Young Entrepreneur Carves a Creative Niche with USB Drives How Flash Pals is gaining traction with its fuzzy animal-themed storage devices.

Finding a cute flash drive for his girlfriend's birthday proved more difficult than Doug Stienstra imagined. At the time a student at The University of Iowa, Stienstra searched the mall and the internet, disappointed to find that the nontraditional flash drives on the market were unattractive and overpriced. So he took a DIY approach: He bought a fuzzy finger puppet from a toy store and glued it to a standard USB drive. The gift was a hit.

"All of her friends loved the flash drive and started asking me to make one for them," recalls Stienstra, now 23. "I knew I was onto something."

In 2010 he used the resources at the Bedell Entrepreneurship Learning Laboratory on campus to launch a business producing and selling the fuzzy finger-puppet drives he now calls Flash Pals (the original name was dataBabies). The drives come in a variety of safari animal designs, and a portion of proceeds from each sale is donated to wildlife charities, reflecting Stienstra's love of animals and desire to run a socially responsible business. "I think it's great that I'm able to use my business to have an impact on something I'm passionate about," he says.