Prototype: A Second Wind From an Injured Knee

Mr. Gustafson is one of a growing number of baby boomers starting businesses later in life — though that was not his original plan. Initially, he worked as a ski instructor. But he found that degenerative arthritis and the wear-and-tear of his rigorous skiing schedule were exacerbating an injury he had sustained several years earlier after falling from a ladder.

Mr. Gustafson sought treatment at the Steadman Clinic, an orthopedic surgery center based in Vail, eventually undergoing five knee surgeries. To continue to teach skiing, he was told, he would need to wear a hard, cumbersome knee brace every time he hit the slopes.

As he grew accustomed to the brace, he began to wonder whether people with less vulnerable joints than his might benefit from a more pliable and comfortable form of knee support — perhaps a pair of tights. To explore this possibility, he turned to a group of biomechanical experts at the Steadman Philippon Research Institute, a branch of the Steadman Clinic.

Coincidentally, the researchers had been contemplating something similar, and they began drawing sketches of nylon and spandex tights embedded with bands of rigid fabric to protect the knees by restoring them to their natural alignment.

Mr. Gustafson and scientists from the institute struck up an unusual agreement: They would develop the tights together, and if the product reached the marketplace, the institute would receive royalties to be applied to future research projects or the hiring of scientists. Within two years, Mr. Gustafson started a company he eventually called Opedix and began selling the biomechanically engineered tights online.

His decision to start a business in his late 50s is far from unusual. A report this year by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation found that late-in-life entrepreneurs — ages 55 to 64 — now comprise 23 percent of new business owners, up from 14 percent in 1996. And the results of a survey released this month by the Pew Research Center showed that baby boomers were less likely to say that job security was “extremely important” to them compared with two younger groups: millennials and members of Generation X — suggesting an inclination toward entrepreneurship.

The trend is partly rooted in a quest for personal fulfillment, says Stewart Friedman, director of the Work/Life Integration Project at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. “Among boomers, of which I am one, our whole early life in the ’60s and ’70s was about self-actualization,” Mr. Friedman says, adding that many in his generation are finally now revisiting career aspirations that they abandoned years ago.

Age and experience, however, aren’t always considered assets in wider entrepreneurial circles, says Elizabeth Isele, founder of Senior Entrepreneurship Works, which runs entrepreneurship training courses for those over 50. She says that many lenders are skeptical of older people’s ability to repay loans and that the biggest challenge for this age group is access to capital.

“Part of that is because people haven’t heard of senior entrepreneurship,” she says.

So far, Mr. Gustafson has self-funded his venture along with his brother, David, who serves as president. But even for older entrepreneurs investing their own money in start-ups, the financial risks of a new venture can be daunting.

Opedix faces several challenges, including the fact that it is competing in a crowded field. “There’s a long history of companies trying to come up with technologies to restore normal function to an injured joint or prevent injury to a joint that’s at risk,” says Bruce Beynnon, director of research at the department of orthopedics and rehabilitation at the University of Vermont’s College of Medicine.

Opedix has struggled to differentiate itself from another type of garment that’s popular with runners and looks very similar: compression tights. What sets Opedix tights apart, Mr. Gustafson says, are the bands of stiff fabric that descend down the leg from the hips, wrap around the knees and extend to the ankles.

The added complexity confers a higher price: Opedix tights sell for $225 a pair, usually twice the price of compression tights. But to the uneducated eye, the two tights are virtually indistinguishable, which can confuse shoppers. (Earlier this year, Opedix also began selling shorts designed to restore the pelvis’s natural alignment; they cost $165.)

One of Mr. Gustafson’s strategies for educating potential customers is to put the tights in the hands of physical therapists, trainers, sports instructors and professional athletes who are likely to understand the banding technology — and, he hopes, to spread the word. 

Mr. Gustafson sees an advantage in making a product geared toward the boomer population. The tights could hold wide appeal for the many members of this generation who have benefited from medical advances and plan to stay active into their 70s and 80s. By 2017, the over-50 set will control 70 percent of the disposable income in the United States and is expected to comprise about half of the population, according to data compiled by Nielsen.

Mr. Gustafson says he believes the experience and skills he cultivated in his earlier career, which included tenures at two start-ups, have been a plus in his work at Opedix. For instance, he knew how laborious it would be to develop and test a new product, and he understood the benefits of working in a field he liked.

“I love the ski business,” he says. “It’s a whole lot more exciting and interesting than office equipment, I’ll tell you.”

Prototype: A Second Wind From an Injured Knee

Mr. Gustafson is one of a growing number of baby boomers starting businesses later in life — though that was not his original plan. Initially, he worked as a ski instructor. But he found that degenerative arthritis and the wear-and-tear of his rigorous skiing schedule were exacerbating an injury he had sustained several years earlier after falling from a ladder.

