Company

Aubry Walch was 14 when she ate meat for the last time. While bagging groceries at her part-time job that day, she thought hard about what she was actually eating. She promptly called her mom on her break to make the announcement: She was going vegan. Her lifestyle choice would, years later, become the foundation for a successful family business—a meatless "butcher shop" run by Aubry and her brother Kale. Learn how this sibling duo is attracting Minneapolis vegans and carnivores alike, one slice of plant-based Havarti at a time.

In this series, we speak with people who know what desperate feels like—people who survived the lowest financial point of their business. While now blooming with success, these founders share their deeply personal struggles and lessons learned on their way back to black.

While in treatment for cancer and working a full-time job, Dana Donofree started AnaOno, an intimates brand that supports post-op bodies. That brand is now Dana’s lifeblood, and her bras ship to women around the world. But getting here wasn’t easy. When AnaOno graduated from a side hustle to Dana’s sole source of income, the cash flow stopped. And she was still paying expensive medical bills. This is one founder’s story of financial struggle.

While at university, Roz Campbell was listening to a presentation by the founder of One Girl, a group that provides scholarships for girls in Uganda and Sierra Leone. A major problem, the speaker explained, was that girls were missing school for a week every month—because of their periods. Without access to proper hygiene products, they were forced to stay home.

The talk had a profound impact on the industrial design student. She set out to create a better product for periods, and, in turn, use it as a vehicle for change. This is the story of how she used her privilege to help others.

When Jeff Campagna and Tania LaCaria returned to their hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, after a decade of world travel, they applied lessons from their experiences to help them build a hyper-local retail motorcycle shop and café. Steeltown Garage Co. is named for the city’s rich steel-working history—it’s a business rooted both physically and conceptually in the city of Hamilton.

A day before her 28th birthday, Dana Donofree was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was in the throes of wedding planning, and, at a time when she should have been meeting with florists and caterers, she was meeting instead with doctors.

Through Dana's own experiences, she identified a glaring hole in the market: sexy intimates for breast cancer survivors. “Cancer took away my breasts, but it wasn’t going to take away my feeling sexy or good about myself,” she says. With few options on the market, she decided to create her own. And, in the spring of 2014, she launched online intimates brand AnaOno. Meet Dana and other founders catering to cancer survivors under 40—a community with unique needs.

Edwin Broni-Mensah’s life started his company GiveMeTap because he believes that everyone deserves access to clean water. A portion of the profits from the sales of his reusable bottles supports clean water projects in Africa. But GiveMeTap is not a charity. Edwin built his company on a simple philosophy: you don’t need to compromise your lifestyle for your cause.

That cause—clean water for everyone—wasn’t even on Edwin’s radar just 10 years ago. At the time, having just earned his first college degree, Edwin set a personal goal: six-pack abs. Little did he know at the time, the pursuit of his own body ideals would take him down a very different path.

Learn how the founder of All Things Real Estate scaled from a single product idea to a thriving in-person and online business with the help of some well-timed financing.

Games are more than just a pastime or even pieces of interactive art. They’re entire worlds that are built for us to visit, that are able to pull us back from time to time, that still cross our minds even as we go about our lives.

It’s these worlds that Snowman—a development studio based in Toronto— believes in building, and it's become the basis for many of the decisions they’ve made as both a business and as the developer of the award-winning indie game, Alto's Adventure.

That belief is also the reason they’re among the first in their industry to incorporate a merch store directly into their game with Shopify's Unity Buy SDK—a decision that resulted in them making 60% of their annual revenue from product sales in 30 days.

A 12-year-old pitches his business on Shark Tank. I’m watching it now on YouTube. At three times his age, hand plunged halfway into a bag of Cheetos, I realize: I am an underachiever.

Have you ever wished that you could break the space-time continuum and deliver wisdom from the future to your teenage self? What life lessons, learned the hard way, would you impart?

I’ve consulted some pretty bright young people to help me. These amazing kidpreneurs, both present and former, share their stories and advice for Generation Z.

Here’s what I wish I'd known 25 years ago.

When Sarah Hannington couldn’t find a company to custom print Valentine’s heart candies, she started her own business. Just a few years later, her 6-figure side gig, MyCustomCandy produces and ships personalized candy hearts to influencers, celebrities, businesses, and customers worldwide.

Customization is touching every product from lipstick to initial-stamped luggage. Even large, mass-produced brands like Nike and New Balance recognized and jumped on the trend towards unique experiences for their unique customers. 

Sarah didn’t plan to start a custom business. She was just one consumer who happened to stumble upon a missed opportunity, a gap in an industry expected to reach $31 billion USD by 2021.

Sarah shares the ups and downs of a custom seasonal business that scales beyond expectation year over year, and her secret to keeping her cool through every crisis. This is her story.