The daughters of former San Francisco 49ers owner and Tampa developer Edward DeBartolo Jr. have made their first venture into business ownership, but they're not doing it with shopping malls like their father and grandfather. They're taking it one scoop at a time.
Lisa DeBartolo, 33, and Nikki DeBartolo Heldfond, 28, opened a branch of Ed & Eddie's Homemade Ice Cream on Monday on S Dale Mabry Highway in Tampa.
Unlike the original location of the ice creamery that was started by their dad, which has a walkup window and outside tables, the new 45-flavor shop has an inside sitting area and a wall of candy and topping dispensers intended to send youngsters' jaws to the floor. The shop is situated near several children's stores, and the sisters say they designed it to be a destination place for families.
The sisters still work for the DeBartolo Family Foundation, a nonprofit that raises money and distributes it to Tampa Bay area charitable organizations, but they hope to be the next generation of entrepreneurs in the family empire. If the ice cream store goes well, they plan to open several more locations.
"We've been involved with some of the development, but we wanted to do a little branching out on our own," Lisa DeBartolo said. "We wanted to do something that had our name and our stamp on it."
Not literally their names. Ed and Eddie refers to their grandfather and father, but considering Forbes magazine's annual ranking of the nation's wealthiest individuals put their father's net worth at about $990-million, it's not a bad name to start with.
