CherryCard Pairs Charitable Giving with Everyday Purchases

By AMY WALLACE

Originally appeared the The New York Times, April 17, 2011

IN February, Noah Fradin turned 18 — finally. It’s a relief, he says, that he no longer needs his mom to co-sign the nondisclosure agreements and other documents related to his plan to change the world.

Mr. Fradin, a high school senior and budding entrepreneur who lives in Studio City, Calif., is the creator of CherryCard.org, a new Internet start-up that seeks to make it easy for consumers to give money to the charities of their choice.

Last week marked CherryCard’s soft launch — very soft, because Mr. Fradin is still lining up retailers to participate. As of this weekend, thanks to a group of sponsors that include NBC Universal and the Milwaukee Brewers, anyone who visits the site will be given 25 cents to spend for a cause. But the underlying mechanism of the venture — retailers distributing CherryCard vouchers that customers can redeem and donate to charity — has yet to materialize.

“It’s a chicken and egg thing,” Mr. Fradin says, referring to his simultaneous need to attract consumers to use the site and retailers to pass out vouchers. While he believes his youth is an asset, not everyone he has approached sees it that way.

“One business owner said, ‘I just don’t see any big retailer wanting to take the chance on an 18-year-old kid,’ ” Mr. Fradin recalls. “But who better to get people excited about something than kids? We’re excited about everything!”

Over the last year or so, Prototype has featured many a creative company and the adults who run them. This month, we lower the median age significantly with Mr. Fradin, who lives at home with his parents and younger brother and will be attending Brown University in the fall (one of his application essays was about pirates).

Why should we care about rookie entrepreneurs like him? Steve Mariotti, the founder of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, says they aren’t just inspiring — they’re essential. “Since all net new jobs over the last 30 years have come from start-ups, we’d better be seeing young people willing to take these risks,” he says, adding that the Internet is an especially powerful tool for them. “They have an intuitive understanding of how social media has changed marketing and branding.”

Here’s how CherryCard works: Participating retailers will hand out business-card-size vouchers to their customers after a purchase. “Redeem this card at CherryCard.org to give $0.25 to the cause of your choice,” reads a typical card, which is printed with a code.

Later, after a consumer logs in to the CherryCard site via Facebook and types in that code, the card’s monetary value is deposited in their account, which they can draw upon to give to charities (which are not charged to be listed on the site). Right now there are 35 charities, and Mr. Fradin hopes to add many more.

So who pays? The retailers do — a minimal fee per card goes to CherryCard (though Mr. Fradin is waiving it at the moment to encourage companies to sign on). When a consumer redeems a card, the retailer who distributed it is also charged its face value.

Mr. Fradin believes CherryCard can be financed out of retailers’ marketing budgets because it identifies them as socially conscious enterprises. Their logo will appear on the CherryCard site and will pop up on consumers’ Facebook pages when they donate.

“It’ll say, ‘I’ve given this amount to World Wide Fund for Nature courtesy of’ all the different places you’ve gotten the cards,” Mr. Fradin says.

Mr. Fradin has been fascinated by business since he was 9 and his grandfather, an accounting professor, taught him about the stock market. He counts Warren Buffett and Blake Mycoskie, the founder of Toms Shoes, among his idols and likes to quote Arianna Huffington on cause-based marketing (when he isn’t making a reference to the Swedish data guru Hans Rosling).

Mr. Fradin has spent about $2,000 of his own money on the CherryCard project, but he needed more than money to make it a reality. The Internet connected him with two other teenagers who helped him develop the site. He found 18-year-old Kris Mendoza, a graphic designer who lives in Lynnwood, Wash., (and is headed to Western Washington University in the fall) on a site called Dribbble.com. Mr. Fradin met CherryCard’s programmer, Will Cosgrove from Fort Worth, Tex., through a twist of what he calls “computer-generated fate.”

By AMY WALLACE

Originally appeared in the New York Times, March 20

THE Beatles were stymied. During a 1968 recording session, they couldn’t find a suitable introduction to “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” a song written by Paul McCartney. John Lennon didn’t much like the song, and, after several hours, he stormed out of the studio. When he returned, he strode to the piano and banged out several chords, then added petulantly, “Here’s your intro!”

“All eyes shifted to Paul, expecting rejection, perhaps an outburst,” according to a new book, “Come Together: The Business Wisdom of The Beatles.” (Turner Publishing, $24.95). Instead, McCartney defused the tension with this: “That’s quite good, actually.” Lennon’s chords, pounded out in a fit of pique, make up the song’s now-famous opening.

