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When Seth Berkowitz was a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, he started baking cookies for friends out of his dorm. Soon, he noticed a trend: students got hungry late at night and there wasn’t any delivery alternative to greasy and heavy food. Berkowitz wondered, “Why not hot cookies and milk – delivered to your door after midnight?”
When inventor Doug Vick got up in the middle of the night and bumped into the bedpost, he wondered, “How many other people do this every night?”
So he invented high-quality double-lined fleece slippers with a weight sensor in the sole, a light sensor on the side, and an LED light in the toe.
In the latest episode of the Why Didn’t I Think of That? ® Podcast, Bob Smith and Greg Anastos sit down with thinkofthat.net blogger Benjamin Christopher and discuss the first of their Axioms For Entrepreneurs, “Re-think Your Industry.”
The Why Guys explore how companies like Netflix, Apple, Xerox, and General Motors were able to look at their industries, and their companies, in a new light.
Richard James was working at a Philadelphia shipyard and was looking for a way to keep nautical instruments stable in rough seas. That’s when a torsion spring fell off the shelf. Richard watched the spring crawl down shelves, stacks of books and tabletops, and land upright on the floor. Suddenly, he had a great idea…
Why do candles all have such “girly smells,” 14-year-old Hart Main asked his younger sister, who was selling the candles for a school fundraiser. Main thought why not have smells that guys would like, like fresh cut grass, bacon, sawdust and leather. So, with a $100 investment, and his heart set on buying a brand new bike, this young man invented a whole new kind of candle: the ManCan.
What they do:
Fruit bouquets arranged to look like flowers.
Inspiration:
Florist Tariq Farid thought it would be original to blend two gift concepts: fruit boxes and flower bouquets.
About the business:
They take fruits and hand-sculpt them to look like beautiful flowers to give as gifts. There are now 870 franchise locations in six countries.
Here’s a mom-turned-entrepreneur who solved a common frustration that most of us just take for granted: Matching Socks.
Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank both worked for a Southern California home-improvement chain called “Handy Dan” in the 1970′s.
While there, they experimented with heavily discounting products in one of Handy Dan’s locations. The experiment was a success in every sense of the word, and it was their intention to expand it to more stores. But they never got the chance.
Today, skateboarding is a 4.8 billion dollar industry. But it wasn’t always that way. Back in Hawk’s high school years, relatively few people knew or cared about the sport. But there was definitely an underground scene, with competitions, and prize money available to those with enough skill. Needless to say, Hawk had enough skill. In fact, he won so many skateboarding competitions that, by the time he was a senior in high school, he bought his own house.
