STERLING HEIGHTS, Mich. (WXYZ) - So many people called and emailed Action News following a Monday report on Tyler McVeigh's lemonade stand that his mother has now established a fund because so many people want to help.
Many people across the country heard about this story and although they cannot visit Tyler's lemonade stand in person, they still wanted a way to donate.
Donations can now be made to: Charter One Bank C/O Kristen McVeigh 5775 East 14 Mile Road Sterling Heights, MI 48310
You may email questions to Tyler's mother, Cheryl McVeigh, at kmdiva94@aol.com
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This is Tyler McVeigh's way of helping his family following the sudden death of his big sister Kristen in mid-July.
Bills have piled up so Tyler and his friends set up a lemonade stand outside Fillmore Elementary School on Irving in Sterling Heights.
Monday was the first day of business.
Meantime there is a police investigation underway into Kristen's death. Police tell Action News they are now waiting on toxicology reports. Kristen went out with some friends, came home, and her family found her dead just a few hours later, according to Cheryl McVeigh, Kristen and Tyler's mother.
Kristen was a 16-year-old student at Cousino High School in Warren.
"She was just like a very nice person, " Tyler says. "The best sister you could ever have.".
If you would like to visit the lemonade stand, it will be open weekdays between 9 and 5. WATCH THE INITIAL STORY IN THE VIDEO PLAYER .
Whoever said men don't like shopping probably never saw a man click through a JackThreads flash sale. Launched in July 2008, JackThreads is the brainchild of Columbus, Ohio-native Jason Ross, 29. In that time, the determined entrepreneur broke into the fashion industry (no small task for a Midwesterner with no connections), commissioned his alma mater to build a website and sold to Gen Y tastemaker Thrillist earlier this year to gain exposure to a 3 million man readership, while remaining CEO.
JackThreads has two to five new sales per day, featuring off-price goods in the streetwear and contemporary fashion category -- brands including The Hundreds, WeSC and Creative Recreation -- at discounts of up to 80 percent, a similar model to the wildly successful Gilt Groupe.
How did you get into entrepreneurship?
I went to Ohio State University and graduated in 2003 with a degree in finance, but I had a love for entrepreneurship and was involved in all the entrepreneurship groups. After graduating, a friend and I started a company, SMI Ventures -- Sports Marketing Innovations -- where we sold promotional products into the NCAA market. Basically, we were taking hats and rally towels and T-shirts with college-branded logos, and selling them to university athletic departments for promotional giveaways. We did that for two years and learned a ton about business, but we weren't passionate about the idea, and it was a very commodity, price-driven business. By 2005, we were able to double our investors' money and walk away to pursue other things that were more exciting and had higher growth potential.
And that's when you went to work on a business plan for JackThreads?
Yeah, and we hadn't written a business plan for SMI. Everybody stresses, "Write a business plan before you start a company!" but we were young and naive and didn't do it. Now I definitely recommend it. While I wrote the business plan for JackThreads in '06, I was working at bars, working anywhere I could find part-time money that would allow me to keep pursuing this dream. And I was always bouncing ideas off my friends and local VCs in Columbus.
Now, there are a ton of flash-sale concepts, like Gilt Groupe, but was that the case when you first started?
At the time, the whole concept of a shopping club was only in Europe, and that's actually how the whole idea came about -- I saw a business working well in a European market. This whole private shopping club wasn't here in the U.S., so we set out to create it and apply it to a niche that didn't have any outlet for their close-out goods. We launched in 2008, just after shopping clubs hit the U.S., which was exciting because it showed us that we were on to something. Gilt Groupe launched in 2007, and by that point, we were already well on our way.
How did you finance the business?
Before the financial crisis in 2008, I was lucky enough -- or the banks were dumb enough -- to get a personal loan. I also had my own money from SMI, which wasn't much at all, and the money I had from the odd jobs I worked while I did the business plan. So it was a combination of self-funded, personal debt and a whole lot of bootstrapping. I went to the computer science department at OSU and convinced the professor to have the class build my website in spring 2008.
You were acquired by Thrillist in May 2010. How did that come about?
