BY: KHADIJA KHAN
Most 20-year-olds are unsure about what path they should take in life, but this entrepreneur formulated a master plan to get rich at the age of 15.
Meet Alex Shlaferman. He started off by making up to $8,000 a day by traveling around the country hawking toy-goods at state fairs. After saving up $30,000, Shlaferman founded his company, Vante Toys, selling his retro-throwback product, the Super Looper—a toy plane that you throw, and it comes back to you like a boomerang. After some persistency—shoving his foot in the door of major retailers like Walmart and Bed Bath & Beyond—his product was released on shelves, even making the top sellers list for a few of these big box stores. Yielding hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, Shlaferman decided to innovate a new product. He calls it the Wallet Ninja. It’s an 18-in-1 tool that resembles a credit card and provides all the assets of a Swiss army knife, fitting right into your wallet.
Party goers get wild at a bash Shlaferman set up in an empty Bensonhurst field last summer.
This has skyrocketed Shlaferman’s success to the point where he now owns a factory in China with 48 employees. Last year, his company pulled in about $10 million in sales.
The Chinese factory and millions aren’t all; he owns a Maserati and a Monster truck too. But despite all of this, Shlaferman remains humble. He says all of these things point toward the idea of him living an adventurous life and taking risks, stating that he even plans to sell the Maserati. Being so young, Shlaferman still lives at home with his parents, where he contributes to rent and expenses.
Alex threw a party on a boat that floated in front of the Manhattan skyline called “Boats, Bitches, and Basshunter. He hired the famous DJ to play his private party.
The 20-year-old has since become infamous for throwing mammoth, flash-mob, free-for-all parties for thousands of young people to attend, operating under the alias “Alex Xander”. He throws these ragers at far-away warehouses, on massive boats or in fields, and even organized a party on the Manhattan bridge, which incidentally landed him jail time for a few nights. However, even this seemed to work out in Shlaferman’s favour, subsequently receiving multiple phone calls from producers looking to churn out a reality TV show based on his life and wild antics.
At 20 years old Alex Shlaferman owned a Vente Maserati.
He doesn’t regret any of it, but rather looks at it as providing a service to his fellow peers and likes to think they would do the same if they were in his shoes.
In terms of success, Shlaferman says it’s important to not lose the creativity we have while we’re young, naïve and gullible.
In an interview he said, “The older we get and the more exposed we are to the world, the more we start to rack our own brains about the decisions we make, essentially mindfucking ourselves into not doing something. It takes balls to make things happen. Ask anyone that’s made money — you have to do whatever it takes.”
… which he then quickly sold and traded up for a monster truck.
I guess the lesson here is that the formula for success doesn’t consider age. It’s about big dreams and an even bigger effort to make them a reality.
These Party goers get the full “Xander Experience” at an illegal party in an abandoned Williamsburg warehouse, thrown by Alexander Shlaferman on June 8
This video shows exactly what it is like to be part of a Xandernation Party:
Hundreds party on the Manhattan Bridge in a party organized by Alexander.
Alexander Shlaferman and his best friend, Eugene Komissarov, watch themselves on CBS’s “Inside Edition” the day after the big party
Sources: wordpress.com, businessinsider.com, brooklynpaper.com, cuny.edu