Company: BarCharts Inc.
Business: Publisher of quick-reference charts
Founded: 1991
Start-up Capital: $1,000
1999 Revenues: $6.6 million
2000 Projected Revenues: $10 million

When the Florida real estate market tanked in the late 1980s, Boca Raton commercial real estate broker John Ford, then 43, suddenly needed a new way to make a living. He tried a woodworking venture, but it fizzled. Next his plan to market mini-billboards for the tops of cars ran up against county regulations.

Then bingo: an idea sprang forth from his kitchen table. That's where, in February 1991, Ford's wife, Bobbie, was studying for the Florida bar exam. She drew a flowchart summarizing her Constitutional-law notes. When she shared the chart with some of her fellow students, they loved it. "A little lightbulb went on in my head," John Ford says.

He drove to several law-school bookstores and described the chart to the managers. "I got a pretty positive response," he recalls. His neighbor, who had just been laid off from a job at IBM, sold Ford a 386 PC for $1,000 and taught him PageMaker desktop publishing. Then Ford laid out the chart on the computer. Having published art prints in the late 1970s, Ford says, "I knew about color and composition." He concentrated on making his charts clearer and more attractive than the products already on the market. He also persuaded some of Bobbie's law-school professors to critique the content gratis.

By June 1991 the Fords were living on credit cards. They borrowed $6,000 from their parents to have study charts printed up for six law courses. They hired neighborhood kids to staple the charts into plastic bags and paid them 5¢ a bag. John dug out his woodworking tools to build melamine display units. He sent the units and six-chart samples to law-school bookstores across the country. "Two weeks later we got our first order from Arizona State University at Tempe, for $230," he says. "We went out and celebrated at McDonald's that night."

By the end of 1991 the Fords had sold $45,000 worth of charts, which retailed for $4.95 each. John built bigger displays and invested $500 in a used laminating machine. In 1993 he started selling study charts to undergraduates and hired professors at Florida Atlantic University to outline popular courses for $650 a course. Even as BarCharts grew, however, the Fords held tight to their bootstrapping ways, operating the business from their 1,500-square-foot house for four years before finally moving it to a separate office. "Bobbie was doing all the accounting in the bedroom," John says. "Another bedroom was my workroom, where I was making the charts. The living room had boxes to the ceiling. Our patio had cardboard shipping boxes under a tarp on a pallet."

Today the company makes and markets about 200 charts covering such topics as cooking and child development as well as its staple of academic titles. Free samples remain the cornerstone of the company's marketing strategy. "This is a product," Ford says, "that we can afford to give away."

I've heard earfuls about Tommy. People love him. They all agree that he's smart. Virile. Debonair. They don't all agree on the details of his life, however. Some say he resides in the Bahamas, while others think he lives in Florida. Some suspect he used to work on Wall Street. And he has a small trust fund. Owns two vintage convertibles. Goes fishing daily. Travels a lot. What a life.

It's said that this tanned enigma has Jimmy Buffett's blood pressure and Gary Cooper's bearing. Such equanimity comes in handy. For a guy whose watchword is relax, Tommy's plate is full. His tastes and preferences are the basis of a lifestyle brand created by Viewpoint International Inc., a nine-year-old company with sales estimated at more than $300 million. Like Martha Stewart, Tommy oversees every choice made in his name, from distribution to product design to advertising.

The punch line (as perhaps you've guessed) is that Tommy is not a real person. He is a fictional character devised by three flesh-and-blood entrepreneurs to develop their brand -- the Tommy Bahama line of merchandise, which includes clothing, accessories, home furnishings, and more. The company's three founders debate "What would Tommy do?" whenever they consider a key business decision. Does he golf? Yes. Does he own an overcoat? No way. Does he own a tie? That last question provoked a feud, which only underlines the obsessiveness that has become the hallmark of this company. "One of the reasons we've been a success is that we know what came first," says cofounder Bob Emfield, 59, a grave Minnesotan with sharp features and silver hair. "This guy came first. He has a strong personality, and we cater to him."

Emfield's obsession is shared by his partners, Lucio Dalla Gasperina, 44, a bon vivant and designer who runs the Seattle office, and Tony Margolis, 59, Viewpoint's New York City-based president, who is the quiet power at the center of the Tommy empire. The three men have a combined experience of nearly a century in the apparel industry. They've seen brands rise and fall, sometimes so quickly that the whole cycle could be timed with a stopwatch. But despite their expertise, it's amazing they succeeded at all. "We spent our first two years going out of business," Dalla Gasperina jokes.

