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Key Takeaways Margaret and Ian Wishingrad launched Three Wishes Cereal from their one-bedroom apartment in 2019 after finding zero healthy cereal options for their baby.
The grain-free, high-protein brand is now sold in more than 15,000 stores after they bootstrapped it with $250,000.
The couple had to completely redefine their power dynamic to save both their business and their marriage.
Margaret Wishingrad remembers standing in the cereal aisle of her grocery store, reading ingredient labels. It was sugar and grains for days. She had a baby boy who just started on solid foods, and there wasn’t a single option she felt comfortable feeding him.
She told her husband, Ian, who ran an ad agency building brands for other companies. Faster than you can say snap, crackle, pop, a lightning bolt struck. “It was like, Oh my God, there’s no one doing cereal yet,” Ian says. “That’s a perfect big category, ready for disruption. I don’t know how we’ll do it, but that’s the one.”
That lightbulb moment became Three Wishes Cereal, a grain-free, high-protein breakfast brand the Wishingrads built from their one-bedroom apartment starting in 2019. Six years later, the brand is now sold in more than 15,000 grocery stores nationwide, including Whole Foods, Sprouts, Wegmans and select Costco locations.
But the biggest challenge wasn’t just cracking the cereal code. It was figuring out how to work together as married co-founders and parents of young kids without killing each other.
The Wishingrads joined the One Day with Jon Bier podcast to talk to me about it. Here are some of the highlights.
Related: He Built a $100 Million Brand in Menswear — Now He’s Taking On Baby Monitors After a Scary Wake-Up Call
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