10 feet away in a prime aisle front location in Bloomingdale’s well-trafficked women’s clothing area lie the fruits of their first entrepreneurial venture. 70 white boxes with bold black lettering neatly stacked in rows of four, one atop the other stacked six feet off the ground. Stenciled on each box was the name of their product, The Pregnancy Survival Kit.

Inside each box lie a little black dress, a tunic, leggings and a slim skirt all in comfortable cotton and Lycra, all fashionably pitch black in color and all available for the first time ever to the notoriously choosy maternity shopper. Dangling outside the box was a price tag -- $152 for the kit. In a display of good taste and crafty public relations, each Pregnancy Survival Kit also included a personal thank you from Gardner and Serota as well as an invitation to comment on the clothes.

After Bloomingdales had given the duo a green light to test-sell the kits, Gardner and Serota chose Labor Day as their launch date, providing the retail world a glimpse of their savvy marketing style. Both knew, however, that hip marketing could only take you so far. If the product didn’t catch the eye of customers, all their hard work to get to this point would be in vain. It was no lock - Bloomingdale’s had never carried women’s maternity clothing before. Long minutes passed as both women smiled politely, holding hands and nervously chatting quietly with a coterie of family members and friends who were on hand in a mixture of solidarity and curiosity. Everyone waited and watched anxiously to see what would happen.

Slowly, the friends and family members who come to lend their support found themselves giving way to customers heading for The Belly Basics stand. A shopper took a box, poked around inside, shook it for heft, and smiling, walked away with a kit under her arm looking for a cash register. Two more shoppers, one noticeably pregnant, gasped at the boxes, elbowing each other in delight as they swooped in to pick up another kit. More followed as the tower of boxes began to shrink to five feet high and then four-feet high. The kits were selling like hotcakes. Gardner and Serota, the young, energetic founders of Belly Basics, a maternity fashions company with an attitude, had struck entrepreneurial gold. "We realized at that time," recalls Gardner, "that this was the birth of something big. Our crazy idea had worked and we were a success."

Awash with waves of emotion, the two young entrepreneurs stood smiling, the notion that they were about to embark on a journey that would carry them to the top of the maternity fashion world far from their minds. In a matter of months, their company would be featured in Glamour, Vogue, Self, Fortune, Good Housekeeping, New York Magazine, American Baby and dozens of other publications. They would, in time, write a book, "Pregnancy Chic" that would be published to rave reviews from a maternity fashion-starved press and public. Belly Basics would sell 100,000 Pregnancy Survival Kits by mid-1998. The partners expanded their line of maternity wear, adding a mini-catalog that included a twin set, boot-leg pant, T-shirt, swimsuit, bike short, unitard, big shirt, a longer-cardigan-and-skirt combination that sells for $132, and a sleeveless shift in black matte jersey that delighted moms-to-be use as a party dress. By 1998, Belly Basics had rung up $5 million in annual sales. "Soon we were selling to England, Canada, Japan and Australia," says Serota. "Our simple idea had become a phenomenon, revolutionizing the way pregnant women thought about style."

Honest-Tea

March, 1995; a college classroom in New Haven, Conn: Barry Nalebuff, a professor at the Yale School of Management, leads a discussion on a case study of Coke versus Pepsi. Eventually the talk turns to what products were missing in the beverage market. Everyone agrees that there are plenty of super-sweet drinks - from Coke and Pepsi to Snapple and Fruitopia to diet drinks with all kinds of artificial sweeteners in them. At the other end of the spectrum, there were plenty of flavorless drinks, such as bottled waters and seltzers with a flavor aftertaste. But there didn’t seem to be any great-tasting drinks that didn’t have all the extra stuff - not just the extra calories, but all of the artificial ingredients like high fructose corn syrup and sodium benzoate.

For class member Seth Goldman, 34, the discussion really hit home. He had developed a reputation among his friends as a voracious consumer of beverages. As a Snapple refugee, he had relied on that drink for refreshment until he could no longer endure another lunch that left a syrupy film on his teeth. After the class, Goldman and Nalebuff spoke animatedly about the kinds of beverages that might fill the void between the supersweet and the tasteless. The discussion would linger in Goldman’s mind for a long time.

At the end of the semester, Goldman graduated and moved his young family to Bethesda, Maryland where he began working for the Calvert Group, sponsor of the nation’s largest family of socially and environmentally responsible mutual funds. Nalebuff returned to teaching and published a book he co-authored with Adam Brandenburger, "Co-opetition", which became a Business Week bestseller.

Two years with Calvert under his belt, Goldman began thinking harder about how a company could be run in both a profitable and socially responsible way. "While I really enjoyed my time at Calvert - it taught me a great deal about how a business could do well by doing good - I always had it in the back of my mind that I would try to strike out on my own. And the healthy drink concept was looking more and more viable for me."

