Entrepreneurship : Innovation + Startup News

After moving to Dayton, Ohio, with his family in 1992, Doug Aldrich experienced the first tug of community – and the Cincinnati sports scene – traveling south for Bengals and Reds games, and soon became a loyal fan.

The problem? A graphic designer by training and a marketer by trade, he grew tired of commercialized fan gear. Instead, he wanted a shirt that would be a nod to local sports, without over-the-top branding. Soon he had drawn up pages of his own designs, and had a couple printed for himself.

“I like the experience of the game and experiencing the community of Cincinnati, but I didn’t want to wear a big brand logo on my chest,” he explains.

When friends saw him wearing the whimsical T’s, they wanted shirts of their own, and after having a handful printed, Aldrich designed a logo and website, and Cincy Clothing was born.

Despite Aldrich’s insistence that his lovingly drawn designs are “pretty simple,” they feature custom, hand-drawn fonts and graphics and tongue-in-cheek text (one reads “Keep Rolen,” another “One Dey”) that makes a statement.

“I wanted to create something that’s on the fringe of the brand, basically,” Aldrich says. “For instance, Mr. Redface is really an homage to the Andre the Giant graffiti -- it’s sort of a take on that. I wanted more of a fan’s perspective in the graphics.”

Aldrich launched Cincy Clothing less than a month ago and has a small, but steadily growing fan base of his own, with four hand-drawn designs available. They’re currently available at Prep Clothing in Dayton and online; Aldrich hopes to win a street vendor’s license soon.
 
By Robin Donovan

“It’s a two-hour tour, so it’s a long walk,” says Scott McHenry of his company’s photo tours in Over-the-Rhine. “Every time, something different pops up.”

The founder of Cincinnati Photo Tours found himself inside a church he’d been curious about during his last tour; one of the brothers happened to be on the sidewalk as his group approached. Another time, he found a group of kids playing volleyball on Race Street, and photographers snapped shots of the children leaping through the sand.

McHenry says interest in his tours is growing thanks to his Facebook presence, which he uses to drive traffic to the main website of his eponymous photography business. McHenry first grabbed a camera to escape fellow soccer parents at his son’s games (he coached for years), and ended up selling shots of high school athletes to the Community Press.

During the next nine years, he expanded his skills, joining the Professional Photographers of America and widening his scope to include portraiture as well as weddings. He also has a flair for fine art; you may have seen his works on display at downtown’s Coffee Emporium during two recent stints as an artist in residence there. 

These days, McHenry is leading groups of 5 to 12 people through Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati’s burgeoning historic district.
He’s also planning a new tour that will transport his students among the various hilltops in the city. “With all the hills surrounding Cincinnati, there are a lot of great photographic viewpoints.”

McHenry says a photo tour he researched while traveling to New York City sparked the idea of offering a similar tour here: “There’s so much interest in Over-the-Rhine with the revitalization of Washington Park.”

By Robin Donovan

Like all with an entrepreneurial spirit, Xavier University junior Anthony Breen is a problem solver.

While he was spending a few days at a local hospital visiting a friend, he met some young children who'd been diagnosed with illnesses. He immediately saw a challenge that he could meet.

"When kids are diagnosed, they are given pamphlets written for adults and by adults. It's not in any way engaging. It's scary," says Breen, a finance and entrepreneurship major, with a minor in accounting.

It was from that experience that Breen developed a web-based app that uses storytelling to teach diabetic children about their disease in an understandable way. It's aimed at ages 2 to 12.

The app, MyHealthyTale, follows a diabetic character through a 15-minute story where the child can answer questions about their chronic disease by following the character through the story. The story pulls from a database of questions, mixing them up. So each time children read the story, they get different questions.

"The can name a bear that goes through the story and customize it," Breen says. "It's a fun way to learn that's not scary."

MyHealthyTale is the inaugural offering of Breen's Minerva Health Learning Systems, one of the winning companies for the new Innov8 for health Startup Accelerator.

MyHealthyTale will soon be available at the iPhone App store, and available on Android in the next three months. In addition to the story book, there's also information and support resources for parents, including the ability to direct email caregivers and other parents with diabetic children.

Breen is working with Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and diabetic educators at Cincinnati Children's and The Christ hospitals. Eventually, he wants to expand the app, with stories that cover a range of illnesses.

"Really, this can be used for any medical condition," he says."Right now we're just entering the market, and we want to move this into asthma and obesity."

By Feoshia H. Davis
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Dawn Sheanshang, a pharmaceutical sales rep, became sick of medications one day. Despite her insider knowledge, she couldn’t handle the medication regimen of a loved one who’d recently been discharged from the hospital.

Determined to help, Sheanshang searched online for solutions but found no easy answers. Out of her frustration, MedaCheck was born. With the help of startup acceleration Innov8 for Health, and a partnership with Jeffrey Shepard, a self-described “serial entrepreneur with a Ph.D.,” this high-tech health startup – and its eponymous app – were born.

