New York’s Incarcerated Will Receive Gifts Of Clothes And Fresh Food This Holiday Thanks To This Former Inmate’s Startup

As packages full of toys crisscross the globe this holiday season, FedEx curriers are toting hundreds of fully cooked $20 turkeys to New York State’s 50 correctional facilities. They’re the most popular item people are sending to their incarcerated loved ones using the ordering platform Emma’s Premium Services.

Founder Anton Kogan, 32, saw a need during his eight years behind bars and created the website and app to allow inmates’ families to effortlessly send fresh food, clothing and electronics to a population that subsists on canned goods, as he puts it. Come May, the Russian immigrant plans to have completed an M.B.A. from Rutgers University while working toward $1 million in 2020 sales.

Aside from meals consumed in the cafeteria, “people were eating tuna for 10 years straight,” he says. “I saw that as a problem.”

It started with an avocado. As a teenager finishing his senior year of high school inside New York City’s correctional facilities on Rikers Island before moving to several other locations, Kogan found himself surrounded by people already imprisoned for 20 years. Some had never tasted or even seen an avocado until his mother sent him one. 

“‘What planet did this come from?’” he recalls one asking. With entrepreneurial gears turning, he thought, “How long can a person eat out of a can? People are still people—right, wrong, whatever they did.”

His path had veered off course when police linked the Edison, New Jersey student to a robbery and gunshot murder involving marijuana. “I thought I was never getting out,” he recalls. He ultimately pleaded guilty and served 85% of a 10-year sentence, including time in maximum security at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. 

To date, EPS has processed orders for 210,000 families—and 62,000 items this year alone. “I answered every call the first three years,” Kogan says. “I’ve spoken to enough mothers, sisters and daughters to know that they feel just as good or better than the person receiving the package.” 

There already were companies, such as Union Supply, founded in 1991 and headquartered in Rancho Dominguez, California, that navigated goods through prison security. But Kogan set out to add fresh fruits and vegetables to the market and save family members the multistep headache of shopping, packing, shipping and hoping the package complied with restrictions such as clothing colors having to differ from those of guards’ uniforms.

He started the business on his mother’s kitchen table five years ago before taking over her garage and finally moving in 2017 to a 3,000-square-foot warehouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Winnings of $20,000 in a Rutgers business plan competition made that move possible.

Rutgers Senior Admissions Officer Stephan Kolodiy witnessed the award presentation and recalls the faculty and outside judges’ surprise at their winner. “I don’t think anyone had pitched that kind of idea to them,” Kolodiy says.

Kogan’s background was atypical of most Rutgers Business School applicants. His résumé showed an Ohio State University bachelor’s degree in business earned online during his sentence but no professional experience—much less a stint at a giant like Prudential or Johnson & Johnson, which Kolodiy says is common among M.B.A. candidates. “He had to sell himself a bit more, but he has really excelled,” Kolodiy says. “He’s really making up for lost time.”

Kogan took on an account executive role at Tyco (the building security provider renamed Johnson Controls) for three years while growing his own business. Now the EPS team of six can pick up inventory from BJ’s Wholesale Club or Costco—cleaning out those suppliers’ stock of turkey this time of year—and package orders on an assembly line Sundays through Tuesdays, before FedEx arrives to complete delivery on Wednesdays.

This year Kogan moved the service onto Shopify software, whose muscle has helped boost monthly sales to about $60,000, and $100,000 during the holiday season, notching 140% year-over-year growth with a 33% profit margin. The platform costs $80 a month, plus 2.6% and $0.30 of every transaction—a big cut, Kogan admits, “but you get what you pay for.”

Kogan owns the lean, profitable venture in full and owes only mortgage debt since diversifying into real estate. He owns eight residential properties totaling 32 apartments—value he says he would tap into, if EPS needed it, before he would consider sharing equity and decision-making with outside investors.

The company is named for Kogan’s niece, Emma, then 4 years old, whose father gave him $3,000 after prison to buy professional clothing and interview for jobs. “They thought I was crazy,” he says, when he spent the money on one suit, cardboard boxes and publishing a catalog. 

Every shipment includes that catalog of EPS products—a key way to inform other inmates about the brand. A few high-profile Instagram shout outs have helped too, such as a comment from Mob Wives and Celebrity Big Brother TV personality Renee Gorziano and a video from actor/producer Gillie Da Kid, who has a following of 1 million. For its part, EPS counts more than 12,000 followers.

Kogan says his family members deny ever doubting his early spending on the business, now that he financially supports his parents and himself. The final box he needs to check to make his mom proud, he says: finishing the last five credits toward the part-time M.B.A. he began five years ago.

His next pursuit: reaching the approximately 6 million individuals in adult correctional systems nationwide. Twice he has applied through the Department of Justice for vendor approval in California, which maintains the second-largest prisoner population, behind Texas, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The coming year also looks hopeful for expansion beyond New York into Florida, Indiana and Alabama, Kogan says.

“From my experience, I knew there was an opportunity in this market,” he says. “I knew how to make a difference.”