On a balmy day in the fall of 1997, Goldman met a former college track teammate for dinner at a diner in New York. The two had just gone for a run in Central Park and were very thirsty. But when it came time to order drinks, they again encountered the void between the supersweet and the flavorless. It was only by ordering some sweet and some flavorless beverages and combining them that the two friends managed to create palatable beverages that satisfied their thirst and flavor needs. On the shuttle back to Washington, D.C., Goldman recalled the conversation he had with Nalebuff. He e-mailed his old professor this note next the day:

"I remember thinking, "what if we had a drink with had 30 calories that tasted good," recalls Goldman. "We wouldn’t want to call it a diet drink but have it have no calories. Anyway, that was the agreement. With my experience at Yale and at Calvert, over a period of time I had developed a lot of contacts with entrepreneurs doing socially responsible things. At Yale we won a new enterprise competition with a biotechnology business we created. We almost launched that company -- we had funding lined up but in the end it just didn’t work out. Bio technology was not where my heart or energy lay."

The timing of the letter to his old teacher at Yale was fortuitous. Nalebuff had just returned from a trip to India where he had researched material for a case study on the tea industry. In addition to nurturing his lifelong appreciation for tea, the trip provided him with an understanding of the tea industry. Perhaps more importantly, during a visit to a tea auction house in Calcutta, he came up with the name Honest Tea -- the perfect name for a company that would sell tea that truly tastes like tea. Goldman had already developed an appreciation for tea during the two and a half years he had spent teaching and writing in China and Russia, two cultures in which tea plays a central role in bringing people together.

"So I got back in touch with Professor Nalebuff," says Goldman." It was one of those serendipitous things where he spent that summer in India doing research on tea. He convinced me that we could start a business called "Honest Tea" that was all-natural and does what it say it does on the label. That fall, he and I spent a lot of time brewing up ideas and thinking about what flavors we would use, how we would package it and how I would sell it. We bought people in to taste the recipes we tried and were happy with the results." On February 1, 1998, the duo launched Honest Tea Inc. and got busy writing the business plan. "Barry was right there with me guiding me along the way. At the end of February I started making headway in getting my tea brewed." About the same time, Goldman got his tea into Fresh Fields, a popular Washington, D.C. grocery store. "They said they would buy a half a truck full," recalls laughingly. "That would prove difficult because we only use high quality tea leaves. But we managed to do that on an assembly line and we learned some lessons about the realities of deadlines and distribution. By the end of summer we were the best selling Ice Tea at Fresh Fields, outselling Snapple and others."

And so Honest Tea began -- and began to prosper. After sampling a plethora of tea recipes and exchanging hundreds of email notes, the company began to take shape. "Though several dozen promising teas were identified, we selected five flagship varieties which would become our initial product line," recalls Goldman. "We spent a great deal of time with our designer, Sloan Wilson, developing a label concept that effectively conveys the authentic, international aspects of our tea while also capturing the elegant simplicity that is often associated with tea rituals. We launched the company in the winter of 1998 and so far have been delighted by the results (he expects sales of about $3.5 million in 1999)."

Goldman is hardly done yet. "Oh, no way are satisfied. We still want to do more and help people out in the process. That’s the best part of my job."

Smoothie Operators

Eric Strauss, 30, owner and founder of Crazy Carrot Juice Bars, can remember the day 16 years ago that he opened his first lemonade stand. "I was living in Lake of the Isles, Minnesota. Believe it or not, it gets hot up there in the summer. I took advantage of that." After some early trials and tribulations, Strauss soon had multiple lemonade stands strategically situated around the Minneapolis area serving up thousands of cups of cold lemonade every summer. To staff these multiple locations, Eric tapped his younger siblings and several close friends.

Born with a business sense, Strauss had a history of entrepreneurs even before his lemonade empire. "I began breeding and selling gerbils to local pet stores at age six," he recalls. "I just had an affinity for organizing and marketing, even then. I used to look forward every day to reading the business section of the local paper, and I was subscribing to The Wall Street Journal at the age of twelve. I couldn’t wait to put what I learned in the business news into practice." It wasn't surprising, then, when Strauss offered his mom stock in the lemonade company in exchange for the requisite lemonade stand supplies; sugar, Kool-Aid mix, and cups.

In fact, Strauss still has the penciled ledgers from the business, including sales records, inventory levels, company rules, and projected profit margins. "Would you believe that our profit margins are about the same today?" he says. Sales were good - with one lemonade stand capable of bringing in up to $35.00 a day in revenue - and buying and selling

shares in the company - named ESBC for Eric Strauss and his partner Bob Cameron - wasn't a bad investment either.