“The underlying disagreement about whether the song had merit in the broader scheme of things did not disappear,” the book concludes, “but resolving the conflict informed the work and made it stronger, rather than destroying it.”

That takeaway — that disagreement can lead to synthesis — is just one of 100 lessons that the book teases out of the history of the Fab Four.

The book’s authors, Richard Courtney and George Cassidy, acknowledge that it is built around a gimmicky idea: treating the Beatles’ successes and failures as a sort of Rosetta Stone not just for aspiring rock stars, but also for businesspeople everywhere. Such a premise is sure to earn some flak from certain Beatles fans who “don’t feel that the Beatles and business are topics that mix comfortably,” Mr. Cassidy says.

“There were some very visible failures, particularly in the late ’60s, centered around the Apple group of companies,” he says, referring to the various enterprises the Beatles started at the time to enter the film, record and retail businesses. “For a lot of people that became the whole story as far as the Beatles and business are concerned. Our approach was to take a look at a longer trend line, a bigger set of facts, and say by and large this thing has been ticking upwards for almost 50 years now.”

It’s an intriguing idea — that by studying creative people who are passionate about what they do, we can enhance our own creativity, and business savvy, even if we work in a completely different arena.

Of course, it’s easier for most people to relate to musicians and their work than, say, to people who design furniture (and their end tables). The obvious emotion underlying a great song makes us feel that we have at least some understanding of the performers and their motivations. The authors of “Come Together,” both Nashville residents and avid Beatles fans, make the most of that idea: that in the beginning at least, the Beatles were just like you and me.

For example, when the Beatles were a young band, their only means of transportation was a van missing its windshield. That meant that in the dead of winter, traveling across England to a gig was such a frigid experience that the band members who weren’t driving huddled on top of one another for warmth, the authors write, adding: “Take a page out of their book. Although frostbite is generally a bad idea, avoid relying heavily on debt to finance your daily operations or growth.”

THE Lennon-McCartney decision to always share credit on songs provided another lesson, the authors suggest: Don’t waste time arguing over crumbs when that energy could be better used building a bakery — or, in this case, the Beatles songbook.

Another story from the Beatles’ early years highlights the importance of heeding feedback, even when it’s not what you want to hear. Executives at Capitol Records, the American affiliate of EMI, took a pass on “Love Me Do.” Even after the success of “Please, Please Me” — a No. 1 album in Britain — Capitol refused to issue the record or any of its singles.

The Beatles could have kept arguing about the album’s merits, or simply given up on conquering America. Instead, Mr. Courtney and Mr. Cassidy explain, they kept recording new material and sending it to Capitol — for one solid year. Finally, in 1964, Capitol released “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which became the Beatles’ first No. 1 hit in the United States.

Research shows that wasps can be taught to sniff out most anything, even bedbugs. Two scientists want to turn the idea into a product but face challenges in raising capital.

By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in the New York Times, February 20, 2011

THE white paper by the Georgia scientists Glen C. Rains and W. Joe Lewis has a technical-sounding title that masks the exciting news within. “A Project to Bring Innovative New Technology Into the Market Place for Detecting Agents of Harm in Agriculture, Security, and Human Health/Safety Arenas,” it says blandly.

Luckily, Prototype is here to translate: Move over, bloodhounds, there’s a new odor detector in town.

The Wasp Hound, designed by the two scientists, is a hand-held device containing five parasitic wasps. These flying, stinger-less insects have outperformed dogs in tests that measure scent detection of cadavers, but research shows that they can be taught to sniff out anything: explosives, drugs and even that newly resurgent scourge: bedbugs.

Yes, wasps can be taught to react to the whiff of bedbugs’ pheromones. All that Mr. Rains and Mr. Lewis say they need to get their company, SmartHound Technologies, on the road to addressing the nation’s outbreak of bloodsucking pests — among many other problems — is $200,000. But so far, raising capital for research and development has been a challenge.

“If you suddenly discover a new chemical, there’s all kinds of chemical companies,” Mr. Lewis says. “All you have to do is plug it in to an existing infrastructure.” But when it comes to training bugs to swarm, no infrastructure exists. “So we’ve got this new tool with this big gap that we need to cross,” he adds. “At this point, that’s where we’re at: How can we get across that divide and take it to the marketplace?”

