Abe's Story
What is Abe's Market?
Abe’s Market is the online marketplace for great natural products. We connect buyers seeking amazing natural products with the people who make them. There’s no need to prowl the Internet for a broader natural product selection than can be found at your local natural market. At Abe’s Market, you can get all your natural product buying done in one place.
Too often today, we buy products without knowing the origin of the products. At Abe’s Market you can discover fantastic natural products while having the unique opportunity to learn the story behind them – straight from the products’ creators. This valuable background goes beyond what can be found on a label. Who makes the product? What’s in it? Where is it made? How? You can even chat directly with sellers to ask specific questions so you know that you can trust and be comfortable with the products you bring into your home.
We’re Abe’s Market. We want you to feel good about your goods.
Our Story
We’ve been great friends for years. Basketball, hiking, mountain biking, camping, tight rope walking (ok, we made up that last one) – we do a lot together. Our wives and kids are friends. We’ve always thrown business ideas off each other.
For a long time now we’ve talked about starting a business that we’d feel great about – a business that is wonderful for both businesses and consumers and that would have a positive impact on the environment. As natural product enthusiasts, we envisioned a place that would enable shoppers like us to discover fantastic, hard-to-find products and to really connect with the product creators – the way markets were once run.
As a serial entrepreneur, Richard, who has already built and grown a natural product business, knows the struggle of sellers trying to grow their business and how to solve these challenges. As a big brand builder, Jon knows how to help companies communicate their stories and build awareness of their products. Eureka! Hello, Abe’s Market.
Our goal is to provide the best natural products that are good for you, your families and the environment. If you have an idea of how we can make things better, we want to hear from you. Abe’s Market is all about discovering fantastic natural products, and it’s about stories. Tell us yours.
Richard Demb and Jon Polin - Co-Founders
Who is Abe?
I never met my Grandpa Abe; he died shortly before I was born. By all accounts, Grandpa Abe was an honest, hard-working man. A pharmacist, for 50 years he owned and operated the eponymous Polin Drugs, a neighborhood drug store, on the West side of Chicago. Beyond being a loving husband and father, Abe represented two things in his community. First, as the neighborhood pharmacist, he was the purveyor of health and wellness solutions to all his customers. Second, as proprietor of the neighborhood pharmacy, Grandpa Abe represented the classic mom-and-pop business fueled by hard work, great products, great service, honesty, trust and passion. During the Great Depression, when many people couldn't afford to see doctors, and again during World War II, when there was a shortage of available doctors, Grandpa Abe was especially busy, offering free "medical" advice to his local customers. 9:00 to 5:00? Not for Grandpa Abe. For most of its 50 years, Polin Drugs was open 9AM to midnight. Only in its last few years did Grandpa Abe start to close his shop early - at 11PM. And, of course, Grandpa Abe knew his customers by name, and he knew exactly which cold capsules Mrs. Sandberg preferred and which medicine to deliver when Mr. Banks was having one of his migraines.
Abe's Market is about combining the best things that Grandpa Abe represented – health and wellness, mom and pop, reliability, trust, honesty, community and personal connection between business owners and customers.
- Jon
That's Grandpa Abe Polin, on the right, in his eponymous pharmacy, Polin's Drugs - c. 1925. It was a real family business; that's Abe's dad on the left. Abe's children, my dad and uncle, were the delivery boys. Each became a licensed pharmacy assistant at age 16. Grandpa Abe proudly displayed their certificates on the wall, right next to his own state license. As evidenced by some of the products on display, the definition of health and wellness sure has changed in the last 80 years. |
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The Team
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Growing up in Chicago, other than a short-term gig mopping the floor at DarNet's as a 12-year-old, my first job was vending peanuts and Frosty Malts at Cubs and White Sox games. Post high school, I studied history at University of Wisconsin and then, after a stint working in finance at a mortgage company in Chicago, I got my business degree at the joint Boston University/Ben Gurion University program in Israel. I stayed in Israel for a few years to help found a software company that got acquired by Thomson Elite, a provider of business software solutions. That was followed by ten years of developing products, building and managing brands, and creating and executing large online and offline marketing campaigns at two Fortune 500 companies, first at The Clorox Company in Oakland, CA, then at Capital One in Richmond, VA. I followed my passion for natural products and my itch to create a business I could be proud of and co-founded Abe's Market. Now, Abe's Market has me working harder than ever, but I'm constantly energized by interacting with our passionate sellers. I have soft spots for great coffee, the state of Wisconsin and the Chicago Cubs, but my four favorite things in the world are my wife, my son and my two daughters. |
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Several times a week, Morton Einbinder, a wholesale grocer in Chicago, packed his trunk full of candy and set across the state to meet his customers. During the summer, I joined my grandfather on his sales calls, and the trips in his Lincoln were spent listening to his stories, like the one about meeting H.B. Reese days before his company’s sale to Hershey’s. "Get to know the people" and "The best companies mirror the founders passion for their products" is some of the wisdom he shared with me, gems that I have carried through life. While completing my undergraduate degree and working at an investment bank specializing in technology startups the entrepreneurial spirit took a hold of me and I left to start GC Zone, a company that provided payment solutions for shipping e-commerce products. For my next venture, I co-founded Dale and Thomas Popcorn. Our all-natural wholesale line, Popcorn, Indiana, was born a year later. After countless meetings and hitting the food show circuit, Popcorn, Indiana established national distribution. On the path to growth I was fortunate to have been featured on TV, newspapers and magazines but the most fun was meeting other business owners who had launched remarkable natural products . We shared samples of our products, lessons we had learned about retailers, advertising, packaging and the excitement from the roller coaster ride that is entrepreneurial life. My wife and two boys loved sampling other companies products and hearing stories about the people who made them. Abe's Market is a result of a grandfather who loved meeting people, my exposure to fantastic companies, a close friend who understands consumers search for natural products and the desire to share my grandfather's wisdom with my kids. |
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Eliezer Israel I started playing with computers before I was three feet tall. I’ve worked in the halls of hi-tech, managed non-profits, and worked in an incubator for launching socially minded projects. I do my best to balance out the technical focus with a conscious way of life. I bake my own sourdough spelt bread every week, am nurturing a new Yoga discipline, and am looking forward to the day when I can trade in my gas guzzler for a Better Place electric car. |
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Before joining the Abe’s Market team I had my hands in a bevy of digital campaigns and experiential events centering on culture. Starting my career as a beauty columnist and makeup artist (my work has been featured on Fox News, E! Style Network and UPN-Chicago), gave me the opportunity to understand marketing challenges from the inside out. From that point forward, I worked with some of the best teams (Reakt Agency & Leo Burnett Worldwide) that challenged creative consumer marketing, leading brand-focused campaigns. Like cupid, I love connecting brands to people who can help them do business better while connecting people to brands whose philosophies align with their ideology, creating sustainable brand evangelists. As an eternal artist and city girl at heart, I love to blog about art, design and the musing’s of an urban lifestyle. I am always looking to stir up conversations either online , over a soy miso at a local coffee house or a glass of cabernet at a local wine bar. Please feel free to contact me on Twitter @lisaframe and lets shake things up. |
Advisors
For press inquiries, contact Ilana Zalika at ilana@resoundmarketing.com or 609-279-0050 x101
