I literally started Klipped Kippahs with $1,000 and credit cards. I was a student in college with a family when I started out, so I didn’t have the capital to start operating a business. It’s a really underrated difference, and a lot of times without a lot of money it can be hard to be able to give a business the fuel it needs to try new things and grow. The first lesson I learned is that there is a big difference between a good idea and a successful business. I even bought a “How to Apply for Your First Patent” book, it was definitely an aha time for me.Ĭan you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard? And just like that, I was in the yarmulke business. Once the state approved the concept, we took 25 of those samples and sent them to Jewish schools all over the country. The boys liked it, so I decided to send samples to the Florida High School Athletic Association in Tallahassee. I ended up creating a sample and gave it to the boys to use during practice. I had seen wig clips before, and I thought of this idea to sew wig clips into yarmulkes. One year, our application letter got rejected and their reasoning was that the yarmulke clips could be dangerous during the sport. Eventually I also became the athletic director of the school, and every year we had to apply for a certain letter from the state that allowed to boys to wear their yarmulkes during the games. When I was in architectural school, I was coaching a boys varsity basketball team in for a Jewish Orthodox school in Boca Raton and they would play with their yarmulkes on. I’m an architect by training and also a big basketball junkie in my free time. What was the “Aha Moment” that led to the idea for your current company? Can you share that story with us? Now it is somewhat expected in the custom e-commerce realm for consumers to be able to come onto your website and be able to create their designs. Our customers were able to go online and satisfy 85% of their needs straight from the website which was pretty cool to see that work. At the time, there was nothing else like it in our industry. A lot of our products are custom, so seven years ago before third-party platforms for customization were easily accessible, we built a system from the ground up where users could design yarmulkes and see what their creations would look like directly on the site. My business model wasn’t designed to be on the web at first, but it became part of the strategy after the fact. I didn’t initially start out as an e-commerce business per say, I came up with a product and then I started to sell it online. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started? Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Currently, in addition to the Klipped Kippahs, they also manufacture apparel, including management and fulfillment for the Olympic Israeli Baseball Team looking to participate as one of six teams in the upcoming Tokyo games. Today, Jon holds four national and international patents, manufactures the patented yarmulkes with licensed MLB and NBA logos and leveraged this single item into a general custom event production company. Klipped Kippahs are sold all over the world, both in bulk for custom orders and in retail quantities. In addition to sports, Klipped Kippahs can be worn whenever a regular yarmulke is required, as a convenient and aesthetically appealing replacement to your yarmulke and clips. In addition to being used with great success by his team at then Weinbaum Yeshiva High School in Boca Raton (Now Katz Yeshiva High School), over 400 schools nationwide now enjoy the many benefits of Klipped Kippahs as well. Klipped Kippahs was born as a solution to this problem. Before it became a major media issue, Jon invented a yarmulke with clips built inside. One season, the Florida High School Athletic Association decided that the boys could not use standard metal clips or bobby pins to keep their yarmulkes on their heads while they played, as was required for safety reasons by school policy. Jon Kaweblum is an architect by training and while studying for his architecture degree, he coached a boys’ varsity basketball team coach at a Jewish day school in Florida. As part of my series about the “5 Things You Need To Know To Create A Highly Successful E-Commerce Business”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jonathan Kaweblum.
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