In the day Dineh Mohajer painted her toenails baby blue and went
out shoe shopping, starting a business was the last thing on her
mind. Mohajer, then 22 years old, was just your basic University of
Southern California premed student escaping to Beverly Hills for a
mindless summer afternoon of retail therapy with her sister
Pooneh.
She wasn't looking for new challenges. Au contraire,
says Mohajer, "I had decided that summer [in 1995] to blow
everything off and do a very unpremed-like thing and just relax
before I had to go off to medical school and never have another
chance to be a kid."
She envisioned a summer of partying and kicking back with her
boyfriend. What she got was something else. On the day Mohajer went
shopping--sporting a shade of baby-blue nail polish she had mixed
herself--she was accosted by dozens of passersby who simply had to
know where she got that polish. A saleswoman at Charles David
practically begged Mohajer to reveal her source: The baby blue
perfectly complemented Charles David's spring line of
shoes.
Content Continues Below
"That was it," Pooneh recalls. "I told Dineh,
`We're going to lunch and put together a business plan and
start selling this stuff.' "
The plan they developed over lunch--and financed with a meager
$200--didn't seem as if it would interfere too seriously with
Dineh's leisure plans . . . until an excited teenager bought
Dineh's stock of prototypes from her while she was pitching
upscale specialty store Fred Segal. Until Seventeen and
Elle magazines put the editorial spotlight on Mohajer's
offbeat pastel colors. Until Nordstrom and then Bloomingdale's
and then Saks called in orders.
In a matter of months, Hard Candy, the Beverly Hills, California,
company Dineh, now 24, Pooneh, 31, and Dineh's boyfriend,
Benjamin Einstein, 24, founded, was pushing $10 million in sales.
So much for a leisurely summer.
Runaway success proved to be more than a minor crimp in
Dineh's relaxation program. Setting up suppliers, distribution
networks, accounting systems and corporate structure while managing
breakneck growth was like trying to put out a fire with a wildly
gushing firehose: There was no catching it. Youthful energy was an
advantage, but inexperience was not. Nor did it help that suppliers
and accounts lacked respect for the young entrepreneurs. Finally,
even 22-year-olds run out of steam. Nine months after starting the
company, Dineh nearly ended up hospitalized from exhaustion.
Fortunately, the story doesn't end there. This is the tale
of a young, hip entrepreneur who inadvertently lit a firecracker.
But it's also about how the same fresh thinking that created an
initial spark also enabled this young company to grow into its
potential.
Page 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 