The Wasp Hound provides a window into the difficult process of turning scientific research — especially groundbreaking research — into a marketable product. Mr. Rains, 45, an associate professor at the University of Georgia, and Mr. Lewis, 68, a retired research entomologist who worked for nearly 40 years for the Agricultural Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture, have jointly patented the Wasp Hound with their respective institutions. They have teamed with the Georgia Centers of Innovation, a state economic development program, to begin attracting investors. But they know they face an uphill battle.

“The term ‘wasp’ elicits a certain fear, though ours don’t sting people and are friendly,” Mr. Lewis says. Then there’s this problem: “We don’t know how to work with people who are venture capitalists. That’s not our thing; we’re scientists. I guess you’d say we’ve floundered a little bit.”

The genesis of the Wasp Hound goes back to 1988, when Mr. Lewis and a colleague, J. H. Tumlinson, published a paper in the scientific journal Nature that demonstrated how the associative learning process used by insects rivals that of higher organisms. These findings, which spawned more published papers — and which Mr. Lewis says were so radical that “had we suggested them 25 years earlier, we would have been laughed out of our profession” — led to the idea that wasps, like dogs, could potentially be used to detect targets.

First, Mr. Lewis and his colleagues had to answer an important question. While their research showed that wasps were undeniably learning and responding to chemicals and stimuli within their natural context, it was less clear whether they could learn to track things not found in their habitats: incendiary devices, say, or the chemicals typically used in arson. The answer: “We found they could detect almost anything.”

Then it became an engineering problem: how to design a tool that harnessed this insect’s skills in a way that people could easily use? That’s where Mr. Rains came in. “We devised a way of detecting the change in behavior of the wasps that would tell us when they detected an odor,” he says. “Pavlov’s dog, when you rang the bell, would always salivate. Well, wasps don’t salivate, but we found some specific behaviors they did do.”

When wasps have been trained to associate a particular odor with a reward — a good, long drink of sugar water — they get excited when they smell it. “They really move around,” Mr. Lewis says. “Like pigs to a trough.” But unlike pigs, these adult wasps live only about three weeks.

By AMY WALLACE

ONE way to understand Emilio Estevez’s backyard vineyard might be to recall a scene from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Remember Richard Dreyfuss, after a run-in with a U.F.O., obsessively fashioning mountains out of mashed potatoes and shaving cream? Except for the U.F.O., that’s kind of how Mr. Estevez is about growing grapes.

“One day I came home and he had dug up all the grass,” recalled Sonja Magdevski, Mr. Estevez’s fiancée. “He was like: ‘We’re going to plant! We need more space!’ ”

The year was 2005, and Mr. Estevez was working on “Bobby,” a film he wrote and directed, about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The couple lived, as they still do, in a Spanish-style home on a one-acre lot in Malibu — not exactly a prime locale for vintners.

Mr. Estevez had already planted the front yard with vines, ignoring the protests of his parents, Martin and Janet Sheen, who live right down the street. (According to him, they said: “You’re out of your mind. What are you doing?”) Now, excepting the house, the pool and the bocce court, he was determined to fill almost every square inch of the property with 800 vines.

“We were just a couple of rubes,” Mr. Estevez said, acknowledging how little he knew about what he and Ms. Magdevski were embarking upon at the time. “Now, I’m a zealot.”

The Prototype column has focused mostly on innovative people and their ideas — how they develop, protect and profit from them and, often, how their mistakes lead to successes. In this column, I examine a more abstract phenomenon: people who battle creative burnout by using the same muscles they developed to do one thing in order to do something completely different.

Consider the Washington Redskins tight end Chris Cooley, a 6-foot-3, 250-pound, two-time Pro Bowler. Last month, this newspaper reported that he throws pots in his spare time, using ceramics to recharge and to keep him fresh for his day job.

Mr. Estevez is no different. What others would call a hobby, he calls “a meditation” — a complementary pursuit that not only helps him to weather the vagaries of the movie business, but also, he says, to write better scripts.

“I write a lot of dialogue out there,” Mr. Estevez, 48, said the other day while looking out the window at the pinot noir plants that he and Ms. Magdevski had recently pruned. He found his vineyard, named Casa Dumetz, particularly useful for working out the kinks and frustrations in the creation of his latest film, “The Way,” which has yet to be released in the United States.

“I’d do a row and then back inside to write and then back outside,” he said. “It was this wonderful exchange.”

“Our first year making wine was a lot like my first film,” he acknowledged, smiling as he remembered 2007, when the first wine was bottled under the Casa Dumetz name. He said that in both winemaking and filmmaking, “I’ve gotten better, and the reviews have gotten better.”

