This Minnesota Company Proves As-Seen-On TV Products are Far From Dead
Have you ever looked at late night TV infomercials and thought to yourself ‘who buys this stuff’ or ‘who comes up with such ideas’? We’ve all had mixed reactions when coming across infomercials.
Most infomercials have a bad reputation for marketing products that are either deemed silly or completely useless. Take, for example, the ‘Sauna Pants’, a product that claims to give you a sauna-like experience while you are sitting on your couch wearing them.
These products may sound silly, weird, and completely useless. But you’ll be quite surprised to hear that they’re selling in millions.
Enhance Product Development, a company in Champlin has been making these products and marketing them through infomercials for decades. And as much as we like to believe that these products are not doing well, in reality, they’re helping the company grow bigger and bigger, day by day.
“It certainly has a checkered past,” Enhance President and co-founder Trevor Lambert said of infomercials. “But it’s a powerful medium when it works.”
Some of the products by Enhance, such as Hot Buns, have sold around seven to eight million units since it was launched. This is enough proof that ‘as seen on TV’ products are far from dead.
Enhance may have a small team working, but it’s a team of brilliant individuals who also help the company come up with unique ideas. Through the company’s ‘inside inventing program’, Enhance employees have successfully launched their personal submissions which became successful products.
But these employees aren’t the only one coming up with ideas for the company, in fact, Enhance regularly works with independent inventors and small companies to launch their ideas.
When these people come to Enhance with a good idea or product, the company helps with designing, patenting, marketing, and licensing.
The profits are shared between the company and these individuals, creating a win-win situation for all.
The key ingredient of making a product successful is acquiring a patent for it. Since these products can easily be copied, Enhance’s life depends on it. Other products are listed on Amazon which also serves as an accountability platform for products that are dodgy.
Since people can leave feedback and rate a product, counterfeit products find it hard to survive on the internet through these e-commerce sites.
“The ‘Amazon Effect’ can kill a product really fast,” Lambert said. “People want the product to do what it promises to do, and if it doesn’t work, they’ll leave a review and other potential customers will see that right away.”
The core idea behind Enhance’s products is that they need to be unique. They need to be something that no one has ever seen. When the company comes up with something like that, it is able to grab attention immediately. And that is how they have been growing bigger.
“If you want to get peoples’ attention today, you really have to have a winner. And that’s what we try and create here every day,” Lambert said.