Sara Blakely: Success from an Ingenious Invention

Sara Blakely, creator of the footless hosiery company Spanx, is proof positive that successful business ideas can be found everywhere, even in personal vanities. Sara stumbled upon the idea for her insanely successful footless panty hose when she was frustrated with visible panty lines that shows under light colored pants and stockings that precluded her [...]

Suzi Drnec: How Extensive Product Knowledge can Propel Business Success

Suzi Drnec is the owner/manager of the world’s largest supplier of Ready-To-Win western show apparel company Hobby Horse clothing. Her company sells blazers and jackets, tunic tops, hats, even body wear smoothers and slinkers for women horse riders. A lifelong fan of horses, she dreamed of starting a horse-related business when she was just 8 [...]

Real You: Business Advice to Women Entrepreneurs

In her book Real You Incorporated, Kaira Sturdivant Rouda offers business advice to women entrepreneurs, including work-life balance, and celebrates their natural entrepreneurial bent.

Maria de Lourdes Sobrino: Success with Gelatin Desserts

Maria de Lourdes Sobrino stumbled upon the idea of selling ready-made gelatin products in cups after failing to find the products in the United States. A favorite dessert in her native Mexico, Maria felt that there’s a huge market, though untapped, in the United States for delicious gelatin, flan and rice pudding desserts. In 1982, [...]

Karen Belasco Staitman: Success with Custom Fortune Cookies

Some of the best ideas are created unexpectedly. Karen Belasco Straitman, a party planner, created giant fortune cookies for party invitations. While walking in a department store in 1995, she saw apples that have been decorated and thought about her giant fortune cookies. She had the idea of dipping the giant fortune cookies in chocolate, [...]

Catherine Keane: Tapping a Lucrative Ipod Niche

Ipods are the hottest music accessories today, with the signature white earphones showing up everywhere from subways to streets to offices. In March 2008, about 170 million Ipods have been sold worldwide. Given the popularity of this product, it is no wonder that service industries revolving around Ipod would crop up. HungryPod.com, a business that [...]

Christy Webber: Success in the Landscaping Business

Christy Webber is one of the most succcessful landscape and lawncare business owners today. She is the founder of Christy Webber Landscapes , a full-service landscape provider, offering landscape design, construction, and landscape maintenance programs to residential, commercial and municipal properties throughout Chicago. Her company, which she built from the ground up in 1990, is [...]