Fitness Quest brings ShamWow home to its flea market roots
September 30, 2010 by Michael Alterio
Filed under Featured Products, Product Zone
Everybody knows about the ShamWow cleaning cloth and Vince Offer, the ShamWow guy. But did you know that Offer got his start selling the product, and other kitchen items, at swap meets and flea markets? Well, after incredible success in TV Land and retail stores, the ShamWow is returning to the flea markets where it was born.
Famous pitchman Vic Offer says, “The ShamWow holds up to 12 times its own weight in water!”
With exclusive rights to distribute the ShamWow in stores and at flea markets, a company called Fitness Quest is bringing the ShamWow home. “The ShamWow was born from the flea market genre,” says Fitness Quest vp of sales Andrew Joyce. “Vince Offer is the ShamWow guy. He took it from the flea market environment and partnered with us on the TV side, turning it into a global phenomenon. We became heavily entrenched in retail distribution, but not as heavily into the flea market world as we should have been. What we want to do is capture an audience and a footprint there again.”
Joyce is enthusiastic about the ShamWow and its potential for vendors. “The product itself works tremendously well. It’s small, lightweight, and has massive brand awareness. It has a price point that makes for a perfect flea market product.”
And Fitness Quest is willing to go the extra mile to make this product thrive in the flea market arena. “With ShamWow, in order to capture the flea market audience again, we’re willing to work with the flea market merchants with a very aggressive margins strategy. That will help them leverage the $24-plus million in advertising spending that we’ve done to generate the brand awareness that’s out there as it relates to ShamWow,” says Joyce. “We’re aggressively looking to re-enter that segment.”
To get specific, a single ShamWow towel retails for $6. Wholesale pricing starts at $3.75, and goes down from there. “What we are able to do through special packaging and bulk lots is drive the price of the Sham Wow down to a much more aggressive price,” explains Joyce. He urges vendors to contact him directly for details on that aggressive pricing.
The ShamWow on sale at New Jersey's Ocean Grove Flea Market.
But pricing is not the only factor that makes Fitness Quest a good partner for vendors. The company offers to help vendors with marketing and selling. The product’s hallmark, of course, is its strength demonstrated in person. “It’s a fairly straightforward demonstration, and we can step vendors through what has worked and what has not in the past,” says Joyce. “And we can provide literature and marketing materials as well.”
Fitness Quest is a company with a track record of success with well-known products. It has sold the Jane Fonda Step Workout, the Suzanne Somers Torso Track, and the Tony Little Gazelle Edge, for example. “Fitness Quest is a marketing and distribution company,” explains Joyce. “We specialize in taking consumer goods, generating a winning infomercial strategy on television, and then marrying that to a retail strategy.”
About 40 percent of the company’s business comes from direct sales to consumers through TV and the Internet. The other 60 percent comes from wholesale sales to retail customers, including flea market and swap meet vendors. The company’s reach is vast: “We have a footprint of 100,000 retail stores across the United States: drug stores, department stores, automotive stores, hardware stores, and convenience stores, with distributor partners in 23 countries,” says Joyce. Fitness Quest has been in business since 1973, and since 1994 under its present name.
But the company is set on the ShamWow. “Out of our suite of products, our focus for the flea market category is purely ShamWow right now,” says Joyce. “Our approach is to get folks in at the ground floor level with some very aggressive pricing on the front end. We want this to be the least restrictive partnership that they can enter into. Someone could come in and spend $200 with us, or someone could spend $2 million with us. We want to be all things to everybody if we can. We work with different merchants to make it a viable proposition for them.”
Fitness Quest makes a point of keeping in touch with its merchants. “With the retail customers, we have a series of meetings several times a year on an annual basis,” says Joyce. “We talk about retail strategies for the next year or six months.” The company also goes out into the field to meet customers. “We do about 40 trade shows a year.”
And of course, Joyce is hoping that new customers, especially flea market vendors, will reach out to him. “The best way to get in touch is just to call and ask for the retail sales department,” he says.
For more information, contact:
Fitness Quest
1400 Raff Road SW
Canton, OH 44750
Tel.: (800) 321-9236
Fax: (330) 479-9213
Web site: fitnessquest.com
E-mail: customersupport@fitnessquest.com
Photo credits, with thanks: Fitness Quest and Black Eyed Susan’s Kitchen blog.
Let’s set the record straight! The “Sham-Wow” product does have it’s roots at flea markets, fairs, auto and home shows; BUT, we’re going back at least 2 decades before a slick marketing company slapped a brand-name and TV marketing campaign onto the product that had been, up to that point, known as simply the Shammy, the Super-Shammy, the Amazing Shammy, and a half-dozen other names. The original synthetic, German made Shammy continues to be sold at live venues across the nation. Meanwhile, the folks at Fitness Quest would have you believe that theirs is the only “legitimate” synthetic Shammy. The funny thing is that in their original commercial with Vince Offer, the “old” version which is truly the Original German Shammy can be seen being used! The truth is that the “original” German Shammy comes in larger size sheets than the Sham-Wow (Somebody has to pay for that fancy box, right?). So before you buy into the Sham-Wow story, remember that the original German Shammy is virtually identical, except they come in larger sheets. The only thing “original” about the Sham Wow… is the name. And the Shammy pitch, (at is a classic), was pioneered by some of the best pitchmen in the business, many years before Fitness Quest smelled a quick buck. The best part is that these original “shammys” are still available at many live events and markets; and, they are truly the “original German synthetic shammy!”