Entrepreneur

We're happy to present this article from one of our favorite sites, Yahoo! Shine:

Coolhaus co-founder and CEO Natasha Case turned her recession woes into something sweet. She jumped full-time into her hobby of making gourmet ice cream sandwiches after her job at Disney dried up. "I didn't look back. . . . I just sort of went for it."

Case approached her friend Freya Estreller, who was then working in real estate development for a private equity fund, with the idea of launching an ice cream truck business. After talking it through and running the numbers, Estreller was on board. She recalls thinking, "Let's give it a shot! Let's reinvent the ice cream cone."

Not everyone was so enthused. The women's parents were skeptical. They had invested time and money into supporting the development of their daughters' professional careers. Case had been in architecture school for seven years before getting the job at Disney. "My parents were concerned. . . . They kind of had a little intervention with me. Like, 'What are you doing?'" she recalls.

The two were undaunted and located a $2,700 used mail truck on Craigslist. It was 2009 and the early days of Los Angeles's famous food truck scene. One catch: the truck didn't actually run, so they towed it to Estreller's mother's house, where it sat until they could raise the money for renovation and repairs.

Keep reading the inspiring Coolhaus story.

We're thrilled to present this smart LearnVest story here on Savvy!

Wondering if you could turn your macramé skills into a money-making biz? Looking for tips on how to sustain and grow your business? Dreaming of a time you can stop answering to others and be your own boss?

We hear you. In our monthly  Entrepreneurship 101 series, we ask female entrepreneurs what it takes to run their own businesses, so you can learn from their mistakes and successes.

Jenn Hyman and Jenny Fleiss are the founders of Rent The Runway, a website that lets you rent designer dresses for a fraction of their cost. (We’ve recommended it for wedding season, along with other money-saving tips.) They realized that many women have a closet full of clothes but still find themselves without the perfect dress for a special event. So, they took on the macho world of venture capital, convincing a room full of men they had what it takes to run a successful company.

We talked with Fleiss and Hyman about their adventures in retail, how they found the confidence to pitch their idea and what skill they think every woman should have.

Tell me about your decision to leave your full-time job.

Jenny Fleiss: I was working in finance, and it wasn’t an industry I was really passionate about. It was good for my resume, but I knew deep down it wasn’t the best use of my skills. Deciding to leave was a little bit about getting up the courage, but it was also about putting a marker down and saying, “If I don’t make a decision by this time . . . ”

Were you really interested in fashion before starting RTR?

Jenn Hyman: I always loved fashion–I grew up as a shopaholic. I see shopping as a way to explore a new city and get a grasp on the culture. Women express their emotions through what they buy and wear.

Jenny Fleiss: I grew up on 59^th Street in New York, surrounded by department stores. I used to view fashion as functional. I’m a great test case: Rent The Runway enabled me to experiment, and now I love fashion.

Read on for to hear what advice the RTR ladies have for women who want to start their own thing.

We're thrilled to present this smart LearnVest story here on Savvy!

Wendy Downs is the owner and founder of Moop, an online shop that sells stylish, utilitarian handmade bags for men, women and children. Is it successful? Just ask her devoted fans, who rave about the quality of both the bags and the customer service.

Wendy’s success seems almost too easy. The four-year-old business turned a profit in its second year, and it has grown from one old sewing machine and an Etsy shop to a storefront workshop in Pittsburgh and its own e-commerce site.

Find out how Wendy turned an idea into a success story, with no previous business experience — plus a giveaway below!

How did you get the business started?

After I graduated in 2006 I was basically unemployable with a useless graduate degree in art.  I was using this old sewing machine to sew together a bag for myself. It wasn’t a very nice bag, just a rectangle with two handles, but people started asking where I got it, and if I could make them one.

Then my sister-in-law came to visit and she asked if I had ever heard of Etsy. A few months later, I set up shop, and within three days somebody had bought a bag.

Do you regret getting your art degree?

It wasn’t totally useless. My degree was in photography, and I do take all my own product photographs. If I’d only had an “Accounting 101″ class, though . . .

Were you scared about running your own business?

There was a short time where I was working another job, and the moment when I decided to quit was scary. But so far it’s been only good. My dad ran his business and both his parents ran their own business, so there was this entrepreneurial thing within me that I hadn’t tapped into.

I tend to operate on the philosophy of just doing things. Sometimes that works for me, and sometimes it doesn’t. But if I don’t try, I tend to wonder what the outcome will be.

