We've all seen them – the strange television infomercials pushing products like rake hands, toilet bowl lights and sauna pants. At some point you've probably asked yourself, "Who's buying this stuff? More importantly, who came up with the idea for this thing in the first place?"
Enhance Product Development, a design firm based in Champlin, has been inventing and selling weird and wonderful "as-seen-on-TV" products for nearly a decade. The company's creations are sold on television and across the internet. Some of its successes include popular hair tool Hot Buns, the Shake N Egg and a pet de-shedding glove called True Touch.
These seemingly silly products are serious business. Despite today's ever-evolving retail and e-commerce market, Enhance is not just surviving – it's planning to expand.
"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 Enhance's most popular products have sold millions of units. Lambert estimates that Hot Buns, the company's first product marketed on TV, has sold between seven to eight million units since its launch. True Touch has sold around three million units.
Enhance currently employs 16 people specializing in industrial design, sales and product development. The company is planning to bring on more within the next year, Lambert told Minne Inno. Through Enhance's "inside inventing program," a number of its employees have submitted their personal inventions, and some have even reached the market.
If an employee invention is successful, they receive a portion of its royalties. Lambert said that some of their most successful products were created internally by employees at Enhance. Recently, the team created several new board games which the company plans to start selling early next year.
But Enhance's employees aren't the only ones brainstorming new ideas and inventions. A significant portion of the company's business comes from independent inventors and larger companies looking to bring a product idea to life.
These entities can approach Enhance with an idea or crude prototype, and the company will help them with design, patenting, marketing and licensing. Patenting is particularly important in today's market, Lambert said. Some of the company's products have been ripped off and resold at lower quality for lower prices elsewhere on the web. He added that Enhance currently has 30 patents in various stages.
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While e-commerce sites like Amazon have made the "as-seen-on-TV" industry more competitive, it's also provided a level of accountability that businesses didn't have in the industry's early days.
"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."
Some products, such as Hot Buns, make a killing on TV, but don't fare as well on social. Meanwhile, the company's vacuum-broom hybrid Vabroom performed well on sites like Facebook, but received less interest on TV. Enhance sells its products through sites such as Amazon as well as in traditional brick-and-mortar retail stores like Target, Walmart and Bed, Bath & Beyond.
"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.