Mr. Gustafson sought treatment at the Steadman Clinic, an orthopedic surgery center based in Vail, eventually undergoing five knee surgeries. To continue to teach skiing, he was told, he would need to wear a hard, cumbersome knee brace every time he hit the slopes.

As he grew accustomed to the brace, he began to wonder whether people with less vulnerable joints than his might benefit from a more pliable and comfortable form of knee support — perhaps a pair of tights. To explore this possibility, he turned to a group of biomechanical experts at the Steadman Philippon Research Institute, a branch of the Steadman Clinic.

Coincidentally, the researchers had been contemplating something similar, and they began drawing sketches of nylon and spandex tights embedded with bands of rigid fabric to protect the knees by restoring them to their natural alignment.

Mr. Gustafson and scientists from the institute struck up an unusual agreement: They would develop the tights together, and if the product reached the marketplace, the institute would receive royalties to be applied to future research projects or the hiring of scientists. Within two years, Mr. Gustafson started a company he eventually called Opedix and began selling the biomechanically engineered tights online.

His decision to start a business in his late 50s is far from unusual. A report this year by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation found that late-in-life entrepreneurs — ages 55 to 64 — now comprise 23 percent of new business owners, up from 14 percent in 1996. And the results of a survey released this month by the Pew Research Center showed that baby boomers were less likely to say that job security was “extremely important” to them compared with two younger groups: millennials and members of Generation X — suggesting an inclination toward entrepreneurship.

The trend is partly rooted in a quest for personal fulfillment, says Stewart Friedman, director of the Work/Life Integration Project at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. “Among boomers, of which I am one, our whole early life in the ’60s and ’70s was about self-actualization,” Mr. Friedman says, adding that many in his generation are finally now revisiting career aspirations that they abandoned years ago.

Age and experience, however, aren’t always considered assets in wider entrepreneurial circles, says Elizabeth Isele, founder of Senior Entrepreneurship Works, which runs entrepreneurship training courses for those over 50. She says that many lenders are skeptical of older people’s ability to repay loans and that the biggest challenge for this age group is access to capital.

“Part of that is because people haven’t heard of senior entrepreneurship,” she says.

So far, Mr. Gustafson has self-funded his venture along with his brother, David, who serves as president. But even for older entrepreneurs investing their own money in start-ups, the financial risks of a new venture can be daunting.

Opedix faces several challenges, including the fact that it is competing in a crowded field. “There’s a long history of companies trying to come up with technologies to restore normal function to an injured joint or prevent injury to a joint that’s at risk,” says Bruce Beynnon, director of research at the department of orthopedics and rehabilitation at the University of Vermont’s College of Medicine.

Opedix has struggled to differentiate itself from another type of garment that’s popular with runners and looks very similar: compression tights. What sets Opedix tights apart, Mr. Gustafson says, are the bands of stiff fabric that descend down the leg from the hips, wrap around the knees and extend to the ankles.

The added complexity confers a higher price: Opedix tights sell for $225 a pair, usually twice the price of compression tights. But to the uneducated eye, the two tights are virtually indistinguishable, which can confuse shoppers. (Earlier this year, Opedix also began selling shorts designed to restore the pelvis’s natural alignment; they cost $165.)

One of Mr. Gustafson’s strategies for educating potential customers is to put the tights in the hands of physical therapists, trainers, sports instructors and professional athletes who are likely to understand the banding technology — and, he hopes, to spread the word. 

Mr. Gustafson sees an advantage in making a product geared toward the boomer population. The tights could hold wide appeal for the many members of this generation who have benefited from medical advances and plan to stay active into their 70s and 80s. By 2017, the over-50 set will control 70 percent of the disposable income in the United States and is expected to comprise about half of the population, according to data compiled by Nielsen.

Mr. Gustafson says he believes the experience and skills he cultivated in his earlier career, which included tenures at two start-ups, have been a plus in his work at Opedix. For instance, he knew how laborious it would be to develop and test a new product, and he understood the benefits of working in a field he liked.

“I love the ski business,” he says. “It’s a whole lot more exciting and interesting than office equipment, I’ll tell you.”

You're the Boss: A Start-Up Tries to Give Wine Spritzers a New Image and a Second Wind

Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times Jayla Siciliano: “Keeping the product natural makes it much more difficult to find bottlers we can use.”The adventure of new ventures.

