Isegoria

Sophie la Girafe is a French teething toy created in 1961 — and a global star:

Priced at $25 in the U.S., compared with less than $5 for more ordinary teethers, Sophie is stocked in high-end baby boutiques around the world, including Mexico, Japan and Australia. The offspring of celebrities such as Sandra Bullock and Kate Hudson have been photographed clutching the giraffe.

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Vulli’s sales of €22 million ($29 million) have more than quadrupled since 2006, just before Sophie was first sold outside France. This year, for the first time, the company expects to sell more outside of France than domestically.

That’s saying something, because in France, Sophie is a national tradition. In 2010, Vulli sold 816,000 giraffes in France, and 828,000 babies were born, meaning that nearly every French newborn got one.

Sophie isn’t nearly as elite at home in France. Local supermarkets sell the blister-packaged toy for $12, less than half of its U.S. sticker price.

I don’t quite understand the allure of 5-Hour Energy, which packages the caffeine of a large coffee or over-the-counter pill into a vile-tasting two-ounce “shot” — but it has made Manoj Bhargava, now 58, a lot of money:

Bhargava was born into affluence in Lucknow, India, thriving capital of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. His family left their comfortable villa to move to America in 1967 so his father could pursue a doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

Their new residence — a third-floor walkup in West Philadelphia that rented for $80 a month — offered a potentially dispiriting contrast to life in Lucknow. But young Bhargava was, if anything, inspired, using his talent for mathematics to win a full scholarship to The Hill School, an elite private academy.

When he was 17, Bhargava became an entrepreneur, purchasing a Chevy dump truck for $400 and removing debris from demolition sites in poverty-stricken North Philly. He banked $600 over a summer, then resold the truck for what he’d paid for it. This was his first taste of profit, and he liked it — no matter the squalor that surrounded the enterprise (rats larger than cats, murders taking place nearby).

Bhargava made it to Princeton in 1972, but what he found — a snobbish social scene and insufficiently-challenging math courses — didn’t agree with him. He left after one year, moving back in with his parents, who had relocated to Fort Wayne, Ind., where his father had a PVC plastics company.

The country was in the economic doldrums, and Bhargava was adrift. He began to read about a Hindu saint whose life had been spent on a spiritual quest; it struck him as a worthy pursuit. By 1974, he was back in the country of his birth.

Bhargava wasn’t, strictly speaking, a monk, but “it’s the closest Western word,” he says, for what he did in India. He spent 12 years on and off in ashrams, trying to learn to “still the mind,” but came back to the U.S. from time to time, where he took odd jobs such as cab driver. Once he returned to America to stay, he obliged his parents, who had been rather upset about his dropping out of Princeton, by going into the family business.

Despite having absolutely no interest in plastics, Bhargava became something of a turnaround artist. By 2001, the company had become a serious success, with $25 million in annual sales. Financially secure, he moved to Michigan, where his wife’s family lived, and declared himself retired.

But Bhargava had learned an important lesson from his time in PVC manufacturing: “Chemicals are really simple,” he told Forbes. “You mix a couple things together and sell it for more than the materials cost.” He applied that simple idea in the spring of 2003, after attending a natural products trade show in Anaheim, Calif. There he encountered a booth whose attendants were hawking a 16-ounce elixir that purported to raise productivity for hours. Bhargava drank it, and was impressed. “For the next six or seven hours I was in great shape. I thought, Wow, this is amazing. I can sell this.”

But not exactly that. Sixteen ounces was too much — too much like the recently-released Red Bull, and sure to have to compete head to head with Coke and Pepsi. So Bhargava looked over the ingredient list, and cooked up his own, much lower-in-volume version.

The formula: “a blend of B-vitamins [like niacin], amino acids [such as taurine] and nutrients,” and “about as much caffeine as a cup of premium coffee,” according to 5-Hour’s website. But as Forbes reports, a 2010 independent analysis by ConsumerLab.com determined that 5-Hour contained levels of vitamins “thousands of times higher than recommended daily allowances,” as well as “207mg of caffeine — a massive amount per ounce, but less than the 260mg in a Starbucks tall coffee.” Still, it clocked in at only four calories and contained no sugar at all — major selling points featured prominently on 5-Hour’s diminutive, shrink-wrapped bottle.

It took Bhargava only six months, from the time he sipped that inspiring potion, to get 5-Hour into stores. Then his sales team went to work, convincing GNC (GNC) to carry it, then Walgreens (WAG), Rite Aid (RAD), and regional grocers like Sheetz.

But his greatest triumph was landing 5-Hour in the Walmart (WMT) checkout aisle. (Every Walmart store in the U.S. sells all four flavors of 5-Hour; Sam’s Club carries 24-packs.) “Getting it next to the register isn’t hard,” Rise Meguiar, Living Essentials’s vice president of sales, told Forbes. “Keeping it there? Very hard. Anything that sells, the stores will try. To own that space is really hard.”

“What we did wasn’t rocket science,” math whiz Bhargava told Forbes. “It’s not the little bottle. It’s not the placement. It’s the product. You can con people one time, but nobody pays $3 twice.”

Employers look for candidates with perfect resumes, but that can backfire:

Directors of summer internship programs, for example, have soured on seemingly “perfect” students with 3.9 grade-point averages from elite schools, who have mastered multiple foreign languages. The reason: these recruits show surprisingly little initiative once they arrive at a big, busy company; they keep waiting to be told what to do. Ultra-rigorous screening of internship candidates has inadvertently eliminated the freewheeling mavericks of previous eras. Those earlier interns might have lacked great transcripts, but they didn’t need anyone’s permission to try something bold.

Small-company chief executive officers voice a similar lament. They are eager to hire lieutenants whose career zigzags have created a burning desire to succeed in a new job. In the boardroom, though, such plans elicit frowns. Directors keep nudging these CEOs to play it safe, filling the management team with steady performers whose work history closely matches the job at hand, even if there’s no sense of “wow!” in the job interviews.

Insist on a perfect resume each time, and it’s impossible to make the most of highly promising candidates with “jagged resumes.” The lost opportunities can be excruciating. Imagine the remorse of a venture capitalist unwilling to back Steve Jobs in 1977, because the personal-computer pioneer never finished college. For that matter, consider Apple’s fate in the 1990s, if the company hadn’t invited Jobs back for a second turn at leading the company, even though his first run ended in dismissal.

In researching The Rare Find, George Anders settled on two key insights:

First, organizations that consider jagged resumes have clear ideas of what high points they must see. Teach for America looks for perseverance. The New England Patriots look for a deep-seated desire to play football, not just to be a famous athlete. Linear Technology looks for tinkerers, who have been experimenting with electrical circuits since childhood.

In all these cases, organizations seize on a few central character traits that are well known internally as future markers of likely success. Such enterprises think harder about which candidates might grow the most on the job, rather than which ones already possess all needed competencies for the task at hand. Traits such as resilience, efficiency, curiosity and self-reliance are among the most likely ones to be prized. This bolder hiring philosophy can be summed up by the maxim: “Compromise on experience. Don’t compromise on character.”

Second, connoisseurs of the jagged resume have well-thought-out ideas about which apparent shortcomings don’t matter (and which ones do.) Hopscotch work histories often are viewed leniently. Quirky personalities and inconsistent grades can be forgiven, too. There’s no forbearance, though for lapses in ethics, an inability to work with people, or a lack of motivation. Jagged-resume hiring can succeed only if the cultural fit between candidate and company is unusually good, so warning flags in that area are taken seriously.