Best known in his younger years as a member of the Brat Pack — that group of fresh-faced actors who tended to pop up, as he did, in John Hughes movies like “The Breakfast Club” — Mr. Estevez in the 1990s found himself all grown up. During this period, he leveraged his work in mainstream efforts like “The Mighty Ducks” from Disney (and its two sequels) to fuel self-produced fare like a Vietnam-era drama, “The War at Home.”

He also developed a fascination with wine, collecting California cult cabernets and high-end Bordeaux and making regular visits to the vineyards of Napa Valley.

This is probably the right time to mention that yes, Mr. Estevez has seen — and laughed at — a current TV commercial for Charles Schwab in which a man saving for retirement mocks the poor investment advice he’s been given oven the years by saying, “A vineyard? Give me a break!”

Mr. Estevez does not believe that growing grapes ensures financial stability. While Casa Dumetz is expanding this year — tripling its output to 624 cases, made partly with grapes grown off site — Mr. Estevez says his motivation has always been more spiritual than fiscal.

By AMY WALLACE

Originally appeared in New York Times, December 25, 2010

LAST week was Doyle Doss’s busiest of the year. An advocacy group for the homeless had called from St. Louis to buy 12 of his Kandle Heeter Candle Holders, which promise “dry, radiant space heat from a candle” for just $29.95 each. He also had a bunch of laminated wildlife portraits — priced at $14.95 and sized to “make your refrigerator happy” — to put in the mail, and so many wearable hummingbird feeders on order that he had to hire part-time help to build them all.

Yes, you read that last one right: Mr. Doss, whose tiny creative enterprise, Doss Products, is based in a chilly cow barn just south of Eureka, Calif., is the proud inventor of a hummingbird feeder that he calls the :–2<: (pronounced “eye 2 eye”). Priced at $79.95, it is a red, helmetlike contraption that dispenses sugar water from a tube positioned between two eyeholes. You wear it on your face.

“Innovation and invention in America are not dead,” wrote Mr. Doss, 62, in an e-mail that included links to YouTube videos that he said proved his point. In them, hummingbirds hovered two inches above people’s nostrils, sticking their beaks into the red, vaguely frightening masks.

Watching them, you couldn’t help but think: If that isn’t American ingenuity at its wacky finest, what is?

Prototype heard from hundreds of inventors in 2010, and most told of a problem they had encountered that they just had to solve. Among the things that stoked their creativity were cleavage, a skiing accident, a tattered pair of blue jeans, the complications of shaving, and the desire to not spill a cup of coffee while boarding an airplane. The solutions included a variety of products and services: a snap-to-bra camisole-like device (cleava.com), arch supports (lovemystrutz.com), a repair service for beloved jeans (denimtherapy.com), a razor whose handle dispenses shaving cream (ShaveMate.com) and a portable cup holder (cup-pilot.com).

More was motivating many of these folks than mere necessity or the hopes of striking it rich. In many of the e-mails, there was an undercurrent of something more fundamental: the inventors’ need to express themselves, to leave their mark and to communicate and connect with others not by talking or writing, but by building stuff.

“It’s an ego thing,” says Pam Starobin, another inventor who got in touch.

Ms. Starobin, 55, is a librarian who lives in Yonkers. She’s something of a renaissance woman, with a nearly completed master’s degree in art history and a previous career writing computer software; she invented CostGuard, a program for restaurant and food service management. But her proudest achievement, professionally speaking, is her invention of an adult booster seat.

Ms. Starobin, you see, stands just 4 feet 11. And when she sits, well, she’s even shorter. For years, a trip to the theater made her teeth grind together as she stared at the backs of people’s heads. At some low-slung restaurants, it was as if her chin barely reached the tabletop. “I’d seethe, instead of enjoying what I’m doing,” she says. “I thought: I can resolve this.”

The Sitting Taller Handbag (sittingtaller.com) is the result. Made of furniture-grade foam hidden inside a leather shoulder bag, it comes in black, red or green and sells for $129 for a 2 ½-inch lift ($139 for 3 ½ inches). Ms. Starobin has its leatherwork sewn for her, but she makes all the pillows herself. Since starting in March 2008, she says, she’s sold several hundred.

Does she make any money? “A very little bit,” she says. “I’m not leaving my job — let me put it that way.” But what she lacks in remuneration she makes up for in satisfaction. She gets letters that say things like: “Just so you know, this present was the biggest hit at Hanukkah. You made a 96-year-old lady who still loves the philharmonic and theater very, very happy!”

“It’s like, I’ve helped someone,” Ms. Starobin says. “It’s pretty cool.”

