Posts Tagged ‘Sarah Newman’
DJ & Sarah’s Troubles
My former colleague on Dragons’ Den, Sarah Newman and her partner DJ Carey, were in the news last week. AIB went to the Commercial Court to foreclose on a debt of 9.5 million euro. There were acres of coverage for the story because, of course, they are a very high profile couple. She was judge on Dragons’ Den for its first two series and her partner is one of the greatest sportsmen this country has ever produced.
Now it has been reported that the couple weren’t expecting a hearing of the case on Monday the 9th last but rather a listing. So when the case went ahead they must have been taken by surprise. But Sarah and DJ should have made themselves available to the media immediately. Instead they kept their heads down hoping it would all blow over. What happens then is a media free for all.
If you have been regularly in the media and using it to promote yourself or your business you can’t then go to ground, so to speak, on a bad news day.
It will sound like I am promoting my fellow columnist here in the paper when I say look at how Ivan Yeats handled his problems just back in January.
Actually Ivan’s problems were far wider ranging in that many people were losing their jobs. Now in both cases it was the same bank AIB that was playing hard ball but Ivan faced the music with great dignity, integrity, honesty and empathy for his colleagues.
The amount of support and concern for Ivan and his wife Deirdre was absolutely amazing and well deserved. Very different to the coverage for Sarah and DJ, described as a couple who “enjoyed the high life” which was not deserved. It would be hard to come across a harder working couple than both DJ and Sarah.
I hope they will both pull through this awful mess. In many a game DJ was well down at half time but the fighter in him would come back and get a win. I know he and Sarah will apply the same determination in overcoming this crisis and I sincerely wish them every success.
The Final Curtain
I was so disappointed tonight. I think it is the first time I have been caught on camera looking really annoyed. I made a hash of it. I loved Grab Radio but said I was out. But I was deploying an unusual tactic. If you are out but another Dragon makes an offer and it is not accepted and a negotiation starts you can come back in. It has not been used as a tactic in the Irish Den but it is used in the Dens in both Canada and New Zealand quite a bit. Aonghos O’ nEocha grabbed the offer and I was blown out. Good enough for me. You can be too smart assed for your own good at times and this was one such occasion.
I do hope Susan has stuck with Seka Cosmetics but it needed work.
Now you know my views on golf, but, I was very interested in Cathal Boyle’s Easi Croc. I hate the name, I like the idea however in the end it just didn’t grab me enough.
David & Cathal’s Dabble appeared to have really irritated us. It is the luck of the draw. We start filming at 7am and by 7pm you can be very impatient. Sorry guys.
The Dragons will try anything. Seeing us there in the Nosey Rosie hats, what were we like?
Alan Rudden didnt ever get my interest. I just don’t see a r.o.i. in landscaping.
What a great way to end the series.
Daithí O’Regan was brilliant and he really pressed Sarah about her committment to manufacturing in Ireland. By the way all the women on crew on the set thought he was really handsome. Daithí thanks I still have your presentation hurley at home above our mantlepiece. Good luck to both Sarah and Daithí.
Herbie, Noelle and Mark in the RDS this weekend.
Don’t miss this weekend’s Spring Ideal Homes Show in the RDS, Friday, Saturday & Sunday. My investments, Herbie Porsche and his Toilet Pipe Cover, Noelle O’Connor and TanOrganic and Mark O’Loughlin of HidBin are all there on a big stand so please go along and say hello. Sean Lemass of SDL Exhibitions has been very good to us. He was so keen to have the guys along so Sean a big THANK YOU!.
Alright I am going to sign off.
Next Blog Monday Morning – Bye!
Any Marketing Geniuses out there?
Good morning what a fantastic Monday morning.
If you have just caught up with us recently, I blog twice a week. Thursday nights, 11:15pm, after Dragons’ Den is broadcast and Monday mornings. They are two definite updates but of course as you have seen I will also go in and update from time to time.
Looking for Great Marketing Ideas
There are now thousands of people following this blog. I am flattered especially by so many overseas friends from around the globe. This is a big resource and I want to use it.
So please check out www.TanOrganic.com and www.Hidbin.ie
I want your advice on how we should best market these two products. Gives us your views on both or which ever one takes your fancy.
Let me give you a bit of a steer. For Tanorganic, the 100% natural, organic, anti-aging, healthy, sunless tan-lotion I am looking to really grab the Irish public’s attention when it is launched mid to late May. I am thinking of billboards around the cities of Ireland and a large prize for the most beautiful tanned woman to appear actually live on the billboard and wave at people as they go by. Please don’t involve yourself if you think it is sexist or demeaning of women etc. It is a beauty product aimed at women and also it is a bit of summer fun. If you can’t get your head around that you are wasting your own and our time. Don’t restrict yourself. Let your imagination runawy with itself. Please submit your ideas for this one to info@tanorganic.com Now don’t restrict them to the billboard concept I just want you to know what I am thinking.
