About the business: Little Burros produces the Little Burro and Burro Buddy, both of which are meant to simplify and organize the gardening experience. The products — sourced with American materials and produced in an Ohio factory — will soon land on the shelves of some 2,500 Lowe’s Home Improvement and Walmart stores, after years of largely online sales, in addition to a select few brick-and-mortar outlets.
How it started: Mollie Thorsen, the Alexandria company’s chief operating officer, has probably told this story a million times — in pitches to big-box retailers, on “Shark Tank,” to the press. In 2013, while doing yard work, her mother accidentally raked her cell phone into a lawn bag. Why was it on the ground in the first place? There was no place to keep it.
Bob Thorsen of Alexandria’s Thorsen Construction, Mollie's father, heard this and went to work. "Bob the Builder," as they call him, fashioned a tray out of cardboard and duct tape to sit on his wife’s wheelbarrow.
A business was born.
“We thought, 'Mom can’t be the only one who needs this,'” Mollie said. “We can make it.”
A recent college graduate, Mollie took on the challenge of running Little Burros with her sister Becca, its CFO at the time. The family bootstrapped the business, investing upward of $1 million in the product's development. The first Little Burro came off the line in 2015, with the Burro Buddy arriving in 2019. Both offer space for tools, a drink and a waterproof compartment for a phone. The difference between the two: the smaller Burro Buddy provides the user full access to the cavity of the wheelbarrow.
The pandemic effect: Little Burros was set to launch in Sam’s Club stores in late March 2020, but the pandemic scuttled that deal. The company was fortunate, Mollie said, for “Shark Tank,” which she had filmed with her dad the summer before — the episode aired May 1, 2020, sending online sales soaring 500% despite no deal with the sharks. She declined to discuss revenue or total units sold.
The key was meeting demand. As the pandemic strangled the supply chain, many businesses couldn’t keep up. And if they couldn’t fulfill orders, interest would quickly wane, Mollie said.
“We were so thrilled to be made in U.S.,” she said. “We were really really grateful that our factory can produce pretty much whenever we call them.”
The challenge today: For online orders, the Little Burro and Burro Buddy are transported from the factory already boxed and ready to ship to customers, minus labels. Little Burros maintains the bulk of its inventory in a Winchester warehouse. As needed, the items are retrieved and moved to an Alexandria warehouse the company shares with Thorsen Construction. There, the boxes are labeled and shipped.
Despite the company’s growth, Mollie is still largely doing that work on her own, as one of only two Little Burros employees.
“We’re pretty overloaded,” she said.
So the company is in the market for a third-party fulfillment center to manage and ship orders, while Mollie is looking to hire some help, especially in, say, marketing. She’s still writes her own press releases.
What’s next: Getting the Little Burro on big-box shelves wasn’t a “Shark Tank” miracle. It was the result of hard work and persistence. Their first buyer’s meeting with Walmart was June 28, 2016. Their first meeting with Lowe’s was just four months later. Many meetings followed before the literal golden ticket — Walmart awards those to businesses that secure shelf space — was in hand.
It doesn’t end with these two.
“As we’re launching, we’re definitely working on other distribution channels,” Mollie said. And the future may hold new "quality, helpful, innovative" products, as well, she said, at which point Little Burros may look to raise funds.
The growth benefits more than Little Burros. A portion of the proceeds from every product sold is donated to A21, a global nonprofit dedicated to fighting human trafficking. It was a personal cause of Becca’s, who died less than three weeks after that first meeting with Lowe’s in 2016.
“It’s an honor,” Mollie said, “to get a product that we worked on together into the stores.”