Inventors seek pot of gold through TeleBrands
FAIRFIELD, N.J. -- You've probably never heard of Rachel Taylor. But it won't be long before you can turn on the TV and hear hard-sell pitches — again and again — to buy the one-size-fits-all hair clip she invented.
Taylor is a rare winner in a world of inventors bedeviled by losers. She recently earned a much-sought-after chance to strike it rich, thanks to a demonstration she gave for the right set of eyes.
USA TODAY was there, too, on a recent Friday for direct-response kingpin TeleBrands' monthly inventor's casting call. Taylor was one of some 50 inventors who sweated, squirmed and stuttered their way through product pitches they hoped would dazzle CEO A.J. Khubani.
During a long day at TeleBrands' headquarters in this suburban office park, the competition is intense. Each inventor has but a few moments in front of Khubani to land the sale of a lifetime. On the line: the potential to leap from inventor wannabe to serious player in the $170 billion direct-response industry. A nod from TeleBrands means a negotiated share of sales through royalties that can make an inventor wealthy.
A father of four pitches a plastic organizer for handheld video game cards. A man from Houston pitches an all-purpose clamp he's worked on for a decade. A technician from Georgia shows off her hand-painted Barack Obama and First Family Christmas ornaments. None made a sale.
Except Taylor, 41. Dressed in bright pink, she coolly demonstrates — on an assistant and on several other women, including Khubani's wife, Poonam, — how her Clever Clip works on hair of any length or thickness. As she drove back to Baltimore, several hours after her pitch, her cellphone rang with Khubani's thumbs-up call.
"I felt like I'd just won American Idol," she recalls.
TeleBrands has a knack for finding quirky $9.99 products you never knew you needed, selling them on TV, then getting them into retail outlets, where sales can really rocket. The company is one of the biggest players in an industry that spent $2.6 billion in advertising last year. TeleBrands spent $300 million of that, the most in the industry, to air its hard-sell 30-second- to two-minute ads, estimates direct-response tracker Infomercial Monitoring Service. While most direct-response companies are privately held and don't report earnings, TeleBrands has one of the most consistent records of hits.
Like many rivals in the industry, it also has a record of some ad tactics running afoul of the Federal Trade Commission, particularly in the early 1990s. And in January, Khubani paid $7 million to settle a 2002 FTC action about claims for the Ab Force, an electronic "abdominal toning" device he sold for about three months. TeleBrands lost two appeals and spent two years negotiating the settlement.
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