In 2019, Oliver Zak and Selom Agbitor, seniors at Miami University in Ohio, had a hunch to create a tattoo aftercare product store after seeing the digital branding issues in other brands. This started as a test, marketing, and selling of products that still needed to be created. Their “test run” ended up being successful, selling many of these unproduced products. The pair had to cancel the orders since there was obviously nothing to give, but it opened up the idea that this business could actually work. They also wanted to differentiate the product by using clean ingredients since most traditional tattoo skincare products contain unnecessary ingredients that may be harmful.

Zak and Agbitor then established Mad Rabbit Tattoo as an actual brand. After this point, they went on the television show Shark Tank to pitch their idea to investors. The pitch was successful, landing a $500,000 investment from Mark Cuban. Now, Mad Rabbit Tattoo is valued at $56 million, which is a mind-blowing valuation for an idea that stemmed from two college students.

These young entrepreneurs teach us the need to jump on ideas that we may have, even if we are still determining how successful they’ll be because you never know what may happen. Even if it’s just the process of testing a product in a particular market (like Mad Rabbit Tattoo), taking advantage of a possible opportunity is crucial to be a successful entrepreneur. Even though they didn’t create an entirely new product, they identified a problem with only poor solutions, finding themselves a solid foundation for entering the market.

In 2015, Tara Bosch, a 20-year-old student from Toronto, Canada, acknowledged that she had an addiction to candy. She decided to research more about sugar, and she discovered that it is more harmful to people than she had known, driving her to look for a solution. Tara dropped out of college at the University of British Colombia, intending to revolutionize the candy industry by providing delicious candy without excess sugar. It took three months of experimenting with the recipes to find what she would later sell. What she identified was that she could use plant-based fibers and plant-based sweeteners to replace corn syrup and sugar.

Eventually, in 2016, Tara was able to commercialize her product, beginning to sell it in several Canadian stores and making the deliveries herself. In 2018, Tara expanded the flavors sold by Smart Sweets with two new flavors, which are now their most popular ones. By 2019, Smart Sweets sold its products in over 20,000 stores. Since then, Smart Sweets has added nine new flavors and expanded into over 120,000 stores. Most recently, Tara has upgraded the taste of her flavors while keeping the same amount of sugar, striving to satisfy the customer’s needs sufficiently. At 25, her business is thriving, with Smart Sweets bringing in $55 million in revenue.

Tara now inspires many young entrepreneurs, motivating them to seize an opportunity when they see one (such as a problem spotted within the candy industry) and how to scale a business to be widely known throughout many nations. Her business excelled because of her dedication to solving a problem she faced, and her solution will positively impact many people in the future.

Sources:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/this-young-entrepreneur-who-has-raised-6-million-is-on-a/332187

https://smartsweets.com/pages/our-story