Mar 29, 2010
A Look Behind Infomercials
There’s been a (huge) backlog in my feedreader. And Firefox is currently loaded down with dozens of open tabs. A level of disorganization I probably shouldn’t ever admit to. But there it is. Presented with interesting stories, my eyes are always bigger than my stomach.
If you’ve every wondered how someone invents informercial products, how much money there is in the business, really, and whether those people are even real, a now six week old interview in the Wall Street Journal provides some clues.
Fans of HSN, the home shopping network, might recognize Debbie Meyer, the soft-spoken uber-housewife who sells nifty inventions – say, a device that creates holes in cupcakes, while they’re baking, for no-mess filling – as if teleported from the 1950s. What many may not realize is that behind the apron is a shrewd entrepreneur who’s built a company, Housewares America Inc. of Clearwater, Fla., with more than $100 million in annual revenues. Her patented products, including best-seller Debbie Meyer GreenBags, are now sold in Target, Kohl’s, Bed Bath & Beyond and other stores. Meyer, 59, whose breakthrough invention in 1999 was a cake cutter, recently teamed up with Reynolds to sell vacuum-seal bags.
Beneath the details, there is some pretty sound advice. Make products you use yourself. Scratch your own itch. Test everything—in a real marketplace—to manage risk. Know when to pull the plug. Love what you do.
This kind of so-obvious-it-hurts advice is easy to dismiss. However, as with most things in like, the challenge is in the implementation. Failure accompanies even middling execution. Even so, you can see the utility in the advice by imagining the outcomes if you do the opposite. “Make something you’d never buy yourself. Dupe the customer. Launch big or go home. Always double down. When you lose, double down again. And again. Trust your vision; never adapt. And by all means, hate what you do.”
Silly, yes. But if you really look at what people do, day in and day out, there’s not a few businesses built around those inverse strategies. Sure, they’re cloaked in management terminology that makes this idiocy sound sophisticated, even wise But sometimes simple advice does more good than all the sophistication in the world.