One cold night in 2010, Derek Pacque, a senior Indiana University entrepreneurship major, was hanging out at a local nightclub. Rather than wear his jacket into the club, he dropped it off in a dark corner while he was dancing, but later, when he went to retrieve it, he found that it was missing. 
Pacque, never found his jacket, but what he did find was the inspiration for a business idea. He noticed that none of the bars or clubs in town had a coat check, so the only way you could make sure that your coat did’t get stolen was to leave it at home or in the car, or wear it the entire time you were at the bar. Parcque approached several local bar owners and asked if they would be interested in offering a coat check at their bars; several bar owners expressed an interest, and Pacque decided to move on with his idea. First he invested $500 in materials to make portable coat racks, then he hired on a several college students and launched Hoosier Coat Check. Three local bar owners signed on and the Hoosier began offering its coat check services at $2 to $3, giving a 10-30% cut to the bar owner. On cold nights, each coat check could bring in up to $1,500, and within 6 months the company had made about $50,000. The business was more profitable that Pacque had originally anticipated, but it came with its own set of problems; people would often lose their tickets or pick up the wrong coat causing huge hassles.
After graduating in 2011, Pacque and one of his former professors partnered up to develop a more secure and reliable coat check service. In 2012, he changed his business’s name to CoatChex and managed to get a contract for the ESPN and Maxim Super Bowl parties increasing his yearly earnings to $100,000. With this new found success, Pacque began targeting larger venues, changing up to $45,000 per event. This change in scale required a much more efficient coat check system, so he developed a system of taking pictures and checking the qr codes of the coats to increase the speed and reliability of his services.
Derek Pacque is a great example of how a negative event can be turned into a profitable business, although he never found the cot he originally lost, he was able to create something much more valuable from that experience. Pacque is a great example of how sometimes those little hassles in life can be turned into big money makers with the right mindset and work ethic.
I like the simplicity, practicality, and self-experience involved with the creation of this idea. However, I wonder how he was able to scale up so drastically, how he implements the picture taking of coats/owners, and where he stores the coats since it would seem like a detriment to the bar/club, which is probably the reason that there were not coat racks initially.