Busy bee catches deal with honey
A 10-year-old Texas entrepreneur, passionate about bees and her lemonade, secured funding from one of the investors of TV’s Shark Tank.
Mikaila Ulmer, of Austin, makes lemonade using her great-grandmother’s recipe, which calls for flax seed. She won’t reveal how that fits into the recipe, calling it “a trade secret,” but she also uses local honey in her Bee Sweet Lemonade.
“Saving the bees is something I have a passion for; it needs to be done,” she said in her corporate video.
Mikaila started a lemonade stand when she was just 4 years old, and “loved it.” As she grew, so did her ambitions.
“One day I was like, ‘I don’t just want to sell this out of my lemonade stand, I actually want to put it on stores and shelves.’ I remember saying that. And we made that happen,” she said.
A busy bee, she got her lemonade into Whole Foods stores in Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas. But stocking more shelves meant Mikaila needed more money to ramp up production. She went on ABC’s Shark
Tank to do just that. She still remembers her pitch for the show that just aired in March. “It just keeps going over and over,” she said. “It’s still in my head. I can’t get it out.”
Daymond John, one of the show’s “sharks,” drank it up.
“She’s like a ball of cotton candy,” John said. “She is just so cute.”
He agreed to invest $60,000 for 25% of her company, under the condition that he finds a distributor who can get them into more stores nationwide. John explained why he made the deal.
“She knew the business and knew where she wanted to go,” he said. “That’s my youngest entrepreneur partner.” Mikaila said, “I am so excited to see what will happen next.”
She and John have met a couple of times since, but they haven’t yet secured that distributor. Because of that, it’s too early to tell how the deal will turn out. Having a shark on board doesn’t guarantee success.
“This is an area I don’t know,” John said. “I think it can be something; but I’m not dumb enough to think I know everything.” John actually thinks he might learn a lot from his 10year-old partner. He said she has “fresh eyes.”