MR. DOSS, too, is motivated by utility. “How do I help people stay warmer in winter?” was the question that kick-started his inventing career, he says. The son of an Arkansas farmer who taught him “If it broke, you fixed it; if it broke twice, you figured out how to make it better,” Mr. Doss has been building things since he got his first Erector Set in childhood. He’s proud that his candle heaters and another heating device — the BluBox Thermal fan, which pumps the warm air that has risen to the ceiling back down to the floor — are designed to save users money.

Whimsy (and Clothes) for Sale

By AMY WALLACE

Published in the New York Times,  October 30, 2010

TO understand the thinking behind Chris Lindland’s company, Betabrand, you need to keep three seemingly disparate ideas in your head at the same time: 1) It’s a challenge for Web-only businesses to sell clothing. 2) Most people want to be witty. 3) Some shoppers go crazy for limited-edition goods. (Think Beanie Babies.)

According to Mr. Lindland, his interpretation of these truisms is crucial to his company’s success. And because he’s a lot of fun, it’s worth hearing him out. After all, he’s the guy who invented Cordarounds, which are horizontal corduroy pants (and horizontal seersucker, for summer). They cost $90 a pair.

Mr. Lindland, 38, is also the man who, along with his business partner Enrique Landa, created a reversible corduroy-brocade smoking jacket — business wear by day, Hugh Hefner by night — that goes for $195, and a $100 pair of trousers, called Disco Pants, that are made of fabric that disperses light. Once, while in Ireland for a wedding, Mr. Lindland found himself sussing out the possibility of making sweaters from the wool of actual black sheep. The $120 Black Sheep Sweater, which comes by its color naturally, sans dye, was born.

Betabrand, based in San Francisco, started in August as an expansion of the previous five-year-old company, also called Cordarounds, and is on track to top $1 million in sales this year, Mr. Lindland says. The reason, he asserts, stems from those three fundamental truths: Betabrand employs No. 2 (our desire to be funny — or at least original), to trump No. 1 (our reluctance to buy something we can’t examine up close). Then the company seals the deal by exploiting No. 3. (Because its products are made only in batches of a few hundred, you’ll miss them if you don’t hurry.)

“We could never afford to make product in volume, so we adopted kind of like a Beanie Baby approach: we’d create small collections that supremely rabid buyers would end up buying,” Mr. Lindland said, noting that some customers own more than 20 pairs of his signature pants. “They’re a collectors’ item, oddly enough.”

It is odd, the choice to embrace horizontal stripes on a garment that covers the area of the body that many people see as their widest asset. But this is where Mr. Lindland’s sense of humor triumphs. Whimsy, you see, is not just the engine that drives the design of Betabrand products. It is the force that fuels what might be called the mystique of Betabrand.com — and of its progenitor, Cordarounds.com. To don a Betabrand garment is to self-identify as a member of a sort of meta club — a group of people who understand irony, who delight in difference and who are eager to simply be contrary.

Mr. Lindland, who says his goal is “not to try to create the coolest, most cohesive line of clothing, but to create the most conversation-worthy line of clothing,” strives to keep Betabrand stocked with products that will generate “new, fun, cult-y talk.” Each week, the company introduces a new item in limited quantities. But this approach isn’t merely a lark, he says — it is a necessary strategy for an Internet retailer that needs to break through the clutter.

Pull up the Betabrand Web site and you will find plenty of intentionally goofy pseudo-science hyping its wares. Cordarounds are said to be “the quietest cords in the universe,” while a handy diagram tries to prove how they “drastically lower your crotch heat index.” Buy a product and you will receive regular e-mail newsletters, written by Mr. Lindland, that explain his yearning to “make a splash by subverting that which is vertical,” as one stated. “This includes our genetically modified zebra breeding program and our recent ‘Say No to Longitude’ P.S.A. campaign.”

“I started writing people on a weekly basis just to give them new jokes to tell about their pants or jackets — because we really didn’t have anything else to sell,” Mr. Lindland said, remembering the early days. “Our philosophy for the newsletters — which get a 40 percent open rate, which is very high in the e-commerce world — is they’re 99 percent fiction and 1 percent fashion.”

Originally appeared in the New York Times 9/05/10

LATE last month, tens of thousands of runners who are registered for this year’s New York City Marathon got an e-mail from Mary Wittenberg, the president and chief executive of New York Road Runners.

