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Our Story
The story of Telebrands is one of great hope for all entrepreneurs around the world. Started by one man, and expanded into a global direct-response empire, it provides encouragement to all those who seek to find their “nitch” in the market.
The Telebrands’ Invention Channel brand can be seen everywhere – on television, on retail shelves, in catalogs, in print ads, on the Web and in 40 countries around the world. Telebrands is riding high and celebrating 20 years in DRTV. It has been AJ Khubani, founder, president and CEO, whose farsighted marketing philosophy and leadership qualities that has driven Telebrands to its leadership position in the “As Seen on TV” category. Telebrands has received many accolades and recognition from the business community as well as from its retail customers.
Jordan Whitney has awarded Telebrands many times over with honors for excellence in the most innovative short-form product and infomercial category. Khubani has also received numerous Market Maker Awards from the drug chain industry – the Aurora Gold Award and Chart Toppers Awards, to name a few. In addition, the retailers that he sells to, have honored him with numerous awards, including the Target Home Décor Award, which recognizes his excellence in home merchandising.
Khubani is a former board member of the Electronic Retailing Association (ERA), current chairman of the marketing committee and has been ranked among the 40 most influential people in DRTV by Response Magazine. He is frequently invited to lecture on marketing at Montclair State and Princeton Universities. In addition, Khubani, now actively involved as chair of entrepreneurial engineering, is currently working with Princeton University students to develop future products for Telebrands.
The Early Years
Upon graduation from Montclair State University in New Jersey with a degree in business administration, Khubani started working for his father’s import business in New York. A year later, in 1983, he wondered whether he could sell some of his father’s imported consumer items through print ads. The first product he chose was an AM-FM radio that cost him $6. He sold it for $10 through a $7500 ad in the National Enquirer. I didn’t realize that wasn’t enough margin,” he recalls. “The ad broke even. But the business was exciting, and I continued to pursue the mail-order business with print ads.”
Exploring the Infomercial World
About this time, Khubani was taking note of television. The modern infomercial was in its infanthood, and it looked like a feasible additional sales channel for his type of merchandise. “I thought that if I took my winning products from print and put them on television, I might have something,” he says.
Khubani produced three short-form commercials in 1987: one for the Easy Cycle, one for the ultrasonic flea collar, and one for the AmberVision sunglasses. The AmberVision infomercial was a great success, spurring sales of 15 million pairs of the sunglasses.
In 1988, few infomercial marketers thought much about retail. There was so much profit being made at the front end from direct-from-television sales, additional sales channels were largely ignored. Khubani was one of the few who, like Al Eicoff, gave retail distribution serious thought.
By then, AmberVision sunglasses had become a brand name through the power of print and television advertising, and it was the first As-Seen-on-TV product.
Khubani decided to try his hand at retail. Khubani had watched AmberVision sunglasses sell like hotcakes on TV for a year at $10 a pair. Khubani, samples in hand, had to struggle to get appointments with retailers. “If they don’t know who you are, they really don’t want to talk to you,” he explains. Buyers may not have recognized Khubani, but they did recognize the AmberVision name, so he finally managed to secure an appointment with Herman’s Sporting Goods.
“The buyer gave me all the reasons why the sunglasses wouldn’t sell,” says Khubani. Fortunately, the store’s GMM (general merchandising manager) immediately recognized the AmberVision glasses and instructed the buy to test them in the stores. They were a hit-just as they had been on TV.
The Great Expansion
Other large retail accounts followed, showcasing such products as Magic Hangers, and the Jack LaLanne Mini Stepper-all DRTV products that sold extremely well in retail stores. “and all of a sudden it became a very big business for us,” says Khubani. Khubani had tested and proven the marketing formula(that is so well known today) of using direct response as a vehicle to build rapid brand awareness to launch products on to retail shelves. Telebrands even coined the term “ABCD” marketing (“Accelerated Brand Creation and Deployment) to describe the process.
Today, Telebrands has grown to become a recognized leader in its industry with an innovative marketing strategy that has catapulted its expansion into the present-day market. Telebrands specializes in the design, manufacture, marketing, and distribution of innovative consumer products. It’s unique products are now sold in over 40 countries around the world. Telebrands is the first direct response television company to open a branch office in Mumbai, India and successfully penetrate the challenging Indian market. In addition to opening a satellite office in India, Telebrands’ products have gained worldwide recognition, causing it to expand its ventures to include Telebrands UK. Telebrands supplies many distributors internationally and additionally hopes to develop more satellite offices globally.
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