Bootstrapper brings social conscience to entrepreneurship (Part 1)

Filed in archive Bootstrapper Profile on October 16, 2006

After 16 years in sales, Shelli Styles, Bath, OH, was happy with a
rewarding career and wasn't looking to start a new business.

However, when Styles discovered a way to help her husband's poverty stricken relatives in South America with a product that was already winning over potential customers, she jumped at the opportunity.

"We were trying to catch up with a freight train that was already moving," Styles said.

Styles and her husband of six years, Octavio Gaviria, a stone mason by trade, used $20,000 in savings to launch Strappity-do-da, a company run from the couple's Ohio home selling handmade beaded adjustable bra straps.

The bra straps, as it turns out, are very special.

The prototype for the decorative fashion piece had been developed in just half an hour by Styles' sister-in-law Janeth Gaviria Sanchez and is now being replicated in a variety of styles by women in her husband's impoverished hometown.

CONTINUED NEXT POST