Entrepreneur Joel Appel, '87, former president and CEO of Orange Glo International, Inc., will meet with students of the Claremont Entrepreneurship Society at on Tuesday, Nov. 6 to discuss how he took his family's mom and pop line of natural cleaners to Wall Street. The event, which will be held in the Parent's Room at the Athenaeum, begins with a 5:30 p.m. reception, followed by dinner at 6, and address at 7 p.m.
The event is open to all 5C students and alumni.
Appel, who was featured in the 2001 summer issue of CMC (http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/news/cmcmagazine/2001summer/orangeglo/), helped his parents turn a fledgling business selling household cleaning products from their garage into a business generating more than $100 million in revenue within his first eight years at the helm. The line, Orange Glo International, Inc., grew to include Oxi Clean and Kaboom household cleaning products and covered several European and Asian countries before it was sold to Church & Dwight (NYSE: CHD) for $325 million in 2006.
Appel, who grew up in Denver, earned his bachelor's degree in economics from CMC before landing a job at the end of his senior year with the Quaker Oats Company. While at Quaker, where he honed his marketing and general business skills, Appel enrolled in evening classes at Northwestern University's School of Business to earn a master's degree. After graduating, he flew home to Denver with a business proposition for his parents: "I told them I'd like to take Orange Glo into stores, and put it on TV, and get national customers," Appel recalls. "But I wanted to start a new company together that I would own half of. I didn't want to just join the business. I didn't want any piece of what they had already created. I wanted to start on something new."
Appel, who resides in Colorado, currently is focusing his entrepreneurial efforts on a couple of new consumer businesses and assists other entrepreneurs.
For more information about this event, contact: Josh Walter in the Office of Alumni Relations, 909-621-8978, or Patrick Shim '04 at 310-927-7410.