While the other grade-schoolers were earning Cub Scout patches, commanding GI Joe battles, and swapping comic books, Joel Appel was peddling furniture polish. Appel and his parents, Max and Elaine, spent weekends at state fairs throughout Colorado and Wyoming demonstrating their homemade products. "Joel had these big brown eyes," recalls his father, "and the little old ladies couldn't say no to him."

Thirty years later, Appel's still getting people to open their wallets for his parents' goods, but he's got more than big eyes and a boyish smile working for him today—he's got infomercials. If you've ever had a case of insomnia, you've probably seen them: Orange Glo Wood Cleaner & Polish renews wood instantly! Stains disappear like magic! Now available in stores! As president and CEO of Orange Glo International, Joel has taken his father's line of natural cleaners and built one of the fastest-growing businesses in the nation, with $120 million in annual revenues last year.

"Our business strategy is to use whatever advertising vehicles are at our disposal to tell our story and to expose as many people as possible to our products," Joel says from his home in Greenwood Village, Colo. This includes the Home Shopping Network, advertising inserts in Sunday newspapers, and those ubiquitous infomercials. By creating demand for Orange Glo products through its infomercials, the company has been able to get its products on the shelves at Long's Drug stores, Albertsons, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, and Home Depot. Muscled by infomercials overseas, Orange Glo's market has expanded into Germany, France, Australia, and, most recently, Japan.

It all started decades ago, when Max and Elaine Appel were tinkering in the family garage with a cleaning product they were buying from a salesman in Denver. The product's recipe used an unsafe chemical and "we didn't like its smell, and the fact that it wasn't good for you," Max recalls. So the Appels worked to alter the formula in their garage, putting the transitory brew to work on fine wood furniture. Their discovery was that oils extracted from the bumpy rinds of oranges produced a chemistry very similar to turpentine. Heavy grease build-up on kitchen cabinets and family heirloom furniture could be obliterated with one swoop of a sponge. Not only that, but the oil had the crisp, nose-friendly scent of citrus.

Mom and Dad Appel whipped up their solvent in five-gallon buckets and bottled it. They'd then lug it around in crates to state and local fairs, with little Joel helping demonstrate its wonders. As months and years passed, "I watched the process grow and saw the requests for reorders," recalls Joel. Though he never assumed he'd be running a family empire, seeing his parents at work did build the dream of some day running his own business.

Joel Appel went from selling Orange Glo between classes at CMC to running the company, a family-owned business that earned $120 million in annual revenues last year.