Shark tank breaks in mall

What would you do if you were chosen to appear on the ABC reality show "Shark Tank," and then Mark Cuban offered to invest $200,000 in your company? If you were Derek Pacque, the 23-year-old founder of CoatChex , you'd turn him down. The Idea CoatChex was born when Pacque, an entrepreneurship student at Indiana University, was told to come up with 10 pet peeves. "One was wearing my coat to the bar and not having anything to do with it," he says. His aggravation level peaked one night when he hid his coat in an out-of-the-way place only to find it had been stolen when he returned. When he asked bar owners why they didn't offer coat checks, they told him it was too messy, and too much of a hassle with patrons often losing tickets or leaving without their checked items. "So I said, do you mind if I set something up?" Pacque recalls. "I'll deal with the customers and the hassles, I'll get out when you don't need me, and I'll give you a percentage of … [Read more...] about Advice From the 23-Year-Old Who Said No to Mark Cuban

At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, affable married couple Chuah Seet Sheng and Liew Huey Ying were running a fashion retail outlet in a shopping mall. When the lockdown was first imposed and mall traffic dropped to zero, Chuah and Liew knew they needed to do something to sustain themselves. “We were previously in the fashion retail line, selling women’s clothing and accessories. But during the movement control order at the start of the pandemic, nobody wanted new clothes. “We had to keep paying rent and our staff salaries so in the end, we had to cut off the business, because it was too difficult to sustain,” explains Chuah. Chuah and Liew then thought about starting a food business to pay their bills. The biggest problem they had? Neither of them knew how to cook! Liew (left) and Chuah had to give up their clothing store during the pandemic, and despite being neophyte cooks, found a new calling in a home food business. “The main issue we had was both of us didn’t … [Read more...] about Ordering in: The couple who couldn’t cook but started a successful food business

Creative director of Gucci Alessandro Michele has teamed up with singer-songwriter Harry Styles for a between-season collection that infuses tailoring with adolescent freedom. The collection is titled HaHaHa , tapping a sense of joy and also as an expression of the initial combining their first names: Harry and Alessandro. "In truth it was easier for him to play with me to create clothes, than for me to sing with him,’’ Michele joked with reporters at a preview for the collection inside a Milan vintage store. Styles was just embarking on his solo career when Michele exploded into the fashion world proposing what was a new era of gender-fluid dressing, looks that immediately appealed to the artiste. Read more: What's the future of men's fashion weeks? Is the menswear calendar dwindling? Michele said Styles incorporated one of his debut pieces as Gucci creative director into his wardrobe upon breaking out from boyband One Direction. The relationship has grown over the … [Read more...] about ‘Ha Ha Ha’: But Harry Styles’ new fashion collection is no laughing matter