As Seen on TV!
By David S. Bernstein
Boston Magazine February 2004
On a quiet hillside road of industrial buildings, in a plain
little Framingham office suite he shares with his five full-time
employees, Michael Antino Jr. surveys a motley assortment of hokey
little doodads for the kitchen, the garden , the car, the lawn,
even for pets. His short, black hair slicked with gel, his peach
shirt hanging untucked over his black jeans, the 35-year-old Milford
townie looks like a teacher judging a fifth-grade science fair. He
picks up a dog to that plays the master's recorded voice. "I don't
know about this one," he says.
If you were here with him, you might think he's a little mad. Because
Antino honestly believes that, although they don't know it yet,
there is some product here that the people of the world cannot
lice without. He believes that people everywhere will want that
gadget so badly they will send their money to this sparse suburban
office and make him very rich.
Antino isn't crazy. He's absolutely right. He wasn't crazy
when he told people they needed two griddles hinged together to
make pancakes without using a spatula. He was right when he told
people they needed a pot with holes punched in the lid to make
spaghetti without a colander.
For anyone who has never watched television, those two items
became Perfect Pancake and the Pasta Pro, just two of the products
Antino sells through his company, Merchant Media. People do indeed
apparently believe they can't live without these products. And,
in fact, they send him money-roughly $50 million a year.
The direct-marketing world, the as-seem-on-TV industry, has
its share of shysters and con men. But it also had entrepreneurs
like Michael Antino Jr., carrying out smart business plans based
on carefully tracked marketing, outsourcing of actual production,
constant innovation, and a bizarre but earnest belief in the fine
line between genius and stupidity. On almost every street in every
town in this country there's a Merchant Media product in a drawer
or on a shelf. It's been barely a year since the world first heard
about the Pasta Pro and the product has already pretty much run
its course from obscurity to what the Wall Street Journal called "perhaps
the biggest as-seen-on-TV phenomenon since the George Foreman grill." And
now Antino, in his Framingham office, is back to looking for the
next gadget America can't live without.
Perfect Pancake makes a pretty good pancake. Nothing amazing,
mind you, but it does exactly what it claims to do. You pour your
batter into the pan, let it cook, and when it's ready to turn over
you close the lid, lift and flip in a steady motion, and set it
back down on the stove.
Frankly, I never minded using a spatula, so I would
never have seen in this device the potential for making zillions
of dollars. Neither, in fact, did the inventor. This is what
separates us from Antino.
Antino often finds his products form outside sources. In the
case of Perfect Pancake, the inventor, by a strange coincidence,
also turns out to be from Milford. A pancake lover and retired
engineer, he worked for years on a device to make shaped pancakes. He
called it the Range Rider. He fashioned preshaped, Teflon-coated
metal plates that spelled out such things as "Good Morning" and "Happy
Birthday: and snapped into place between two griddles. Pour in
the batter and the pancake takes this shape and keeps it, even
when you flip the pan.
The engineer from Milford tried for years to sell his product,
and eventually made a deal with one of those other companies
that advertise on TV-to inventors. That company, based in Florida,
never promoted the product successfully, Antino says. It so happens
that the Florida concern that produces Antino's commercials also
works with the invention company that picked up the Range Rider. Someone
there told Antino about it, and Antino contacted the inventor.
Antino didn't care about the "Good Morning" messages in the
pancakes, but he did like the idea of making pancakes without a
spatula. "I was concerned people would have reservations because
it only makes one pancake at a time," he admits. "But it's a large
pancake."
He bought out the contract, repackaged the hinged pan, threw
in a heart shaped plate and a batter dispenser, and renamed it
Perfect Pancake. He contracted with a factory in China to make
the things, with a couple of places to take the phone orders, and
with a couple of other places to warehouse and ship the products. He
had the folks in Florida make him a commercial, and he saturated
the airwaves with it. And then he waited nervously to see whether
anybody besides himself wanted to make pancakes without a spatula.
It was on back order almost from the moment the commercial first
aired. To date, Antino has sold more than 4.5 million perfect
Pancake pans. The retired engineer from Milford? He moved to Florida
years ago and is enjoying the royalties.
Michael Antino Sr. is a pleasant, unpretentious man who handles
Merchant Media's importing and fulfillment operations from the
company's Framingham office. Antino Sr. for years supplied goods
to retail outlets like Target. In the early 1990's he stumbled
across a supplier trying to unload a big stash of DD7, a miraculous
stain-removing product touted in infomercials. The infomercials
were no longer running, and since the only way the product sold
was through the toll-free number advertised on TB, sales were nonexistent. Antino
Sr. figured maybe he could convince his retail partners to try
stocking it. He bought the remaining DD7 on a closeout, got it
into stores, and , lo and behold, the infomercials had so much
sticking power that people recognized the stuff and bought, and
bought, and bought, until there was no more to buy.
Antino Jr. saw his calling. In 1996, he founded Merchant Media
with his father. His plan: Find the next miracle product, saturate
cable TV with commercials for it, and at the some time put it on
shelves with that familiar re "As Seen on TV" logo.
Perfect Pancake was far from his first success. First there
was the Gator Grip universal socket wrench ("Instantly grips any
shape!"). There was the Singer Smart Scissors, the Chef Wizard,
and the DividePro. There was the Squeeze Wrench ("Works in any
space.fits in any place!"). Even Secretary of State Colin Powell
bought a Squeeze Wrench. Antino kept the general's signed check.
He's had failures too. There was the Glove Vac, which is exactly
what you'd imagine-a glove-shaped attachment for you home vacuum
cleaner that you wear on your hand. You can walk around your house
with it and just reach up, around, under, wherever, to suck up
dust. "I though that was a unique idea," Antino says, still clearly
heartbroken not just over the financial loss, but also about being
so very wrong. Describing it, he gets excited all over again and
looks at me eagerly, apparently hoping that I'll agree how great
this product is. Then he comes back to reality. "It was a dud
right out of the gate."
