Sugarman Blu Blocker

Hi Garth,

> This may be old news to some of you but I
> was watching HSN I believe and I saw that
> they were selling Blu Blocker auto visors
> and I just thought to myself wow what a
> great idea.

> They took the Blu Blocker name and applied
> to a new product that was a natural
> adaptation from the original idea. At the
> point I saw it they had already sold nearly
> 4,000 at about $19 dollars a pop. I don't
> know if Sugarman still has the rights to
> that or someone else bought him out but I am
> thinking how many other products are out
> there where a simple change can create a
> whole new market.

Thanks for sharing this, Garth....

I think Joe Sugarman still runs the BluBlocker company. He's had a lot of success with his BluBlockers!

I admire Joe Sugarman a lot.... He's someone who has really been there "in the trenches" and made it. :)

If you have a copy of his book "Success Forces," you'll read how he got his start, and it's an inspiring story! He didn't start out in mail order.... He did several different things. He had failure after failure.... One of the biggest were his "Batman" credit cards (I hear there's still a warehouse somewhere full of them)....

But after each failure, Joe picked himself up and kept going (paying his debts as he went along)! You have to admire someone like that.... They don't take no for an answer.

Back to BluBlockers, you can read the story of how he got started with BluBlockers in his book "Marketing Secrets of a Mail Order Maverick" (another "must own" book)....

What happened was he was going to check out a portable fax machine which someone had told him about as a possible product. He didn't feel too confident about it, but as they were driving, he was squinting in the sunlight.... His friend picked up a pair of sunglasses and told him, "here, try these out"....

They were called Perception sunglasses, and he was very impressed by how they worked. To cut to the chase, one of the manufacturers of a product he was selling went bankrupt, leaving him with an empty page in the United Airlines catalog. He quickly arranged to advertise Perception sunglasses....

It was a blockbuster result. The Perception sunglasses outsold any of the other products in the catalog by a factor of ten.... He had sold 2,000 of them.

This led to it being a staple item in his catalog.... However, the manufacturer of Perception sunglasses was unstable and erratic, which isn't good enough for a mail order product, where you have to ship it in a specific time frame. The technology had actually been around at least since World War II, so Joe Sugarman arranged to have them manufactured in Korea, under his own brand name, BluBlockers.

And from there, I'm sure you can guess the rest.... It was a success in his catalog, then from there BluBlockers went to infomercials, to the home shopping channel, and finally to retail....

It was so successful, that Joe Sugarman decided to focus solely on BluBlockers practically to the exclusion of anything else! So clearly, it's been a profit bonanza for him now for about 15 years, since he first advertised "Perception" sunglasses in 1986....

I find Joe Sugarman's story quite inspiring myself, I highly recommend getting anything he's written.... :)

Dien Rice