Iowa State University Alumni Association| online edition | fall 2009

FALL 2009
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Cover Story:
>>Your Way

Feature Story:
Just another Saturday in October

Departments:
Getting Started
Letters
Around Campus
Association News

Peanut butter crazy
Orange is the new green
Gardening evangelist
Here's the dirt
Going to the dogs
A world black perspective

PEANUT BUTTER CRAZY

Here’s a new twist on a lunch-box favorite: A curry spice peanut butter sandwich, with Asian curry spice peanut butter, cucumbers, and pineapple.

No? Then how about a “cinny nilla” sandwich: Sumatra cinnamon and raisin peanut butter, vanilla cream cheese, apple, and caramel?

Clearly, this is not your mother’s peanut butter sandwich.

It’s P.B. Loco, the brainchild of Jodene Jensen (’89 electrical engineering) and two of her friends, who co-founded the company in 2003.

Jensen says she always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but she took the safe route after graduation from Iowa State: She went to work as an engineer for 3M in St. Paul.

Then she got a law degree, worked for a federal judge, and practiced law with two different firms. But she still had the itch.

“I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I was scared to do it by myself,” she said. “Whenever I was working for somebody else, I was like, ‘I really want to go try something on my own.’ But I never would have done it by myself.”

She quit her job in May 2003, and she and her partners opened P.B. Loco Café at the Mall of America on the day after Thanksgiving.

The café was crazy-busy – additional licensed cafés later opened in Arizona, Delaware, and Florida – but the jars of premium gourmet peanut butter always outsold the menu items. The café in the Twin Cities closed after four years, but jars of raspberry white chocolate, jungle banana, and chocolate chip cookie dough peanut butters now fly off the shelves at Super Target and other grocery stores. Eight flavors – plus creamy and crunchy – are available online at www.pbloco.com, in single jars or multi-packs. The peanut butter is also sold on QVC and was a finalist to become one of Oprah’s “favorite things.”

Jensen still practices law. She recently opened her own law firm, Jensen Family Law, LLC. “Starting my own firm is what I wanted to do out of law school, but it took starting P.B. Loco to be able to go and do that.”

ORANGE IS THE NEW GREEN

Five hundred dollars doesn’t go very far toward graduate school tuition, room and board, and textbooks.

But $500 was all Aayush Phumbhra had when he came to the United States in 2001 to pursue an MBA at Iowa State. And he was determined not to ask his parents for money.

The cost of textbooks, in particular, was a problem for him.

“Especially it hits you when you’re an international student,” he said. “Every dollar was 40 Indian rupees. You translate a $150 book into 6,000 Indian rupees, and that’s a lot of money. That’s probably a monthly salary for some of the people there. I didn’t want to take money from my parents; I wanted to pay for my own education. So as a student, it was always hard to get books. I was fortunate.

I had professors who helped me with textbooks, or I would get a copy from the library, or just share with a friend.”

That experience led Phumbhra to launch Cheggpost, an online marketplace where students at Iowa State could exchange books, sell furniture, find rides, and swap other goods and services.

At first, the service was only for students at Iowa State. But Phumbhra saw the potential to take it to a national level.

After graduating with an MBA in 2004, he approached Osman Rashid with the idea while they were both living in Silicon Valley. The two launched Chegg as an online hyper-local student marketplace for campuses across the country.

But textbooks were always the main category. One night, while they were trying to think of a way to save students money and make textbooks affordable, Phumbhra and Rashid came up with a revolutionary idea: an online textbook rental company.

Modeled after the popular movie rental company Netflix, they called the company Textbookflix. It was an immediate success. In 2006, the founders maxed out their credit cards buying books, set up a warehouse, found an investor, merged the company with Chegg.com, manufactured a gazillion bright orange shipping boxes, and watched the business take off.