Soon after completing a fourth grade class on finance (yep, you read that right), Strauss informed his mother that he was interested in making some real life investments himself. By the age of thirteen, a letter he had sent to 'corporate raider' Irwin Jacobs had already been quoted in Fortune magazine. At about the same time, Strauss began publishing a computer magazine. Compuzine was a bi-monthly, trade journal focused on personal computer users.

By age fourteen, Strauss had become serious about investing and along with two friends, published the Rogers, Schalet, and Strauss Investment Newsletter. The newsletter, which recommended eight to twelve stocks per month, had an impressive track record and more than thirty subscribers. Anyone who followed the recommendations would have racked up gains of 55% in a year - a high enough return to earn the trio of underage investment advisors billing on the cover of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune's business section.

I Scream, You Scream, Minneapolis Screamed for Ice Cream

It wasn't until high school that Strauss really learned how profitable the food business could be. As an ice cream salesman around the Minneapolis Chain of Lakes, he pedaled and pushed his way through thousands of Dove Bars, Bomb Pops, and other assorted goodies, eventually becoming the top salesperson for Blue Bell Ice Cream Company for three years. "Nobody could sell more than Eric Strauss," said Tom Fischer, vending truck manager at Big Bell (formerly Blue Bell) Ice Cream Co. "He's got the knack and energy it takes to be successful."

Strauss opened his first Crazy Carrot Juice Bar in the Macalester-Groveland neighborhood in Saint Paul in January, 1998. "I had started planning the business in August of 1996," recalls. "To raise capital, I sold stock to 30 investors and got a loan ($50,000) from the Small Business Administration. I sold $80,000 worth of equity interest and the city of Minneapolis kicked in $35K from a small business loan program they had."

Demand was strong right off the bat, as the company's first went more than 3,000 pounds of oranges a week, up to 1,500 pounds of jumbo carrots, and hundreds of pounds of bananas, strawberries, raspberries, and other assorted fruits and vegetables.

The Crazy Carrot's ingredients were carefully conceived and orchestrated by members of 'Team Carrot' - a group of people strategically put together to take the company to the next level. The Crazy Carrot concept - which consists of everything from the distinctive logo, to the one-of-a-kind smoothies, to the company's focus on environmental awareness - was more than eighteen months in the planning.

Beginning in 1996, Strauss and other members of 'Team Carrot' began scouring the country for juice bars. From California to Florida, he visited more than one hundred juice bars in his quest to perfect the Crazy Carrot concept. Studying every aspect of a juice bar's operation, Strauss soon honed in on the ultimate juice bar prototype. Soon afterwards a site was selected, a lease signed, and construction begun.

By September, 1998, the second Crazy Carrot Juice Bar opened in Minneapolis’ Uptown neighborhood, an area Strauss describes as positively dripping with cachet. A third store opened near the University of Minnesota campus. By Spring, 1999, two more locations opened for business. To lure younger juice lovers, Strauss installed personal computers in his stores with free Internet access for customers. His passion for juice drinks and flair for marketing has paid off. Revenues for 1999 are soaring past the $1 million mark.

"I knew we’d hit it big when (actress) Bridget Fonda came in and had one of our wheat grass juice drinks," says Strauss. "All of a sudden we were happening. I

d like to say that I knew it along, but I can’t. It takes a lot of hard work and some luck, too. We had both on our side."

Time for Generation-E

Jody Kozlow Gardner, Cherie Serota, Seth Goldman, and Eric Strauss typify a hardy new breed of young entrepreneurs who are rewriting the business rulebooks. In fact, it may be time for Generation X to claim its place upon society’s mantle as America’s best generation in decades. No, not as "Generation X". That title implies that the burgeoning number of 20- and 30-something entrepreneurs who run their own businesses today have no identity, no ideals, and no power.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Scarred by spiraling divorce rates and pigeonholed by autocratic baby boomer bosses who feel threatened by their younger siblings overwhelming technological prowess, Generation "E" - for entrepreneur - are taking matters into their own hands by running their own shops on their own terms. And doing it matter-of-factly, with little fanfare and less chest-thumping than previous generations. To Generation E, launching your own business at an early age is just as much a right of passage as getting married and starting a family. No big deal.

Generation E’s agenda represents a marked departure from their parents and grandparents, emphasizing a more technologically proficient, humanitarian workplace and the demolition of the rigid corporate hierarchies that confined older generations. Inside these pages you’ll find out how young entrepreneurs are starting and growing some of the most successful businesses America has seen since the days of J.P Morgan and Henry Ford. It’s a business revolution relatively unheralded in the mainstream media, who may be missing one of the biggest stories of the new millennium - the rapid ascension of the young entrepreneur.

So get ready for management, generation E style.