You have the idea… we have the team that can make it a reality.

Think your invention can be the next inventor success story?

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably done your homework and read about products selling 30 million, 50 million, and even 100 million units from their TV commercials – but for every one of those there were countless others that didn’t make it big.

With a global network of over 80,000 retail stores, Ontel can guarantee maximum market penetration, both domestically and world-wide. On this page, we’ll discuss what we look for in a product and help you determine whether it’s something that’s a fit for our market.

Does it Solve a Problem?

Every commercial starts by identifying a particular problem. Sometimes it’s a simple inconvenience, other times it’s a health, lifestyle, or money-related problem. Products that prevent the problem from happening usually aren’t a good fit for our format, but products that solve the problem can be.

Can it be Demonstrated?

Products that can be demonstrated using high-impact, lively demonstrations with emotional trigger words that build excitement can work great on TV. Every feature or bullet point of the product should be demonstrable; If your product is a knife that always stays sharp, we’ll cut a piece of leather and then slice a tomato. If your product is small and compact, we’ll show how little space it takes up in your cupboard. If your product will let someone lose weight and gain muscle, we’ll show someone with a well-toned body looking confident on the beach. Seeing is believing. Products that require too many words to explain won’t do as well.

Is it easy to use?

The spokesperson, or “pitch man”, will always highlight how easy it is to use the product. They take the product apart to show you how easy it is to clean or maintain, or how quickly it assembles or solves the problem. For example, “Just drop it in, and your clothes stay fresh!” Most inventors are experts in their field and sometimes forget that what’s simple for them isn’t always simple to the average consumer. If your product needs to be explained, has too many features, or requires a complicated instruction manual or documentation to figure it out, it probably won’t do well on TV.

Manufacturing & Scale

For a product to be profitable on TV, the hard cost to manufacture it needs to be about one fifth of the target retail price. With our manufacturing capabilities, we can typically manufacture the product at scale for a fraction of what it costs you for small batches, but the reality is that the margin must be sufficient enough to cover all media and production costs. This ratio can be offset if the product has optional accessory or bonus items that can increase the average order value.

Is your product READY for us?

Perhaps the most important of all is whether or not your product is ready to sell. Do you have a patent? Is the product out of the design phase, manufactured, tested, and ready for production? We don’t accept “ideas”, napkin drawings, or schematics that haven’t been made into products yet – we can help with the manufacturing and packaging, but at the very least you’ll need to be able to send us a working prototype that looks and functions like the final version and could be used in filming.

We also require the ability to manage the product’s online presence during the media run. If the product is already available for sale on other websites, we would end up driving traffic to other parties where we can’t control how the product is presented or priced. Having control of the brand presence is critical to determining whether or not the media run was successful, so if your product is already available for sale on Amazon or anywhere other than your own website, it isn’t something we’ll be able to take on.

© Ontel Products Corporation.