Read about what Wendy has to say about the advantage of being on Etsy.

We're thrilled to present this smart LearnVest story here on Savvy!

As part of our Entrepreneurship 101 series, we sit down with female entrepreneurs who inspire us and, we hope, will inspire you. Whether your goal is to start a little something on the side or to leave your current job in order to pursue your passion full-time, take heart that starting your own business may not be as hard as it may seem.

From selling clay jewelry on the playground to catering for her parents’ friends in high school, Emily Dubner, 26, has had an entrepreneurial spirit all her life. She finally decided to turn her initiative into a full-time venture after college. While working as a management consultant in New York City, Dubner and her colleagues bounced around ideas as part of an entrepreneur peer group.

In 2009, she left her consulting job to launch Baking for Good, an online bakery that donates 15% of each purchase to a charity selected by the customer–like the school bake sale, on a larger scale.

Dubner chatted with LearnVest about launching a business on a shoestring budget, learning patience, and where it doesn’t make sense to cut costs. Keep reading for her interview.

The fact that people will soon be able to start trading cupcake stock is a sign that cupcakes have gone above and beyond a temporary craze. Meet Pam Turkin, a woman who capitalized on the cupcake frenzy and left her marketing job to start her own chain of cupcake stores. It was definitely the right decision in her case — not only did she turn her passion into a job, but she also generated a sweet $1.6 million from her business last year.

It seems really easy when you're reading someone else's success story, but there is actually a process to creating your own job. Here's how Pam did it:

Early Observer: Pam caught on to the cupcake trend in 2008 and was one of the first to start that concept in Detroit.

Experimental Stage: She tested out recipes on people. In her case, her family members were the lucky guinea pigs.

To find out how she made cupcake magic happen, read on!

What are you going to do if you're fresh out of a college and face gloomy job prospects? Become an entrepreneur and create your own job and perhaps in time, jobs for others as well. The almost 10 percent unemployment rate is not getting any of these youngsters down — entrepreneurship is becoming a more popular option for young grads looking for a job, according to the New York Times. Want to start your own biz? Here are some handy tips I gleaned from the Times article:

• Young Entrepreneur Council: Get in touch with organizations like the Young Entrepreneur Council which supports young entrepreneurs, providing access to mentors, an online help desk, and even a fund which provides financing for budding startup founders.
• Teach Yourself: To operate on a shoestring budget, sometimes you have to do everything yourself. Eric Bahn, the founder of BeatTheGMAT.com, learned how to design a website from some free online resources, which saved him the cost of hiring a web designer.
• Consider Outsourcing: So you’re up and running, but need to recruit others in order to grow your business. An affordable way to do that is to outsource the work to people in other countries who are willing to work for less. Shama Kabani, 25, has a profitable Internet marketing business and has never met any of her 24 employees. A total of 15 of them are in the Philippines.

For more great entrepreneur tips, read on!

Christin Evans takes the cake this week for the ultimate dream job, because The Booksmith owner is doing her community a great service by matching up book lovers with great finds. In addition to that, she's also breathing life into the floundering breed of independent bookstores, which are being overwhelmed by Borders, eBooks, and sites like Amazon. Christin and her husband, Praveen Madan, bought the San Francisco-based bookstore three years ago, and have never looked back to their previous corporate and business suit-filled lives.

SavvySugar: How did you get into this?

Christin Evans: I was actually a management consultant for many years and helped big companies get bigger. After I had done that very successfully for many years, I kind of got to the point where I said am I having an impact or am I just helping Microsoft get bigger or helping Bill Gates get richer? So I took some time off, and spent a year thinking about a lot of different business ideas. Then I stumbled on the idea that independent bookstores really haven't been recreated for the 21st century. Most independent bookstores were started 20, 30, 40 years ago by book lovers who really nurtured their stores during the hay day of paper and hardcover books. But then with the arrival of chain stores, then Amazon, now eBooks, there continues to be lots of pressures on independent bookstores. Over a decade ago, there were more than 5,000 bookstores in the U.S. and now there are fewer than 1,200, as measured by the American Booksellers Association membership. The way I came into this job is because I found it an intellectual challenge, I was always a reader, but I also saw it as an opportunity to try to create an independent bookstore that would be able to sustain . . . thrive in a technology era.

To read more about Christin's wonderfully bookish life, read on!