Peter Mann: Initially, I started with a couple of factories in China and started with those products to get the business started. These were mostly Chinese developed products that I adjusted and branded. It wasn’t really manufactured from the ground-up by us. Shortly thereafter, I started looking at air purifiers. In its simplest form, it’s a motor, fan, and a filter. My idea was to get the best filters, motors, and fans and put them together. That kicked off about a year’s worth of research into different motor manufacturers. I was looking at it as a high-end consumer product with industrial-quality components. I evaluated component after component until I settled on the components that we felt comfortable putting into the product. We built a prototype and ran it for several months. That’s how we got into the current air products at Oransi.
Sramana Mitra: What happened after Dell?
Peter Mann: When I was at Dell, I learned pretty quickly that the culture wasn’t what I was expecting. At the same time, the Internet bubble burst. Dell started going through round after round of layoffs. The morale was low. It was a difficult environment from a cultural perspective. I was confident that I wasn’t going to lose my job but at the same time, no one really knew what was going to happen.
Peter Mann: Shortly after that, the Gulf War began and so we were sent over the Red Sea for about six months. That was a changing event for me. I got married a year out of college. We got married very young. I missed the last six months of the pregnancy and I missed the birth. I didn’t actually find out he was born until a day or two after because we didn’t have Internet.
Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking of when you got back from the Gulf War?
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Peter Mann started Oransi as a B-to-C e-commerce company. Today, 40% of his $10M revenue comes from China. This is the kind of company America hopes to see more of – selling American products to international consumers.
Sramana Mitra: Peter, let’s start with your background. Where were you born and raised? What kind of background leads up to your entrepreneur story?
Peter Mann: I was born in Syracuse, New York. I lived in the same house till I was 18 and went off to college. My father was a mechanical engineer. He was a manager at General Electric. He comes from a time when people worked 40 years in a company and then get their retirement package. He was also a professor of Mechanical Engineering at Syracuse University. We were heavily involved with the university. I grew up around a university atmosphere during my childhood.
Groupon (Nasdaq: GRPN) just cannot catch a break. They expected to turn around a failing business model by bringing in a new CEO, but it hasn’t helped much. The company continues to deliver disappointing projections, causing the stock price to fall. They are struggling to find the right mix of offerings and are continuing their experiments with product sales to arrive at a profitable business model.
eMarketer estimates the online coupon industry to be worth $4 billion annually. The research firm also estimates that the number of people redeeming digital coupons will grow to 100.1 million this year, compared with 92.5 million in 2012. The use of mobile devices to access coupons is also rising and is projected to grow to 53.2 million this year, compared with 12.3 million in 2010.
Fashion is a HUGE industry. The global women’s clothing industry, just a piece of it, is expected to exceed $621 billion in 2014. How many industries do you know of that scale?
Yet, online, fashion has still relatively a small presence.
In this article, I will explain why, and how to unlock the potential of this enormous industry using the strategies and tactics of Silicon Valley.
On February 14, 2007, I wrote a widely read post titled: Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS). On the Internet, it remains, after seven years, a widely read piece, defining a vision for the evolution of the web.
However, the web has not evolved according to this vision quite as rapidly as I had imagined. We have hardly seen the fragmented web mature into a more deeply personalized user experience.
Given that backdrop, I was excited to encounter a company recently that does realize the true potential of a context-specific, deeply personalized user experience that brings together content, community, commerce and vertical search.
Have a look at our recent Entrepreneur Journeys story: From Berlin, Bringing Art Auctions Online: Auctionata CEO Alexander Zacke.
Auctionata competes with Christie’s and Sotheby’s, engages a community of art collectors – both buyers and sellers, and art experts who know how to appraise and value art. It takes 20% from the buyers, and 20% from the sellers, and pays a commission to the experts who help them in each transaction. Given their items are high ticket, the business model is fabulously lucrative. I would even go so far as to say that this is one of the best business models I have seen on the web in a long time.
The entrepreneur, Alex Zacke, is from an Austrian family that has been in the art business for generations, and has deep domain knowledge of the art business. This background has enabled Alex to raise funding from VCs in Berlin on a powerpoint. The company is doing phenomenally well.