Brian Millman (left) and Tyler Kupper have created a thriving business delivering Christmas trees with all the trimmings.
“We realized there was a niche.”
Tyler Kupper, 27, and Brian Millman, 28, co-founders of the NYC Christmas-tree delivery service Tyler’s Trees.
In brief: In 2008 the friends saw a disgruntled New Yorker dragging his Christmas tree home through a packed city street. They were both working in entry-level sports marketing jobs and looking for extra income – and thought there had to be a better solution. “We [reasoned] there were hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who didn’t want to be doing what this person was doing,” says Kupper, a University of Delaware grad who lives on the Upper East Side.
So the duo decided to advertise their services on Craigslist, offering to pick up trees in Kupper’s native Connecticut, deliver, mount and remove them for one inclusive price.
Today, Typer’s Trees is projecting roughly $200,000 in revenue from the estimated 800 trees they’ll sell… To keep up with the growing business, Kupper and Millman have hired a full-time operations manager to oversee day-to-day business so they can continue their full-time sports-industry jobs. Things are going so well, the duo is even considering expanding to Chicago, Boston and Washington, D.C. (Read the story here.)
