Meet Four Successful Companies that Share One Important Trait: They do Something Others Don't.

By Geoff Williams

Jim Poss
Company: Seahorse Power Co., Needham, Massachusetts
Started: 2003
The innovation: Poss, 34, created the BigBelly, a cordless, solar powered trash compactor that doubles as a trash can. Beyond the "gee whiz" factor, the brilliance of the compactor is that when people throw their trash into the container and the compactor does its work, that means the garbage has to be picked up fewer times-saving not only manpower, but also the fuel that gets sanitation workers to the trash. It's good for the environment and the trash-collection business. And it's good for Poss' own business. Last year, when his company started selling the BigBelly, revenue was $300,000. By the end of 2006, Seahorse Power will bring in nearly $1 million. See the BigBelly at work at www.seahorsepower.com.

The inspiration behind the innovation: It helped that Poss had always wanted to be an inventor, even as a kid. "I liked taking things apart," Poss says, "and here I am, doing my childhood dream." To his mother's horror, he would take apart her blender, the garage door opener, his toys-and "one of the things I took a keen interest in was the trash compactor in the kitchen. Not only from an electromechanical perspective, but [also] the natural tendency for a young boy to be destructive." (In other words, he liked the idea of dissecting a machine that could crush cans, bottles and balloons.) After college, he worked in the electric vehicle industry, engineering motors, gear boxes and batteries, and often working with college students who were putting together solar cars.

After Poss left the electric vehicle industry, he had an epiphany, remembering the trash compactor and thinking of everything he had learned in the past few years. He suddenly knew exactly how he would invent his own compactor.

Enlightening the unenlightened: It isn't too difficult for Poss to sell the BigBelly after he shows potential customers the dollar amount that their organizations will save by buying it. "For something to really have a profound, lasting and sustainable impact, people need to buy it on the economics alone," says Poss. "I knew that I needed a product that had environmental benefits but wouldn't hurt anybody's budget. There are waste management professionals who definitely want to do the right thing, but I've also been selling to people who don't care about the environment, and yet I've suckered them into being environmentalists unwillingly."

Beyond innovation: The BigBelly was an idea that Poss came up with after leaving the electric car industry. He then went to Babson College and came up with three business plans, all of which promised a profound environmental impact. This is just one of them, so Seahorse Power Co. is poised to be around for a long time.

Phillip Chipping
Company: ShieldZone Corp., Salt Lake City
Started: 2005
The innovation: The product that ShieldZone sells is the InvisibleShield, something that Chipping, 30, describes as "a screen protector on steroids." It's designed to be used for the iPod, a musical gadget phenomenon that has always had a major flaw: It scratches easily. No matter. Instead of offering a pricey case, Chipping's company sells his InvisibleShields for $9 to $25 apiece.

It apparently works. The reviews have been extremely favorable. A reviewer for the Macintosh News Network wrote: "The full-body InvisibleShield, wrapped carefully around my iPod [since] last July, has protected my iPod unobtrusively for months. I was only reminded of it when my beloved iPod appeared in my son's peanut butter-smeared hands. The InvisibleShield and a simple wipe-down averted disaster."

That sort of reaction helps explain why ShieldZone should do more than $2 million in online sales alone this year.

The inspiration behind the innovation: Chipping had attempted to start companies before ShieldZone, but it hadn't gone well, even resulting in his personal bankruptcy. A couple of years ago, when he was utterly broke, his father-in-law gave him an expensive watch. Chipping became worried that he might scratch it. Most mere mortals would roll the dice and learn to live with that concern, but Chipping began doing research, trying to come up with a way to protect his watch. He finally read something about a material the military uses to protect its helicopter blades, and he thought, "That would probably protect my watch."

Exactly what is this material, anyway? "That's a trade secret," says a cheerful Chipping.

Chipping wasn't just obsessive about watches or disturbingly eager to make a good impression on his father-in-law. It takes some prodding, but the committed entrepreneur finally admits, "In the back of my mind, I thought if this worked out, this might be the start of some sort of moneymaking opportunity." Not that it was easy for Chipping: He started his business with nothing more than a $5,000 tax refund check.

Enlightening the unenlightened: He hardly has to, at least with iPod users.

Beyond innovation: If the iPod market somehow disappeared tomorrow, Chipping's company would likely live to fight another day. The InvisibleShield is made for numerous devices, from digital heart monitors and watch faces to MP3 players and laptop screens. Check it out at www.shieldzone.com.

Jessica Franz-Christensen
& Scott Christensen
Company: Jessica Scott Ltd., Boulder, Colorado
Started: 2002
The innovation: Jessica and husband Scott, both 29, make organic maternity clothes and organic baby linens. It sounds kind of New Age at first, like the organic movement is being taken to an extreme. What's next? Organic fuzzy dice and organic picture frames? But Jessica makes a great argument for every pregnant mom out there to run, not walk, to their website, www.jessicascottltd.com.

