 "Photo: Sarah Mattero")
 "Photo: Sarah Mattero")
 "Photo: Sarah Mattero")
Last spring, while most of Suffolk's Class of 2009 was finishing up their final classes and looking for jobs after college, cousins Joe Melville, 31, and Greg Balestrieri, 24, had bigger plans.
Already involved with their family's business, Melville Candy Company, in February 2009 they looked into purchasing the domain name Candy.com for their own business conquest.
Melville and Balestrieri wrote the business plan for their website in one week, and spent the next five months working with a lawyer to obtain the $3 million domain. Their purchase was the second-highest domain sale of the year behind the $5.1 million paid for Toys ‘R' Us Inc.'s bid of Toys.com.
"It's all I thought about in class," said Balestrieri. Their ability to make the purchase came through bank backing, private investors, and a lot of commitment.
On Tuesday, Nov. 10, the former Sawyer Business School students gave a presentation in the Sargent Law School conference room to aspiring business students.
"Candy is recession proof, it's a $27 billion industry," answered Balestrieri when asked about starting a business in an economic downturn. By the mid-July launch, Candy.com was already starting to receive 1,000 unique hits a day. Estimates expect that there will be 10,000 unique hits within the next six months.
The website itself has over 6,000 items that are imported all over the world, and 14,000 more items will be added within the year, including a cake and candy making branch.
"The more variety the better," said Melville, "we capitalize on the hard-to-find candy, we want to focus on the consumer directly." For the future of the website, they hope to add a "pick and choose" option, as if one were to go into a real candy store and fill a bag with whatever they wanted.
Don't be surprised if you start seeing the Candy.com logo in malls near you as well, the cousins have already been approached with franchising opportunities for kiosk branding and retail stores that hope to be constructed within the year.
Of course, having a family company already in the picture before starting this enterprise has helped Melville and Balestrieri incredibly. They attend 20 trade shows a year, and their association with Melville Candy Company helped create more alliances for Candy.com at trade shows.
"It's hard to just go to one of those shows and have no connections," explained Melville.
"If you have an opportunity in front of you, you have to take it, know the potential, have vision, passion, drive," said the cousins about starting the business. "We had no social life, our close friends thought we were nuts, most of our support came from our family and professors," they added.
Candy.com recently won the We Get It! Award in Brooklyn for "for demonstrating an understanding of the power of generic domain names and how they generate new business."
The cousins shared their remarkably unreal story with students during the business school presentation, and giant lollipops were given to SBS Dean William O'Neill and Professor George Moker in thanks of their never-ending support of the Suffolk graduates.
"If you told us a year ago that we'd be up here sharing this story with you, we would have never believed it," said Melville.
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