Though Viewpoint is now a smash success, its start-up was a botch, hampered by too many projects aimed at too broad a consumer base, an exorbitant payroll, and a miserable distribution strategy. And yet the business endured -- a testament to the steel of its founders and the strength of the brand they created. Along the way, they developed tactics that would well serve anyone growing a brand from infancy to adulthood. Tactics like choosing distribution channels for what those channels do for the brand, not what they do for short-term profits. Like never marking down prices. Upgrading quality to stay ahead of knockoffs. Insisting on employing homegrown merchandising methods. And -- in a bravura moment -- taking money they might have spent on advertising and instead spending it in an unexpected way.

Now that the hardest parts are over, the guys behind Tommy Bahama may be tempted to rest. That would be a mistake. As the scope of the Tommy Bahama product line surges like the sea at high tide (now sarongs, now lamps, now golf bags), the company is in danger of expanding carelessly, even as the partners proclaim that "brand is not about volume," as Margolis puts it. Already, they seem to be contemplating some extensions that sound utterly ridiculous. But even their craziest ideas can't be dismissed because of one simple fact: in just under a decade Viewpoint has created a brand that even the most accomplished entrepreneur would envy. Under the guidance of Tommy, of course.

For a management discipline that's written about a lot, branding is a pretty fuzzy concept. And giving birth is the stage of the process that's often ignored. Few of the recent books about branding detail the particular rigors of brand entrepreneurship; instead they focus on professional brand management. The distinction between the two is an important one. If you have a brand lying around the office and spend your time thinking about ways to build it out, then what you're engaging in is essentially science. But if you have to create a brand out of whole cloth -- well, that's more of an art. It takes a different mind-set. And time. Henry did not build Ford in a day, and Michael is still nurturing a brand called Dell some 17 years after founding that company.

In her recent book Brand New, Harvard Business School professor Nancy F. Koehn defines a brand broadly: it's the relationship between a company and its customers. That relationship encompasses everything a company says about itself and everything customers perceive to be true about the company. The relationship is hard to sustain and even harder to create. As the CEO of a start-up or small company, you face the toughest circumstances of any brand creator. You don't have cash. You don't have time. And you have a lot of other priorities. Unless an entrepreneur is disciplined, the process of brand creation gets ignored, Koehn says.

In the case of Tommy Bahama, the company's three principals didn't let a lack of time or money stand in their way. They were dogmatic when it came to building their brand, focusing relentlessly on every signal they sent to the market. And they were rewarded. That's because if a start-up builds a good brand, it can grow very quickly. Witness Tommy Bahama, which has grown from $3 million in revenues to more than $300 million in seven years.

But what appears now as a textbook example of how to build a brand began as a lark. In the 1980s, Emfield and Margolis and their wives bought neighboring beach homes on Florida's Gulf Coast. The two men had met in 1969, when they worked for blue-jean maker Brittania Ltd. Over the years, as their vacations drew to an end, the couples joked that they never wanted to leave the beach. They wanted a trust fund. An island home. To fish all day and walk all night under the stars.

For three guys who isolated the DNA of an excellent brand in short order, the company they founded was a mess right from the start. One of the most obvious problems was that the three founders put themselves on a pay scale that was lavish by the standards of fledgling companies. "We were all coming out of six-figure-salary jobs," Margolis offers by way of explanation.

There were other structural problems. One of the earliest decisions they made was that Tommy would not carry the company on his own. The partners invested their capital to launch not one but three apparel lines in three segments of the market that, Margolis says, they felt were opportune at the time. The two other labels: Gear for Urban Training, a teen-skateboarder line, and Linguini & Bob, for the lady-killer "Vinnie Barbarino group," Margolis says. They premiered the trio of brands in the spring of 1993 and breezily assumed they'd turn a profit in a year.

From the start, distribution plans for all three brands faltered. For Gear and Linguini & Bob the problem was simple. Viewpoint had agreed to sell both brands through Merry-Go-Round Enterprises Inc., a midsize retail chain based in Maryland that operated stores called Merry-Go-Round and Chess King. The chain leased a lot of mall real estate, but it was entering a period of decline that would end in bankruptcy.

Tommy Bahama's initial distribution strategy was also flawed. The company had intended to sell Tommy Bahama to large department stores -- perhaps an unrealistic plan, given that big retailers have never treated young companies warmly. In the early 1990s it was even harder for a boutique brand like Tommy Bahama to get any attention. At the time, department stores were centralizing purchasing, reducing their number of buyers, and requiring wholesalers to travel to their offices for sales calls, rather than sending store representatives to wholesalers' showrooms to be pitched. The message those changes made was unmistakable to small fry like Viewpoint. "If it wasn't red-white-and-blue Hilfiger, Polo, or Nautica, they didn't want it," Emfield recalls.