| âI havenât had a âreal jobâ since I was 18 or 19. Iâve always been working different businesses, trying to figure out my path,â said Josh Dzime-Assison, CMO of the reselling platform Vendoo and self-described born entrepreneur. But even his earliest endeavors signaled the approach to marketing that has informed his career ever since and that underpins Vendooâs marketing blueprint: Grow real relationships organically, and stay focused and agile. Finding his niche in 2007, Dzime-Assison (pronounced âgeeMASSissonâ) parlayed a passion for shoes and vintage streetwear into a brick-and-mortar sneaker store and online reselling business. But he quickly ran into the pain points every successful reseller faces: visibility, inefficiency, and inventory management. A chance meeting with Thomas Rivas, Vendooâs founder and CEO, changed everything for the fellow fashionistas and the companyâs other two founders, CTO Chris Amador and COO Ben Martinez. Vendooâs value proposition is to address these issues by allowing users to simultaneously post items on multiple reseller sites and by automating inventory management. Problem not solved. âBeing inexperienced, and being minorities in the space, we often werenât taken seriously when approaching financial institutions,â Dzime-Assison said. He described meetings in which bankers expressed skepticism about their intentions and their funding sources. âWe heard a lot of things that I donât know other people experience getting into this,â he said. So Dzime-Assison tapped his own network and found the companyâs ideal investor, a colleague in the footwear business in the Baltimore area, who gave the startup a cash infusion of $400,000. With an âexcited and anxious waiting list of users,â Dzime-Assison said, Vendoo launched on January 20, 2020, and had brought in $30,000 by the end of the month. Read more here. | 