Kevin Corey, co-founder and president of Stall Mates, and a teacher at Uniondale High School in Uniondale, New York.
Kevin Corey spends his weekdays teaching high school students about real-world examples of the ups and downs of running a business, including his own side hustle.
Corey, 41, teaches business courses at Uniondale High School in Uniondale, New York. He's also the co-founder and president of Stall Mates, a flushable bathroom wipes brand that brought in more than $3.8 million in 2025 revenue, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. And his students have a front-row seat watching Corey and his co-founder Greg Schipf run the business.
"Every high and every low, including the tariff situation now, is certainly a learning lesson that ... I can take back to the classroom and talk to them about," says Corey. "When they're talking about, like, 'Why [are prices] going up?' It's certainly a lot easier for me to explain, because I can actually pull up my invoices."
Corey and Schipf launched Stall Mates in nearby Islip, New York, in 2013, and Corey started teaching at Uniondale the following year. His students have tracked the successes and setbacks of growing a packaged goods brand that began with a $14,000 seed investment—which went toward an initial run of 100,000 units of individual wipes that Corey stored in his house and took nine months to sell, he says.
Today, Stall Mates sells nearly 250,000 units per year, including "on-the-go" packs and larger boxes of wipes, mostly through Amazon and online retailers like Walmart and Grove Collaborative, says Corey. It's been profitable since 2015, and the co-founders take $100,000 annual salaries from the business, not including shareholder distributions or bonuses, he says. The bulk of Stall Mates' profits get reinvested back into the business, he adds.
Corey spends about 20 hours working on Stall Mates each week, mostly nights and weekends, and roughly 40 hours teaching, he says. The one aspect of Stall Mates that he avoids sharing publicly, even in the classroom, is the line-item cost of each wipe—a practice many businesses follow to protect their profit model.
Nearly everything else is fair game, he says. "We actually have a class called Business Math, and that alone is showing them that, OK, these companies can do a million dollars in sales ... But it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be, like, living in a mansion [or] driving a nice car," says Corey. "You have to keep going and building."