During the seven years she did product development and design for both Diesel in Santa Barbara, Calif., and Burton Snowboards in Burlington, Vt., Jayla Siciliano attended a lot of work-related parties and dinners and did plenty of social drinking. The problem was that she also had to get up the next morning and work, so during social events she started pouring sparkling water into her wine. “It was perfect,” she said. “I could sip that all night and I would wake up feeling fine.”

What she had concocted was a wine spritzer, the stuff women drank at summer barbecues in the 1970s and ’80s. The spritzer always had a “girlie” reputation, solidified with the advent of wine coolers in the ’80s, a bottled, sweetened version of the spritzer. The popularity of both spritzers and coolers faded in the ’90s, but in the last year or so the spritzer has been making a comeback. (This newspaper wrote about that comeback last May). Now Ms. Siciliano has become part of its second wind.

She first created her version of the spritzer while at Burton Snowboards, where she spent a lot of time on boats in the summer, conducting business with “big guys that do a lot of snowboarding.” They saw Ms. Siciliano pouring Pellegrino into her wine glass and started asking for some in theirs, too. “I thought if these guys want to drink a spritzer, I could break through the feminine reputation it has,” she said.

She quit her job in 2007, moved back to Santa Barbara and started doing research into things like carbonation, bottling and flavor formulas. She also went back to school and got an M.B.A. at the University of San Diego. While there, she wrote the business plan for her wine spritzer start-up, Bon Affair, and started raising money. Although Ms. Siciliano did conduct focus groups and surveys to collect data on the importance of ingredients, she did no market research before diving in.

Ms. Siciliano did look at trends in the alcohol industry, however, and saw both the growth in light beer over the last 20 years and the growing interest in wine as indicators she was onto something. “I also bartended in college and again in 2009, when I was starting Bon Affair,” she said, “and I saw lots of women looking for a lighter option after that second glass.”

In April 2010, Ms. Siciliano connected with Troy Johnson, a food writer in San Diego and former creator and star of the Food Network show “Crave.” Mr. Johnson said when he heard Ms. Siciliano describe her version of the spritzer — using good wine, no preservatives, no sweeteners — “lights started to go on. I had seen wine spritzers coming back a bit; the best mixologists were starting to play with them on their menus. And when I tasted it, it was so much better than I thought it was going to be. It has a very sophisticated palate.”

Mr. Johnson was traveling for “Crave” last February when Ms. Siciliano called to tell him she had found two angels willing to invest $450,000 in Bon Affair. She asked if he was on board. “I was sitting in a bar in Manhattan and I looked down at the menu and it said ‘wine spritzer,’” Mr. Johnson said. “I told her, ‘I’m in.’”

Founder: Jayla Siciliano.

Employees: Bon Affair has nine partners — all have stock options — but no full-time employees yet.

Location: Solana Beach, Calif.

Pitch: “The reason I got into this was because it fit into a healthy, balanced lifestyle, which is how I want to live,” Ms. Siciliano said. “We have two products, a sauvignon blanc and pinot noir and we don’t add sugar or preservatives. It’s a lighter alternative for wine drinkers, it has half the calories.”

Challenges: The first 5,000 bottles that came off the line last spring at the Detroit manufacturer Ms. Siciliano chose had specks of tomato floating in them. “They had been bottling a Bloody Mary mix and didn’t fully clean the line,” she said. “We had to scrap all of that.”

There were other bottling issues too — leaking, caps that wouldn’t come off, incorrect labels and low-fills. Ms. Siciliano discovered the cap problem right before a big event in San Diego, after which she and Mr. Johnson spent two days sorting through boxes to separate the bad from the good. The company has since switched to a California bottler. “Keeping the product natural makes it much more difficult to find bottlers we can use,” she said.

Traction: In January, after Bon Affair was mentioned in a Shape Magazine “Hot List,” Ms. Siciliano said Web orders went up tenfold: “We went from a few a week to five or six a day.” In fact orders went up so fast there wasn’t enough product to meet the demand. This spring, Bon Affair will be in four Whole Foods stores in San Diego as well as on Amazon. And in April, after the next bottling run, it will be sold in eight states. The company has also had some international sales through Wineflite, a wine-shipping service based in San Francisco.

Revenue: $15,000. The bottles retail for $14.

Financing: Three investors have put in $640,000.

Competition: “We really don’t have any direct competitors,” said Ms. Siciliano. “There are a couple of spritzer companies in Italy, but they are sweeter and have over 7 percent alcohol. We’re at 6.5 percent.”

What’s Next: A year from now Ms. Siciliano wants Bon Affair’s bottles lining the shelves of all the Whole Foods stores in California and offered on Virgin America flights.

What do you think? Is there a market for Bon Affair?

You can follow Eilene Zimmerman on Twitter.