irvine-california
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The Agency That Learned to Sell the Work Before It Built the Office
Riches & Saint began with a founder who kept turning away work. The useful lesson is what happened when he finally listened - and what the agency did after three clients disappeared overnight.
Hamedia Put a Price Tag on the Work That Quietly Eats a Company
The Irvine company began with brand stories. Now it sells something less glamorous and often more useful: trained people, visible workflows, and a weekly bill for the work that founders should stop doing themselves.
GOLD PR’s 11-Year Lesson: Credibility Comes Before Reach
The Irvine boutique did not make clear aligners famous with one lucky headline. It spent years turning professional doubt into public curiosity - a useful lesson for anyone marketing a product people must trust before they can want it.
Citizen Paine Spent 18 Months Winning Taco Bell - Then Helped Build a Global Agency
An Irvine PR shop learned patience on one fast-food account, sold most of itself, and joined a network built for borderless conversations. Its best work still follows the same rule: make the message do something useful.
The Doorbell That Rang Before Ring
It crowdfunded $600K, out-patented its rivals, and put two million cameras on America's doorframes - then Amazon bought Ring and everything about the doorbell wars got louder.
The Irvine Shop That Buys Dead-Famous Brands and Sells Them Back to You
How a three-person back office in Irvine turned into the quiet machine that keeps Sharper Image gadgets, FAO Schwarz toys and Vornado fans on the shelf.
Forty Outdoor Brands, One Dragonfly, and a $1.125 Billion Bet on Craftsmanship
Fox Racing, CamelBak, Bushnell, Simms - Revelyst is the maker collective quietly running the gear behind your weekend. Here is how a Vista Outdoor spinoff became a $1.125 billion private-equity prize, and what it is building next.
Habit Burger & Grill
It started as a burger stand under the Santa Barbara sun in 1969. Fifty-five years and one ampersand later, Habit Burger & Grill is Yum! Brands' bet that a chargrilled patty can scale without losing the char.
OluKai
OluKai is a Hawaiian-inspired premium footwear brand that designs sandals, sneakers, slippers, boots and golf shoes for people who live an active, ocean-oriented lifestyle. Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Irvine, California, the company blends the Hawaiian values of comfort ('olu') and ocean ('kai') with contoured, high-support footbeds and water-friendly, durable construction. A Certified B Corporation, OluKai channels a portion of every sale into its 'Ohana Giveback Program and the Ama OluKai Foundation to preserve Hawaiian culture and communities.
Kantata
Kantata is a cloud software company that builds a purpose-built Professional Services Automation (PSA) platform for services organizations. Formed in 2021 through the merger of Mavenlink and Kimble Applications and backed by Accel-KKR, Kantata unifies project management, resource planning, time and expense tracking, billing, business intelligence and increasingly agentic AI so that consulting firms, agencies and other services businesses can scope, staff, forecast and deliver client work profitably. The company serves more than 2,000 organizations across 100+ countries, including Deloitte, Sage, Hitachi and NTT Data.
Lantronix
Lantronix is an Irvine, California-based global provider of secure IoT and remote environment management solutions that combine intelligent hardware, connectivity, software-as-a-service and engineering services. Founded in 1989 and publicly traded on Nasdaq as LTRX, the company builds device servers, IoT gateways, cellular routers, console servers and PoE switches, paired with cloud management platforms like Percepxion and ConsoleFlow, to help organizations connect, compute, comprehend and control equipment at the edge across automotive, industrial, smart city, defense and enterprise IT markets.
Vena Vitals
Vena Vitals is an Irvine, California medical-device startup building a soft, skin-worn sticker sensor that continuously measures blood pressure without a cuff or an arterial line. Spun out of UC Irvine biomedical engineering research, its VeriTrack system uses a patented wrinkled-metal capacitive pressure sensor to capture beat-to-beat data with accuracy validated against arterial lines in operating rooms across the country. Founded in 2019 by Ray Liu, Michelle Khine, and Josh Kim and backed by Y Combinator, the company is pursuing FDA clearance to bring continuous, noninvasive blood pressure monitoring first into hospitals and later into homes.
StretchLab Franchise
StretchLab is the original and largest one-on-one assisted stretching franchise, built on the simple bet that flexibility deserves its own studio. Trained specialists called Flexologists guide members through customized stretch sessions using techniques like PNF, supported by 3D body-scan technology (MAPS) and recovery tools such as NormaTec compression. Founded in Venice, California in 2015 and now owned by Xponential Fitness, StretchLab became the first assisted stretching brand to surpass 500 studios in North America.