From saving shelter dogs to revolutionizing retail

When Jordan Karcher (MBA ’15) decided to enter the MBA program at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, he didn’t know he was going to become an entrepreneur. Yet 12 years later, landing on such a career path seems inevitable. “I like to create,” said Karcher. “I don't like sitting in meetings. I don't want bosses telling me what to do. I'd rather go out there on my own and see what I can do.” Though Karcher knows this about himself now, this professional insight first came to him from an unexpected source: a Dalmatian named Molly. Just six months before arriving at Mendoza to study brand management and marketing for a likely career in wine and spirits, Karcher rescued Molly and learned just how perilous life was for his new best friend while at the mercy of the underfunded animal welfare system.

Suddenly, his focus broadened from marketing wine and spirits to preventing the estimated one in five shelter dogs from being euthanized each year due to overpopulation. To tackle this issue, he knew shelters needed steady funding. Soon, he was attending classes while launching Grounds & Hounds Coffee Co., a gourmet coffee company that donates 20% of its proceeds to animal rescue organizations. “I honestly think more people should go to grad school with the idea of using it as an incubation period,” he said of his time at Mendoza. “You are getting applicable knowledge that you can test in a real environment every day.” Karcher funneled what he learned from his professors and classmates, as well as resources from the Notre Dame network, into Grounds & Hounds, which grew from an e-commerce operation into a successful wholesaler available at more than 5,000 retail locations. After the company was acquired by a private equity group in 2018, Karcher stayed on as CEO for a few years. As rewarding as that role was, he longed to create something new again. “The brand is still doing really well and I still have a vested interest in it,” he said, adding that Molly, 14, is still “cruising along” and has been joined by a pit bull rescue named Jazz, 5. “But I wanted to take on a new challenge.” That new challenge is the startup Eileen, an intelligence platform that helps retailers scale while maintaining oversight of products in physical stores. It’s an idea that came about thanks to Karcher’s experience with Grounds & Hounds. “One of the big pain points we had was that while our e-commerce business could scale really rapidly, the brick-and-mortar world was the exact opposite,” he explained. “We would pick up big retailers and still have one or two people internally managing thousands of stores. There were countless intermediaries between us and our product.” While located in California, Karcher would sometimes ask his parents in Pittsburgh to take pictures of the shelves while shopping at grocery stores so that he knew his coffee products were stocked correctly. “There's a personal touch element that you need to manage a brand effectively,” he said.

Eileen is designed to bring about that personal touch by enabling brand managers to access a shopper network instead of sending their parents to stores across the country. Shoppers for the Eileen network upload pictures of requested information, such as shelf displays or price tags, while browsing stores in exchange for cash rewards and discounts. “Everything that you could execute with a human in store is what we're trying to provide in a scalable, more decentralized platform through the Eileen marketplace,” said Karcher. His partner in this venture is Michael Lorenzen (MBA ’14), whom he met while at Mendoza. Lorenzen is no stranger to the tech space, having worked in analytics at Hungryroot, DoorDash and Kayak. Karcher acknowledges that building and executing a novel tech platform like Eileen is a bit more complicated than selling a dependable product like coffee, but that’s what makes it exciting. “It's very much back into the trenches of being a startup, which I love,” he said. “It starts to shift so quickly, whereas the consumer space is a little bit more linear in how things come together.” As an entrepreneur, the work — and earnings — is unpredictable and Karcher certainly doesn’t believe it’s the right path for everyone. Money and passion can’t be the motivators because money isn’t guaranteed and passion won’t always translate to a transferable skill if the venture fails. Instead, Karcher is guided by the desire to find solutions for problems. “My focus is on the problem and solution and how do we get some type of structure in place that fixes issues. Once I hopefully solve this, or it’s in a good spot, I'm going to find something else,” he said. “There's always something that needs to be solved and I'm wired to want to solve it.”