The path to entrepreneurial success is never a straight line.
You see opportunity in them thar hills but the path to that opportunity is circuitous and finding it is not a sure thing.
by Contributor for ForbesWomen
The path to entrepreneurial success is never a straight line. You see opportunity in them thar hills but the path to that opportunity is circuitous and finding it is not a sure thing. Profits may be weak or non-existent, research and development can be fraught with unexpected delays and costs, and competitors may commoditize the product you worked so hard to develop. Nadine Cino has navigated those odds, not just once but twice.
She was outraged at the waste created when she moved her successful fashion design firm from one part of Manhattan to another. It was 1991, no municipal recycling was in place, and all those boxes she packed had to be incinerated. What a waste of planetary resources! As a 9-year-old Girl Scout, Cino had fallen in love with trees and wanted to protect them.
“I’m half Cuban and half Italian, which means I’m all Latina and can get into to a snit faster than a Ferrari can go from zero to 60 [miles an hour],” she said. At dinner, still fuming over the waste, Cino suggested that somebody ought to create a business where you could rent reusable plastic boxes as an eco-friendly alternative to cardboard. Packing and packaging services represent 7.5% of the $12.6 billion of the moving and storage sector, according to the American Moving and Storage Industry.
Those somebodies were Cino and her husband, Marty Spindel. Along the way to building a successful business, TygaBox, the couple nearly went bankrupt three times. “We didn’t know what we didn’t know,” she said referring to the development of the box system.
Kudos for this feature, Nadine, and for your persistence as the ultimate entrepreneur! And continued thanks for your support of the IWEC Foundation as a Gold Partner!