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Articles that have been published in the New York Times.

 

Prototype column: Whose Idea Was It, Anyway?

Saturday, July 10th, 2010
Originally appeared in the New York Times, July 9, 2010

Whose Idea Was the Dry-Cleaning Bag Anyway?

By AMY WALLACE

LAST month’s Prototype column — about a company that makes reusable dry-cleaning bags — began: “Man or woman, every one of us has experienced the frustration that drove Rick Siegel to become an inventor.”

The day it appeared, with a picture of Mr. Siegel, his wife, Jennie Nigrosh, and their product, the Green Garmento, I heard from another Los Angeles inventor, Jane Wyler. She was plenty frustrated with Mr. Siegel.

It turns out that Ms. Wyler, whose company is called Reuseniks, met Mr. Siegel in 2008 when he and his wife approached her at a trade show. The couple told Ms. Wyler that they were blown away by her reusable dry-cleaning bag, the Clothesnik. After buying two, they asked to meet to discuss investing in her company.

Ultimately, Ms. Wyler opted not to team up with them, but not before Mr. Siegel sent an e-mail message to her and her business partner, Rich Leivenberg, in April 2008, titled “WE LIKE REUSENIKS.” “The reason we want to be so involved in your company,” the message said, was because of how easily the Clothesnik “could be replicated by potential competitors.”

If a more muscular competitor were to emerge, Mr. Siegel continued, it could “undermine your uniqueness and reap the available rewards.” Ask Ms. Wyler today, and she says that Mr. Siegel was absolutely right — and that he has been undermining and reaping ever since. “Can you believe this guy?” she asks. “He stole our idea.”

Au contraire, Mr. Siegel says. Click to continue »

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Prototype: Take Them to the Cleaners, Again and Again

Saturday, June 12th, 2010

Originally appeared in the New York Times 6/13/10

By Amy Wallace

MAN or woman, every one of us has experienced the frustration that drove Rick Siegel to become an inventor. He would be in his clothes closet, running late, wrestling with the plastic bags that encased — and the twist ties that entangled — his dry cleaning. Surely, he thought, those twist ties would drive him mad.

“He’d freak out,” said his wife, Jennie Nigrosh, recalling the typical harried morning. “Scream is a good word.”

Familiar, too, is the guilt that Ms. Nigrosh felt when she tried to intervene. Her husband is 6-foot-4, meaning that if the artist Christo did an installation using the plastic film around just six of Mr. Siegel’s suits, he could easily wrap your garage. Ms. Nigrosh’s father ran a cardboard recycling factory when she was growing up, so a trip to the closet made her stomach clench: Where did all this plastic go?

Suddenly Mr. Siegel, who was once a Hollywood talent manager, and his wife, a marketing copywriter in the music industry, had an idea: a reusable bag to transport your clothes to and from the dry cleaner. After an initial investment of about $200,000, the Green Garmento was born. Click to continue »

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Prototype: Putting Customers in Charge of Design

Saturday, May 15th, 2010

Originally appeared in the New York Times

By AMY WALLACE

THE idea was never to try to supplant retail, says Fan Bi, the 22-year-old chief executive of Blank Label. Sometimes you need a dress shirt right now, and at those times, Mr. Bi says approvingly, “you can get it right now at Nordstrom.”

But what about those times when you get a hankering not to wear the same thing that 10,000 other men are wearing? Or when you wish you could have the fabric, collar, pockets and lining you’ve always wanted — not what some fashion buyer has chosen for this season? What if you could design that shirt yourself and hang it in your closet for about the same price as a mass-produced button-down?

“The value proposition of customization at retail prices was a cornerstone of our company from the very start,” Mr. Bi tells me by phone from Shanghai, where Blank Label shirts are sewn to customers’ specifications and delivered anywhere in the world in about four weeks. But Blank Label, his Web start-up based in Boston, offers something else that off-the-rack doesn’t: “the emotional value proposition: how expressive something is.”

“People really like a Blank Label shirt because they can say, ‘I had a part in creating this.’ ”

Since last Halloween, when the company’s dress shirt design application made its debut at www.blank-label.com, Mr. Bi and his three partners — ages 19, 22 and 30 — have joined a small but growing co-creation movement that uses the Internet to let consumers have a hand in making the products they buy. Web ventures have already popped up that allow shoppers to customize granola (MeAndGoji.com), jewelry (gemvara.com), chocolate (CreateMyChocolate.com), handbags (LaudiVidni.com) and clothing for girls ages 6 to 12 (FashionPlaytes.com). There are also online competitors selling design-your-own shirts, while Brooks Brothers is one major retailer that offers the service on its Web site. Click to continue »

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Prototype: Crème De la Cell: Six-Figure Phones

Saturday, April 17th, 2010

Originally appeared in the New York Times

April 18, 2010
By AMY WALLACE

IN 2006, Frank Nuovo was 45 — “boom!” he says, “five more years to 50!” — and at the top of his game. Except for one thing: “I’d kind of lost my soul.”

As chief of design at Nokia, the world’s leading mobile phone supplier, Mr. Nuovo presided over a huge team that brought 250 products and accessories to market each year. Among many other things, he was credited with inventing removable face plates, those colorful accessories that turn a phone into a personal fashion statement.

A sought-after public speaker, Mr. Nuovo logged about 200,000 miles a year on planes and was often inter viewed by journalists, one of whom, in a profile in The New Yorker, called him “the Henry Ford — or at least the Calvin Klein — of cellular communication.”

