One day, Michael Sydlowski was walking through Ann Arbor with his wife and wandered into a boutique store. The couple happened upon an old wooden golf club that had been fashioned into a bottle opener.
"We looked at it and said this is perfect," Sydlowski says. "Then we looked at the price and said it’s not so perfect."
That inspired the sales and marketing professional to start his own business,
Another Rinse, four months ago. The Ann Arbor-based company specializes in taking old things and giving them new life as a refashioned product. In this case, it is turning old wooden golf clubs into bottle openers.
"Sadly, wooden golf clubs have been pushed to the corner of the garage or the resale shops or even the trash because technology has made them obsolete," Sydlowski says.
Now they are starting to collect in Sydlowski's basement where turns them into bottle openers and coat hooks. He is also working some of the same magic by turning old wooden tennis rackets and baseball bats into bottle openers and old golf balls into corkscrews. All of which are available on Another Rinse's
website.
"This is increasingly fun to do," Sydlowski says.
Sales for
Another Rinse's products have steadily increased since its launch. Sydlowski is currently working to get licensed to make his products with logos from the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. He hopes to get
Another Rinse on more store shelves in 2014 and move the business out of his basement into its own space later this year.
Source: Michael Sydlowski, president of Another Rinse
Writer: Jon Zemke
Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.
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