“More and more today, medication regimens are extremely complicated, with many different drugs and people’s changing presciriptions," Shepard says. “People are using mobile devices for a slew of different things. We wanted to target our product around medication adherence – ensuring they’re taking the right pill at the right time, in the right amount and having it set up with a system to ensure they’re actually doing it.” 

Instead of simply placing a reminder on your phone, this app works with the pharmacies, utilizing frequently updated, high-resolution images of the approximately 16,000 medications catalogued by the National Library of Medicine.

When it’s time to take a medication, a user can click on the pill box to open it, then view their medications using photos and bulleted lists of pertinent details: medication name, dosage, etc. Reminders, including a phone-call reminder if a dose is missed, are also built in.

The challenges of developing such an app include the necessity of HIPAA compliance and generics that constantly change.

“The challenge is making sure that you’re not making specific claims around medication consumption,” says Shepard. “We don’t give anybody advice or share any information about any specific individual.”

The company is running a pilot of the app in November in collaboration with Cincinnati-based Kroger, with the hopes of making the app public in mid-November. Users will pay a small fee to download the app, which will be available through their pharmacy.

A web-based app as well as native apps for mobile devices is available.
 
By Robin Donovan

Kristi Woodworth and Jennifer Sauers tell stories for a living, but they’re not performance artists or members of the media. In fact, they’re licensed oral historians. The business they launched together, Beyond the Trees, offers design and printing services for small runs of books, many of them celebrating milestone accomplishments or memories of a lifetime.

“You get really close to people,” Woodworth says, describing how she becomes enmeshed in family stories while working with groups of people to compile photos and written memories.

“It’s sort of a privilege for us to be that close to the lives of these people, because what they’re doing with these books is creating a gift of love to honor the people in their life, and it’s a thrill to help them do that.”

Moving to the Norwood-based Hamilton County Business Center in 2009 helped grow the budding business, says Woodworth. “We could kick ideas around more easily,” she says. The duo also received business coaching in speed sessions during morning mentoring sessions at the HCBC.

The women are currently working on products that will allow people to complete their own projects, such as legacy letters to one’s descendants, or other projects. The company offers Cincinnati-based workshops, for example, and skills taught in these classes are now being leveraged into products that anyone can use, regardless of their location.

Services provided by Beyond the Trees include tribute books that can be purchased as gifts for milestone occasions, such as graduations, birthdays or anniversaries.

The company issues invitations by email or standard post to friends and family of the honoree, then compile the resultant memories and photos into a bound book. Beyond the Trees also provides self-publishing services for authors who want to print and sell books of prose, poetry or other creative work.

Woodworth says the trend she sees now is how much easier it is to self publish. When the company began, it was something of a novelty, and Woodworth’s partner, Jennifer Sauers, took materials to Staples to have them printed, then downtown to be hand-bound. Still, the family cookbooks she produced were a smash hit, and, soon, other people were asking about having books made.

“What we’re adding to it is the value of the service. We are adding the advice and the guidance through it and the design of the product,” says Woodworth. 

By Robin Donovan

Flywheel, Cincinnati's social enterprise hub, has launched a new series of training sessions designed to develop marketing, planning, research and business skills in the nonprofit sector.

Meetings run this month through November, beginning with a session on Market Research, Wednesday, Sept. 19. The session will help nonprofit's better use market research to test the feasibility of new programs or to improve existing ones. (The session runs from 2 to 4 pm at The Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati. You can register at Eventbrite.)

This training series fits with Flywheel's mission to help non-profits in generating money through social enterprise, or products or services that have social value. 

The organization was formed early this year by the Leadership Council for Human Services Executives, the Executive Service Corps of Cincinnati, the Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Miami University, and Centric Consulting.

Flywheel has scheduled two other workshops. Click on the links to register for the them.

Social Enterprise 201

October 9, 1 - 4 pm

Business Planning Training

(in partnership with The Health Foundation)

November 2, 9 am - 5 pm

By Feoshia H. Davis
Follow Feoshia on Twitter.

Steve Deal has one problem with the infusion of technology into today’s healthcare model: it leaves out the patient. “We have the government pouring money into health IT on the providers’ side, but patients don’t have anything,” he says.

Along with co-founders Rene Raphael Vogt-Lowell and David Pingleton, Deal launched IFG Health, which is now in the beginning stages of launching a host of apps aimed at helping patients and families work more efficiently with their physicians and other healthcare providers.

Their first app, the IFG Provider Journal is available in web and mobile versions, and has a Facebook-like interface that allows users to track vital statistics, such as height, weight or blood pressure, record details of care plans during appointments and note progress via text and photos.

In many ways, the app is an electronic version of the notebook many people take to their physician’s office, and may be especially useful for caregivers who help a loved one manage complex conditions.

Unlike a physical notebook, the app has search and sort functions for ease. Deal says that having information available – even basics that should be in a provider’s electronic medical record – helps appointments flow smoothly when time is limited. Also, not every physician or nurse is comfortable with EMRs, Deal points out.

