She started to build Headbands of Hope — which gives a headband to a child with cancer for every item it sells — while she was in college. She leveraged school assignments to focus on her business.
For years, she said, "I tried to hide it as a completely separate part of my life. I didn't want to be associated with someone who could do something like this." But just this month, Ekstrom has started talking about the experience for the first time with the November release of her new book, "," which devotes a chapter to her story.
After discovering eBay in middle school, the then-preteen hung a white sheet in her room as a backdrop and photographed her toys with her mom's digital camera to upload them to eBay. By the time Ekstein was in college at North Carolina State University, while she admitted that she didn't have stellar grades, she did have a sense of confidence that she too could be a problem solver.
She described the role that college played in her startup as "more of a springboard for my business, not a barrier." "I needed $10,000 to start the first round of production," she explained. "This was a problem because I had about $500 in my bank account at the time and was still on the college ramen noodle diet."
She identified a turning point for the company's ultimate financial success as a simple outreach effort she made after seeing an article in Fitness Magazine in August 2012, while still in college.