Another flop was a device meant to be put in a stovepot that
automatically stirs sauce or gravy to prevent clumping and burning. Antino
was so sure of it that he ignored some warning signs. "I thought
it was a slam dunk, but it tested terribly," he recalls. The stirrer
is still in production but has never earned back its investment.
Still, Antino says, "The batting average in this industry is
about one success in ten attempts," Antino says. "We're probably
two or three out of ten." Merchant Media rolls out ten to twelve
new products a year.
There's no science, no formula-just Antino's gut feeling for
America's impulse buy desires. He and his small staff sit around
a table looking at products, discussing them, debating them. If
they like an idea, Antino works out the numbers-he needs a 400
to 500 percent markup, so for the typical $19.95 item he needs
to keep his cost down to $4 per unit for everything from marketing
to advertising to shipping. One of the big challenges is figuring
out what little bonuses to throw in. The Pasta Pro, for example,
came in well under the $4 limit, so Antino and his employees sat
around thinking of extras to add. They ended up with a recipe
booklet and a cheese grater. Sometimes they throw in another product
already lying around, like the Chef Wizard wire tongs.
Next, the producers in Florida get to work putting together
those cheesy but incredibly effective commercials that show families
enjoying the product while and excited announcer exclaims: "But
wait-there's more!"
Antino test-markets the ad for a week on a couple of national
cable channels and gauges the response. He knows exactly how many
orders per spot he needs to make a profit. "You learn in that
one week whether it's a slam dunk, a dud, or a gray area," Antino
says.
If it's a go, it's a go. Everything has to get out there
at once-the television ads, magazine insert cards, catalog insertions,
up to 500 different online store placements, and those product-offer
slips that come with your credit card bill, not to mention the
product itself and the store displays to plug it. "We hit you from
all angles," Antino says. Women are the primary targets, since
they buy about 60 percent of directly marketed products. "Men
are generally more pessimistic buyers," Antino says. "Women say, 'I'll
try anything and return it.'"
Depending on the product, Antino gets from 1.5 to 3.5 percent
of his products returned, he says. He makes refunds without question. The
most trouble he has had was when the Vermont attorney general threatened
to prosecute him on behalf of Perfect Pancake buyers misleading
advertising. Merchant Media paid the state $20,000 and sent refunds
to 1,200 Vermont purchasers of the product to settle the suit.
On the other hand, as many as 30 percent of the people who call
to place an order for an item buy more than one. And 1,200 refunds
is a drop in the bucket; one of the things that caused the problems
in Vermont, in fact, was that demand was so unexpectedly high;
Antino couldn't fill orders fast enough. "I underestimated how
often and how many people eat pancakes," he says now.
One of the callers was a company that wanted to distribute Perfect
Pancake in Eastern Europe. Sure, Antino said: Give it a shot. He
has sold close to 100,000 units in Slovenia and Hungary. "I don't
even think they eat pancakes there," Antino says.
It may amaze you to know that pasta pots with holes in their
lids for straining, which you may think of as a thoroughly modern,
21st-century invention, have been around for 80 years. The
original patent was given in 1920; a version was actually on the
shelves of Wal-Mart and Target stores before Merchant Media ever
got involved. It's just that before Antino told the world about
it, nobody realized how much they needed it.
Like the Perfect Pancake, the Pasta Pro works just fine, except
that it's a little small to make spaghetti in. Again, I never
really minded the colander experience, but who am I to question
genius?
One of Antino's Perfect Pancake subcontractors tipped him off
to the pasta pot the July before last. After three months working
on the product, Antino ran a test commercial and contracted with
a Chinese factory to start producing the pots. Normally, he would
have had a two- to three-month leas time at that point to get everything
in place. This time, things went a little faster.
Someone at the factory, Antino says, leaked information about
the Pasta Pot to a Merchant Media competitor-a constant threat,
he says, in the dog-eat-dog, high-stakes world of direct marketing. Since
the patent had expired, the pot/colander concept was open to anyone. He
had to beat the other guy to the market.
He rolled out Pasta Pro three weeks later, spending on average
between $350,000 and $750,000 a week on ads. Things went berserk. At
the height of Pasta Pro mania, Antino had seven factories churning
out 45,000 pots per day. The commercial was on as many
as 100 networks, using 150 different toll-free numbers to help
Antino determine by the minute which shows did the best, and which
did poorly.
Competitors were right behind him with the Better Pasta Pot
and the Perfect Pasta Pot, capitalizing on Antino's advertising.
Antino laughs at one of them. "They made theirs white. People
in a store know that the one they saw on TV was red. If they had
made it red, they could have stolen way more of out business." To
be honest, Antino's product really is better. The others don't
have the lid-locking mechanism that makes the Pasta Pro easy to
use.
Even with the competition, to date, Antino has sold more than
5.5 million Pasta Pros.
On the other hand, once five million people own a Pasta Pro,
that's about all you're going to sell. A year after Antino first
laid eyes on the product it had run its course. You can still
find the pots on store shelves and you might have caught a few
final commercials before Christmas, but for the most part, this
item is done.
So Antino is looking for the next big hit. Commercials are
now running for the Pack Max and the Original Chocolate Factory,
a chocolate-dipping double boiler that seems to greatly entertain
the mother and children in the commercial Antino showed me before
it tested.
You can get two medium, two large, and one jumbo-sized
bag for $19.95, plus shipping and handling. I'm buying a set. One
more household succumbs to Michael Antino Jr. |
