The $80,000 was nice, but it really wasn't what Tripp Phillips was after.
In 2018, when he was 12, the boy from Dalton, Georgia, pitched his business idea on the show "Shark Tank." He wanted investors for Le-Glue, the adhesive he helped invent after the frustration of watching his complex LEGO creations topple unexpectedly to the floor. While it holds the plastic bricks, Le-Glue - "No More Messy Breakups!" - dissolves in warm water.
On "Shark Tank," though, Tripp wasn't interested in the cash so much as the connections.
"We really didn't need the money. We wanted the expertise," he says. "We wanted someone to advise us and get us in with way-bigger companies."
His pitch worked. Kevin O'Leary, one of the investors on the show, offered $80,000 for a 25 percent stake in the company. Along with the money, O'Leary hopes to convince the LEGO Group that it needs to join forces with Le-Glue, Tripp says. That hasn't happened yet, but the effort is ongoing.
"They know about us, which is really good," says Tripp.
Tripp is hardly the only young entrepreneur in the Chattanooga area. Others have opened popular restaurants; some have created organic beauty products; others cook up condiments like apple butter or design backpacks that don't flop over when you put them down. They might not have made a national splash, but they're hard at work, too, researching, creating, tweaking, adapting, making mistakes and learning from them.
And dreaming. Always dreaming.
"I was always tell people to keep dreaming; you can't succeed if you never think of doing anything," Tripp says.
Being young is no reason to think small, other entrepreneurs say.
"A lot of people don't expect someone younger to do something like this," says Adelle Pritchard, the 15-year-old whose dream culminated in Adelle's Creperie on East Main Street. "You're busy; you've got school; you've got other things outside of school. But I've never thought of that as a reason to stall on things that I know I wanted to work on.
"'Unrealistic' sounded like a poor excuse."
Maturity is a trait exhibited by teenage entrepreneurs in Chattanooga. They seem wise beyond their years with a clear understanding of their goals, the steps to reach them and the time it's going to take. They refine their customer-relations strategies; they set quality-assurance requirements; they time-manage; they calculate cost vs. profit margins.
In short, they run businesses. Successful businesses.
Birth of a business
Sitting in Stone Cup Cafe on the North Shore, Abbey Katelyn Pettus, Mary Claire Nimon and Lily Petree are wearing identical Girls Preparatory School outfits: plaid skirts in blue, black and white topped with white shirts with "GPS" embroidered above the pocket. Enormous, stuffed-to-the-gills backpacks sit on the floor next to each of them.
Lily Petree, left, Abbey Katelyn Pettus, Emma Hamilton and Mary Claire Nimon pose with their Cute as a Button products at Girls Preparatory School. (Staff photo by C.B. Schmelter)All are 14 years old and business partners in Cute as a Button, the company they run that sells tubes of organic lip balm and hand-sewn lip-balm carrying cases with key rings attached so you can hang them on your backpack and not lose them - a common problem, apparently, in the world of lip balm. Fourth partner Emma Hamilton is unable to make it to the interview on this particular day.
In 2017, the girls debuted their products at the MBD Marketplace, the GPS-sponsored event in which girls ages 7 to 17 can sell their products. Since then they've taken Cute as a Button to the Brainerd Farmer's and Christmas markets, the Honeybee Festival in LaFayette, Georgia, and Ketner's Mill Country Arts & Crafts Fair in Whitwell, Tennessee. That last one was actually the first they attended - and their first bout of pre-sale jitters.
"I said our pitch so much, I actually said it in my sleep that night," Lily recalls.
Cute as a Button also has a website, but the girls say they sell most of their product at markets and to friends and those friends' family and relatives. But they quickly learned that they need to take credit cards at markets, so now they take them at both markets and online. In other words, they're learning as they go.
"Our parents helped out a little bit, but mostly we figured it out on our own," Mary Claire says.
Each summer, they set aside four or five "workdays," 7 a.m.-to-5 p.m. sewing marathons with the goal of having 400 or more carrying cases ready by the time fall arrives and the farmers market seasons kicks in. Christmas also looms. They've discovered that an assembly line setup is the most efficient, each handling a different step in the sewing process.
