Million-dollar businesses you have never heard of

Dubai: Business ideas come from anyone, anywhere, anytime. For best friends Adrian Salamunovic and Nazim Ahmad, it turned out to be a million-dollar deal.

The two are the founders of DNA 11, a company that sells DNA imaging art. An 8"x10" mini-DNA portrait goes for $200, while a 36"x54" wall canvas garners $1,300.

The Museum of Modern Art features DNA 11 art in its museum stores in New York and Tokyo. The company's revenue in 2008: $1.4 million.

Another million-dollar business idea came from Risa Barash, a 33-year-old stand-up comic, who, in 1999, hit upon an organic preventative shampoo for head lice.

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Her big break came one morning while watching The Rosie O'Donnell Show--Rosie was lamenting her own children's lice outbreak.

Barash wrote a letter, walked over to the NBC studio and told the security guard she was delivering some hair products for O'Donnell's kids.

The next day, Fairy Tales Hair Care's Rosemary Repel Shampoo was the talk of the show.

Laid off from her software engineering gig, Laura Zander decided to open a yarn store with her husband Doug in 2002.
Zander found success with walk-in customers; she could teach them how to knit in less than five minutes, and many walked away with $100 worth of novelty yarns.

Her business, Jimmy Beans Wool, earned a revenue of $2.1 million in 2008.

Kevin and Angie O'Brien, the husband-and-wife team who sold a doggy day-care business to get into the pet-moving game, came up with PetRelocation.com.

The couple says it can move any live animal, anywhere around in world—from Seattle to South Africa. In 2008, the company's revenue was $2.5 million.