We launched July 31, 2008, and in October we were featured in Thrillist for the first time, so as a business we saw the power of having our brand in front of their audience. Over the next year, we did whatever we could to get the Thrillist editors to write about us more and more, because we saw how many sign-ups were generated from that press, and we also saw that those people were buying repeatedly -- it's a very valuable audience. A year later, I became an advertiser on Thrillist, and we saw some more success. I then approached their marketing team about doing something on a higher level, in terms of a revenue share or a partnership, and it became official in May.
They bought a portion of JackThreads, so they own an amount of our company, but we operate as two different companies. I'm still heavily involved -- I still run the business and I'm still a shareholder. The value for JackThreads it that we now have access to this massive audience of guys that's closing in on 3 million, and we're plugged into some really deep resources and infrastructure that have been built by Thrillist over the past five years. We've seen massive growth since the acquisition -- our business has doubled, our membership has doubled.
What was the biggest challenge in developing JackThreads?
For one, breaking into the fashion industry with no connections from Columbus, Ohio?! That was extremely difficult, to say the least. It was just a matter of persistence and paying money to travel to trade shows and see the same people over and over again, and working hard to improve the pitch.
Why do you stay in Ohio, when the fashion world and a lot of Thrillist's readers are in New York?
We stay in Ohio because 75 percent of our team is there, and it's cost-effective from a production standpoint and from a logistics standpoint. And it's not really hurting our team to have an office in Ohio and one in New York. We're building out a team in New York City more focused on PR and retail, because a lot of the brands we work with are based in New York. So it does make sense to have a presence here, but we have warehouses just outside Columbus. The Midwest is known as a distribution hub, so it's very easy for us to get orders anywhere in the country in a timely manner.
What's been the most exciting aspect of JackThreads?
After that two-and-a-half-year journey, the point of launch was unbelievable. We had a website and six brands that wanted to work with us! We built strong relationships with the brands we sell, and the niche we're in -- better streetwear and contemporary fashion -- didn't really have an outlet for their off-price goods at the time. So that's where we come in. They look at us as a trusted partner at the end of a season that can move their goods in a way that prevents brand dilution. Now we have more than 250 brand partners!
It seems like you're naturally entrepreneurial. Do you come from an entrepreneurial family?
No, my father is a West Point grad and a police officer and knows zero about business, and my mother also wasn't in business. But I did see some uncles foray into business, and it just seemed like the natural path for me. I found it in college when I was searching for what major I wanted to be, and once I became educated on entrepreneurship, there was really no other option for me. It was going to happen one way or another. I had no idea how to start a company, but I made a pact with myself that I had to figure it out. That's how it all started, and if I weren't doing JackThreads, I'd be an entrepreneur in some way, shape or form.
What entrepreneurs do you look up to?
You read about Bill Gates and some of the big ones who've been incredibly successful, and that's always exciting, but to me, when I was in college, it was more the guys who were taking advantage of the Internet bubble and all the excitement that surrounded the tech boom. That was what I really honed in on, what I wanted to do long term.
Universal Studios in Orlando was supposed to open its new roller coaster, Hollywood Rip Ride Rockit, back in May. But the effort was so technologically complicated that it couldn't cut the ribbon until around Labor Day.
The resulting thrill ride may be behind schedule, but it's ahead of the times. It's the first one that's equipped to capture your every move as you ride it -- cameras at every row, plus more on the tracks -- and combine that feature with the ability to choose the song you want to hear while you ride it using a personal touch-screen that you program before you leave the station.
The result, which steps up the ongoing theme park wars in Orlando, produces a new kind of theme park souvenir: a video of your ride that you'll have the rights to take home and share online. Some coasters (SheiKra at Busch Gardens in Tampa, for one) have recorded elements of a ride for sale, but this is the first to combine that pervasive video coverage with a custom-selected song.
The coaster still doesn't sell you every second of your ride -- more like selected highlights, set to your song choice and some canned animation -- but it's a step toward a new way of seeing theme parks. In the future, you won't be finishing paying after you park and buy your entry ticket. You'll be dishing out another $25 or more for a video keepsake of your screams.
Wouldn't it be great to live in a mansion on the water, Gatsby-style, with your best friends and make art all day? That was the fantasy of Celene Ramadan, a twentysomething filmmaker and musician living in Seattle, who rented a lake house in Chicago with 17 friends while attending an improv festival. The rental only lasted a week, but it left Ramadan with the idea that her artist collective, Beta Society, should have a "frat house" of its own.
