BIG Brand Ventures
Big Brand Ventures was Co-Founded by Sharks with decades of high-level business knowledge and experience. Join Co-CEOs Brandon T. Adams and Brian Harrington as they discuss topics like Investing, Digital Marketing, Personal Branding and Business Growth! Ultimately, Brandon and Brian want to help you build and scale your brand beyond 9 figures. 🚀
BIG Brand Ventures
The Harrington Brothers: Behind 40 Years of Massive Product Growth
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In this episode of the Big Brand Ventures Podcast, Kevin Harrington, the original Shark from Shark Tank and pioneer of the As Seen on TV industry sits down with his brother Tim Harrington, President of Big Brand Ventures and co-founder of HSN Direct to share the incredible story behind over 40 years of building, launching, and scaling some of the biggest product brands in the world.
From launching the first ever infomercial to taking a company from $20M to $500M in sales, working with legends like Tony Little, George Foreman, and the Kardashians, and turning a 10 cent stock into a $15 billion company with Celsius... Kevin and Tim have done it all.
Now they're sharing how they did it and how Big Brand Ventures can help your brand do the same.
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Hi, I'm Kevin Harrington, an original shark from the Hit TV show Shark Tank, also founder of Big Brand Ventures. And I'm here with my brother, Tim Harrington, president of Big Brand Ventures. Hey Tim, how are you doing? Good to see you. All right. So we have many, many years, more than 40 years, it goes all the way back to the early days of this business, doing infomercials and finding products and really having a lot of success in this business. But let's talk about how it all started when you and I got, you know, way back when you got involved.
SPEAKER_00It was really amazing. I was working my way through college, a junior at the University of Cincinnati in marketing, and you called me up and said, I'm on to the next wave of marketing. It's going to be the biggest thing ever. And I'm like, wow, that's pretty cool because you were very entrepreneurial. You had started your own businesses at an early age. I'm like, wow, I can't wait to hear this. And you said, I'm doing 30-minute TV commercials. And I'm like, I thought you were crazy. I'm like, no one wants to watch a 30-second commercial. Who's going to watch a 30-minute commercial? The word infomercial didn't even exist then. But you invited me up. I came up for a week. Philadelphia. Yeah, to Philadelphia. I learned more in one week than I learned in three years of college. Met some of the most unbelievable people. One of the first meetings we sat in, I sat in on was a product called the Food Saver. Yeah. And I thought that was kind of crazy. A guy walks in the office and he says, I have a $300 vacuum pack food sealer that I want you to sell. And I'm like, who's going to buy that?
SPEAKER_01I remember we looked at each other and said, This guy, he's either crazy or he's on to something.
SPEAKER_00Okay. But what really leveraged us into the into that whole business was his business was selling that product at home shows and state fairs. Yeah. And he learned a pitch by going from one city to the next city, the next city. And as he did his presentation, people would ask questions. You know, hey, uh I'm I'm a fisherman. Can I put my vacuum seal my fish? And so he learned to incorporate that into the pitch. And then people that collected baseball cards and said, hey, uh uh oxidation in the air is not good for collectible cards. So can I put cards in there? So what he thought was once just a product that was geared towards food, he learned, you know, silverware, coins, all kinds of things to keep them preserved.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. And obviously it was great for food. But the point you're making here is very powerful because what we did is there was one force happening in the world of television. TV, um TV was expanding, cable television was launching. They were launching Discovery Channel, Family Channel, uh the Bravo Discovery I already mentioned, but a lifetime, you know, hundreds of channels, and many of them had downtime.
SPEAKER_00Right. Because because none of them, a new network couldn't afford to buy programming. The way TV works is a station has to buy a program. They have to pay for that program. For the right to run it. Right. And then they have to sell, have someone sell ads inside of it. Right. Well, at three in the morning, their salespeople couldn't sell those ads. Right. So they went dark from you know, sometimes six hours a day. Six hours a day.
SPEAKER_01So so that all of this airtime was available. How do you fill it with with commercials, right? Well, not 30-second commercials. If you got to fill six hours, you need a lot of 30-second spots. If you've got a 30-minute show, you have a chance to sell the product. So we focused on the pitchmen industry, really. And that was what you mentioned at the trade shows and the home shows. The food saver guy, he would go to the home show, develop his pitch by getting feedback, and then it was strong. We would then bring the cameras in, film that pitch, exactly, and put it on television. And we we dealt with all of the top pitch men from Arnold Morris and the and the blade and and Billy Mays, who created OxyClean and Sandy Mason's or the Daily Mixer and Wally Nash for the walk.
