The rise of the Tweezerman

Dal LaMagna, photographed at IceStone's Brooklyn factory

(Fortune)

I grew up in Queens, N.Y., in a family of five kids and went to Catholic schools. My father was a fireman and longshoreman, working two or three jobs to support us. Every year the elementary school would raffle off a donated Cadillac to raise funds. The prize for most chances sold was a Schwinn Racer. My parents couldn't afford to buy me a bicycle, so in third grade, I sold 48 books [of raffle tickets] to get the bike, and won it. That was the start of my career.

I didn't ever want to be a guy who'd go to work and get paid by the hour. I wanted to make a difference in the world, and I thought being a millionaire would allow me to do that. So I applied to the business schools at Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford universities and got accepted by Harvard and Columbia. My background was more in the direction of the Willy Loman school of business than an Ivy League citadel, so going to Harvard really expanded my view of things.

During my undergrad and MBA years I started more than a dozen businesses, each of which imploded. I converted drive-in movie theaters to drive-in discotheques, but it rained 11 times in a row, and the business failed. I opened a waterbed store in Harvard Square, but the landlady evicted us because she was afraid the beds would leak. When I graduated from Harvard in 1971, I wanted to be a movie producer to influence opinions in society. So I spent 10 years trying to put together a film project and ended up in Venice Beach, Calif.

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It was 1979, and I was running an ice cream parlor there. One day I was sunbathing au naturel with two women who were sisters on the rooftop of their apartment building next door when one sister's boyfriend showed up. Next thing I know, he was with her, and I ended up with the other sister on the redwood deck. When I went home, I had splinters all over my butt. Redwood doesn't dissolve; it infects. So I went to a drugstore and asked for needle-pointed tweezers, but couldn't find any. That gave me the idea to sell splinter tweezers.

At that point I had bounced from one business to another, and by age 32, I was $150,000 in debt and had failed at everything I'd tried. So I moved back to New York and got a minimum-wage job working for an electronics company. I saw people on the assembly line picking up diodes with needlepoint tweezers. There was my product idea! So I decided to market electronic industrial tweezers as splinter tweezers to hardware stores and lumberyards.

I started with $500, and my father, who had retired as a longshoreman, decided to invest in the idea. Over the next few years my dad lent me $180,000, and I paid him 12% interest on it. My dad also played the lottery, hoping to make $1 million one day. At some point I converted half of the $180,000 he'd lent me to stock. When I sold the company, his stock was worth $1 million, which made me really happy.

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The rise of the Tweezerman