Today, Chegg.com is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., with 75 full-time employees, a horde of temporary workers that pitch in during the “return rush,” 1.6 million titles in its online catalog, a 60,000-square-foot warehouse in Louisville, Ky., and hundreds of thousands of students from more than 4,000 campuses across the country renting books.

“In 2008, it was crazy,” Phumbhra said. “We were 300 percent over our goal, and we kept getting orders.”
This year has been even better. During the month of January, Chegg brought in more revenue than during
all of 2008.

Chegg has partnered with American Forests to plant one tree for every book that’s rented – 750 acres so far. Phumbhra says the company’s bright orange boxes are making an impact.

“Students are very environmental.”

GARDENING EVANGELIST

A self-described “odd child,” Kelly Norris (’08 horticulture) started gardening at age four, planting squash and collecting flower seeds with his maternal grandmother.

At age 13, he became Iowa’s youngest certified master gardener, carpooling to the classes with a neighbor lady because he was too young to drive. He had his first freelance gardening article accepted for publication the same year.

So it probably came as no surprise to his parents when Norris, at age 15, announced at the supper table one night in 2002 that he’d been browsing an iris listserv and came across an iris farm for sale in Texas and wouldn’t it be a good idea to buy it?

Two weeks later, the family was on a plane to Austin, Texas. When they returned to their farm in Bedford, Iowa, they tilled up 7 ½ acres of land and became the proud owners of Rainbow Iris Farm.

A cousin who ran a trucking firm hauled the 40,000 original plants back from Texas.

“When he got out of the truck, he says, ‘You kids have a lot of planting to do,’” Kelly laughs.

The first day, the Norrises and a few of their friends planted 10,000 irises, and the company began to take root.

Today, the iris farm has 250,000 plants and 1,300 different cultivars. About 60 percent of its business is
online (at www.rainbowfarms.net).

Meanwhile, Norris graduated from high school, enrolled at Iowa State, became a sought-after speaker on the gardening circuit, interned with Better Homes & Gardens garden group, completed a bachelor’s degree in three and a half years, and became a prolific plant breeder.

He’s written two books, The Iowa Gardener’s Travel Guide, published in 2008, and Planting Passions: The Story of Why Gardeners Garden, a collection of stories that will be published in 2010.

He’s finishing his judge’s certification with the American Iris Society, and he co-edits the society’s 128-page bulletin. He’s been a featured speaker at the Garden Writers Association conference, the Perennial Plant Association convention, and the national iris convention. He recently entered a master’s program at Iowa State.

If he was a child gardening prodigy, he’s become an adult gardening evangelist.

“I’ve had a very clear idea for a long time exactly what I wanted to do,” Norris says. “I see my garden as a work of art. It’s an expression of who I am. I think in this era of technology and everybody’s life is just kind of a whirlwind, it’s helpful to remember that in gardening we can find something about our humanity.”

He pauses to catch his breath and chuckles at his own passionate pronouncement.

“My plant interests are multitudinous,” he says.

HERE'S THE DIRT

When you give Sara Martin a stovetop with baked-on gunk, you’ve given her a challenge.

Martin (’08 liberal studies and linguistics) owns Professional Home, a residential cleaning service in Ames, and she knows that most people are too busy to scrub their shower scum and polish their espresso machines. So she does it for them.

Professional Home – which consists of Martin and eight other women who work for her part time – is not a “traditional maid service.”

“I think there seem to be two types [of house cleaners]. There’s the single woman who comes into your home and cleans and cleans and cleans, year in and year out. I’ve been called to a lot of homes where they say, ‘So and so cleans for me, but she doesn’t clean that well, so could you come in and deep clean?’ So there’s the single cleaner, and then there’s more the Molly Maid type of [business]. They send them out with the uniform and the car and the checklist, and I’m sure those are all really good systems, but I really want to try to be more personalized than that and have women who can handle themselves without that checklist.”

Martin established the business four years ago after co-managing Martin Property Management. Her 40-plus clients typically have a nice house, a couple of kids, two jobs, and a pet.

