Mission Belt

Mission Belt started with a bus. Before there was a belt, Zac Holzapfel and his partners helped a friend in Panama named Luis Melendez buy a bus they found on eBay in Florida, then shipped it from Panama City, Florida, to Panama City, Panama. The Orem company says one bus grew to three, and that is how its founders got sold on micro lending.

Luis had been working on the docks and lost the job after an injury, the company's account says. They looked at pig farming and backed away when pork prices swung. Then they noticed the long lines for buses into Panama City, and Luis started charging commuters $1.25 each way.

Zac Holzapfel and Jeff Jensen founded Mission Belt in the early fall of 2012 with Zac's brother, Nate. They named the company after the mission and built the loans into the price: a dollar from every belt goes to micro loans through Kiva, the peer to peer lender. "A lot of people know how to fish, they just can't afford the nets," the company's site says.

The belt itself has no holes. A track system in the strap lets the ratchet buckle adjust every quarter inch, where a traditional belt has a hole every inch. The company's own copy suggests loosening it a few clicks after a big holiday meal, which is more candor than most belt makers offer. The Daily Herald noted that Mission Belt did not invent the hole-less belt.

They filmed Shark Tank in October 2012. Daymond John offered a deal, and after the episode aired in April 2013 he came back with a better one, Zac told the Daily Herald. The team had 19,000 belts in stock and hoped to sell half that week. They sold out within the week instead, and the founders spent the night of the broadcast ordering more.

On the day the episode aired, the belts were in 12 stores. By 2016 they were in about 1,200, with sports licenses from the NHL and NBA among others, and ABC4 has reported more than 2 million belts sold.

The honest note is in the specs. The standard straps are genuine leather with a synthetic coating, according to the product pages, and full grain Italian leather is an option. The warranty is one year.

The loans kept compounding. The Daily Herald put them near $1 million by 2016, and the company's site now counts more than 250,000 loans in 81 countries, from $25 to $500 each. "That first belt we've sold, we're still loaning that dollar out again and again," Zac said. It has gone a long way from one bus in Florida.