Here is a great story about making something huge out of a great idea. Maybe it will get you thinking about your big thing, hope you enjoy it.
You have probably heard of Scrub Daddy. Did you know their headquarters are right around the corner from Bullen? Here is their story:
How Scrub Daddy Became a Household Name, After First Collecting Dust for Several Years
This tale of accidental entrepreneurship is good clean fun.
“It’s nice to start with a big stack of dirty dishes, and then everything is clean after,” he says. “A sense of accomplishment in a short time.”
When Krause discovered the sponge that would eventually become Scrub Daddy, the round perma-grin cleansing sponge that’s notched $170 million in total sales across 40,000 U.S. markets, he was the CEO of another company he’d founded called Dedication to Detail. He led the Folcroft, Pennsylvania-based manufacturer of paint finishing systems, which included buffing and polishing pads, from 1992 to 2008. It was Krause’s dirty work on this company factory’s machinery that would eventually give rise to Scrub Daddy.
As any mechanic knows, fixing heavy-duty machinery can leave an oily film on your hands that can be painful to remove. Industrial soaps, says Krause, felt like “lotions with rocks” and didn’t get the job done. A company based in Germany eventually supplied him with a buffing pad that could scrape off grease without grating the skin off his hands. He created a line of sponges in 2006 for people with similar problems, like mechanics and body-shop owners, but the product never took off.
Two years later, 3M approached Krause about buying Dedication to Detail–hoping to build out its vehicle appearance line of products. They said he could keep the hand sponges.
He discovered the material that removed dirt and oil from his hands also worked on the furniture, and that it was thermosensitive–acting like a hard scrubber in cold water and a soft sponge in warmer temperature. Krause brought it inside and put it to the ultimate test: the evening dishes.
“It was an epiphany,” Krause told Inc. “This has nothing to do with cleaning your hands.”
A rectangular Scrub Daddy prototype didn’t feel right in his palm, so he went with a round design, which, it turns out, makes sense. “Why are sponges rectangular?” muses Krause. “Look around the kitchen: Mugs, cups, coffee pots, muffin tins–all round.”
With the design in place, things happened fast: Several live demos at ShopRite, a chain of grocery stores in the northeast, won local press coverage in Pennsylvania and helped land Krause on QVC. Shark Tank came calling in 2012, and Krause persuaded Lori Greiner to ante up $200,000 for 20 percent of his business.
For the full story, here is the link-
https://www.inc.com/magazine/201904/emily-canal/scrub-daddy-dish-sponge-shark-tank.html?cid=hmsub1
Great golf today with the Players Championship, maybe Tiger will make a run.
Have a great day and an even better sales week!
Scott Jarden