Starting Small

One family recipe has grown into one of the fastest-rising brands in ready-to-drink cocktails. Inspired by her mother's gin, lemonade, and mint summer cooler, Meredith Mills-Merritt founded The Original Southside with a vision to bring premium ingredients, elevated branding, and transparency to a category that had long prioritized convenience over craftsmanship. Leveraging her background in presti...

What started as two college friends chasing side hustles and building an Instagram account called @Sauce has grown into one of the most recognizable premium food brands in America. Today, TRUFF can be found in more than 17,000 retail locations nationwide, with an innovation pipeline stretching far beyond hot sauce. Co-Founders Nick Guillen and Nick Ajluni join Starting Small to share how they set...

Before Yes Way Rosé became one of the best-selling rosé brands in America, it started as an Instagram account. Long before they sold a single bottle, Erica Small and Nikki Huganir were building a community around a simple idea: wine didn’t have to be intimidating. It could be fun, approachable, design-forward, and still be high quality. That audience eventually became Yes Way Rosé. Since launching...

Angela Caglia spent decades behind the scenes as one of Hollywood’s most trusted estheticians before launching her own skincare brand. Her career started treating celebrity clients in Los Angeles, including Barbra Streisand, who once asked Angela what her dream was after a facial appointment at her home. Angela told her she wanted to create her own skincare line someday. Streisand’s response? “Why...

Long before SIMPLi hit shelves at Whole Foods, Sprouts, Erewhon, and Wegmans, Sarela and Matt were traveling globally working directly with farmers to source regenerative organic ingredients and rebuild transparency at the root level of food production. What started as a sourcing mission eventually became SIMPLi — a pantry brand focused on traceability, regenerative agriculture, and proving that b...

Lauren Corugedo grew up watching Chef Merito operate like a hidden gem in Los Angeles kitchens long before the rest of the country caught on. Founded in 1985 by her Cuban immigrant grandfather, Chef Merito started with a single carne asada seasoning and built a loyal following through word of mouth, neighborhood markets, and authentic flavor that didn’t compromise to fit trends. Now, nearly 40 yea...

Dr. Kyle Landry wasn’t trying to build another skincare brand. Before Delavie Sciences, he was doing postdoctoral research at Harvard studying extremophiles — organisms capable of surviving radiation, extreme heat, and even the vacuum of space. That research eventually led him to a microorganism connected to NASA and the International Space Station that could withstand conditions most life forms c...

Working full-time while studying for a professional certification, Peter realized the real problem wasn’t intelligence — it was the format. Most working adults were trying to study late at night, squeezed between jobs, bills, and family responsibilities, using outdated materials built for people with unlimited time. So in 2012, before “edtech” became a category everyone chased, Peter and his co-fo...

Shahab Elmi didn’t come from the wellness industry. He came from building and exiting companies — from telecom retail to media — before turning his focus to something much bigger: fixing a broken supplement industry. In 2019, he stepped into Cymbiotika with a simple idea — people shouldn’t have to guess what they’re putting into their bodies. What followed was one of the fastest rises in modern we...

Sandra Powers Murphy spent decades building a career in finance — running her own firm, working with institutional clients, and raising six kids along the way. She wasn’t planning to start a footwear company. Then one night in New York, caught in the rain trying to make a train, she had to take off her heels and run ten blocks barefoot just to get there. That moment stuck with her. After years of...

Mary Hagen knew early she wanted to build something — launching her first business at 20. Today, she’s the CEO of Colossal, a company that’s quietly reshaped how fundraising works. Since joining, Mary has scaled Colossal by over 1000%, helping generate more than $207 million for nonprofits like the National Breast Cancer Foundation, Baby2Baby, PAWS, and the James Beard Foundation. But the real shi...

Julian Tcherassi didn’t start Magiktea trying to compete with traditional tea brands. He found something most people had never heard of — palo azul, a tree bark used for centuries as a natural kidney remedy. When brewed, it does something unexpected. It turns bright blue in the light, thanks to its high concentration of polyphenols — with studies showing it contains up to 8x more antioxidants than...

David Thurston didn’t set out to build the fastest-growing hair color brand in professional beauty history. But that’s exactly what happened. As the founder of Pulp Riot, David created a brand that shook up the salon industry — bold colors, artist-first culture, and a community that felt more like a movement than a product line. Just 23 months after launch, Pulp Riot was acquired by L’Oréal for $1...