Hidbin, as you know is a synthetic screen hedging that neatly hides your ugly wheeliebins. “Making the unsightly unseen.” It costs €99 for a one bin unit and €179 for a two bin unit. Can you think of any guerrilla marketing tactics for this concept. Please send your best ideas to info@hidbin.ie
Our Last Show This Thursday
Thursday’s show is the last in the series and I genuinely believed they have saved the best to last. I am actually going to be out of the country with all the Dragons, well actually Sean can’t make it now. We are going on a late season ski trip to Zermatt. It is all down to Sarah’s great generosity. I am not the facebook type but I will ask Sarah for her permission to report from there and her wonderful chalet, www.chaletgrace.comI am told it is literally out of this world, so Bobby, Niall and myself are really looking forward to a few days ski-ing and crack with the hostess with the mostess.
Great Ideas and a number of Investments
The show on Thursday, and I will be blogging at 11:15pm directly after the show, features some really interesting pitches including an Irish developed, I-Phone App’ and you will also get to see just how bad Sean Gallagher is at hurling. If you are a Dragons’ Den regular and you followed last year’s first series I’d like to know why you think this was even better? I say it is better because the ratings are even higher. During the series the programme had a bigger audience than the main evening 9 o’clock news (Programme 6). That’s a large audience for 10:15pm and the viewers stay right until the end until well after 11pm.
Desperate Housewives twinned with Dragons’ Den
Also we are informed there was a very large number of female viewers. In fact the programme was “diaried” and “twinned”, we are told by the media buyers in the advertising agencies. That means about 125,000 women had two favourite shows per week, that they definitely would NOT miss. Desperate Housewives on Tuesday and Dragons’ Den on Thursday. Sean says he knows why, he claims it is his sex appeal. I argue his most endearing quality is his modesty. But if anything, I believe, it is down to the humour. Niall O’Farrell was just so funny at times this year. For example when he held up the Feel Good energy boost cocoa ball and said “It looks like something you’d find behind the couch,” I cracked up. Bobby can be so brilliant at giving fantastic advice to the point and succinctly and then the next minute he can crack a great joke. And all the audience research tells us women are fascinated by our Sarah. I feel privileged to be in such great talented company.
Eugenia Cooney Producer
Sadly not coming away on our little Dragons’ Den trip, though we did everything to twist their arms, are Larry Bass and Eugenia Cooney. Larry, the Executive Producer, is at the TV festival in Cannes this week. By the way that’s where he bumped into Mark Burnett in a lift in 2004 and that led to him acquiring the rights to both the Apprentice and Dragons’ Den. Both were invented by the genius of Burnett.
But the genius behind our Dragons’ Den is, Producer, Eugenia. She and hubby Ed’ are attending a family wedding this weekend and couldn’t join us. I would have dropped my family to go to Chalet Grace but Eugenia is a good Dundalk woman and they value family not like us south Louth, Drogheda types who eat their young, well that’s what they say about us in Dundalk.
600,000 Viewers
The success of the programme, and the almost 600,000 viewers a week is down to Eugenia who takes it from people applying to come on, vetting them, accepting a fraction to come to studio, recordings for weeks, editing down 120 hours to about 7 hours in total for the full eight shows of the series and she is across every item until the last credits roll this Thursday night.
We have been honoured to work with such a great leader.
I will talk to you on Thursday night.
Bye for now.
Mark O’Loughlin’s HidBin story
What is the ugliest and most unsightly thing in your home?
You and your family use it every day and it’s a necessary evil that we all suffer.
Imagine making it disappear but it’s still there when needed.
The offending article is of course your wheelie bin and my new product, the hidbin, does exactly what the name suggests. See it on www.hidbin.ie ……From Unsightly to Unseen!
I brought my new invention onto the Dragon’s Den this week and explained how it banishes the blight of your wheelie bins. It went down amazingly well and I walked out a happy man with my investment.
My name is Mark O’Loughlin and the hidbin, as pictured here, camouflages a garden eyesore turning it into a nice, neat, natural looking hedge. It’s simply a synthetic hedge on a steel frame, complete with lid and doors and for only €99.95 (incl vat) you too can turn the unsightly into the unseen!
