a look at our Maker Movement infographic and a SlideShare presentation I put together that looks at Launching a Consumer Product in 1995 vs. 2015, that can help serve as your guide.

Keep in touch through Twitter and my blog. I welcome your comments and feedback about Makers Who Made It on The Grommet’s blog.

2,000 Makers and Counting

Learning the Retail Ropes

My story begins in Lynn, Massachusetts. As a young person I hesitated to talk much about the place where I grew up. Lynn is full of hardworking families who take pride in their city, but it is not a fancy place. Much of who I am as an entrepreneur and a person started in the pharmacy that my family owned and operated for over 40 years. I am the oldest of five children and the first woman in my family to go to college.

As a youngster, I worked in the pharmacy as a helper. I mainly dusted shelves. My father always praised me for doing it better than anyone else. I removed everything first, washed and shined the base shelving, dusted all the merchandise—and then I lined everything back up on the shelf carefully. I took pride in the way the merchandise displayed when there was order and hierarchy. Anyone looking down on me in those days might have been able to predict a future in retail merchandising.

The drug reps that were my father’s friends would bring green trash bags full of drug samples. I would sit on a stool and pop pills out of the small sample packs and then place them into the main dispensary bottles. This was probably illegal. But my father has passed away and his business is gone, so there can’t be any harm in telling the story. Here’s what stuck: at eight years old, I was learning the concept of COGS (cost of goods sold) on a very granular level. Free samples that became dispensable to customers at zero COGS bolstered profits. Our pill popping work was a high value initiative and even I understood that the profits in a small neighborhood pharmacy were slim.

I liked working on the soda fountain because I could make myself frappes and root beer floats. I also enjoyed an occasional spoonful of ice cream from the commercial tubs in the ice chest. I’ll never forget one day when a customer entered the front door and shot me a stern look. This customer proceeded to the other end of the pharmacy and reported to my father, George, your daughter is down there eating all the profits. And she’s dipping her spoon directly into the ice cream that your customers buy.

This was really bad. I was humiliated. I learned to respect and represent the business better and think of our customers first when I completed any task. I also learned to eat the ice cream in a cone—and out of sight.

I loved working alongside my father and watched him care for his customers in a way that totally imprinted on me. He was community-minded and generous, but most of all he cared about service, quality, and citizenship. As a hometown entrepreneur, he was always striving to operate the most progressive and most successful pharmacy in town. And he did, for a very long time. In the end, managed healthcare, drugstore chains (like CVS & Osco) and mail order pharmacies put most independent pharmacies out of business. We are not better for it. These nameless and faceless businesses are neither community-minded nor generous. Unfortunately, most neighborhood pharmacies are now shuttered.

From Simmons to Stride Rite

Simmons College was where I learned to think for myself and worked to broaden my perspectives beyond Lynn and the pharmacy. Simmons is a liberal arts college for women, located in Boston. Between classes I worked at Jordan Marsh, a department store downtown. It paid the bills and more. I learned that retail selling is a lot about understanding the merchandise and being able to help your customer relate to it. This is pretty basic, but listening carefully to my customers there on the selling floor, and knowing what I owned in the back room was an advantage. I was closing sales faster than the rest of the team, becoming the lead salesperson on the floor without really trying. Well, I guess I did try but mainly because it was commission-based and I needed the money.

I graduated from college in an economic slump and took a retail job at Stride Rite in their children’s shoe stores. It was low-paying and not what I had planned post-grad, but I had college loans to pay and Stride Rite ended up being a good choice for me. I got noticed quickly and held interesting positions of increasing responsibility focused in merchandising, retail buying, design, line building, product development, sourcing, manufacturing, engineering, and management leadership. I was not sophisticated or brilliant, but I was bright enough and I was hardworking. I applied myself fully to whatever I was working on and any opportunity that was presented. I became a force in whatever role I had, because I enjoyed pushing the envelope, I thought hard about how to improve things, and I was fearless about taking on challenges.

