Photolimn: Entrepreneur Uses Chinese Connection

I was recently told about a very interesting online business called Photolimn.com. The entrepreneur behind this website is a guy from Southern California named Jim Bowler, who graduated from George Washington University in 2004. Like a lot of college graduates, Bowler decided to travel abroad in his first year out in the "real world," but unlike a lot of them, he went to work in China. While there, he decided to spruce up his room with a painting, so he met some local artists. Those interactions led to relationships that he retained when he came back to the United States in May 2007 and that he has used to start his business. The idea is that you submit a photo to the website, and for a fee you get back a painted version of that photo created by a Chinese artist. The results are pretty cool. Bowler also tells me that the number of orders he was receiving went way up after he paid for some ads on Facebook.

Bowler's business an example of how globalization and other broad trends aren't just things that small-business people and entrepreneurs read about in the newspaper. Thanks to better communication tools and other factors, they actually can ride those waves.

Bowler told me that while he was living in China, he noticed just how entrepreneurial people were there, defying the stereotype of attitudes in communist countries. "It's similar to the U.S. where a lot of people are starting small businesses," he told me. Years under communism have actually shaped this attitude, he said. When you know what it's like to live without capitalism, you appreciate it when you have access to it. Instead of just looking at these amazing changes and thinking, "that's interesting," Bowler built entrepreneurial relationships. He not only works with the artists he met in China but also with a number of studios throughout the country, several of which he found online. One might guess that it takes a lot of capital for a small business to go global. In Bowler's case, ingenuity was much more important.