A video on the company’s website says physicians wait an average of 10 to 15 seconds for the answer to a question before they move on, with or without the necessary information.

Deal has experienced this firsthand as a caregiver for his father and mother-in-law, but doesn’t fault physicians. Today’s primary care providers, he points out, “go from one life crisis to another every 15 minutes,” facing burnout along the way.

He hopes that organized patients will be able to partner better with their doctors, and plans to unveil a host of new web and mobile apps to help.

By Robin Donovan

Pellé Medical Skin Care products aren’t prescription strength, but neither are they drugstore pick-up items. They have a higher level of active ingredients than drugstore brands, and must be sold from a physician’s office, but no prescription is required.

Chris Klueh, who co-founded the business with partner (and fellow nurse) Debbi Gittinger, says Pellé’s products cost roughly the same amount as department store cosmetics, but are formulated to penetrate deeply into the skin, addressing issues like dryness, acne, premature aging, rosacea and even skin damage caused by chemotherapy and radiation treatments.

Klueh says she always recommends three core products: a vitamin-C serum to protect skin, a sunblock to moisturize and prevent sun damage and a retin-A cream for nighttime use. She also offers treatments, sometimes called “peels,” though she warns the term is misleading; most of her treatments require little time away from the sun or normal activities.

“We have a microexfoliation treatment that can be done every five to six weeks, and that’s what patients mostly come in for,” she says.

Nurses at Pellé schedule consultations for patients, keep track of appointments and recommendations on medical charts, and often refer those in need of additional help to local dermatologists. Because her services are cosmetic, they are not covered by standard health insurance plans, but the staff treat consultations like any other medical appointment and maintain charts to track patients’ progress.

“We see so many people get frustrated with the way their skin looks. It looks dull or they don’t like the crepe-y skin around their eyes,” Klueh says. “The beauty of medical skincare is that we can correct the premature aging process. Everyone’s going to go through the natural aging process, but we can correct some of the early onset wrinkles and damage.”
 
By Robin Donovan

When Cheryl Walters was laid off from her corporate marketing gig last February, she was a victim of the same mindset she describes as the most common misconception about her field: thinking it’s not important.

Marketers, Walters says, are often first to be cut in rounds of layoffs. Yet, “You don’t need to do big branding campaigns like [Procter & Gamble] to be effective. You do need to do something,” she says.

After the layoff, she launched her own marketing firm, CheronaWorks, to address the marketing needs of smaller companies in a variety of industries.

She specializes in budget-conscious work; many of her clients are just starting out, like Walters herself, or don’t have a marketing staff.

“I respect that clients don’t want to spend a lot of money,” she says. “I make sure I don’t give them any costs they can’t handle, and I’ll be honest if they do something and I think it’s a bad investment; I’ll tell them not to waste their money.”

CheronaWorks offers marketing services from direct response mailings to websites and email campaigns. Like so many startups, Walters is currently finding new clients through referrals and, of course, marketing herself. She says she uses social media to connect with local companies with marketing needs – and frustrations.

“When I’ve had to do marketing to drum up business, I’ve had luck with social media. I look for people who are looking for help or seem frustrated or are just blatantly posting that they need something,” she says.

Walters says her most common requests are designing logos and websites for new businesses or those “ready to move beyond their WordPress site.”

By Robin Donovan

In tech time, 10 years is forever, and if a privately owned software company reaches that milestone, it's through hard work and adaptivity.

AI Software, in Kenwood, recently passed that 10-year mark, meeting market and economic challenges along the way.

The company, headquartered in Cincinnati with another office in Arizona, was founded by high school buddies and Cincinnati natives Dave Ebbesmeyer and Ed Buringrud. The pair ran into each other after college and found they both were trying to start web development companies.

Teaming up, they began AI Software, offering development services including a signature content management system. They developed the system for non-coders at a time when those systems were far less ubiquitous than today.

Now, AI Software has six full-time employees, two part-time employees and occasionally hires subcontractors. They continue to sell their SiteManager v5.0 content management system, but have added a full array of digital marketing products to meet client demand. In the last 18 months, the company has started offering content services as well.

"Clients want a single point of contact for their web development and web and social media campaigns," Ebbesmeyer says. "We've become a place that handles companies' entire online web strategies. That could include an online web store or video," 

Expanding AI Software's services also has helped them compete against a crowd of freelancers, Ebbesmeyer says.

"Freelance competitions still continues to be a bit of a challenge, but it's difficult for freelancers to offer everything," he says.

This service shift has helped the company weather the economic downturn and subsequent sluggish rebound since 2008.

"We do offer a great content management system, but our clients are less concerned about tech than they are about managing their web presence," Ebbesmeyer says. "We've really seen a lot of that in the last year. And because of the growth of that demand, we are adding talent to deliver things outside the scope of ones and zeros (the bedrock of computer coding language)."

By Feoshia H. Davis
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