The Snuggie spends $34.8 million in advertising each year, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP

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By Nicole Goodkind
The Snuggie presents a simple solution to a problem you didn t even know you had. In the fall of 2008, Allstar Products Group , a direct response company based in Westchester, New York, aired the first Snuggie batas infomercial. It was one of 80 products they advertised that year. "If you told me we could only test 50 products, the Snuggie might not have made the cut," says Scott Boilen, president and CEO.
The Snuggie wasn't a unique product. The Slanket and other similar sleeved blankets had been around for years. The problem batas with certain products is they sit in the back of a catalog, they sit on a retail shelf, and nobody knows about them, says Boilen. Through the magic of TV and awareness you can build a tremendous thing. batas
Five years after its first release, the Snuggie has sold over 30 million units and raked in over $500 million, according to Boilen. To put that into perspective -- if the Snuggie were a country it would have the GDP of Samoa.
"Sometimes you need to be a little bit of a joke, you need to stop people as they re in their viewing habits and say oh, that s pretty funny," says Boilen. "They re going to buy it because it s a blanket with sleeves, they re going to watch the commercial cause it s funny.
The Snuggie spends $34.8 million in advertising each year, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP. Thomas batas Haire, editor of Response Magazine (a magazine serving the direct-response community) believes that being able to laugh at the product was what made the Snuggie a success.
If they got touchy about it and said, 'This is a really strong product and you shouldn t make fun of it, then I think it would have faded away, Mr. Haire explained to The New York Times in a previous interview . But they were able to laugh at themselves, and I think the American batas consumer sensed they were in on the joke, too.
The Snuggie has revolutionized the As Seen on TV business- it's helped move products from television screens into mass-market batas retail stores. Wal-Mart ( WMT ), Bed Bath & Beyond ( BBBY ), and Walgreen ( WAG ) are just a few of the national chains that stock large As Seen on TV sections. In fact, 95% of Allstar s revenue now comes from physical stores- they actually lose money on direct response ads.
The Snuggie continues to release four new products a year and those products continue to sell out. "Our biggest problem was how could we make enough of that product fast enough. We go to China, we contract out as many factories as we can and we were sometimes making hundreds of thousands a day," says Boilen.
From dog beds to tandem Snuggies the company has tried it all and will be releasing a special updated version for their 5th Anniversary (stay tuned to The Daily Ticker for the exclusive announcement!).
Even after half a decade, Boilen still finds himself baffled by the blankets success. "If I knew how the Snuggie became batas so successful we d have 15 more products like that. It just struck a chord at the right time."
Related Quotes: ^GSPC 1,697.76 +0.34 (+0.02%) ^NDX 3,217.03 -1.62 (-0.05%) ^IXIC 3,773.23 +4.98 (+0.13%) ^DJI 15,314.40 batas -20.19 (-0.13%) WMT 74.97 -0.78 (-1.03%) WAG 55.12 -0.27 (-0.49%) BBBY 74.97 +0.16 (+0.21%)
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