She talks of how the chemicals used in making clothes are eventually absorbed by the oil in our skin. "You know how when you [drop] a french fry on your clothes, and the stain never comes out?" says Jessica. "Chemicals are like that-they stay in clothes, and they're really hard to get out." She figures that moms probably don't want their fetuses exposed to that-nor their babies, which is why the company's bed linens are organic.

She mentions that organic bedding has been available in many countries for years now, and that the rest of the world is further along in the organic movement. In all of North America, she says her company is the only one that makes organic maternitywear, and it's proving there's a market for it: By the end of the year, the company should be clearing $500,000 in revenue.

The inspiration behind the innovation: Jessica came to the organic lifestyle before conceiving her daughter, Kendall, not yet 2 years old. In 2001, Jessica was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and she was advised by some naturopathic physicians to start eating an all-organic diet and examine all the chemicals in her house. That's when she began scrutinizing all her household cleaners, beauty products and clothes-and realizing how few products there were for someone like her. Jessica Scott Ltd., the combination of her name and her husband's, was born.

Enlightening the unenlightened: Talk for a while with Jessica, and you'll find her charming. You'll also see why people say that ignorance is bliss. She talks about how she was recently touring a conventional cotton farm and how she was accidentally sprayed several times by chemicals, which gave her a rash that lasted several days.

"Nobody's really talking about organic clothing," she says. Jessica thinks the organic clothing industry is where organic food was maybe 20 years ago. As more and more people learn about the industry, the more hopeful she is that a groundswell of consumers will start insisting on organic clothing. It hasn't hurt her cause that a lot of early adopters have been celebrity moms: Katie Holmes, Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow and Brooke Shields have all purchased maternity items or linens from Jessica Scott Ltd.

Beyond innovation: Just as environmentally friendly products often have to make economic sense, Jessica realizes that hers need to be on par with other clothing. "We don't want things to look organic-you know, frumpy," she says. "We want our
clothes to be current, stylish and hip." She and Scott also want to eventually expand their organic clothing company into baby clothes and other apparel.

Bradley Husick, Rakesh Mathur
& Beerud Sheth
Company: Webaroo, Bellevue, Washington
Started: 2004

The innovation: The company makes the web accessible to laptops, PDAs and the like-even if you're not connected. Uh, excuse me?

That's right. Webaroo is free software, and if you have an interest in certain topics-worldwide news or soccer, for instance-it'll download the web pack, and you can transport page after page after page of information into, say, your laptop. If you planned on doing a lot of research on the internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, you could download the entire site onto that laptop with your Webaroo software, then go off to a park and research while lying in the grass, far from any network server. If you're due to fly to Dubai or Chicago-two of the geographical web packs available on Webaroo-you could download those and read all about them on your laptop as you fly to the city. Curious? Get more information at www.webaroo.com.

The inspiration behind the innovation: It was Mathur, 50, who thought of the idea first, says 36-year-old Sheth, whose CTO title suggests he was the one who largely turned the idea into a reality. His pal would go on long walks with his dog around Seattle, supposedly one of the most wired cities, yet he had trouble getting a connection in many spots, and searching the web on his mobile device was a very unsatisfying experience. Mathur then took a photography trip to Alaska with Husick, now 42, to photograph the northern lights-and they began serious discussions about building a product that could search and browse web content from anywhere, at anytime, without a connection.

At that point, says Sheth, Mathur came to him because aside from being friends, Sheth was already an entrepreneur, the founder of an online company called Elance. "We started asking ourselves, 'What if we could store the web in a mobile device?' and we began connecting the dots," says Sheth.

When it's suggested to Sheth that that's pretty impressive-most people remember playing connect-the-dots as a kid and coming up with a picture of a turtle or a bunny-he acknowledges, "There's a big difference between an idea and a business. It requires execution. I guess in our case, we were all serial entrepreneurs, and we were familiar with the process of starting a company and how it all works, how you start with the germ of an idea, flesh it out across different dimensions and start thinking about how the product should look, what the user experience will look like, and what the value or experience to the customer is. And asking yourself: Can you even build the technology to go behind it?"

Enlightening the unenlightened: It hasn't been too difficult to get investors excited about their business, says Sheth, who says of some of their investors, "call us dreamers, call us visionaries, but dreaming of bringing dreams to life is what this is all about." The public, however, is another story. "How do you explain a new idea? It's a marketing challenge," admits Sheth, who says that when it comes to launching an innovative product, "You want to be innovative, new and ahead of your time, but not so ahead that nobody else can catch up and use your product. It's a balancing act between promising and delivering."

Beyond innovation: Sheth says they're projecting that in a year, they'll have hundreds of thousands of customers, if not millions, and that in five years, theirs will be a standard platform for mobile devices sold around the world. Just as Google was recently made a word in the dictionary, "we hope Webaroo becomes a word in the English language," says Sheth.

Geoff Williams is a writer in Loveland, Ohio. Contact him at gwilliams1@cinci.rr.com.