WHILE the Denver Broncos and the Atlanta Falcons faced off, 22-year-old entrepreneur Jeremy Kraus, W’98, scored the equivalent of a touchdown in the business world with an ad aired during the Super Bowl. And he didn’t have to spend a dime of his burgeoning ice cream company’s money for the $1.6 million time-slot.
Jeremy’s MicroBatch Ice Creams won a nationwide search for a small business to appear on Mail Boxes Etc.’s annual Super Bowl commercial.
Kraus founded his business while an undergraduate at Wharton [“Gazetteer,” November 1997] . On his entry form for the See Your Small Business on the Super Bowl Search II, he wrote, “Using MBE on the Penn campus made it possible for me to juggle school and business. I am now my own boss, and heading a rapidly growing and delicious company.”
With 130 million viewers projected for the big game, Kraus was confident that he will be scooping up more customers than ever. “It’s going to take the company from a small, but vital, growing brand to a national brand overnight.”
Kraus, who works out of a home office in Philadelphia with full-time partners Sam Cohen, W’98, and Tom Shelton, W’99, wouldn’t disclose last year’s sales figures, but says he expects his product to reach between 7,000 and 10,000 outlets by this summer.