LiteWipes

by Matt Hughes

“Clean is confident” is how entrepreneur Bryan Richman ’14 explains the value of LiteWipes, the personal-care product he began selling in November. “I guarantee they will make you feel cleaner than toilet paper alone,” the Bucknell management grad declares, “and one will come in handy when you least expect it.”

Richman, who is taking a pause from his consulting job at Deloitte to attend Columbia Business School, launched a side business selling individually wrapped, pocket-size flushable wipes through Amazon.com in November, and had already moved more than 50,000 wipes to more than 1,000 customers in the first six months.

Richman concedes his isn’t the only product of its kind on the market — flushable wipes are already a multibillion-dollar industry — but he says what sets his wipes apart is their packaging — discreet, gender-neutral and, most important, small enough to easily fit in a wallet or purse. Smart search-engine optimization has also helped him land his wipes among the top search results in the travel wipes category on Amazon — a key to his early success. He adds that the fabric in LiteWipes has been independently certified to exceed flushability guidelines to alleviate plumbing concerns.

Richman’s product is still a work in progress — he’s currently tweaking both his product packaging and the cleanser formulation, based on customer feedback — but the young entrepreneur says his Bucknell education taught him the importance of diving in and seizing opportunities. Richman’s team won the University’s annual Business Pitch Competition in 2012 with an idea for an online dating website similar to Tinder, which existed but had not yet taken off. But as Richman and his teammates let the company languish, Tinder went on to be worth billions.

“If you have an itch to scratch and want to try something new, now is the time to do it,” he reflects. “Take baby steps with your ideas, and make it a reality — just go for it.”