Back in 2010, David Gilboa founded the innovative eyewear e-commerce company Warby Parker with his Wharton Business School buddies Neil Blumenthal, Andrew Hunt, and Jeffrey Raider. Since then, the brand has sold over a half a million frames. What sets this company apart is the added value it gives to the customers. Us millenials connect with this company because of its charitable aspect, every pair that is bought, one pair of glasses is donated to a needy person. This is appealing and tugs at the heartstrings of those who want a pair of glasses but also wish to make the world a better place. Warby Parker satisfies both of those desires and that is where they went right in creating this company.

As Gilboa said, “I think the best businesses are always thinking about not ‘how much margin can we squeeze out of our customers’ but ‘how can we provide more value to our customers’.” Who wouldn’t want to buy from a company who believes that?

Carmen MacDougall is not one to see a problem and wait around for someone else to fix it. She has a creative mind and if she wants something that is not available, she makes it. She’s a Chicago native and when she went to school in Manhattan she was disappointed in the thrift scene that she found. Clothes were not very good quality and priced unreasonably high just because the word “vintage” was attached to them. So she found a way to fix this and offer thrifted clothes at more reasonable prices by starting her own online vintage clothing store.

She hand picks and with the help of her partner, photographs each piece of clothing before uploading it to the cite to start the selling process. She gets her friends to model the clothing which gives the clothes life and increases their appeal. Buying from Bummer City also saves you the time and hassle of digging and sifting through racks upon racks of old clothes to actually find the nice pieces that are hiding.

The store ships anywhere in the United States, but their target audience is students and people in the New York area. A member of the Bummer City Apparel team can also meet with customers in the East Village or on campus to hand-deliver items, thus eliminating shipping costs.

Being the avid thrifter that I am, I could not believe my eyes when I first saw all of the clothes on the website under the “sold” section. She sells things for $10-$20 that I could find easily for under $5. I say this not as an insult but as a complement because she is not just posting clothes for much higher than she paid, she is selling them; and by the looks of the sold page, she is making a lot of money.

I love to thrift and turn things for a profit so this inspires me to believe that I can combine those two loves. I give Carmen credit for noticing a problem and coming up with a profitable way to satisfy that need.

Rob Kalin was 25 years old and living with three cats when he came up with the idea for Etsy. It was 2005 and he was living in a wood shop  an aspiring furniture designer with a dream of making a living off of selling his furniture online. He searched endlessly to find a site that he could sell through, and after not finding any he came up with the idea and design of Etsy.

Etsy has now transformed into a multi million dollar site. Etsy today is a place where the public can buy directly from artisans, and where sellers can purchase materials from crafts suppliers. Directly competing with eBay, Etsy focuses on handmade items and has a passionate community of buyers and sellers.

Rob Kalin is inspiring because he saw a problem and figured out a way to fix it. He created a community for craftsmen and women to meet, share ideas, buy materials, sell what they create and to make money doing what they love. There is nothing else out there quite like it.

In 2011, James Fisher and his wife Tatiana Parent founded the website Roadtrippers.com in their mid twenties. This web and mobile app is designed to help plan your traveling and turn trips into adventures. Fisher grew up traveling Africa with his parent’s safari business, and Parent grew up traveling the US extensively. After they got married and came to the US they found the lack of useful travel resources frustrating. Particularly finding independent points of interest that could be easily synced with navigation was nearly impossible, so they created Roadtrippers.

I think one of the most valuable things about their product, is how easy it is to use. You simply set a start and end point that appears on the map, and then you can choose to see potential points of interest ranging from outdoor & recreation, to entertainment & nightlife, by clicking different icons. All of the possible options will appear along the map and you can choose to add them to your trip. Roadtrippers also adds value by calculating your mileage and gas costs.

Roadtrippers has provided for those in need of travel inspiration and adventure.