Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
Mothers of young adult sons may wish to avert their eyes from this story about a St. Paul entrepreneur who is developing clothing and other products that never need laundering.
His first major line? Bedsheets for young men, who it turns out rarely wash them — a truth everyone who gave birth to boys intuitively knows but tries to block out when they’re on their own.
“Everyone usually gets grossed out at first,” admits Wenceslaus “Wen” Muenyi, “but then they say, ‘I have a 20-year-old son’” who could use those sheets. He is the Cameroon-born entrepreneur who founded HercLéon a couple of years ago with $7,000 from a Kickstarter campaign, pitched his products on Shark Tank last year and this fall won one of five cash prizes in the MEDA Million Dollar Challenge in Minneapolis.
“The future of clothing is laundry-free,” his website declares, but the need for his self-cleaning sheets goes beyond the basic gross-out factor. “Every three months men wash their bedsheets. Three months is a long time” for bacteria to collect, says Muenyi, by far the most charmingly nerdy person I’ve ever talked to about dirty underwear and B.O. “They’re stressed, partying and drinking. They’re constantly sick. The bed is quite toxic for them.”
Muenyi, 27 years old, got his idea in the classic entrepreneurial way: he found a need and filled it. Grieving after his mother’s death, he took a trip to Iceland with only a small backpack. Right away one particular shirt became very smelly, and soon all his clothes reeked. “I wanted to understand why smells happen,” he recalls, so he dove into the research. “It’s a lot. I talked to everybody.”
The short version of what he found: Bacteria and other matter makes clothes smelly, with the type of fabric and the “matter” involved dictating how much. “Most Americans don’t have bidets,” he said, explaining his challenge in creating self-cleaning underwear for kids, another product line. He’s been trying to make a version that customers can wear for 100 days.
“It’s just me trying to figure it out,” he said, adding he’s landed on copper for now as the best self-cleaning additive. “Essentially it stops the production of new bacteria and kills the old.”
Other winners in the fourth-annual MEDA Million Dollar Challenge are Bon AppeSweet, a Virginia-based healthy dessert company, which took the top prize for $350,000. Slick Chicks is a New York women’s underwear company. FitnesCity is a New York wellness testing company. Seraph 7 Studios is an Eagan-based video game studio.
Muenyi has an instant answer when asked what he’ll do with his prize, $200,000. “It means that I would have money to hire employees,” he said, allowing him to fill backlogged orders.
As for what’s next, he also has a ready reply. “I’ve talked to NASA. We’d like to see if we fit,” he said, noting on International Space Station voyages, “they just throw away all their underwear.” He wants to supply “some of the most luxurious, cleanest underwear” for trips to Mars. “That’s a long, long way,” he notes.