"We each have a part that we're best at. It goes at a lot faster," says Lily, whose job it is to attach the key ring because, she says, "I cannot sew a straight line at all."
Before the sewing sessions, they scour fabric stores to find patterns for the cases and are smart enough not to let their personal preferences get in the way of good business.
"We'll try to pick out many different varieties," says Abbey Katelyn, the "organized one," according to the other girls, and apparently the company's main spokesperson. "Although we all have our certain tastes, we want to appeal to everybody."
"Everybody" includes boys, so they make cases in camouflage, with soccer themes, airplanes and Batman. Boys are a valuable niche market, don't you know.
The girls mix their lip balm in their kitchens. They have tweaked and retweaked the formula - right down to the chemical level - until it was perfected just before Ketner's Mill last October. They know that three tablespoons of the ingredients makes about 7 tubes of lip balm. They know peppermint and vanilla flavors sell best in fall and winter, while tangerine and lime do well in summer. They've created a eucalyptus balm that, based on sales research, they think will do well.
As for what the future holds, they plan to continue Cute as a Button through high school, but after that, who knows? They'll be headed off for college, probably in different states, they say, so the chances of all four of them staying together seems unlikely. But they realize that what they've learned with Cute as a Button will stay with them, no matter what direction they take.
"I think I've gotten pretty at good talking to adults and to know how to present your product, and also the responsibility that goes with it and the time management," Mary Claire says. "It's not just one day where you go and make things."
A taste of Europe
Each year for as long as Adelle Pritchard can remember, her family has made a trip to England, where her father grew up. While there, they often take side trips to other European countries, including France, where he lived for a few years.
"We would see little, side-of-the-street carts and they would have crepes. It became one of my favorite things to get crepes from there," she recalls. "I was thinking of how to replicate that over here."
While it's not a street cart, Adelle's Creperie does have a food truck to go along with its permanent location, so it's kinda sorta close, she says. The most important detail was the crepes, of course. Can't call yourself a creperie without them.
In July 2016, when Adelle was 12, the restaurant opened inside The Granfalloon, the meeting space owned and operated by her mother, Carla Pritchard, who also runs Chattanooga Presents!, organizer of Nightfall, 3 Sisters Festival and Ice on the Landing. Opening day for the creperie was "a weird feeling," says Adelle, who is a 50 percent owner of the restaurant.
"It felt like it went by really fast after we had worked on it for months on end and faced setbacks and then it finally came. It was incredibly busy; lines out the door all day. I always knew that I wanted to work with food, and it coming to life was a surreal feeling."
Her mother says she knows "just to get out of the way" when her daughter is passionate about an idea or a plan.
"I've learned not to ever doubt that she can get something done when she mentions it, even if it seems a little far-fetched," Carla Pritchard says.
The idea for the restaurant first occurred to Adelle early in sixth grade and, by the beginning of seventh, it was a reality. She was involved throughout the process, from formulating a business plan to lining up finances to overseeing the logistics of buying equipment and hiring employees.
Naturally, she also played a major role in putting together the menu, which has grown and been modified in the months since. Along with adding sandwiches and waffles and omelets, different styles of crepes have been created, including the spicy chicken Fire in the Hole and the apple-filled Miss American Pie, blending the American South with the cosmopolitan French.
"The whole thing has been constantly moving and changing," she says.
Now a freshman at Baylor School, Adelle admits she can't spend much time at the restaurant when school is in session. The creperie runs from 8:30 a.m. until 2:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, so it closes before school is out. But she's there every Saturday. If the food truck heads out to an event such as Nightfall or Ice on the Landing, she's onboard, and she helps provide food for some Granfalloon events.
"It's where I spend my free time instead of doing the typical things," she admits.
Now that the restaurant is on solid footing, the now-15-year-old is embarking on a new path that begins at the restaurant and heads out on a pay-it-forward mission.
"I've been working on a business plan for a food delivery service for those on food stamps or in food deserts," she says. "I've been able to use the business aspects that I've learned here to pursue that."
