Pageant News Bureau

Michael Schneider built an empire while he was still in college, and he filled it with beautiful women. He became a corporate celebrity in the late 1990s, one of the "young Internet tycoons" who were expected to reshape the world.

It all seemed too good to be true.

But it wasn't.

Tia

New Jersey beauty queen Syma (above) says working with UModels has been a pleasant experience. At left, Tia, a model and sometime pageant competitor, admits she doesn't know Michael Schneider well. But she is impressed with UModels.

That's the most remarkable thing about the rise of Michael Schneider He didn't fall. While most of the dot-com "whiz kids" were swept into obscurity by the tech crash of 2000, Schneider survived. He prospered. And the women are still as beautiful as ever.

"You can't hate Michael," says a fellow cyber-pioneer who has fared less well, "but it's no sin to be jealous."

Schneider, who lives in White Plains, N.Y., and is still only in his mid-20s, is the founder of Universitymodels.com, also known as Umodels.com. It is, to use the dry jargon of the entrepreneurial sector, "the largest premier business-to-business full service online modeling agency in the world."

To put it in layman's terms, UModels has helped multitudes of women -- and more than a few men -- find success in the modeling industry. Among them are scores of beauty queens and pageant competitors, including Tia (featured on the cover for this story).

Among the company's clients are MTV, Sports Illustrated, Clairol and General Mills. And even if you have never heard of Schneider before, you have almost certainly seen his models. While some people talk about the "Internet bust" and lament that selling groceries online didn't work out, Schneider has used the Internet to reinvent a whole industry.

Beauty queens' comments about UModels are overwhelmingly favorable, if somewhat bland. "Nice," "very helpful," "really great to work with." One could chalk this up to the natural tendency of pageant girls to say polite things. But Linda Tran, who has worked with UModels for years and is an Internet star in her own right, has similar views. She praises UModels as "an active force in the industry," and describes Schneider as "diligent" and "completely professional."

A successful man surrounded by gorgeous females attracts attention, and Schneider is what media people call "good copy." He has sometimes been portrayed as his generation's version of Hugh Hefner, the Playboy founder who likes girls, girls, girls. The New York Times, on the other hand, has depicted Schneider as a workaholic, an industrial-strength brain whose true obsession is "the business model."

Perhaps the real man lies somewhere in between. Though Schneider does seem more at home talking the language of business than chatting idly about the opposite sex, he has an appreciation for his models that's more than merely commercial. He clearly has more fun cutting deals to benefit glamorous women he would running a string of furniture factories.

Business is in his blood. In his pre-teens (not really so many years ago), he launched a pet-sitting company, and by his mid-teens ran a computer consulting enterprise. Then came the university, and then came Universitymodels.

Schneider was studying business administration at the University of Delaware when he decided to make and sell a "coed calendar" to raise money. This fairly simple project led him into long conversations with some of his models, and being a good listener, he learned something. Most of them were not satisfied with their agencies.

It was the heyday of the dot-com boom, and Schneider sensed that the time was ripe for something new. He would start a full-fledged modeling agency on the Internet. In 1997, Universitymodels.com was born.

Schneider never tires of making the point that Umodels is a full-service agency. It doesn't simply list models on the Web, it does everything for them that a traditional agency would do. "The key strengths of UModels.com are speed, efficiency and security," he says, and he insists the modeling business will never be the same.

Always looking for new prospects, Schneider and UModels are showing an increasing interest in the pageant world. Unhampered by the anti-pageant snobbery of some traditional modeling agencies, he recognizes beauty competitions as a vast source of potential models. "We have a lot of models with pageant backgrounds," he says, "but we want more."

Besides being very bright and very focused, Michael Schneider is probably very lucky. In the Internet downturn, Web giants with a glamorous component have fared better than most. (Pageant.com is another example.) But UModels, for all its innovations, is not really about technology. It's about people. And that's why it's a force to be reckoned with.

Professor of glamour