For Jaspreet Singh, business is just plain fun.
The second-year student at Wayne State University Law School is getting a lot of media attention for a company, 5 Water Socks, he started recently, but he's got other ventures in the works, as well.
When Singh has an inspiration, he automatically starts considering how to turn it into a business. It's just how his brain is wired.
Take the sock company. The inspiration came when Singh was taking a class on public speaking at the University of Michigan, where he earned his bachelor's degree in neuroscience. He was running late and was unprepared for the assignment, which was to pitch some sort of product. As he dashed through a puddle on his way to class, his feet got soaked. Brainstorm! He stood before his classmates and ad-libbed his way through a pitch for water-resistant socks.
He decided those socks really were a good idea and began to do some research in his spare time. He already had his own real estate business, Singh Co. LLC, and was a full-time student, too. The sock research was intensive and fun for him. At first, the search engine on his computer got a good workout.
"I had no background in apparel, textiles or anything like that," Singh said. He went to a fabric store to see what was out there. "That didn't work too well," he said.
"I started calling around different places. I ended up with a fabric manufacturer in Seattle. They had a lot of waterproof fleeces. I took those fleeces and worked with a place in Hillsdale to make socks. That didn't work too well.
"I had to learn how socks were made. I started talking with sock mills. Socks are made from yarn, not fabric. I had to find a way to make the yarn itself repel water. I spoke with a lot of textile engineers and finally partnered with one, and we fused hydrophobic nanoparticles with natural fibers. Those fibers were then spun into yarn."
With a product he thought could be manufactured and sold to a lot of people, Singh needed capital to get the business going. He turned to crowd-funding online via Kickstarter. He ended up with more than $20,000 in donations but not solely by luck.
"I spent months and months doing promotions and getting many subscribers excited about our launch," Singh said. "I had early bird discounts. It was my first time launching a product-based business, and I really had no idea how much people would pay for socks. We ended up hitting $10,000 in two days."
Early on in the process, he hit a snag on the way to sock-making success. Naturally, he is turning that snag into another business.
"I was scammed during the crowd-funding by a marketing company out of California," Singh said. "They had a money-back guarantee, and it sounded good. I gave them my marketing funds, and they stopped picking up my phone calls and ignored my emails. I found out I was scammed.
"So, I have created a course to help people find out how to do marketing without hiring someone. I launched it in August and already have over 1,000 students enrolled."
The course website, www.udemy.com/crowdfunding101, can be linked to through 5 Water Socks' website, www.5watersocks.com, where you can also order those water-resistant socks.
Singh calls the course "How I Blew Past My Crowdfunding Goal with Kickstarter," and it features more than 40 short lectures for $245. But the first 500 people reading this to enter his coupon code, wsuDetroitPunjab, will get the course free of charge.
Somewhere in the process of creating the course, Singh, who is a full-time law student and works as a real estate agent, had another inspiration. He has created an organization called The Minority Mindset (www.theminoritymindset.com), which he calls "a community of hustlers and entrepreneurs who want more than just a 'job' because being average sucks."
Through Minority Mindset, Singh, 24, hopes to inspire other young minority entrepreneurs. "A lot of young entrepreneurs have come to me," he said." I like talking to people and giving them whatever I know. I'm building this community through social media."
Meanwhile, he's contracted with a sock mill in North Carolina to make the water-resistant socks, which have the patent-pending RainArmor technology created by a textile engineer at Singh's behest. The socks, which sell for $22 a pair, are soft and machine-washable and have special appeal for runners and hikers, according to the website.
"I found very few manufacturers in the Midwest for this," Singh said. "I found one in Michigan, but they kind of shut the doors on me, but I would love to bring the manufacturing to Detroit at some point. Right now, that's capital-intensive."
He loves Detroit and chose Wayne Law for law school to be in the heart of the city, where he now lives.
"I feel like I fit in Detroit, where things are emerging," Singh said.
He was born in the United States and grew up in a traditional Indian household with his parents and grandparents in Canton and then Northville, and Punjabi was his first language. His grandparents, in particular, instilled their history and culture and Sikh religion in him, and he visits extended family in Punjab, India, every year.
"It's so much like Detroit with its socio-economic issues," Singh said. "It's very close to my heart, and I feel like it's my job to raise awareness about it."
With that goal in mind, he named his business 5 Water Socks after the five rivers of Punjab and Michigan's proximity to the five Great Lakes.
How does he manage all this?
"I don't sleep too much," Singh said, laughing. "I don't watch TV. I don't like to waste time. I enjoy doing these types of things. For me, it's fun. I have a lot of ideas in my head."
Published: Tue, Oct 06, 2015
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