Christine de Wendel spent more than a decade helping scale two of Europe’s biggest startup success stories — first at Zalando, then as COO of ManoMano. Both companies grew from early-stage startups into multi-billion-dollar businesses. But at 40 years old, with three kids and years of scale-up experience behind her, Christine decided it was time to build something of her own. That idea became sund...

Mark Lee started MarqVision while earning his J.D. at Harvard Law, convinced that brand protection was about to break. Counterfeiting and IP theft had grown into a $3 trillion global problem, but enforcement still relied on manual takedowns and fragmented systems. He believed AI could change that. Five years later, MarqVision has raised $90M, doubled revenue in a single year, and is now trusted by...

Dave Munson didn’t launch Saddleback Leather with a business plan. He was living in Mexico, burned out from ministry work, when he designed a leather bag he couldn’t find anywhere — simple, rugged, built to last. A local craftsman made it. Strangers kept stopping him to ask where they could get one. He went back, had a small batch made, and started selling them one by one. That small run turned in...

Steve Schwartz didn’t start Art of Tea because tea was trendy. He started it after watching Western medicine fail his mother. That moment sent him down a path few founders take — studying Ayurveda, working in herbal pharmacies, traveling the world to source botanicals, and learning how plants affect the body at a deep, functional level. Art of Tea began in a living room, blending by hand, making j...

Eric LeVine didn’t set out to build a startup. He was a Microsoft engineer during the dot-com boom who just wanted to keep track of the wine he owned. So he built a simple spreadsheet — an “Excel for wine” — to organize his own cellar. Friends started asking for access. Then friends of friends. In 2003, Eric put the tool online. That side project became CellarTracker. Today, it has 10M+ users, tra...

After years running a packed West Hollywood fitness studio and launching multiple FitTech products, revenue flattened, Justin Norris' health slipped, and the business stalled. A single cold plunge changed everything. The clarity he felt stepping out of the water sparked a pivot that would take LIT from a traditional fitness brand to a design-forward recovery company now backed by pro athletes and...

At 22 years old, Eugene Kang bought a tiny jerky business from an 80-year-old butcher he met on a road trip. It was doing about $500K a year and relied entirely on private-label production. Over the next fourteen years, he rebuilt everything — the brand, the manufacturing, the product strategy — transforming it into Archer, one of the fastest-growing companies in meat snacks. From navigating USDA...

When Michael Jacobson took over his uncle’s barely-profitable flower shop in 2018, many saw a sinking business — he saw potential. Through a mix of technology, obsessive customer care, and operational discipline, he turned what was doing roughly $600K a year into a $9.5M+ powerhouse. Today, French Florist isn’t just surviving — it’s preparing to scale nationally through franchise expansion. In thi...

As the founder of Pocono Mountain Maple, a 450-acre certified organic maple farm located in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, Nicole has always had a deep appreciation for nature. Under her direction, the farm produces Pocono Maple Water , a naturally hydrating, subtly sweet water tapped fresh each spring from organic maple trees.  In addition to its flagship product, the property also...

From early experiments in pet tech to running one of the most successful bootstrapped companies in the country, Jacob Zuppke has led Whisker (maker of Litter-Robot®) into a multi-hundred-million-dollar powerhouse. Over the past four years, Whisker surpassed $1B in revenue—all without raising a single dollar of venture capital. With millions of loyal customers across DTC and retail channels, the co...

Mark Newman has spent his career fixing broken systems. At just 20, he co-founded HireVue, a company that reimagined hiring through video interviews, scaling it into a platform used by millions worldwide before its acquisition by Carlyle Group. But it was his own experience in a hospital after the birth of his child that sparked his next fight—taking on the healthcare system. Today, as founder and...

Emily Vaca launched MINNIDIP in 2017 as a bold antidote to sad blue kiddie pools — designing a sleek, adult-friendly inflatable that was missing in the market. She bootstrapped the brand, protected it via early patents, and slowly built a passionate fanbase. In 2024, she blew everyone’s minds with the MINNIDIP Balloon Garland: a reusable, latex-free, single-inflation cluster that sold seven figure...