Ms. Wittenberg wanted to introduce them to a person whom many had already heard of: the actor Edward Norton. But the words “Hollywood movie star” didn’t appear once in her message. Instead, she implored the runners to join a social networking Web site that Mr. Norton and three partners started in May that she says has the potential to revolutionize charitable giving. It’s called Crowdrise.com.

“They’ve built a phenomenal platform to help us really broaden our reach,” says Ms. Wittenberg. Thanks in part to Crowdrise, she says, the marathon has a shot at raising a record $26.2 million, or a million a mile, for charity this year. That would be up from $24 million in 2009 and $18.5 million in 2008.

As for Mr. Norton, she adds: “You should see him standing in my office at the whiteboard. Seriously, Edward is as passionate about our vehicle, the marathon, as I am. And I’ve never said that about anyone.”

Yes, Mr. Norton is a runner. More on that in a minute. But this two-time Oscar nominee — known to many as the Incredible Hulk’s alter ego or the guy to whom Brad Pitt explained the first rule of Fight Club — is also a believer in marrying technology and philanthropy.

He knows that a majority of people who now donate to charity don’t do so online; they write checks. But he and his partners contend that Crowdrise, with its mix of edginess, silliness and good-humored competition, can change that habit, especially for young people.

“The ’60s were the era of people realizing they could rally together to express their priorities,” says Mr. Norton. But today, he says, social networking offers “a new way of getting people together to create power in numbers.” More than that, he said, it can help users express themselves through the causes they support.

Mr. Norton added: “One of the things we’re trying to say at Crowdrise is plant a flag. Raise a fist. Declare yourself.”

Crowdrise aims to make raising money for a cause not just easy, but also fun. Setting up a page to support something you care about takes less than a minute. Then, friends and family can be invited to be sponsors by donating any amount of money, large or small. You don’t have to run a marathon. You can volunteer at a soup kitchen or do whatever strikes your fancy. But Ms. Wittenberg, who has already sent her e-mail to 33,000 runners based in the United States and will soon send one to the 27,000 or so based elsewhere, hopes that anyone running in New York on Nov. 7 will use Crowdrise to do it for charity.

Once your Crowdrise page is up, anyone can donate to it and join your team.

Crowdrise isn’t the only site that helps with online fund-raising. There are a handful, with FirstGiving.com among the best known. But Crowdrise is different, its founders and users say, because it seeks to build community in much the way that Facebook does.

Irreverent in tone — one of its slogans is, “If you don’t give back, no one will like you” — Crowdrise also appeals to anyone with a gaming sensibility. Users compete for prizes, earning points for every dollar they raise and more points for every vote they get from members of the Crowdrise universe.

On July 31, top scorers on the Crowdrise Points Leaderboard won prizes including two MacBook Pros, a Kindle, a Wii and two $500 gift cards. “One of the most unexpected parts of Crowdrise since we launched is how obsessed people are with their points,” says Robert Wolfe, another partner in the venture. (The other two are Mr. Wolfe’s brother, Jeffrey, and the movie producer Shauna Robertson, whose films include “Superbad” and “Knocked Up.”)

Crowdrise and its partnership with the New York City Marathon both sprang from the same event: last year’s race, in which Mr. Norton ran to raise money for the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust in Kenya.

Originally appeared in the New York Times, August 8, 2010

ONE Sunday a month, this column seeks out creative thinkers and tells their stories. You might think that finding these folks would be easy, and we acknowledge that the Prototype in-box is often flooded by readers’ suggestions. But finding entrepreneurs whose sagas say something insightful about business culture — other than just “Buy my product!” — isn’t always a cinch.

That’s why Jules Pieri and Joanne Domeniconi inspire awe. What Prototype does 12 times a year, these women do five times a week at their e-commerce start-up, Daily Grommet. Their goal is to promote innovation by endorsing what they call “nice companies,” ones with well-made products and impeccable service. If those products preserve a craft or protect the environment, they say, all the better.

Here’s what distinguishes Daily Grommet from other Web marketplaces like eBay or Etsy: To be featured on Daily Grommet, you have to be chosen. In the tradition of the seal-of-approval judges at Good Housekeeping, the 15-person Daily Grommet team does its own research and features only products and companies it has battle-tested.

The women behind Daily Grommet say their goal is to enable consumers to find products that support their values. That doesn’t mean every item on the site claims to do good; there’s plenty of whimsy for sale. But by offering a curated list, the site seeks to help people patronize innovative companies that its team believes will treat customers well. Ms. Pieri calls this link between buyers and inventors “citizen commerce.”

