Snuggies have pulled in more than $500 million since becoming a viral sensation five years ago. Allstar Products, the company behind them, is still thriving with the blankets with sleeves and a host of other “As Seen on TV” products.
Snuggies on display at Allstar's headquarters in Hawthorne, New York.
It's been about five years since the Snuggie exploded into a viral phenomenon, when its absurdly earnest infomercial for a blanket with sleeves entertained millions, spawned countless parodies and even landed the head of Allstar Products, the private company behind the fleece robes, on Oprah.
Now, more than half a billion in Snuggie sales later, Allstar has continued to introduce a bevy of other successful "As Seen on TV" products to the world and is even planning a "new and exciting" revival of the famed blanket for later this summer.
"It certainly put us on the public's radar," Scott Boilen, Allstar's chief executive officer said in an interview this month at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, New York, clad in a button-down and slacks, sans Snuggie. "It was the first product that really went viral, that really went mainstream like that. It was probably the first product that had the advantage of social media really peaking."
Since 2008, Allstar, a direct-response marketing company, has sold more than 35 million Snuggies, of both the human and yes, dog variety. The excess of $500 million in revenue is astonishing for a single product during five years, considering the annual sales of some public specialty retailers, which sell a wide array of clothing and accessories: $617 million at American Apparel and $800 million at PacSun, to name a couple. While Boilen declined to share Allstar's annual revenue, he said "industry standard" for companies in the "As Seen on TV" business is typically at least $200 million a year.
A wall of Allstar's products in the company headquarters lobby.
The main wall in the lobby of Allstar's headquarters is covered with lit-up signs surrounding a flat-screen television. Each advertises a separate item: Hot Buns, for the perfect sock bun, Forever Comfy, a portable gel cushion, and Magic Mesh, a magnetic screen-door substitute, among them. On a wall to the left is a blown-up, framed 2010 New York Times article about the Snuggie.
Allstar, founded in 1999, finds this array of problem-solving merchandise in a variety of ways: they develop items themselves, license them from smaller companies, and also pursue some of the 5,000 to 10,000 submissions a year from individual inventors. (Boilen says the amount of submissions doubled after Snuggie's success.) Essentially, the company searches for $30-and-under items— though $19.95 is the magic price point — and tests 5 to 10 each month on TV.
Each infomercial has a unique 1-800 number and some web algorithms can match online orders to certain spots as well, Boilen said. If the item hits the right level of response metrics, it ends up at retailers such as Wal-Mart or Walgreens a minimum of 90 days later, which is where 95% of sales comes from and more than 100% of profits, since TV ultimately loses money. The medium, however, is essential for building awareness and driving customers to retail.
"We can do 1,000 focus groups for people to tell us what they'll do, but when you actually air a TV commercial and somebody gets off the couch to go on a website or call a number and actually place an order with their credit card from a company they never heard of and wait a while to get it, that person's definitely going to buy it at retail," Boilen said. "If we build awareness to a certain level, we'll sell through retail," he said, comparing the strategy to how consumer-products giant Procter & Gamble uses TV to advertise its goods.
