Prairie Tumbleweed Farm: Joke becomes successful web business
November 28, 2007
Tumbleweeds…See them rolling along , Pledging their love with a song
Here on the Range I belong , Drifting along with the Tumbling Tumbleweeds …
Your fortune might be just out the back door. Linda Katz did not start out to be an entrepreneur of an online money making business selling tumbleweeds. No, Katz was simply attempting to learn how to create a website. In order to build a website, the website should have a purpose. Katz, who lives in Kansas, took a look around the prairie landscape and all the tumbling tumbleweeds and jokingly decided to make up a company called the Prairie Tumbleweed Farm.
The Prairie Tumbleweed Farm website would offer tumbleweeds for sale. Although certain she wasn’t going to see any tumbleweed sales, orders started coming in to the website. 13 years later, and Katz is said to be pulling in over $40,000 dollars a year selling tumbleweeds. Some of the tumbleweed farm customers include NASA, who used her tumbleweeds to test the Mars Tumbleweed Rover, movie and television production companies, and Western theme weddings. The tumbleweeds have been used to make tumbleweed snowmen.
Katz describes her 80 acres of a tumbleweed prairie with deeply embedded covered wagon wheel tracks as the most beautiful land imaginable. Just like the enterprising early pioneers who traveled West in the 1800s, Katz has succeeded in taking something and making something more from it.
To this day, the Prairie Tumbleweed Farm website is as basic as most websites found during the 90s. Static webpages, basic graphics. It doesn’t seem to slow down business at all. And as opportunity might offer, fortune was indeed just outside the back door.