Amid recent blunders and betrayals in corporate America, consumers have “a burning hunger for real leadership and access to authentic experiences and trustworthy people,” Ms. Pieri says. Daily Grommet’s solution is to highlight inventive products that often don’t have the marketing muscle to promote themselves.

What, you must be wondering, is meant by the use of the word “grommet”? The site, whose logo is a drawing of the real thing (a metal ring used to reinforce an eyelet), explains: “It’s a wonderful product still waiting in the wings, just ripe for discovery. It comes from a designer, or inventor, or artist or manufacturer who is clearly passionate about what they create.”

Every weekday at noon Eastern time, the site, based in an 1880s Victorian house in Lexington, Mass., posts “Today’s Grommet,” products like a hands-free flashlight, a newfangled pogo stick and an embroidered Peruvian belt. There are pictures and prices, as well as a video made by the site that shows how to use the product and often introduces its creators.

“We are seeing an unprecedented democratization of innovation, but existing retail and distribution systems don’t give everyday people access to the fruits of that trend,” Ms. Pieri says, noting that new, cheaper prototyping tools have made it easier to become an inventor. Of Daily Grommet’s chosen partners, she says, “We raise their game.”

Then the site makes that game — or salad bowl, or bracelet adorned with a USB drive — easy to buy. Ordering is simple, and Daily Grommet promises buyer satisfaction and a money-back guarantee. “We’re responsible for the customer’s experience,” Ms. Pieri says. In return, the site gets a cut of the revenue; she won’t say how much, though it’s enough to enable the site not to carry advertising.

The lack of ads is important because the Daily Grommet team seeks to be more than a buying platform. It wants its endorsement to stand for quality, which won’t happen if customers perceive that praise is for sale.

Not long ago, Ms. Domeniconi, whose title is chief discovery officer, drove three hours north to visit Custom Cordage, a company in Waldoboro, Me., that weaves doormats out of recycled fishing line, or “float rope.”

In the resulting video about “the most beautiful doormats you’ve ever seen,” she explains that the colorful rope has been banned because it harms marine life. She lauded Custom Cordage for helping the lobster industry and for keeping people employed year-round.

Daily Grommet started in October 2008, in a week when the financial markets plunged. The site, whose investors include Geraldine Laybourne, founder of Oxygen Media, was the brainchild of Ms. Pieri, an industrial designer with a Harvard M.B.A. who’s worked at companies like Stride Rite and Keds. She grew up in Detroit, the daughter of an autoworker. From childhood she was interested in how products were designed, engineered and made.

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.

“June 2008, we got our first prototype,” Ms. Nigrosh recalls of the Christmas-morning-like feeling she had when they opened it. Then came disaster.

“It ripped,” Mr. Siegel said, grimacing.

“Gi-normous rippage,” agreed Ms. Nigrosh.

“We went from heaven to ‘Oh, no!’ in five seconds,” said Mr. Siegel.

Two years and several design improvements later, they say they’ve sold about 40,000 Green Garmentos — priced at about $5 wholesale, $9.99 retail — and expect to sell an additional 300,000 more by July 2011. And in March, they got their first outside financing, other than $100,000 that’s come from friends: $350,000 from a small cap investment fund put together by the Progressive Asset Management Group, a brokerage firm that specializes in what it sees as socially responsible investing.

The fund, which Mr. Siegel hopes will eventually raise $900,000 for the company, promises investors a 30 percent annual return on their money until it is repaid — via the first 9 percent of gross revenue.

Just as important, Mr. Siegel and Ms. Nigrosh say, they’ve begun to alter how a very set-in-its-ways industry thinks about doing business. For the Green Garmento to succeed requires not just a customer base, after all, but also a cultural shift within the dry-cleaning world. After all, a reusable bag, unlike disposable plastic, must be kept track of and returned to its owner.

The Green Garmento is not the first reusable cleaner bag. There’s a nylon rival out there, for example, called the Converta Bag that Mr. Siegel says he didn’t know about until they were already committed to their bag. (The Green Garmento is made of polypropylene, a recycled product derived from oil sludge.)

Mr. Siegel, 53, and Ms. Nigrosh, 44, say they’re glad for the competition. They’re trying to do more than make money. They’re trying to change the world.

“Single-use plastic at dry cleaners has gotten a pass,” Mr. Siegel said. “We’re not so much selling our bag as publicizing the concept of the bag.”