Along with the memory of stopping at crepe-selling street carts in France, the inspiration for Adelle's Creperie has a second source, one that's closer to home. In fact, it's inside the house where she lives in Chattanooga.
In England, the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday is known as Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Day. (Over here, it's Mardi Gras.) To celebrate, United Kingdom folks eat pancakes, but across the pond, those pancakes are actually crepes, Adelle explains. So each year, her family plans a celebration around that day in Chattanooga.
"We'd make hundreds of crepes the night before - all types and varieties - and the next day we'd have as many people as we could in our house. It quickly became my favorite day of the year," says Adelle.
She has been helping with the cooking of the crepes since she was 5 or 6 years old, she estimates.
"Crepes have always been a big part of my life," she says. "I believe I've had more crepes in my life than any other food."
Glued to his work
For the most part, Tripp Phillips is like any other middle school kid. He's on the Dalton Middle School golf team. He hangs out with friends. He likes to ride four-wheelers (at least until the neighbors get mad at the noise and he has to stop).
Tripp Phillips is the public spokesman and co-owner of a company that, in December, sold $140,000 worth of Le-Glue.Still, it's unavoidable that he stands out as the public spokesman and co-owner of a company that, in December, sold $140,000 worth of Le-Glue. It means that every day after school, he heads to the company facility in Dalton to fill orders, placing labels on individual packages before shipping them out.
And occasionally, it means he's on TV to talk about his product and his life, especially after he appeared on "Shark Tank."
"It helped a lot," he says. "We had thousands of orders and what felt like thousands of phone calls from people wanting to do interviews."
Despite the attention and the workload, Tripp takes it all in stride, says his father, Lee.
"He is cool as a cucumber and pressure never really gets to him," Lee Phillips says. "He doesn't consider himself as special and really doesn't prefer the spotlight. He does have some special gifts - public speaking, for sure - and his creativity is through the roof.
"I run the day-to-day and handle the money side. He is for sure the face and mouthpiece of the company," says his dad, who has been a product-making entrepreneur for most of his adult life. His experience helped Tripp patent Le-Glue, a process that took about a year, a lot of money and a lot of paperwork.
It all began as a school project when Tripp was 9 years old. The task was to create a product that people could use, but Tripp was blanking, nothing coming to mind - until he thought about a problem he was having personally.
He loved building things with LEGOs, but what was the point when the finished construction wouldn't stay together? His hard work and the hours spent ended up scattered across the floor in pieces. Then it came to him: glue. He needed glue to keep them steady. But it couldn't be permanent. LEGOs are made for using and reusing time and again.
With the help of his father and a friend who had worked with adhesives, they came up with Le-Glue. They made sure it was strong enough to hold LEGOs together - 12 times the holding power of regular glue - but also would be easy to remove when the time came. Hot water was the perfect solvent.
Since LEGOs are played with by kids of all ages, including young ones, they came up with a substance made from natural ingredients that wouldn't be harmful if some kid wanted to see what Le-Glue tastes like. They also added a deterrent, mixing in a nasty-tasting ingredient so, even if someone put the glue in their mouth, they'd want it out of there as quickly as they could spit.
After Tripp handed in his Le-Glue-based class project, his teacher was so impressed, she entered it in the 2014 International Torrance Legacy Creativity Awards, a competition open to students from 8 to 18 years old and divided into four categories: creative writing, visual arts, music composition and inventions. Le-Glue won first place in the inventions subcategory of toys and games.
Once Le-Glue became available to the general public, the Phillips family were filling the tubes themselves, but as the word spread, they realized they couldn't keep up with demand. They've now partnered with a manufacturer in Dalton that can make as much Le-Glue as they need.
And they need a lot. If the LEGO company buys in, Tripp says those numbers will skyrocket.
For the time being, though, he is sticking with being a 13-year-old who just happened to invent a product that has sent his face and name across the U.S., and also put a little extra change in his pocket. Even that has helped him learn lessons in money management, which includes buying stocks for the future and not blowing it all on "stuff."
"When you have money as 13-year-old, you can get pretty trigger-happy on Amazon," he admits.