Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Here’s My Business Model, Fund Me Maybe? The Startup is America’s Themesong


I have recently taken on some marketing consulting for a friend and her Internet startup. Sierra and husband Jeremy Penrod founded The Dress Spot, an online dress retail site, in January 2013. Their story is to the 21st century American economy what Call Me Maybe was to the summer of 2012: the themesong, the one you heard countless times, in your car, over small radios on convenience store counters, at community gatherings being belted by throngs of tweeners. It is an anthem indelibly etched into the consciousness of an entire culture. Years from now, when we here Jepsen’s teen anthem it will take us right back to summer 2012, and when we hear the Penrod’s story we will be right back in the marketplace of the 2000’s and 2010’s. A story so American and so timely deserves telling.

First, the backstory. Sierra is from Littleton, Colorado. Jeremy is from Orange County, California. They met as undergrads at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and as so many BYU undergrads do (myself included), they got married. But before they could get married, they needed a wedding. Sierra’s colors were peach and slate blue, which should have been simple enough. Long story short, searching for bridesmaid dresses in a color range so specific proved disastrously impossible. So difficult, in fact, that she was forced to dumb down her color pallet to simply pink and blue (Where was Martha Stewart in all of this? She hasn’t recommended a wedding color pallet with two readily identifiable color hues anytime in recent history. What does she expect brides to do when she sells them on a fuscia and taupe wedding?).

Well here’s where it gets good. Jeremy is studying Information Systems and Computer Science. What’s that you say? The Internet no good? “I can fix this,” was his response. And I imagine more or less those exact same words are spoken by every entrepreneur who dares to incorporate. The story of the 21st century American economy is the story of the one who saw what was broken and said “I can fix this.” For the Penrod’s, “I can fix this,” meant building a retail website from the ground up, but doing it better than anyone else. It meant months of writing and rewriting code to create search tools powerful and precise enough to let brides, bridesmaids, and anyone else looking for a dress to search by more than 650 colors, be it peach, slate blue, fuscia or taupe.

The details of the Penrod’s story with The Dress Spot are unique, but the narrative is woven so tightly through our business landscape that we would hardly recognize our economy without it. Cheryl Conner is a PR consultant in South Jordan, Utah and regular contributor to Forbes Magazine. In July, 2012, Conners published a piece in Forbes titled Who's Starting America's New Businesses? And Why? The article sets out to profile America’s entrepreneur. The picture she paints sounds an awful lot like the team behind The Dress Spot. She is quick to point out that the number of people starting businesses in the U.S. is huge. According to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, each month, 320 of every 100,000 adults in this country start a new business. Of all the new entrepreneurs in America, nearly 30 percent are age 20-34. The U.S. market in not only a great place to start a business if you are young, but according to a recent world wide study produced by Dell, it is also the best market in the world for female entrepreneurship. But the similarities to Jeremy and Sierra’s story don’t stop there.
 
Zooming in from a national to a regional profile of entrepreneurial behavior reveals even more similarities. Think it's any coincidence that The Dress Spot is a Utah based company? A 2010 report by The Association of University Technology Managers found that when it comes to University produced startups, BYU ranked 3rd in the nation. The number one spot? The University of Utah, with only MIT separating the two. If there is a company breaking into the tech sector with university students behind it, the odds aren’t bad that it calls Utah home.

So it’s entrepreneurs who are the face of America’s economy in the 21st century. Granted, the bulk of the economy is populated by players that are largely familiar and have been playing the game as long as anyone cares to remember. But these aren’t the charismatic megafauna. Who are the Great Pandas or the Emperor Penguins of the business world? Who are the American businesses that we want to drop down and cuddle with? The ones that we rally behind because they are symbolic of a movement or change that we want ot see in our business landscape? It’s the little guy that strikes out on his own. Today’s iteration of that story is Sierra and Jeremy Penrod and The Dress Spot. They are young, half of them are female, and they are a tech startup from a region and educational system that produces more tech startups than just about anywhere else. They are theme song of our economy. You’ve heard their story a lot lately. Well, you’re going to hear it a lot more. So here’s my number, call me maybe.


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