According to an analysis of 2005 census figures by the Drycleaning and Laundry Institute, 1.4 billion pieces of clothing and other items are professionally cleaned in the United States each year. If you figure that most cleaners wrap no more than two pieces in a bag, that’s at least 700 million bags a year, or 131 million pounds of plastic gathering dust in the back of our closets. At 5 to 8 cents a bag — plus twist ties and the like — that adds up, which is why even nonenvironmentally minded dry cleaners may be open to making the switch.

That means opportunity, said Mr. Siegel, who says hotels and cruise lines are Green Garmento’s other target customers. “If we can make it the Q-Tip, Kleenex or Xerox of the industry,” he said, “ours will be a $10 million-a-year company.”

Here’s how Jason Lafer introduced the Green Garmento to customers of his Linders French Cleaners in Bernardsville, N.J.: Last November, he informed his 730 pick-up-and-delivery clients that they’d be receiving no more plastic on their clothes. Instead, in a move he called “Greenvenient,” customers received two Green Garmento bags emblazoned with the Linders logo (for which he charged them $7 a bag).

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.

The upside for business owners is obvious: low overhead. At Blank Label, for example, the sew-as-you-go business model eliminates the need to produce shirts of every size and style. There’s no need to rent space to store inventory. There’s no storefront, no office other than a borrowed space at Babson College in Boston, where until recently Mr. Bi was an exchange student from the University of New South Wales — he grew up in Australia.

“We’ve focused on being very bootstrap, very lean,” says Mr. Bi, who says the business has sold about 450 shirts. Recently, it has seen a big bump in traffic, with orders of about 10 shirts a day. He says the company makes money on every shirt.

Once, Mr. Bi wanted to be an investment banker. In the summer of 2008, while pursuing his finance degree, he worked as a junior analyst at a Sydney bank. But the experience left him disenchanted. “Probably a product of my generation — I was too entitled,” he acknowledges. “I felt I’m just one very, very small ant in this massive firm. I’m not feeling very engaged. And entrepreneurships and start-ups became interesting.”

On a trip to Shanghai, where his parents grew up, he got an idea: a service offering custom-tailored suits to college students at a bargain price. He wasn’t thinking about an online business. He thought he’d hire a rep at every college in the Boston area and sell suits one at a time.

Then he met Danny Wong, now a 19-year-old communications major at Bentley University. Mr. Wong had applied to be a rep. Excited about “bridging the gap between consumer and manufacturer,” Mr. Wong remembers quizzing Mr. Bi about his marketing strategies, particularly on the Web. They teamed up and, several months later, Blank Label was born.

At first, Mr. Bi and Mr. Wong tried to raise venture capital.

“To be honest, we couldn’t,” Mr. Bi says. “We were two very young guys who had no track record.” So Mr. Bi financed the site with about $10,000 in savings, he says, recruiting a programmer and a Web designer and vowing to make leanness a strength, not a weakness.

One goal was to communicate directly with customers. The Web site commands: “Call us. We like to talk.” Depending on the time of day, Mr. Bi answers the calls himself. When he is awake, he also activates a feature that sends instant messages to customers who have been on the site for more than 90 seconds.

Need help? he asks. For several hours a day, he and his partners chat with customers about what they like and don’t like on the site.

The feedback has led to several site revamps and — I can’t resist — alterations. The company is on its third home page in six months, and the partners say they tweak the site every day.

A FEW weeks ago, before I had decided to write about Blank Label, I sat down and designed a shirt for my 13-year-old son. It was a striped button-down made of “Green With Excitement” — all Blank Label’s fabrics have hyperdescriptive names. I chose the cut, the size, the placket and the collar; I opted for single-button cuffs, no pockets and no epaulets.

For fun, and to test the ordering interface, I added a contrasting inner collar and cuff in a solid fabric called “Masculine Poplin Grey,” and added a monogram of my son’s initials on the cuff. For the inside of the collar, I made up a custom label, “Live Free or Die” — I was reading “Game Change” and had New Hampshire on the brain.

The whole process took 10 minutes. With all the bells and whistles, the shirt cost $72, compared with $45 for Blank Label’s most basic, no-frills model.

The site showed me a mock-up, which looked great. But when I went to check out, the order summary did not list the contrasting inner collar. No matter what I did, the inner collar was green and excited instead of masculine and grey. So I clicked on “Help” and sent a message. Soon, I heard back — from Mr. Bi himself. Notably, this was before he knew he would be in my next column.

On Friday, the shirt arrived. It was just as I’d designed it, just as Mr. Bi assured me it would be. If my son doesn’t like it, Blank Label policy is that I can return it, no questions asked. And here’s the best part: I sort of made it myself.

E-mail: proto@nytimes.com.