Invent It, Sell It, Bank It!: Make Your Million-Dollar Idea Into a Reality (29 page)

Look for a representative who can source your product and negotiate on your behalf.

Come up with a clear vision for how you want your packaging to look (but remain open to suggestions).

Research and hire a graphic designer and photographer to create your packaging’s design.

Work with a packaging company to make sure your package will secure your goods and pass an eleven-point drop test, if needed.

9

DRIVING THE BUSINESS

“Nothing is impossible; the word itself says, ‘I’m possible.’ ”

—A
UDREY
H
EPBURN

The phone call that really changed everything for me was the one I made to the corporate offices of JCPenney, in Plano, Texas. There, I spoke with an extraordinarily nice man named Paul Clark. He listened to what I had to say. I did my fast pitch, and said, “I’ll be in Plano next week,” and I asked him if he could meet with me at his office at JCPenney headquarters. Days later, I was standing in his office, demonstrating how my earring organizer worked and pitching with everything I had. When I was done, he informed me that he loved my product, but that each individual JCPenney buyer made his or her own purchasing decisions (the retailer’s buying policy has since changed).

Then he made me a deal: if I could sell my organizer into all twelve JCPenney stores in the Chicagoland area, and it did well in the fourth quarter, which is October, November, and December, he would take it nationwide. It was August. Fourth-quarter
orders are usually put to bed in April. After thanking Paul Clark, I left his office so excited, because I knew no matter what, I was going to meet his challenge and get into every Chicagoland store. The next day I started calling.

I called every single JCPenney store within a 100-mile radius. I did my mini-pitch over the phone, those same sentences—“Hi, I’m Lori Greiner. I have the coolest earring organizer ever!”—same as always, with the added line that I had met with Paul Clark in Plano headquarters, and he thought I had something they would want to see. I got my appointments, I did my pitch, and every single store bought.

YOU’RE NEVER DONE

Now I had to make sure that sales were so good that Paul would jump at the chance to take me nationwide. All I was required to do was ship my product to the stores and wait for the sales results, but there was no way I was going to stand idly by and hope for the best. Surely there was something else I could do to ensure that everyone who walked past a display of the Earring Organizer would stop to take a closer look.

I decided that the best way to sell the organizer was to show everyone what it could do. It was a hard product to display because clear polystyrene is transparent and doesn’t show well on its own. I hung the prototype with fifty pair of beautiful color-coordinated earrings in all styles and sizes, and every weekend I would bring it into two of the stores in the Chicagoland area. I’d spend Saturday in downtown Chicago and Sunday in Schaumburg. The following weekend I’d spend Saturday in Vernon Hills and Sunday in Buffalo Grove, and so on. I’d find a little spot next to where the store had displayed the organizer, and from the
minute the store opened to when they locked the doors at night, I would demo.

Over and over, I would catch people’s eyes and say, “Look, isn’t this cool?” and I would slide the Lucite stands back and forth, and back and forth, and open the drawer and show them how great it was and why they needed it, or why it would be the greatest gift. It was the coolest earring organizer ever, right! People noticed, and they stopped, and they’d watch me, and then they’d buy. When traffic would slow down, Dan would often sidle up and start exclaiming about how interesting the organizer was, and could I tell him more about it? That would bring people over quickly. People are naturally curious, and no one ever wants to miss out. I sold about 80 to 100 organizers a day, every weekend. I did this throughout the holiday season, and when it was done, I had beaten the quota Paul Clark set for me. He kept his promise to take me nationwide, and that spring my invention was selling in every JCPenney across the country.

My philosophy is that you can do anything if you put your mind to it. Many in the retail industry might say that conceiving, pitching, manufacturing, and shipping a product to stores in a handful of months requires a miracle. But I had no choice. I knew the holiday season was peak sales season, and if I didn’t hit it, I’d have to wait a whole additional year. I believed I could make anything happen; I just needed to figure out how. It was hell, but I was so excited I was like a woman possessed. And when the doors did start to open, I didn’t slow down—I pushed ahead even harder.

You have to keep driving your business forward. You want to keep your hands on the steering wheel so that when challenges arise or problems occur, you can take it where you need or want to go.

