Linda Katz sells tumbleweeds. You have read well. Tumbleweeds. Dry, dead, brown tumbleweeds.
Linda sells tumbleweeds online and she sells a lot of them. Last year alone, she sold more than $40,000 worth of tumbleweeds, all from the comfort of her rural Kansas home. Who the hell buys tumbleweeds?
Ralph Lauren, for example. And Pottery Barn. Both companies have used Linda’s tumbleweeds in store windows. A couple of major Hollywood studios get their tumbleweeds from Linda Katz. Miramax played her tumbleweed alongside Johnny Depp in “Finding Neverland.” They have also appeared on “Barney & Friends.”
NASA is a big fan. In fact, the US federal government is its biggest customer. When they were designing and testing their “Tumbleweed Rover,” NASA purchased all of their tumbleweeds exclusively from Linda Katz.
It has clients in Paris, Dubai and Japan. Selling tumbleweeds to an international clientele and earning enough money to support herself and her family is an incredible achievement. But it’s not the most incredible part of Linda’s story. The really amazing thing about Linda’s success is that it happened completely by accident! Linda never planned to become the largest supplier of tumbleweeds in the world. It was a total fluke!
Like many people, Linda understood the importance and power of the Internet. At first, she saw it as an exciting way to keep in touch with her loved ones and she wanted to create a “family website”. So Ella Linda took a class to learn how to design websites. As part of an assignment, she created a mock website for a fantasy business called “Prairie Tumbleweed Farms,” where she offered “small, medium, and large Tumbleweeds.” It was a fictional business that was supposed to help her learn a new skill. She created a web page for her fantasy farm, put up some photos of tumbleweeds rolling around in her front yard, wrote some mock product descriptions, and set up an online shopping cart to process credit cards. It was all just for fun…until she started getting orders. Many orders! An average of around 15 orders per week to start.
Now, 14 years later, Linda’s online business generates more annual income than the average nine-to-five worker. She never leaves the house and her store is open 24 hours a day. Anyone in the world can browse your inventory and place an order. Scientists, horticulturists, NASA engineers, and Wild West enthusiasts can point and click. The money they spend is deposited directly into their bank account. Every time an order comes through her website, she walks out the front door, grabs a large dry tumbleweed, puts it in a box and waits for the UPS truck to arrive. (They come directly to her house to pick up the packages.)
Today, Prairie Tumbleweed Farms employs many of Linda’s relatives, who share in the profits. And the whole remarkable affair was completely inadvertent.
If Linda Katz can sell $40,000 worth of dead, dry, crunchy brown tumbleweeds strictly by accident, imagine what she could sell if she really tried.