When Mankato entrepreneur Kate Hansen tried to find the perfect shirts to mark a hiking adventure to the Porcupine Mountains of Michigan, the uninspiring selection managed only to inspire her to design some herself.
Recognizing a business opportunity, she started planning an online store she decided to call Cabin No. 4. Then the coronavirus pandemic erupted.
The blank T-shirts she had ordered had yet to arrive and could be shipped back at no charge. It wasn't too late to put everything on hold.
It was just a couple of thousand dollars of inventory, she explained last week, but she was a self-funded entrepreneur and who would want to buy a $25, fun T-shirt in a pandemic? Then her husband pointed out that boxed T-shirts on a shelf don't spoil. "So I kept going," she said.
Cabin No. 4 sold its 500th shirt the weekend of Thanksgiving. Hansen's new business makes money and her biggest problem now might be getting enough high-quality T-shirt blanks from her supplier to restock the store.
This is an inspiring story of launching a promising new business in a year that's been routinely described as having the worst economy since the Great Depression. But as it turned out it's not that rare of a story.
New business formation was up by a lot last year. The country hadn't seen anything like it since before the Great Recession of the late 2000s, based on closely watched U.S. tax data. It's one of the most hopeful things to come out of a very challenging year.
Launching a new business in a recession is a little like planting an oak tree in a drought, so there's usually no rush to start up in a down economy. But by now it's clear that what's happened in the last year is anything but a normal recession.