But now I had a problem. I couldn’t be in 1,200 stores to demonstrate my product, yet I knew it was important for people to be able to quickly see and understand why it was so cool and unique, and how it worked. Then I realized that, though I couldn’t be in every store, a model of the organizer could be. An organizer sitting on the counter with earrings hanging from it would help sell the packaged product and would attract a lot of attention. I went to the craft store, bought thousands of gold-colored beads and jewelry wire, and got to work making pretty but inexpensive pairs of earrings. Mind you, while gold and shiny, they were just plastic balls. No one was going to want to steal them. I hung about eight pair per unit, twisting the jewelry wire around the rods with tweezers so that they couldn’t easily fall off.

My fingers killed, I made over one thousand individual earrings for the displays. Then I packaged the store display in its box, taped a big note to the top that said, “Store Display. Please place on jewelry counter,” and placed one in every master carton of my product that was heading out to the stores. I did it myself because I felt it was important that every store got their sample, and I was going to kill myself if I found out that all those hours twisting wires with needle-nosed pliers were for nothing because the displays didn’t make it out onto the floor. The retailers put the display out and it helped my product sell even though I couldn’t be there to do a demo. Dan and I would go to the stores in our area to make sure the displays were out and help from time to time, continuing with an occasional live demo on weekends.

When you get an order, your work should not end with shipping your product to the store.
There is more to be done
. You should check periodically on how your product is displayed, where it’s displayed, and that everything is going well. When we get my
Shark Tank
entrepreneurs into the stores, they’re always checking to see how their products are displayed and making sure
everything is right. And of course, taking photos as a proud parent would. That’s what driving the bus looks like. It’s about making sure that you’ve got control over your product, and over your destiny, every step of the way toward accomplishing your goal, which is to sell successfully.

Things got exciting. I expanded from JCPenney and got into Marshall Field’s, Linens ’n Things, Kohl’s, and Carson Pirie Scott, to name a few, as well as several catalogs along with QVC. I was as excited about each new store we’d land as I had been about the first one.

RELATIONSHIPS MATTER

One of the most important things any entrepreneur, or anyone in business, can do is to get to know the people you work with. It’s stunning how few people do this. I suppose that’s because it takes time to get to know someone, to find out how many kids they have, what they like to do on the weekends, and what teams they root for. Time is money, and time talking about which is superior, a crusty deep-dish Chicago-style pizza or the thin, flimsier slices preferred in New York, can be time away from the immediate concerns of your business. But it is time well spent—maybe some of the best investment possible.

Because one day you will need to rely on these people to solve a problem, or to help you meet a special order, and they will have a choice. They could choose to step up, maybe beyond the parameters of their job, and make sure your problem is solved; or they could continue on as usual and let you fend for yourself. If you have made their business your business, if you have shown them that you appreciate how hard they work, and have treated them with respect, kindness, and care, there is a much better chance that they will in turn make your business their business
and value its success almost as much as you do. Building friendships and finding advocates at every level in a business ensures that when you need them, people are willing to help you fight your battles because they believe in you and want you to succeed. More than once, the effort I put into building relationships helped me avert major crises. In fact, if I hadn’t done it, my very first order for JCPenney might have ended in disaster.

A Crisis Averted

The first manufacturer I used was housed in an old factory that had been around for almost a hundred years, one of those places where you can still feel the ghosts of our industrial past and the generations of men and women who worked there. Like many U.S. manufacturers, the company had experienced a slowdown in recent years, so the arrival of my business was welcome. I liked them, they were good guys, and I spent a lot of time talking with them in their offices, learning about the company. I would go down to the factory almost every day, making sure that everything was running smoothly, and building relationships with everyone working on my product, from the foreman to the press operator, to the people packing the product, to the guys fixing the tools in the tool room. In addition, I found that being so involved and learning as much as I could about how the factory worked meant that when things went wrong, I was able to do something about it.

Seeing your finished product come off the line for the first time is such a thrill. Here it is, your baby, the physical embodiment of the idea you’ve been working toward for so long. I was so excited I couldn’t wait for the day my first organizer came off the presses. I stood on the factory floor, at the end of the conveyor belt, and let it roll to me. I picked up the organizer and automatically started moving the stands to see how they slid. And they
stuck. This was not good. Plastic often shrinks and expands with heat and pressure, and the molds often need to be tweaked when they’re brand-new. That’s what had happened here. Not to worry, the toolmaker assured me. It would only take three weeks for him to fix the mold and then my product would be perfect. This was not okay. I didn’t have three weeks. I had one week. In one week my product was supposed to be packed and shipped to JCPenney so it could hit the shelves.