But something wasn’t right. Everybody’s heard of the Peter Principle, the idea that organizations tend to promote people to one level beyond their competency. But what do you call an almost-opposite phenomenon, when a person is promoted to the highest heights and excels at that altitude, but is left feeling empty? Whatever you call it, that’s what Mr. Nuovo was experiencing. Click to continue »

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Prototype: The Wit that Breeds Wisdom

Saturday, March 20th, 2010

Originally published in the New York Times 3/21/10

By AMY WALLACE

JEN BILIK sells wit for a living.

Since 2002, when she founded her gift and stationery products company, Knock Knock, with a $750,000 windfall from a Manhattan apartment sale, Ms. Bilik, a 40-year-old entrepreneur, has been churning out cleverness in abundance. There are the sticky notes saying things like “Useless Info” and “When Pigs Fly”; list pads titled “All Out Of” and “Things You Must Do to Make Me Happy”; flashcards for parenting, slang use and sex; and kits to aid in decision-making, dating, and even decision-making during dating.

She has also written “The Complete Manual of Things That Might Kill You” and designed a series of guided journals with names like “I Can’t Sleep” and “My Dysfunctions.”

Along the way, her annual revenue has grown to more than $6.3 million. Her company motto is, “We put the fun in functional,” but she acknowledges that the company’s voice is more confessional than practical.

“A core aspect of Knock Knock’s identity is justifying my own inadequacies, which has, I think, struck a chord in our customers,” she says, sitting in Knock Knock’s headquarters in Venice, Calif.

But oh, the lessons she’s learned. Like this one: “Great, creative inspiration feels so good. But translating that into a good business decision — well, it’ll probably take longer than your inspiration did.” Click to continue »

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Prototype: Building a Better Mailbox

Saturday, February 20th, 2010
Originally published in the New York Times, 2/21/10
By AMY WALLACE

WHEN Vanessa Troyer and Chris Farentinos first hit on the idea that would change their lives, they were thinking big — a little too big, actually.

“It was a mail receptacle/guest house,” Mr. Farentinos jokes, describing an oversize, locking mailbox nicknamed the Elephant Trunk.

His wife agrees. “It was big enough to fit a small family,” Ms. Troyer recalls of their contraption, which the couple invented in 1999 to accept delivery of large packages and to keep the parcels safe and dry, no matter how long homeowners were away.

Back then, they were driven by the belief that as Americans ordered more and more merchandise online, particularly bulky computers, the Elephant Trunk would become a must-have item. It might have happened, too, except that while Mr. Farentinos and Ms. Troyer were still tinkering, the flat screen was born. Before the Elephant Trunk could even be tested and brought to market, its main reason for being — microwave-size computer monitors — became obsolete.

You might wonder why Ms. Troyer, 45, and Mr. Farentinos, 43, can giggle about this. Here’s the answer: From the ashes of their failed experiment arose two smaller products — the Oasis and the Oasis Jr. — that have put their company, Architectural Mailboxes, on the map.

Their smallest locking curbside model is available at Costco.com, Target.com, Lowe’s and about half of Home Depot’s 1,900 stores in the United States. To date, the couple estimates that they’ve sold more than 150,000 of their newfangled, secure letter drops, which cost $97 to $258. They expect to sell 50,000 more this year.

This mom-and-pop success story — the owners qualify because they have two daughters — seemed the perfect way for me to kick off this monthly column about summoning creativity to achieve innovation. Click to continue »

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Whispering to Rottweilers, and to C.E.O.’s – New York Times

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

Cesar Millan, the “Dog Whisperer,” built a multimillion-dollar company on his skill with pets and their owners. “God was my lawyer,” he says.

Originally appeared in the New York Times on 10/11/2009

BY: Amy Wallace

IT’S a miracle. That’s what the humans believe, more often than not, after watching this compact, 40-year-old C.E.O. do his work. He enters a room purposefully, his chest thrust forward and a smile on his face. “How can I help?” is his standard introduction, and the way he says it — calmly, assertively — indicates that your problems are about to be solved. Click to continue »

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Edra Blixseth – The New York Times

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

Checkmate at the Yellowstone Club

Bankruptcies Jolt a Ski Haven for the Superrich

Edra Blixseth
Jeff Minton

Originally appeared in the New York Times June 14, 2009

BY: Amy Wallace

RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. – Nine days after declaring personal bankruptcy — again — a barefoot Edra Blixseth pads excitedly around Porcupine Creek, her 30,000-square-foot estate here. Guests are coming, probably 125 in all. They’re due any minute. The zipper on her sternum-baring cocktail dress is jammed. Do you think it’s too tight? Can somebody help her?

Click to continue »

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Rabbi Finds Anti-materialism A Tough Pitch in Hollywood – New York Times

Sunday, December 21st, 2003

Originally appeared in the New York Times December 21, 2003

BY: Amy Wallace

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — It was dinnertime when the 80 or so invited guests began arriving. Handing off their Benzes and Boxsters to uniformed valets, many of Hollywood’s most important agents, producers and studio and network executives followed a brick path to Sandy Grushow’s front door. Mr. Grushow is the president of 20th Century Fox Television, and his clout was reflected in the 8,000-square-foot Tudor house he shares with his wife, Barbara, and their two children. A pianist played standards on a baby grand in the foyer. An army of waiters in taupe Nehru jackets offered hors d’oeuvres on glistening platters.

“Mini-Reuben sandwich? Knish?” a waiter asked the guest of honor, Rabbi Steven Z. Leder. Rabbi Leder opted for a corned beef and Swiss about the size of a postage stamp, then climbed a few steps up the Grushows’ elegant staircase and quieted the crowd. Click to continue »

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