Minnesota

The warehouse on Rochester’s north side doesn’t look like much from the outside. But inside, pallets of a made-in-America medical device arrive from U.S. contract manufacturers, get sorted by customer, and move out the door — to hospitals, a nationwide network of eyecare clinics and institutions, and to Amazon, where they reach individual patients across the country. From here, Dr. Alyssa Song, the Mayo Clinic graduate who built Nanodropper from a student startup into a Rochester-based medical device company, is planning her next move: taking Nanodropper global, with Amazon.

Nanodropper makes an adapter that fits onto nearly any eye drop bottle and delivers the right size drop of medication for the human eye. Standard bottles were designed to dispense drops up to five times larger than the eye can hold, a known flaw documented since the 1980s. It means patients on expensive medications are using more than they should until they run out, and often before insurance covers a refill. Song’s adapter makes a bottle last three times as long at roughly one third the per-dose cost.

From leashes to harnesses, sweatshirts and bandanas, Lucy & Co. gives Ahmed El Shourbagy and Ashley Paguyo’s customers all the joy of dressing up their fur babies. They built their high-quality dog gear and apparel business, Lucy & Co., to appeal to their “Dogs of Instagram” community on social media. As sales increased, the husband-wife pair turned to Amazon as a selling partner.

“Amazon creates a fair playing field,” said El Shourbagy. “You don’t have to have an enormous ad budget or a big name. If your idea’s good and priced well, it will succeed.”