Why One Man Came Out of Retirement to Start a Custom T-Shirt Franchise
The most inventive franchises can have unexpected starts.
In 2004, Leeward Bean was happily retired. He’d helped build a scientific instrument company, Ocean Optics, and sold it for $50 million. But when a pair of former employees, Christina Bacon and Ron DeFrece, pitched him on an online novelty shop called Uniquely Geek, the science nerd couldn’t resist: He agreed to give them seed funding and advice. And soon enough, this little side project would
