One year ago this time, the Seattle P-I profiled a former Rainier resident who made it big by starting a business from scratch:
“As a middle-schooler, Tal Moore didn’t belong to any clubs.

He didn’t much care for them. But he was envious of one thing: the cash they got from selling candy bars.

One day, as the 12-year-old shopped with his mother at Sears, he saw a large plastic candy cane filled with gumballs, did a quick calculation of their individual resale value, and bought it.

“Within two months, I was pulling in $12 to $15 per day, selling two gumballs for a quarter,” Moore said. “To a kid, that’s a lot of money.”

With that, the president and founder of Gumballs.com — a multimillion-dollar-a-year Seattle-based online retailer of gumball machines — began his career in the vending industry.

Now, his 4-year-old company is posting 50 percent annual growth after doubling in size several times since he launched the Web site from the bedroom of his mother’s home in Rainier, southeast of Olympia.

Moore’s success story — the eldest son of immigrants from Israel, the first in his family to graduate from high school, then college — now unfolds from an unassuming building in the shadow of the Magnolia Bridge, but it began when times were much harder for him.

His father drove a taxi in Brooklyn, where Moore was born in 1976.”

Mr. Moore’s businesses continue to florish.

Tal’s website:
Gumballs.com

Tal Moore
Photo by Dan DeLong, Seattle P-I

Congratulations Tal, and Happy 30th birthday today.

[Ed. Note: Tal’s mother described in this story is this writer’s wife, Yael.]