Many humans hate tidying up. Aaron Krause isn't among them.
"It's nice to start with a big stack of dirty dishes, and then everything is clean after," he says. "A sense of accomplishment in a short time."
Not coincidentally, Krause is the founder of Scrub Daddy, which sells smiley-face sponges and cleaning wands that stiffen in cold water and soften under steamier temperatures. He's also a classic case of an accidental entrepreneur whose story may well serve as inspiration for aspiring founders, or at the very least, a reminder to spruce up your office.
When Krause discovered the sponge that would eventually become Scrub Daddy, the round perma-grin cleansing sponge that's notched $170 million in total sales across 40,000 U.S. markets, he was the CEO of another company he'd founded called Dedication to Detail. He led the Folcroft, Pennsylvania-based manufacturer of paint finishing systems, which included buffing and polishing pads, from 1992 to 2008. It was Krause's dirty work on this company factory's machinery that would eventually give rise to Scrub Daddy.
As any mechanic knows, fixing heavy-duty machinery can leave an oily film on your hands that can be painful to remove. Industrial soaps, says Krause, felt like "lotions with rocks" and didn't get the job done. A company based in Germany eventually supplied him with a buffing pad that could scrape off grease without grating the skin off his hands. He created a line of sponges in 2006 for people with similar problems, like mechanics and body-shop owners, but the product never took off.