She writes a blog titled “Adventures in cleaning: How a recently divorced woman with a teen chooses to spend her time after finishing an Iowa State University degree and before deciding what to do with her life, while avoiding the poorhouse and putting some finesse into the service industry.”

Everything she does, she does with flair. Her Web site is spiffy (she designed it herself), her cleaning products are green, and she’s really, really good at detail cleaning.

And as for that baked-on gunk on the stove? Martin gives this advice for keeping your kitchen clean: “Don’t cook.”

GOING TO THE DOGS

After 12 years in an advertising agency, Sue McMurray Hummel had had enough.

At Iowa State, Hummel (’79) had wanted to study animal science or veterinary medicine, but tough science classes convinced her otherwise, and she opted for Plan B: advertising design.

But the cutthroat atmosphere of the agency never appealed to her.

Then one day, while taking her dog to the veterinarian, she had an epiphany.

“We were talking about how different the advertising world is from working with animals, and he said, ‘If you would ever be interested in a career change, let me know and we’ll talk,’” Hummel remembers.

It only took her one day to call him back. He trained her as a veterinary assistant, and she worked at the vet clinic for the next eight years.

In 1991, while she was working at the clinic, she got an idea. Several pet owners had asked for referrals for pet sitters to use while they were out of town. The Waterloo/Cedar Falls area didn’t have a pet-sitting business. So Hummel started her own company: Critter Care.

For four years, Hummel worked both jobs. But with a growing client list, she eventually left the veterinary clinic and ran Critter Care full time.

“I had no idea that a pet-sitting business would take off like that,” she said.

“It just went up and up and up.”

Nine years, 250 clients, and five part-time employees later, Hummel sold the business. It had gotten to the point, she said, that she was working seven days a week.

“I guess because I was so passionate about it, it just took over,” she said. “It’s morning, noon, and night. It’s working on Christmas.”

She sold Critter Care to another pet-sitting business, Dusk-to-Dawn. Today, Hummel sets her own schedule, working as a subcontractor for Dusk-to-Dawn and as a “free agent” pet sitter. She says it’s something she’ll continue to do for the rest of her life.

“I figure as long as I can walk and drive, I’ll keep doing it.”

A WORLD BLACK PERSPECTIVE

Port of Harlem was supposed to be a one-shot deal.
Wayne Young (’81 business management) helped create the publication to distribute at a black memorabilia show in Washington, D.C., in 1995.

Businesses bought ads, the publication made money, and the readers liked it. So they did it a second year. And then people asked, “Why don’t you do it more than once a year?”

So it went biannual.

And now Port of Harlem is published four times a year and is available at more than 175 locations in Washington, D.C., Harlem, N.Y., Gary, Ind., Jacksonville, Fla., and other cities. The publication has a circulation of 56,000 and a staff of 25.

Young, who holds the title of publisher, says Port of Harlem is a unique general-interest magazine because it “looks at things from a world black perspective.” The publication includes sections on food, health, history, money, fashion, travel, and the arts. The most popular department is “The Other Side,” written by a columnist
who is incarcerated for life.

Content is varied. “We did a story on places that black people traditionally don’t go, like Boise, Idaho,” Young said. Another story was about discrimination toward people who live together but aren’t married.

Young says the magazine has increased the level of tolerance for differences among the black community.
“Our whole point is about tolerance and about diversity,” he says.

One of his goals is to get readers involved in projects in The Gambia, a small country in Western Africa. Bord-ered by Senegal, The Gambia is the smallest country on mainland Africa.

Young travels to The Gambia nearly every year and describes himself – and the magazine – as “small philanthropists.” Readers sponsor schoolchildren, become pen-pals, donate books, sponsor a local soccer team, and involve themselves in the history and culture of the country.

To locate Port of Harlem distribution sites or to learn more about The Gambia programs, go to www.portofharlem.net.

Read on | Message to students: Dream big

About the writer | Carole Gieseke is the editor of VISIONS.