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Press
9/1/2002
Of Mites and Men
Atlanta Magazine
New Shop ACHOO! ALLERGY is nothing to sneeze at
 It looks like a cockroach on steroids or a caterpillar with an enormous paunch, but whatever genus the creature belongs to, it's the stuff of nightmares. Cade McDonald, as pleasant as the thing is creepy, displays its Technicolor portrait in his Buckhead shop to remind customers of the microscopic evils that lurk in the recesses of the typical American home.
Let me introduce you to the dust mite,” says McDonald, 28, the baby-faced founder of achoo! ALLERGY, which sells preventive products for allergy sufferers. “It’s an 8-legged member of the arachnid family that feeds on dead skin and humidity. Barely visible to the eye, dust mites live in mattresses. I’m talking about between one and 10 million of them.”
His best sellers are encasings that keep pillows, mattresses and box springs free of dust mites, one of allergy sufferer’s most resilient adversaries.
 “A native of Gainesville who has been in business on Roswell Road for just under two years, McDonald insists that his concept in nothing to sneeze at. He believes that the preventive impulse will ultimately prevail in the marketplace, that we’ll spend money to make over our environment rather than pop blockbuster drugs like Claritin and Allegra. If so, McDonald argues, his store could become a national franchise, the embodiment of a longtime entrepreneurial dream.
Track-lit, airy and devoid of clutter, achoo! ALLERGY has the delicate, sanctified feel of a health food store or a New Age bookseller. Besides the linen covers, there are air purifiers, an “Allergy Machine” that absorbs pollen, dust and dander and DustMitex, which kills mites in carpet and upholstery. Most of the items are under $30, although machines such as the Eureka Oxygen Vacuum Cleaner can cost several hundred.
“The air inside is 10 times dirtier than the air outside,” says McDonald as he touts one of his purifiers to a woman who has come to browse on her lunch hour. “Homes don’t breathe.”
Nothing in McDonald’s past suggests that he was hard-wired for the touchy-feely business of environmentalism, albeit for profit. After graduating from the University of Georgia, McDonald worked in investment banking, helping bring a number of high-tech firms public, including Mindspring. Then, after getting his MBA at Emory University, he spent four months with a dot-com that quickly went belly-up.
McDonald says achoo! ALLERGY was a brainstorm that brought him back to his teens, when his allergies were so bad that he “ate Sudafed like it was cinnamon candy.” The company was born in 2000 with seed money from friends and family, and although McDonald says both its retail and mail-order divisions are doing well, he won’t divulge any financial specifics. Bus as long as “achoo” remains part of the nation’s vocabulary, the marker, at least, will be strong – Alan Sverdlik
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