SkinIt Founder Driving New Automotive Trend

In 2003, Tom Stemple had the sort of struck-by-lightning moment every entrepreneur dreams about--on steroids. Stemple's brother had taken his wife's cell phone to work by mistake--a mistake that was temporarily costing him his sanity. Drowning in a sea of drab black and silver cell phones hardly distinguishable from one another, Stemple decided there had to be a better way to personalize them. Others had tried with stickers and decals, but no one had Stemple's high-tech background and computer-aided design skills. So within a month of that chance phone swap, he and his brothers had bought a $50,000 printer and were designing vinyl skins cut specifically to fit certain cell phone models. The SkinIt website launched in November of 2003 and received more than 200 orders the first day. Within a year, the company was moving into a bigger space every three months and opened a second office in the United States as well as offices in Paris, New Zealand and Canada.

"It was like a rocket ship, so we held on and rode it," Stemple says.

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