In 1987, PhillySwirl's
co-founders, Alex Plotkin and Max Lapin were attending Penn
State University - a 60,000 student school. One day Alex was
leaving his room in the dormitory, and the door hit another
student in the head. The unfortunate student with a knot on
his head was Max Lapin. (opportunity knocks?). After making
friends with each other, Alex graduated from Penn State while
Max finished his last year at University of South Florida.
Upon graduation they enrolled at Widener University School
of Law.
Only
a few months into their first year at law school , Alex was
just fed up. He said to Max "Let's quit. Let's go sell
Italian ice in Florida." Max said, "What are you crazy?
What are you going to tell your Mom and Dad?" Alex called
home, and his parents hung up. That happened twice. He drove
home and faced them and begged. They wanted him to finish law
school, but Alex said he wanted to quit then. Max wrote the
same kind of letter home. His folks said it would be okay for
him to take a year off, as long as he finished Law School later
on. Max and Alex drove 1100 miles to Tampa, Florida.
Max remembers:
"We called an ice cream manufacturer in Ybor City (located
in south Tampa). He sold us an old ice cream machine and we
also got a chest freezer. We rented a 400 sq. ft. house with
a car port. We bought a super large mattress -- one of us
slept on the far left and one of us on the far right. We bought
an ice cream truck for 400 dollars. It didn't have a gas gauge.
We lived like this for 7 months. One day there appeared a man from the health department.
He was the largest man they had ever seen. He looked behind
the sheets Alex and Max hung around the car port.
He tasted
one of their Italian ices, and he liked it very much. But he
told them, "You can't make that here;
it's against health department regulations." They had to
find a store. They couldn't afford both a house and a store,
so they moved into the store, where they lived for approximately
one year -- on the same mattress! Max and Alex kept selling the
Italian ice -- kids loved the stuff. They had 3 flavors: lemon,
cherry and blueberry. So -- they were 7 months in the house
with the car port, and approximately 1 year in the house/store.
One morning, after those 19 months, Alex just wanted to sleep...
his dream was falling apart, and he was too embarrassed to open
the store that day.
But someone started knocking at the door.
They recognized one of their regular customers.
Alex finally answered the door and said, "It's
over -- I mean, do you know where we sleep?" He showed
her the place, and the bed in the back of the store. She couldn't
believe her eyes, but came up with an inspirational thought...
she told Alex that she's the cafeteria manager for a Tampa,
Fl. High School, and wanted him to make her 300 cups for the
school. Alex actually had to borrow the money to
buy the plastic cups! An hour later she came back and said,
"Get me 300 more cups." Alex asked "Did they
melt? Did you drop them?". To Alex's amazement, she
replied "The kids and faculty loved them and they ate
all of them, I need 300 MORE!" They managed to get that
number. She took them to school and called two more times for
300 more each time!
This was just the beginning
to a long journey of success for Alex Plotkin and Max Lapin.
They eventually got PhillySwirl Sorbet Chillers into the entire
school system in the State of Florida, and you can now find
them in major grocery stores across the US!
While running their factory in Tampa, Max and Alex have had the
opportunity to devote some of their spare time to presenting their
story to thousands of youths and sharing their experiences of
perseverance with them, in hopes of them understanding their own
true potentials they can find from within.
Alex and Max would love to hear your success story as well.
You can even have a chance to win T-Shirts and other neat
stuff, just for participating! Go to our "Kid's Section"
to enter!
We would like to
say THANK YOU to all of our amazing customers, without whom
PhillySwirl would not be what it is today. Max and Alex.
