Dot-Com Winners: the Working Person's Store, a New Find

This pass's winner stands in no banked fragment before it. The Working Person's Store / WorkingPerson.com — founded in Lakeville, Indiana in August 1995, a multichannel specialty retailer of work apparel, footwear, and safety gear under CEO Eric DenigerThe growth at published figures (BKD Indiana Excellence Awards coverage, 2006): sales $1.8 million (2004) → $3.6 million → an estimated $9 million; employment 12 (June 2005) to nearly 80. The national record from the grantors' and trade press's own carriers: Internet Retailer "Hot 100" Best Retail Web Sites (announced 6 December 2007); the company's standing boilerplate claim of third-fastest-growing e-retailer in America and a Webby Honoree citation (printed at company-boilerplate strength, the Hot 100 at trade-press strength); the 2006 BKD Gold Prize in Technology; Interactive Media Awards Best in Class, Retail, 2012 and 2013; a 2013 Mobile 400 listing; an expansion announced February 2015. The seat prints exactly: the firm's own 2012 boilerplate divides it — "a retail store in Lakeville and headquarters and technology center in South Bend" — and later profiles seat the headquarters at 1608 Commerce Drive, South Bend. The founding, the store, and the growth years are Lakeville's; the mature firm's headquarters moved to South Bend. Both facts stand. No bankruptcy, acquisition, or closure was found in any carrier reached; the release record runs to 2015 and the firm's web presence stands in current profiles — its post-2015 course is a named gap (settlers: the Secretary of State entity records for Working Person's Enterprises / WPE Holdings, and the Internet Archive's capture history). The pre-web classes print empty: no bulletin-board system seated in Lakeville was found, and no Lakeville-seated first ISP; no Lakeville native is documented winning elsewhere in the dot-com era. Lakeville was a commerce internet town, not an infrastructure one — its one winner sold work clothes from a town the 2007 release itself sized as "(pop. 400)."