Welcome to a new feature I’m trying out: posting about products that aren’t DRTV items — at least not yet. In case you didn’t know, I’m the co-founder of a successful feeder company called Paragon Products. That company employs a talented team of product researchers we call “scouts.” Every week, these scouts inform us of the latest products trending on social media, selling well on Amazon, or generally looking promising on the other known sources of products we monitor.
I estimate that we review at least 100 new products per week. Of course, we pass on almost all of them. Wouldn’t you love a chance to review some of the better ones we see? Well, as a paid subscriber to The SciMark Report, you can! No strings attached. These particular items are free for you to do with as you please. However, if you need a good consultant, supplier, agency or producer — I may have some recommendations for you.
Best Items This Week
Clean Screen X. Just getting my feet wet here. This item is trending on social with nearly half a million likes. It might have made a good $10 BOGO back in the day, but nowadays it’s a little too low on the price-to-value scale. I’ve seen a few lens and screen-cleaning items over the years, but no rollouts. To be honest, one reason I’m including this one is the entertainment value. Check out the ridiculous claim the guy in the video makes. Yeah, dude, I’m sure you immediately turned Apple down right after you beat LeBron in one-on-one and slapped Dwayne Johnson across the face!
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Tidy Brush. Here’s another item that’s starting to trend on social. It caught my eye because several successful brushes in DR history have been self-cleaning — they were just all for pets. For example, there was IdeaVillage’s Pet Groom Pro in 2005 and Emson’s Pet Zoom in 2008. To my knowledge, the concept hasn’t been tried on a brush for human hair. But maybe it’s the twist that’s needed to bring back an Old Gold hit like Emson’s Ultimate Detangling Brush? Or maybe it’s the key feature that could turn a promising volumizing brush that didn’t quite make it (see Stunning Volume Styler, Hair Shark) into a winner? What about adding it to something like the Hairology Refresh Brush? After all, that brush shared another feature with the Pet Groom Pro: ionic technology. The point is that while not a stand-alone reason to buy, this highly demonstrable feature could have promise as a way of grabbing consumer attention.
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Full Page Magnifier, MagniPros 3x. I always pause on these items because of a successful project I worked on back in 2010 (with Spark Innovators and Hutton-Miller) called Page Brite. Telebrands had also found success five years earlier (in 2005) with a wallet-size magnifier called the OWL. There hasn’t been a similar success since then. But thanks to an aging population, this is one of those problems that hasn’t gone away. Perhaps now is the right time?
Speaking of Old Gold, here are a few items that caught my eye because they originally come from our industry:
BlendJet. After Magic Bullet took the world by storm in 2007, several short-form players tried to bring a value-priced version to market. One of the first I noted was Allstar’s Blend Buddy in 2010. It was ahead of its time, though, because the price needed to be $29.99 at a time when $19.99 was the upper limit for DRTV items. By the time higher price points were possible, it was too late and the market was crowded (as a no-go retest in 2018 demonstrated).
Side Sleeper Pro. Speaking of Allstar, that marketer was the first to introduce this “candy cane” pillow for side sleepers in 2011. It went on to become a solid DRTV hit that is apparently still selling today.
Electric Nail Clipper. This one was originally tested by a feeder company called Lenfest in 2015 and — fine, OK, it’s yet another item Allstar did first. They called it Roto Clipper. Remember that Nail Grooming Frenzy of Christmas 2015 I mentioned recently? A version of this was one of the five items. Anyway, today this fancier version is trending on social with more than 1.4 million likes.
That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed this new feature and want it to continue, be sure to let me know by liking this post or dropping a comment.
It takes me back to my early DRTV that most things we put to air sold buckets loads
Interesting collection of products. Have you been able to correlate likes to sales?