Serial entrepreneur Scott Dancy capitalised on a business idea that came from his smelly apartment. Dancy, a father of two, was going through a divorce in 2017. Back then, he was living alone in New York and had to deal with a broken washing machine one day.
When a friend offered him tea tree oil with antibacterial properties, Dancy was surprised how the odour-elimination solution did its job. 'It got rid of the smells,' Dancy said. 'I was like, This is amazing - how do we market this?'
So, after years of running his own businesses, including staffing companies, an information security software firm, as well as investments in a sand and gravel pit, where he 'lost everything,' Dancy's encounter with the tea tree oil solution reignited his entrepreneurial spirit.
In a few years' time, Dancy launched Azuna in 2019 in partnership with his friend who introduced the solution. ' Other products just mask what the smell with fragrance. While we do have fragrance, the tea tree oil, basically in layman's terms, is effective against mold, mildew and bacteria - and that's the source of all your smells,' Dancy had explained.
With a hands-on approach, Dancy set out to build his business. ' No idea what I'm doing, literally writing the ad copy myself. For three years, I set an alarm every day for two hours to wake up to see if there were things I needed to respond to, whether it was customer service questions or Facebook comments,' he had stated.
He tracked orders, started collecting products from the warehouse, and shipped them all by his own. His odour-elimination product cost about $10 to make and sold for $20, but including labour costs, margins were 'rough.'
Despite challenges, Dancy's business brought in $12,000 in April 2020, at the height of the pandemic. However, sales surged to $105,000 next month with people wanting their homes to smell better during the global lockdown.
While Azuna got its own third-party logistics as operation had to keep up with rising demand, Dancy did not hire anyone until he took to business to $3 million in two years.
In recent years, Azuna'ssales trajectory showed no sign of slowing down. Sales hit $53 million in 2025 and on track to surpass $100 million this year. The bootstrapped business also picked up investments along the way, which remains under $10 million to date.
However, fast growth is seldom without challenges. ' I'm not an operations person. I'm an entrepreneur. They just put up a job description for an executive assistant for me, and someone wrote in there, "Cleaning up after the Tasmanian devil." So that puts it in perspective. That's me,' Dancy stated.
Source: International Business Times UK