Meeting Jules

It was at the Stride Rite Corporation where I met Jules in 1993. She walked into my office for a memorable interview dressed head to toe in red—a dress, tights, and shoes. I didn’t know it then, but Jules was full of the probing questions that she is now famous for. I liked her. She was a bit geeky, although we didn’t use that word in those days. I realized pretty quickly that she was whip smart, unusually insightful, and had a probing curiosity that could sometimes make you a tad uncomfortable.

As she explained her goals for her next career move, I admired the clear thinking and the progressive ideas that are her trademark. There was solid reasoning behind every big idea she had for shaping herself and the company she would join. Little did I know then how much her big ideas would also shape me. I confessed that day that I was up to my eyeballs in a difficult role, with overseas travel, intense pressure on all sides, and a young child at home. Jules offered her thoughts on job sharing, changing the workplace for women, and designing the career and life you wanted. The job sharing idea never got off the ground, but we became colleagues and friends and worked on an amazing team together for a few years.

More than 10 years later I got a call from Jules. She said, I’m starting a business and you’re a very important part of it. I was listening. We are going to tell stories about cool products using the internet and videos. Listening. Social communities are forming, we are going to access them to create powerful word-of-mouth online. Listening. We’re going to help spread the news of emerging product concepts. Listening. Video is going to be central to this. Listening. We’re going to do the videos ourselves. Huh? Jules, I don’t do video. Jules said, We’ll postpone that conversation for another day, but I need you. Before I knew it, I was reinventing myself as an entrepreneur in the technology space—and appearing in videos.

I would say that our success together has a lot to do with the history we share and respect for each other’s unique and complementary skills. We know what each other is made of and recognize that neither of us could have built The Grommet alone. We come from similar backgrounds, born in the same year. We spent time, elbow to elbow, on a successful team under Meg Whitman almost 20 years ago. We share a brain when it comes to brand and how to build one. She sets the vision and goals. I lead the execution of the plan, finding the pathways and pushing initiatives and the team forward. I tell her when she’s out of her mind and she tells me when I need to look up and see the view from where she sits.

The Gatekeepers of Product Launches

At Keds, I spent a great deal of time thinking about and acting upon ideas that would extend and propel that sneaker business forward. I led Product Development, which included overseeing U.S.-based design and product management, taking our specifications overseas, and working with the factory engineering teams to prototype our designs.

Once the leadership team and sales adopted the designs, we would ready them for commercialization and production. Having an ongoing strategy for creating innovative new products is the most important work a business does. A culture of invention erases complacency and creates positive, lucrative change. Business innovation brings hope when there is trouble and it rallies believers and naysayers into action.

We were responsible for launching four product lines per year. I often likened it to getting a huge cargo plane off the ground. And I learned that successfully launching new product lines required nerves of steel, great skill at moving things forward, and delivering results in ever-changing sands with immovable deadlines.

With constant change you must train yourself to look up, read the signals, anticipate what’s going to happen next, and then install initiatives to address what you see. This is true for both opportunities and threats. As Makers, helping others see what you see and believe is crucial. Being great at articulating what you see and then selling your idea for change is hard. It’s hard for a reason. Seeing is believing and sometimes, as inventors, we are selling ideas—things that don’t yet exist.

We were successful at Keds, but sometimes the most brilliant new products that we created were rejected by management; it would piss me off. There were opposing forces everywhere: mitigating risk, maintaining the status quo, stalling, bandwidth issues, diluted focus, excuses, misunderstanding, resistance to change . . . there are always forces that exist to destroy opportunity. These forces squelch so much progress that someone should do a study on it some day.

Unfortunately, most retail buyers look backward for answers. And of all the gatekeepers, big Retailers were the most powerful. They could squash good products with one disinterested glance and, more often than not, they couldn’t wrap their heads around anything that wasn’t a sure bet.

My thesis was this: the more innovative a product, the less likely it is to succeed. Why? Because most people can’t imagine or relate to ideas that they don’t expect or they don’t understand. And there are so many gatekeepers blocking access for new products that it’s almost impossible to break through to retail and the end consumer. Here is a fact: 75% of new products fail and if you’re a