“A small hobby turned into a Clarendon Hills-based candy company and a sugar-fueled international obsession,” reads the lead sentence in a recent Chicago Tribune article about Vintage Confections, a Chicagoland custom lollipop company. It’s a classic small entrepreneur start-up story with one major twist: thanks to the internet, this boutique candy company is doing an enormous amount of business in China.
According to the article, “Vintage Confections says 95 percent of its business is online and that, according to IP and mailing addresses and customer feedback, 95 percent of those customers are Asian. Half live overseas, mostly in China.”