Perhaps fear can best drive someone towards success. Well, that was the case with young Mikaila Ulmer, whose fear of bees drove her to create a delicious honey and flaxseed lemonade concoction at the age of four. To conquer her fear of the little pollinators, Ulmer took initiative to understand bees and their environment and after looking through a cookbook from her great grandmother, she found her great grandma’s special recipe for flaxseed lemonade. She decided to add a bee-inspired twist to it: honey. What started as a lemonade stand in her front yard and at a few youth entrepreneurial fairs grew into Me & The Bees Lemonade.
The business started to take off when a local pizza shop asked her if they could sell her product. She agreed and in doing so, was forced to start bottling her lemonade. A few years later in 2015, Ulmer took Me & the Bees Lemonade to the TV screen, appearing on Shark Tank. She walked away with $60,000. Me & the Bees Lemonade has, since its beginnings, been sold in 1,500 stores all over America including Whole Foods Market, Kroger, and The Fresh Market, to name a few.
From the beginning, she’s been donating to save the honeybees since they are such an important part of agriculture. Ulmer donates ten percent of her profits to charities that support the honeybees. Furthermore, she has established The Healthy Hive Foundation, a nonprofit that educates people and supports beekeepers and research. Mikaila Ulmer is a great example of not creating something entirely brand new, but something with a brand new twist: honey-sweetened, flaxseed lemonade. Mikaila Ulmer is a great entrepreneur because she saw that something great (her grandma’s lemonade) could, with a little innovation, be made even better.
I think this is a great example of how to take a big-selling product and improve it. I wish you would have focused more on how this innovation helped her conquer her fear of bees. I think that selling a product in local shops and stores is a great way to start and grow a business.
I love how she was able to use her own experience to improve her product. Even though there wasn’t a clear problem with regular lemonade, she still saw an area for improvement and used it to create a really great product. She also was able to identify a serious need and give profits to that need, greatly increasing the appeal pf her product.
It is so cool that she had a fear of bees but that did not stop her from pursuing her great idea. No one would have ever thought there was a problem with regular lemonade but she found a way to improved it and make it better that no one have ever heard of before.
I like that Ulmer took a modification for something simple and didn’t keep it to herself. Instead, she created a business to share it with the world, as well as benefitting the struggling honeybee population. In essence, she created a win-win situation where everyone wins.