Kim Vaccarella bet her kids’ college fund on her business and lost it all.
The founder of Bogg Bag dumped $60,000 into what she thought would be her big break in 2012—a massive order of her waterproof tote bags. When the shipment arrived, her heart sank. Black streaks covered every bag, rendering them unsellable.
“I went for broke and spent my kids’ college money and bought a full container’s worth, and they were all bad,” Vaccarella told CNBC Make It.
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Instead of giving up, she donated the defective bags to Hurricane Sandy victims. Those recipients started asking where they could buy more. With renewed confidence, she secured a $120,000 loan from a family friend and rebuilt.
Today, Bogg Bag rakes in roughly $100 million annually.
Entrepreneurs face setbacks all the time. Some crumble. Others transform those disasters into stepping stones. CNBC Make It interviewed a few business owners who survived potentially career-ending failures before building multimillion-dollar companies.
Karen Robinovitz and Sara Schiller launched The Sloomoo Institute, a hands-on slime experience venue, in October 2019. After investing $600,000, they sold $1 million in tickets their first week. Then COVID hit.
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Five months after opening, they laid off 90 part-time workers, keeping just their co-CEOs, a bookkeeper, and their slime expert.
Rather than folding, they hustled. They switched to online slime sales. They created virtual slime-making camps for kids stuck at home. They ran corporate workshops for companies like Google and Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) until they could fully reopen in 2021.
It paid off. Now, their five U.S. locations bring in about $4.3 million monthly from in-person tickets.
“We want people to know that you can choose to try, get out there and do something that’s never been done before,” Schiller told CNBC. “After what we’ve both been through, what are we going to be afraid of now?”
Sometimes the biggest obstacle is the reflection in the mirror. Shizu Okusa learned the lesson after watching her first company, Jrink, collapse despite seven years in business.
The cold-pressed juice company couldn’t overcome high costs and rapid spoilage. But Okusa admits her management style was the deeper problem.
“One of the key lessons was getting out of my own way,” Okusa told CNBC. She treated Jrink like her baby, refusing to trust her team with critical decisions. “In terms of allowing and hiring people that were much better than I was in certain areas of business. Now, I just move aside. I have my strengths and give my weaknesses away.”
These entrepreneurs’ stories reveal common threads—an unwavering belief in your concept, willingness to adapt when plans implode, and knowing when to get out of your own way.
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