Ben Cantey had never really planned to move back to Cincinnati. But the Covid-19 pandemic significantly shifted the course for the Springfield Township native.
Systemwide shutdowns were the sole factor behind his move home from Los Angeles, one only meant to be temporary. He initially rented an Airbnb downtown for three months — that was more than a dozen months ago.
“Los Angeles probably shut down harder than any other city outside of San Francisco and New York. The beaches were closed, the parks were closed, there was nothing to do,” Cantey said. “I have nieces and nephews here, four siblings and parents here. I thought we could be our own pod unit. Three months turned into a couple more months. I met a woman and it became a little longer and more permanent.”
Cantey is one of a handful of boomerangs — or in this case startup entrepreneurs who have returned to their hometowns — now building businesses here. The move means Rumby, his tech startup that launched in January 2020, counts the Queen City as headquarters, too.
Rumby’s e-commerce platform takes dry cleaners and laundrymats online — one the last brick-and-mortar verticals to be disrupted by all things digital, Cantey said.
The platform allows customers to check out online, and pairs with Uber, Door Dash and Postmates to offer on-demand or scheduled pickup and delivery. The platform is white-labeled, so it’s branded to each cleaner, and Cantey said the model organically generates traffic and orders.
The concept is growing quickly. Rumby has more than 500 customers across the U.S, including two of the country’s largest franchisees, Maryland-based Zips Dry Cleaners and Chicago’s CD One Price. The company generates revenue by taking a small percentage of every order it processes.
“The future is pickup and delivery, and there’s all kinds of applications for this, from hotels to residential and commercial buildings to gyms and country clubs,” Cantey said. “There are some competitors, and there are quite few startups in the laundry and dry cleaning graveyard, when (companies) made a push to Uberize everything, but our approach is different. It’s a lot like what Square did for farmers markets when they could finally take credit cards at each booth.”
Rumby has raised a small amount of capital to date, including a $1.25 million seed round from Chicago’s M25 to scale its development team. While Rumby’s employees are largely distributed, Cantey is intentional about hiring here. He said Rumby will likely soon outgrow its space at Over-the-Rhine’s Union Hall.
“There’s a lot of excitement and new stuff happening, and there’s some really great tech talent here. It will be nice to put another company on the map here in Cincinnati, to log another success story for the city,” he said
Out of the box
When Jake Whitman, a P&G alumnus, moved back to Cincinnati following a four-year stint in the San Francisco Bay Area, his goal was to buy a local business in town to run, he said.
In the back of his mind, however, lived a lingering question: "Why doesn’t better boxed wine exist?” Covid, in short order, dramatically shifted how consumers shop for and consume wine, and seeing a big business opportunity, he launched Really Good Boxed Wine, a direct-to-consumer wine brand, in August.
The irony that Whitman left the Bay area — aka wine country — to launch a wine company in Ohio is not lost on him. But there’s confidence in the decision, he said.
“I’ve thought about it a lot. Would I have been better off starting this business out there?” he told me. “But I feel I’m in a better position for success with the support network here. I’m always hearing, ‘What can I do to help?’ ‘How can I support you?’ ‘How can I help make this vision, this idea in your mind, a success?’ That is not always the case in the Bay.”
Boxed wine has several major benefits versus traditional bottled wine, he said. It stays fresh up to six weeks after opening and packaging costs are 85% less — meaning Really Good Boxed Wine can sell superior wine at a fraction of the cost.
Its launch included a few hundred boxes in Ohio, which sold out in five days, Whitman said. Really Good Boxed Wine is planning a national launch in mid-November, just in time for the holidays.
Its wait list includes consumers from more than 33 states and three countries.
"Things are definitely rolling,” he said. “It's getting exciting.”
Podcast platform takes off
Mike Kadin, co-founder and CEO of podcasting startup RedCircle, isn’t a boomerang by definition — he grew up in New Jersey — but he and his wife landed in Cincinnati in October 2020, fed up in large part with the cost of living in San Francisco.
Founders, Kadin jokes, often don’t pay themselves very well.
Since the move, RedCircle, which offers a podcast platform for independent creators, allowing for distribution, cross-promotion, dynamic audio insertion, listener payments and automated advertising, has raised a $6 million Series A, co-led by Cincinnati-based Refinery Ventures.
Kadin, formerly engineer No. 40 at Uber, is looking to hire software engineers, project managers, designers and more in the region.
He’s also working on making more inroads with the local ecosystem, especially given that Cincinnati serves as headquarters for giants like Procter & Gamble and Kroger. RedCircle works a lot with CPG, or consumer packaged goods, and DTC, or direct-to-consumer, brands looking to do podcast advertising, he said.
“There are so many cool companies building in Cincinnati (and) there’s some really interesting talent here for us to tap into,” Kadin said.
