The entrepreneurial spirit is deeply-rooted in Northeastern’s community.

For Northeastern alum and business tycoon Terry Daidone, his entrepreneurial roots grew from a cabbage patch.

Today’s students may not remember the Cabbage Patch Kids craze that struck the nation in 1983. It was the big toy item that couldn’t stay on the shelves; it drove crowds of shoppers into frenzy. At the time, Daidone was a third-year Finance and Insurance student in Northeastern’s College of Business Administration.

“They were a hot item back then,” Daidone recalls. “No one could get their hands on these dolls. I would even hear stories of shipments being hijacked – it was madness.”

Sitting in his dorm room one day, Terry spent the entire afternoon making phone calls to see if he could find a contact he could buy a large batch of these vinyl-faced cloth dolls from.

“Unfortunately, I racked up a $150 phone bill on calls, but I eventually found a company in Europe that had 10,000 dolls they couldn’t sell. The level of demand we were experiencing had not hit Stockholm, Sweden.”

The original Cabbage Patch Kids were licensed to be manufactured by various doll companies around the world. In the U.S., Coleco Industries couldn’t keep up with demand. The dolls Terry found were manufactured by a licensee in Barcelona, Spain, called Jasmine, which were then sold to a Swedish company in Stockholm.

“I thought to myself: I’m a finance major, I can figure this out. And so I jumped on a plane to check the dolls out.”

Daidone applied for a passport and flew out to Stockholm to forge a deal to have the dolls shipped to a bonded warehouse in Port Elizabeth, NJ. The dolls could only leave the warehouse once they were paid for. Luckily for him, the dolls were still in high-demand.

Daidone met with a toy buyer for then Boston-based Jordan Marsh, who bought up almost the whole batch! He was pre-paid, wired the money to the importer from Stockholm, who then authorized the release of the dolls. This process is called parallel importing.

“I ended up selling all 10,000 of the dolls, netting almost $250,000 in cash. That was the beginning. I knew at that moment I would be an entrepreneur.”

Taking it to the Next Level
By his senior year at Northeastern, Daidone partnered with two fellow Northeastern students – Chris Phillips, an engineering major, and Dan Houston, an accounting major – to form their own company, appropriately named PHD (Phillips, Houston and Daidone).

PHD specialized in collecting, rebuilding, and distributing remanufactured copier and printer toner cartridges. This process is called reverse logistics and is an integral part of the growing reusable recyclable industry.

“We had a very successful operation going on from campus. At first, we were selling about 50 remanufactured cartridges a month. Chris Phillips was able to develop and ramp up our “remanufacturing” process dramatically. By the end of their senior year, they were selling upwards of 2,500 cartridges a month and had licensed their remanufacturing process domestically and abroad in places such as London, Munich, Copenhagen, and Mexico City.

PHD bought replacement toner (dry ink) from a publicly traded company called Nashua Corporation, a Fortune 500 company, located in Nashua, New Hampshire. The trio started its rapid growth by selling refurbished cartridges to businesses in the Prudential Center and downtown Boston.

Nashua Corp. caught on to the trio’s success, and acquired PHD as a wholly owned subsidiary. Nashua Corp. had employed Daidone and Phillips on five year management contracts, as president and vice president of the new acquisition, and which had since changed its company name to Nashua Cartridge Products, Inc. Coincidentally, at this time, all five of the senior management team appointed by Nashua Corp. were Northeastern University alumni – spanning four decades of graduation dates.

Continuing the Tradition
Daidone has used that same model again and again and is an expert in reverse logistics and remanufacturing. Currently Daidone has co-founded and is actively involved with CertiCell, LLC, another reverse logistics company formed in 2005. CertiCell is a leader in the collection, repair, and deployment of mobile phones, PDAs and smart phones around the world. Certicell employes over 500 people worldwide with locations in Louisville, KY, Franklin, TN, Hong Kong, and the Philippines.