🇺🇸 Mickey Naqvi

The rejection that did not end it

The brothers appeared on Shark Tank in 2019 and again in 2021, pitching the Ornament Anchor to investors they had grown up watching. No offer came either time.

Mickey's account of what that taught them is the most quoted line in their story: “You can keep going. That’s what we did. And now we are more successful than ever.” The sentiment is common in business writing and unusual in practice, because a televised refusal in front of millions is the point at which most consumer products quietly disappear.

How they got into Lowe's

The breakthrough was self-produced. Rather than approach the retailer through the conventional channels, the brothers filmed a video inside their local Lowe's, demonstrating the anchor and interviewing customers about it, and used that as the argument for stocking it.

It worked. Lowe's agreed to carry the product in more than 500 locations. The method is worth noting because it inverts the usual power relationship: instead of asking a buyer to imagine how the product would sell, the brothers showed the buyer the retailer's own customers reacting to it in the retailer's own aisle.

From $5,000 to multi-million

The first year, 2019, produced about $5,000 in sales. Three years later Entrepreneur described the business as multi-million-dollar, with more than 500 reviews on Amazon.

Both figures are useful together. The $5,000 shows what a genuinely small start looks like, at a scale most people would treat as a hobby. The growth that followed came from distribution rather than from redesigning the product: the same simple loop-and-pull fastener, placed where hundreds of thousands of people buy Christmas supplies.

Seasonal products live or die on shelf placement, and the brothers had built a second advantage by then: more than five hundred Amazon reviews, which is the closest thing a small consumer item has to a credential when a buyer at a national chain is deciding whether to risk the space.

The older brother's job

The invention belongs to Ayaan, who was 10 and had a school assignment. What turned it into a company was the pair of them, and the record consistently presents Mickey, a year older, as the business half of the partnership.

That division is common in family ventures and rarely documented precisely, and it is not documented here either: Entrepreneur does not assign formal titles or split ownership between the brothers. What the article does establish is that both were present for both television pitches and both are credited with the retail expansion.

Where Mickey Naqvi is now

The last documented position is December 2022, with Mickey at 15. The stated plans were to expand into more retail chains, develop new variations of the Ornament Anchor and increase online advertising.

Nothing after that appears in the sources used here: no revenue update, no further retail announcements, no information about school or university. There is also no published date of birth and no personal net worth figure. A note on the name for anyone searching: the source gives it as Mika'il Naqvi, with Mickey as the form he uses.