WHEN Steven Carse began hawking ice lollies on a corner in Atlanta, one of his best customers was a lawyer representing Unilever. Mr Carse’s brand name was King of Pops, but his marketing used the word Popsicle—a trademark indirectly acquired by the conglomerate from a Californian who, as a child, accidentally invented the delicacy on a wintry night in 1905. The lawyer would serve him “cease and desist” notices, Mr Carse recalls. But she always bought some pops, too.
That was in 2010, when he was 25. He had abandoned a brief stint in Idaho as a journalist and returned to Georgia, where he grew up, to be a data analyst for an insurance firm. Losing that job in a post-crash cull, he reverted to selling candyfloss at baseball games, as he had in college: good practice, he says, for making eye contact and ten-second sales. Hoping to buy a pop-freezing machine, he became embroiled with a Cypriot businessman in West Palm Beach, who undertook to import one from Brazil (he didn’t). He made his pops by night in a shared Atlanta kitchen, lugging a cart to his corner to sell them by...Continue reading
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