Entrepreneur Lilien '00 creates Gelscrubs.com

Greg Lilien '00 hears voices. Or at least that's how he answers jokingly when asked how he gets the ideas that have made him a successful — and unusual — young entrepreneur.

In reality, it seems, the recent grad has mastered a delicate balance of business savvy and an independent, adventurous spirit.

After earning his A.B. in economics at the University two years ago, Lilien went on to start his own online company, Gelscrubs.com, which makes and sells medical scrubs — the pajama-like clothing doctors wear in the hospital.

Lilien markets the scrubs not only to medical personnel, but also to college students, who wear scrubs when "hanging out, going to the gym, sleeping," he said.

"The company is still small," Lilien said. "Our main product is the college scrub. It's more like a pajama . . . it's made of really soft fabric and has an embroidered college logo [on the leg and chest pocket]."

Lilien came up with the idea of the college scrub last year and since has begun decorating them with college and university logos, approaching the schools to request licensing and offering them in return royalties from product sales.

Since his first deal with Ohio State University last summer, Lilien has sold the scrubs to 25 stores at eight schools.

"They're selling really well," he said. "We have 25 schools pending. Hopefully, in another year, we'll have 35 to 40 schools [under contract]."

While most entrepreneurs conduct a significant amount of research before launching a venture — taking polls and studying the consumer market — Lilien follows a different, more relaxed approach.

"I just bounce ideas off of friends and family," he said. "There's a kind of randomness [to my method]."

Ultimately, Lilien says, he would like to present his scrubs as a brand and make that his business focus. At the moment, though, he is experimenting with other online ventures, particularly in unexplored markets.

"More niche product makers are not as internet-smart as they should be," Lilien said, describing "niche" products as those that target specific buyers, such as teenagers or young children.

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He added that consumers, for some reason, love online products. "It's kind of bizarre — people will buy anything online," he said.

To prove his theory, Lilien points to the success of two of his other online enterprises, a website selling toys and another selling mailboxes. Lilien described himself in these projects as "the front man online," taking orders that are then shipped directly from the factories of partner companies.

The scrubs company, however, is different; it belongs to him.

"It literally started in my own basement," he said. "I know a lot of people say that, but for a year, I ran it out of my parents' house."

Now, Lilien runs the company out of an office and a warehouse that he rents in Scottsdale, Ariz., close to where much of his family lives. When his lease runs out during the next year, he will consider moving to San Francisco or the East Coast, he said.

But in Ariz., Lilien has a network of help readily available to him. Both his parents have been involved in the start-up process — his mother, a teacher, has even taken time off to help with the business.

Lilien's father is a physician, but Lilien insisted that his father's career has had no influence on his decision to sell a medical product. Instead, he said, it was his experiences at Princeton and at a summer job with Broadview — an investment bank that handles technology mergers and acquisitions — that steered him toward this product.

"From the time when I was little, I always wanted to start my own business," he said. "I was on a pretty conservative path . . . but senior year, I wasn't entirely thrilled with the idea of banking and consulting."

Lilien said he enjoyed and learned from his job at Broadview, but that it reinforced his wish to start a company of his own rather than join a firm.

Some of the business strategies Lilien learned in his favorite class at Princeton, Professor Ed Zschau's ELE 591: Hi-Tech Entrepreneurship, also left an impression on him.

"It was as close as you get to entrepreneurship at Princeton," Lilien said. "[Zschau] is a guru. He knows a lot of good stuff . . . I learned a lot of great lessons [in his class]."

Lilien said that one idea reinforced in Zschau's class that has proved especially useful in business is the idea of execution — that, to create a successful business, "it takes a great idea, but even more, it takes execution," Lilien said.

In addition, Lilien gained valuable experience as the business manager of the Nassau Weekly Magazine, for which he also wrote.

"It was a good trial of having money come in and having to pay money out," he said. "It was more . . . real world stuff."

In the spring of his senior year at the University, Lilien and his partner, Dev Tandon '00, won second place and a $3,000 prize, in the Annual business plan contest.

Their idea, Apparel-Online.com, dealt with creating an online trading place where clothing producers could swap materials and patterns online, Lilien said.

Though Apparel-Online.com was not perfectly analogous to the company he owns now, Lilien said that it was "in a similar vein. It was starting a company, brainstorming . . . going through the thought of all of it."

While Tandon took the prestigious, well-traveled path to McKinsey & Company as a consultant, Lilien turned down similar offers from Morgan Stanley, Mercer Consulting and Broadview in order to start Gelscrubs.com.

For Lilien, the most frustrating aspect of creating and running his own company has been learning the virtue of patience.

"I always want to try to grow everything really quickly, but you have to balance what's appropriate for the company," Lilien said. "That means slower growth than I would sometimes want."

Perhaps mastering that frustrating balance — patience with the ambition and independence necessary in an entrepreneur — is what has led Lilien to his current success.

But Lilien isn't content to simply focus on the present. Rather, he's thinking about the future.

"The plan isn't to run college scrubs forever," Lilien said, explaining that he might make the company a side project or sell it. "I definitely want to start [other] companies and build companies and maybe sell companies."

When Lilien says this, there's an eagerness in his voice. He wants students to know that financial services is not the only career choice open to young graduates.

"I think that Princeton people should realize that young people can start companies," he said. "People shouldn't feel trapped in conserative options."

And Lilien certainly did not.