For those who didn’t catch the Dragon’s Den this week (I’m acutely aware that it clashed with both ‘Lost’ and the Masters Golf), I marched up the stairs, removed the black cloth revealing an early prototype of the hidbin.
Then I turned to face the Dragons and nearly had a heart attack. It’s a daunting challenge but my firm passion and belief in the hidbin solution carried me through the next 45 minutes or so of intense questioning.
Memorised 2 minute pitch over, there followed an unnerving and rather long silence which I wish someone had warned me about. Richard Curran’s voiceover summarised things nicely, ‘it’s a simple aesthetically sound solution to an everyday problem’. Once the questions started I was away in a hack.
Clearly all the Dragons were enthusiastic. Niall O’Farrell, a bit of a design guru himself, said ‘it’s great and is definitely gonna work. ’ His constructive criticism has since contributed to perfecting the new and improved hidbin design. Even Sarah Newman exclaimed it was a pretty neat idea. She bowed out, however, on the grounds that some people can’t even afford their bin charges these days. My polite retort, sadly edited out, was that since the property crash the focus of people’s spending is very much on home improvement. Besides, with 27 million homes in the UK alone, the potential export market for hidbin is huge. 7 million of these are terraced houses, (we have 300,000 in Ireland) many of whom are forced to keep their bins out front by necessity. The hidbin gives all of us the convenience of keeping our bins out of sight and in whatever location suits best.
Nowadays most of us are lumbered with 2 or even 3 large wheelie bins. One hidbin unit comfortably covers a standard 240litre bin – 2 units together hides up to 3 bins as illustrated {on the right}.
Bobby Kerr loved the idea too but was worried I wouldn’t dedicate sufficient time and energy to the promotion of hidbin given my other successful business. Balderdash ! My retort, also not aired, was to point out that I certainly wasn’t the only person in that room with more than one business and it did not seem to have hampered their success. For the record, I also run SanctuarySynthetics.ie, – Ireland’s specialists in supplying and installing artificial child and pet friendly garden grass for the domestic and childcare market.
It was a rollercoaster experience. At one point I thought that they’d all want a stake. As Richard Curran said ‘there was a lot of love in the room for the big man from Kildare’. In the end I was delighted to team up with Gavin Duffy and am honoured to have such a respected mentor on board to help launch and establish the hidbin as a household brand.
Now for the blatant plug – we appreciate that this is a product people will want to see, touch and feel. Thus we are exhibiting at the Spring Ideal Home & Garden Show in the RDS next weekend where the hidbin will be displayed in a garden context. Along side will be 2 other successful Dragon’s Den entrepreneurs, Noelle O Connor with Tanorganics ( remember the girl in the bikini that Sarah Newman sent away halfway through the pitch ) and Herbie Porsche with his toilet pipe cover ( the guy wanted ‘money for Herbie’ ) – the Dragon’s Den dream team! You can also come to investigate and buy your very own hidbin at Bloom in the Phoenix Park on the June Bank Holiday weekend.
Last week in this column Kate Carmody of Beal Organic Cheese made a very cogent argument about Ireland inc and how we should maximise our resources, whether they be the natural grassland of the Golden Vale or our innate passion, innovation and ingenuity to create value added products which we can trade and export. Well done to both RTE and the Sunday Independent for giving the hidbin and other great ideas the invaluable oxygen of publicity, particularly given all time low national morale.
Finally, a sincere thanks to all my family and friends for their support and belief in my enterprise. Demand since the show has been hugely gratifying. By the way, the hidbin doesn’t just cunningly disguise your bins, a less obvious use can be seen by searching for hidbin on YouTube!
For more information call us on 045 579100 or visit www.hidbin.ie
Anthony Walker
I loved Anthony Walker the New Yorker who was a great talker, but valuing plastic bags at €1m was a shocker. His idea was so good everyone will copy it but the Dragons didn’t think it was investable.
Brian Boru Sauce
It was like the battle of Clontarf all over again. Bobby Kerr did not like the Dane’s sauce.
Another Golf Idea
What is it about golf, that it keeps throwing up so many ideas? The one thing we learned from this item is that there is loads of sex going on in golf clubs – that is according to Sarah Newman.
20 For Out
I am always a bit disappointed when some presentations from the Den only get a short airing TV in the end. Joe and his daughter were lovely people and presented so well. Yes, I know they didn’t get an investment but I thought their item deserved more airtime.
537,700 Viewers
Thanks for watching the show. 537,700 watched last week. The numbers are going up every week, so thank you for all the support and again I promise I will try to answer all your queries.
Next blog, as usual, on Monday morning. Bye.