Small Business Profiles
What started as a chance encounter between two community-minded engineers at a conference blossomed into a lasting partnership and an innovative small business focused on public engagement and environmental planning.
Nspiregreen, the brainchild of business partners Veronica Davis and Chancee Lundy, is a Washington, D.C.-based environmental and urban planning consulting firm.
The best pieces of art are often transformative. What starts out as one thing can take on a new shape, meaning or purpose for someone else. It’s the out-of-box creativity and perception of an artist that can take one piece and make it something wholly different and unique – an artist like Olivia Ashjian James, for example.
246 hours. For eight months, Kristine de la Cruz spent one hour each day working on a business plan. After 246 hours, Crème Caramel LA was ready to sell.
Crème Caramel LA, a custard and confection dessert bakeshop in Sherman Oaks, CA, may have only taken 246 hours to conceive, but the notion of owning her own business had been with Cruz for far longer.
A vacation that turned out to be more work than play sparked a crazy idea for Isabel Sanchez and her husband, Daniel Huerta, that led to Portland’s red-hot food truck, Churros Locos.
During a trip along the Oregon coast, Sanchez and her husband met a gelato business owner who was lamenting about the lack of smell exuding from his shop to attract customers. In a flash, inspiration struck.
Picture this: a young woman, Hipatia Lopez, is hosting a holiday party and working furiously to get her festive spread ready in time. Her husband is in the kitchen, frantically whipping up 100 empanadas to serve, a party favorite of the Lopezes’. Lopez enlists the help of her three children to seal 100 empanadas, a task she comes to find as dauntingly time-consuming. Then, inspiration strikes.
Some people are made to be leaders. At the tender age of 25, Ricardo Sibrian has bought into a restaurant franchise and now owns and operates it. He’s lighting his own torch, and looking to carry it forward like the true leader he is.
Sibrian’s Perkos Farm Fresh Café, located in Sacramento, CA, is an all-American diner experience. The man behind the restaurant is a millennial Hispanic entrepreneur, blazing a path toward conquering the restaurant world.
While your typical person may spot a nail salon and think of manis and pedis, Robert Pancoast and Julie Tobias-Pancoast thought of pizza.
The two spent four months planning and constructing in order to transform a derelict nail salon in Walnut Creek, CA into Pancoast Pizza, a pizzeria promising to bring a slice of the East Coast to Californians.
Every business sets its sights on making it rain greenbacks, but LA-based marketing firm Unique Image decided to look past the money and build a brand around purple. And why not base a business around the qualities of purple? After all, purple embodies strength, royalty, style and intelligence – key attributes for any successful business, especially a marketing and media agency.
Here’s a scoop: Residents of the Columbus, Ohio area do not have to take that lavish Italian dream vacation to get their hands on some dynamite gelato.
Coppa Gelato, a family-owned gelateria, offers authentic Italian gelato out of a cozy café in the town of Westerville.
Jennifer Strain was all washed out after being in the corporate world for many years. But after a night snuggled up in bed reading a book on soap making, Strain’s cleansing process began with an idea that had the sweet smell of success.
Good Fortune Soap, a manufacturer, retail store, spa and wholesaler in Chattanooga, TN, is Strain’s one-stop destination for washing one’s troubles away. And the process of starting this small business did just that for her, as well.
- ‹ previous
- 22 of 26
- next ›