Then a friend forwarded her a Craigslist posting for a 10,000-s.f. mansion on Seattle's Puget Sound, available for rent. The subject line of the e-mail expressed the astonishment of the find: "really, truly, seriously."
The mansion had been languishing on the market for two years until the owner, web entrepreneur and indie-film financier Garr Godfrey, gave up and decided to rent it out at a loss. Ramadan spent months wrangling 10 tenants, enough to cover the rent -- and writing Garr a heartfelt letter expressing her appreciation for his house.
And so it was that Ramadan scored quite possibly one of the best Craigslist finds in history. The housewarming party, celebrating the signing of a two-year lease, lasted days. "I never thought anything like this would exist in Seattle," Ramadan said as she relaxed in her ivy-covered gazebo on a sizzling afternoon last week, during the Pacifc Northwest's mercifully rare triple-digit heat wave.
The mansion, built in 1952, is a gated, multitiered playground. Along with the gazebo, the backyard has its own kitchen with a pizza oven, a playground fit for a well-endowed elementary school, a massive lawn, and a seating area festooned with tiki torches and a telescope for stargazing over tranquil Puget Sound. Just past the palm-tree garden in the front yard is a hot tub and pool with a retractable roof and changing rooms, where the crew has been hanging out every day since moving in in April.
The sprawling interior -- nine bedrooms, 7.5 baths (and three bidets), a home theater (projector, 12 giant leather recliners), and entryway fountain -- gives its tenants plenty of room to roam; they could avoid each other for days if they wanted to. The house's 10 bohemian tenants have made the house a performance space. Last weekend, they hosted an interactive play inspired by MTV's longrunning reality series The Real World, in which the audience/party guests shuffled from room to room, voyeuristically checking out the drama in each. They even wrote and recorded a retro sitcom theme song for their mansion, inspired by the bidets.
"I've never been this popular in my life," says Ramadan. Even better, the high life is saving her money. She's spending $650 a month on rent, less than she was for her old apartment, and she's cut back significantly on bar tabs: her friends would rather meet at her place. But she's already living with most of the people she hangs out with anyway.
"This is the first time I'm excited to go home," says Ross Whippo, 29, a marine-biology student working at the Seattle Aquarium. The giddiness has yet to wear off, and the usual roommate tensions include "fridge wars" -- elaborate espionage games between the two fridges in the kitchen, each used by half of the household. One cunning retaliation included wrapping one fridge like a gift and leaving it on the backyard lawn -- still plugged in, of course.
If you're burning with envy, don't begrudge these people for their good fortune -- follow their example instead. If you know a dozen people you'd like to live with, now's the time to hit up your local high-end realtor to find a mansion for rent. The Wall Street Journal reports that there's no recovery in sight for the luxury housing market: It's still suffering overdevelopment, cash-hoarding jitters, and tight credit for massive mortgages. And the economy has challenged people's notion of how much home is enough.
In some luxury markets, the rich can afford to wait, says Doug Wright, an agent for Century 21 in the Southeast Valley of Phoenix, Arizona. "We're a global market here, unlike Seattle or some area that doesn't have the huge global tourism...We are seeing a number of sales, all cash. We're seeing 8, 10, 15 offers on a house, 50% of what it was 8-10 months ago."
"I'm seeing more flexible owners, willing to do lease options and vacation rentals," says Eric Colona, a realtor for multimillion dollar mansions on San Diego's coastline. As the owner of SDMansions, Colona advises any would-be "group tenants" to show off their responsible side to homeowners, including an academic transcript. "It gives them an idea of what type of lifestyle you have."
That line of thinking worked for Ramadan. To beat a group of what she calls "frat boys," she based her letter to her prospective landlord on two classic films, The Breakfast Club and The Goonies. "On paper we may not look like the best tenants....But we're not the jocks, throwing parties all the time, we're the dorks on the laptops who are going to stay up all night learning editing software. We're the dorks, and this is our time."
That letter, her realtor told her, is what got her the house.
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All you art collectors out there. Here is a chance to get a Giclee copy of some of Ian M Sherwin work. Ian is planning on doing a whole series of Marblehead, Massachusetts paintings. His work is amazing.
Universal Studios in Orlando was supposed to open its new roller coaster, 
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