Cynthia Wylie

  Cynthia Wylie is a hard-driving entrepreneur with a successful track record. She was raised on a farm which taught her the habit of hard work from an early age. Her recent startup, Bloomers Island has become the standard bearer brand for children to live healthier lives and make healthier food choices as well as inspire in them a love of gardening and nature. She has received two patents on her seed starters, SeedPops which have been sold in over 5,000 stores in North America including Target, Nordstrom and Costco Canada. The first five books of her nine-book series have been published with Rodale Kids, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Previous companies where she was a partner/co-founder include X-Large Clothing, the seminal streetwear brand, and Maui Toys, the activity toy company recently sold to Jakks Pacific. In addition to starting and selling companies, Ms. Wylie does business consulting with The Project Consultant. She focuses on raising money, turnaround actions, and strategic and tactical planning in operations for small manufacturers. She is a founding member of the Startup Founds Group in Silicon Beach, a group designed to process issues and problems that all startups inevitably face. She started her career in Investment Banking writing private placement memorandums and developed an expertise in helping companies to raise money, including over $1 million in seed capital for her latest company. Her B.S. degree is in agriculture from Pennsylvania State University and she has an M.A. in economics from Georgetown University in Washington D.C. She is the part-owner of her family farm in Western Pennsylvania. She raised four children and loves writing, reading, learning foreign languages, and growing plants and companies.

   



12 Stories by Cynthia Wylie

So, What Business Are You Really In?

What is McDonald’s business? Some might say, the fast food business, or more broadly, the restaurant business. But what many people don’t realize is...
4 min read

Why Your Cost of Goods Sold is So Very Important

Many companies don’t really understand what a cost of goods sold is and don’t calculate it correctly. I’m going to tell you why that’s...
4 min read 154

Fiscal Policy v. Monetary Policy

If you want to understand taxes, inflation, spending and interest rates, you should know the difference between fiscal policy and monetary policy and the...
4 min read 132

How Do Bonds Work?

A friend of mine moved her 401K stocks into bonds at the end of last year because she thought a revolution was coming. While...
3 min read 174

#1 Thing I Need to See in a Startup— from a Venture Capitalist

– What do you need to see in a company before you’ll invest? – What is the main reason startups fail? I’m not a...
1 min read

Selling encyclopedias door-to-door taught me 5 crucial facts about selling

Let’s start with a caveat emptor. I hesitated writing about this subject because so many have made their life’s work researching and writing about...
5 min read 434

Amazon’s fundamental weakness that Bezos can turn into a strength

As brick & mortar retailers file bankruptcy, the plight of small manufacturers becomes much more perilous. They won’t be able to survive selling on...
6 min read 136

Relationship banking – Advice from an ex-banker

I used to be a bank executive. Ever since then I have always maintained solid relationships with my banks, the ones I use today....
5 min read 145

Do This With Your Kids Before You Jump On Your Next Zoom Call

In this age of a pandemic with working from home and schooling from home and daycare from home, and cleaning our homes, not to...
3 min read 103

Is There a Correlation Between Tax Cuts and Tax Revenues?

The other day on a Facebook thread, I was trying in vain to make the point with a group of recently retired pilots that...
3 min read 169

A Policy Shift that Takes From the Poor and Gives to the Rich

I remember when I was working on my PhD in economics at Georgetown, one of my classmates actually called Paul Volcker and he just...
53 sec read 159

What would Honest Abe do now?

“The time is ripe, and rotten-ripe, for change; then let it come.” ~ James Russell Lowell During the time I was a postgraduate student at...
6 min read 211

Follow DDI

Gain Access to Expert Views

We won't send you spam. Unsubscribe at any time.