“I will be giving away some of my best ideas for inventions, businesses, stories, and marketing ploys. I don’t have the resources or passion to make these ideas reality, but I know that you might. If you use any of my ideas to make tons of money, please let me know and think about sending me a small percentage of your profits. I hope this blog makes the world a better place.”

One lesson might be the free flow of ideas to promote innovation, but I feel that the more prevalent is the way he communicates his ideas.  His blogs are a few paragraphs, but he is able to “pitch” the idea effectively.  He never starts off with so this is my idea and that is it, like so many inventors do.

Tactics:

Experience, he starts off talking about his background…  “Most of you, my millions of readers, would probably be surprised to find out that I have worked for no less than four ice cream franchises in varying capacities. Yes, I have a lot of ice cream experience under my belt.”

Targeting, focusing the pitch on who he wants to hear it… “Do you work for Willy Wonka, Hasbro, Jelly Belly, Tonka, Wham-O, Slam-O, Jack-O, Wack-O, or any other candy/toy company that I didn’t mention? Do you want to bring joy and cavities to millions of boys and girls, while making millions? Are you excited yet?”

Humor, a little joke (not a gut buster) to get people hooked… “Whenever I eat Chinese food, I use chopsticks. Guess what. Billions of Chinese people also use chopsticks when they eat Chinese food. Of course, they just call it food.”

You might notice that there is no mention of his product in the opener.  These are hooks showing the market, problem, experience etc.  Work some of these techniques into your pitches and marketing materials.  Getting the attention of the reader is encredibly important when looking for investment, licensing and everything else.

The other major take away from the talk is it’s all about Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart sells approximately 14% of all retail and they are good to work with. They don’t ask for exclusive selling rights, they pass ‘earnings through savings’ back to you and are open to the smaller companies beating out the smaller ‘innovative’ companies.

As I look over my notes from the meeting, there were so many stories of successes and failures that it would take 10 pages to retell them so I will focus on just a few.

The PegBar was a cornerstone innovation in the talk.  It was a new product that was conceptualized (prototyped and then produced by) the shop foreman. Its creation led this company to expand their distribution network into QVC where Keith was doing pull ups on the bar at 2 in the morning.  Take aways: Moto: Buyer relationships are key, do what it takes for the customer.  The PegBar is currently being sold by McMaster-Carr, picture below from their website.

The second story that I would pass on is the Printed Curtain.  Keith had a curtain that had Blue cartoon character, (Blue the dog).  This product was well received by many stores like Bed Bath & Beyond and Wal-Mart but did not do well because of it’s price point.  During the development process, the inventor had agreed to exclusive domestic manufacturing and that forced the price of the curtain upto $12 while most other simple curtains are apx $3.  While the curtains did very well at clearance prices ($4) the consumers were too used to the existing price point to pay the high end price for kids curtains.