SPEAKER_00So what was great is we took people who've who spent years and years and years perfecting a presentation on a product, right? They basically said the same thing every time, just to a different group of 10 people in front of them at a live event. And what we said is instead of having to travel 200 days out of the year and and say that pitch 10,000 times, right? Let us turn the camera on. You say that same pitch, and we're gonna put it in front of millions of people on TV, and you can be sitting and earning money while you're sleeping. Don't have to travel.
SPEAKER_01When we met Arnold Morris, that's exactly what we said. Arnold had been pitching the Ginsu knives for for more than a dozen years, 40 weeks a year. Now he filmed it once and just sat back and received royalty checks for the rest of his life. So it was awesome. And so that was a major success for us. We had dozens of successful infomercials in the early days, and then of course, over time, we we did over a thousand product launches. And there was one other big, big thing that hit uh the industry. And of course, along the way, we went public, ended up on the New York Stock Exchange, took a company from a dollar a share to over $20 a share on the New York Stock Exchange, and this was back in the 90s.
SPEAKER_00We we were rated before the dot-com craze and the internet craze. You know, we were written up as one of the fastest growing New York Stock Exchange companies out there. Absolutely. So it went went from, you said from a dollar to twenty, but in in other terms, we went from about twenty million dollars a year to a half a billion a year in sales in a few years. Yes.
SPEAKER_01And so here we had this big library of infomercials, and a lot of they were global infomercials because they were kitchen products and fitness products and things that people around the world might be interested in. But how do we get distribution? Well, we started going to the international trade shows, TV shows, and at the at the Cannes Film Festival and Mipcom TV Festival, we were getting distribution deals with the Super Channel in Italy and and Sky Channel in Europe and uh Mitsui Mitsui TV in Japan and Latin America.
SPEAKER_00And what what gave us the idea there is we were sitting on a library of programming. Yeah. Okay, content basically. We had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of 30-minute TV shows. All in English. All in English, but many of them had run their course. They had they had peaked out, they sold everything. We sold as many as we were going to in the U.S. And we're sitting with this library, and we said, where else can we run these shows? We said, hey, the the feature film industry a long time ago only ran movies in English and America. Right. But what they realized is if they produced a great movie that did really well here, if they dubbed it over into German and Italian and Spanish and Italy, Italian, that that good chances that it will work around the world. And we said, well, that worked for 30-minute commercials. Right. And I'll never forget when we we went to the MIP uh TV show in Cannes, France, right? Yeah. The the way that show works is kind of the opposite of that you would think. Everyone that had a booth at that show were companies that had programming that they were looking to sell to TV stations. And all the people or a lot of the people that walked the shows were people, stations that were looking to buy programming. Yeah. You know, but everyone that had a booth was selling. And what did we do? What was our sign, and how did we get people to our booth? Because there were million, two million dollar booths from these massive TV companies. We had a 10 by 10 teeny little booth, and how did we have the the best traffic there?
SPEAKER_01Well, we we we said hey we we gave you a video cassette tape with a dollar bill taped to it and said, We pay you to run our show, we're gonna pay you to watch our show.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and and the giant banner said free programming.
SPEAKER_01Free programming, exactly. Whereas everyone else was selling their programming. So people lined up, they're like, wait a minute, I don't get it. How can you give us the programming for free? Well, we have a cooking show, and we're cooking with a Chinese walk, and at the end of the show, we offer you the walk for sale, and we're gonna pay you a percentage of those sales.
SPEAKER_00And we have we have an exercise show that shows you how to exercise in a healthy way and do all these different exercises, but then during the show and at the end of the show, you can buy that exercise product. Exactly. So you can run all these great shows, not only for free, but we're gonna pay you on the sales.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, in England with Rupert Murdoch and Sky Channel, we had 18 hours a day. In the Middle East, Arab Radio Television, we had 24 hours a day. A deal we did with Sheikh Salah Camel back in the 90s. In in Latin America, we had the same thing out of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
SPEAKER_00We had a dozen hours. Japan, uh Sumitomo was our partner. First year in Japan, we did $85 million in the world.
SPEAKER_0185 million because we took existing winners and brought them into the international market. So that we've had an awesome amount of time together over the years, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of years, hundreds and hundreds, over a thousand product launches we've had now over over the last year.
SPEAKER_00So, Kevin, what what's what's one of your favorite uh products that we that we got involved with?
SPEAKER_01Well, one one of my favorites is you know, he's he's a good buddy, Tony Little. Uh we met him back in 1989, and Tony was just kind of a fitness guy, right? And we said, Tony, we want to do an infomercial with you. And he said, What's an infomercial? Because nobody really knew back in those days. I mean, it was still an early industry, but um, Tony, so we did Tony's first infomercial. It was videotapes and target training. And it was like, if if you want to get rid of some of the flab here or here or the love handles, he could target a particular part of your body. He had six videos that targeted your body parts, and that was huge. It did 300 plus million dollars in sales. That was his first show. His second show was the AB Isolator, which was another $300 million success. It is just unbelievable these days how powerful these shows could be.
SPEAKER_00And and one thing that, you know, not to kind of brag on ourselves, but you know, we innovated a lot of things that no one had ever done before in terms of product categories and just concepts in the industry and and fishing shows, the first fishing lure. First golf show, et cetera. But for Tony Little on the Ab Isolator, that was the first ever live infomercial. Exactly. And what we did there is we were partners with HSN at the time. Uh we ran HSN Direct, and Tony would go on the air with the Ab Isolator about once every six weeks. Right. And what we sell about 10,000 pieces every six weeks, 50,000 pieces a year, give or take. Yeah. So what we did is we saw that that was successful on live shopping. We said that's a great candidate. Great candidate for an infomercial. So the next time Tony goes on the air, let's produce it like an infomercial instead of him just going up and going live. So we we shot testimonials in advance. We created a uh a CTA, a call to action that we wrote out. And we we created his next live show to look like an infomercial that we would have to go pay and shoot. Yeah. We even had a few people in the audience. Yeah, we had an audience. First time that we brought an audience onto a live shopping channel, et cetera, had an audience, brought people out, made it interactive, brought rolled in testimonials, rolled in an actual commercial. So we did the first ever live infomercial. And that infomercial ran went on to do probably seven or eight million pieces and hundreds of millions of dollars in sales all around the world.
SPEAKER_01So with Tony, we we also got involved. We did the gazelle uh with Tony in the early days, and uh Tony was awesome. But um, you know, it was Tony Little, it was Jack Lane, it was George Foreman, it was the Kardashians. We we literally worked, you know, we worked with Kathy Hilton, Paris Hilton, celebrities galore. We had lots of fun, uh, many, many years in doing all of this. Last thing I want to talk about is that you you mentioned favorite products. Well, Tony Little and all the names I just mentioned, but one of the favorite stories is I got involved with a company called Celsius a few years ago, 12 years ago, when it was a startup. It was really just really coming out of the uh the grass.
SPEAKER_00Jerry Jerry David, who used to run our international, was the president of Celsius. Jerry worked for us at HSM Direct.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, he became CEO of Celsius, called me to be on the board, and it started out as a 10, 22 cent stock, 10 cents, 22 cents, um, and and and it went to hundreds of dollars. And today it's a 15 billion dollar company. So it's a massive success. It's been an awesome uh number of years working with you, creating you know, million-dollar products, hundred million dollar products, five hundred million dollar products, ten billion dollar products, and now a fifteen billion dollar product.
SPEAKER_00You know, and now we're we're we're keep we're still doing it, and and hopefully whoever's listening to this podcast may have the next one that we can take to the moon.
SPEAKER_01And and that's why Big Brand Ventures is here for you, the entrepreneur. If if if you're um an entrepreneur, you're a uh you've got a product, you got a business. We don't just do products, we've had a lot of luck with products, over a thousand we've launched over the years, but if you have a business, we can help you because starting a product business is starting a business. And starting a service business is the same, and we do it all. So, any last words of wisdom for the folks?
SPEAKER_00Uh no, uh just uh if if you got a great business or or product or service, you know, whether you use us or not, just get it out there and market it the best way you can, and uh good luck. Awesome. Thanks for being with us today, Tim. All right, buddy.
SPEAKER_01Great talking. Thank you.