https://www.listennotes.com/e/14567659324c4e138ab68d7e9c8d318f

Protect your brand, product or invention from the hazards of consumer product launching and go from idea to product to big brand with guidance from retail product design and development experts Tracy and Tom Hazard. Get the insider secrets to put the right things in the right order with the right resources so you can out design, outsource and out profit your way to retail success.

Hey everyone, welcome to Product Launch Hazards. I'm Tracy Hazard and I have a really fun and interesting couple to talk with you today. I have Natasha and Fred Ruckel from the Randy Cooper Foundation. They were also featured in a book that I may have written about. And I should have grabbed my copy already so I could have it over my shoulder. But as stolen on TV and boy, when I read their story, I just thought, God, I'm so glad I'm not doing this every single day. I'm so glad I'm not out there inventing new things. And that's a terrible thing because we want those wonderful inventions that you're working on. to come out into the world. So it's amazing what they're doing with the foundation. We're gonna talk about that. But what they've done is they have put this in the name of Randy Cooper is the inventor of the noodle head sprinkler. And it's aimed to embody Randy Cooper's passion and desire to stand up for inventors rights. And that's what Natasha and Fred have been doing on their own. They have their own program, their own products called Snuggly Cat. That's the name of their brand. And they have been inventing and out there selling and getting knocked off left and right. And it is that story that is absolutely unfolded into, I don't even know how to describe it, but like a network of very, very scary players who are going after inventors and stealing their concepts and knocking them off in such a crazy way that it's almost not believable. It's an As Seen on TV movie. So, As Stolen on TV movie. So we're going to talk about that today. I mean, the infringers out there are really getting sophisticated. and the things that they're doing are really getting very, very scary. And this isn't just a like blatant, you know, someone invented it at the same time as me. This is an absolute dead off. I'm buying your product and I'm making a video of it and knocking you off. So Natasha and Fred, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm so excited to talk about this. I can't wait to hear what you have, what you guys are working on on the foundation side of things and what you guys are working on on your own as we see a cat walk across the background if you're watching this on video. Love it. You got the cats going there, so they're advertising right now. So welcome both of you. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

So how long have you been inventing and working in the space?

Well, it should be first said that we both worked in marketing and advertising for 20 plus years each. So we were helping others with their inventions for many years. We just decided back in 2015 to take the leap and make one of our ideas real. and we applied all of our skills that we've learned over the past two decades or plus each into launching and creating an actual brand as opposed to just a product.

Well, you know, that's a really interesting, I want to start there because, you know, it's changed a lot in the 20 years that we've all been working in this industry. I mean, marketing and advertising has changed. And I think that's why it's opened up a lot of, you know, opened up the field for the infringers to be a lot better at it than they used to be.

Yeah, for sure.

So what kinds of things have you seen change?

Well, going back to when we first started in business, I remember something as simple as the office memo. So that was how communication was done. And if you were talking to someone on the other side of the world, you'd pick up the phone and have a conversation late in the evening or early in the morning. Now, business isn't done that way. We all know that we spend our time through email. Social media is a new way of communicating with people. And that makes it so easy for information to get out to multiple people at one time, which means that nowadays we have to be constantly monitoring all the traffic out there, all the noise to see what's happening.

Yeah, so you're saying that the speed of communication really has also opened up the possibility of having things leaked out, having all this information be spread as quickly too, which is problematic.

Well, it's kind of the immediacy of now generation that we're in that you're expected to answer A text message, even if it's 11 o'clock at night or 6 o'clock in the morning that you're expected to always be on and it takes away from having a life. And in the past, working in television, we used to make what's called 3/4 inch videotapes and send a client a version of a commercial on tape and it would take a courier to either take it downtown or to send it via FedEx somewhere across the country. They would watch a rough cut of a commercial and say, okay, we like this, this and this, let's change this. So you had a moment to breathe and that allowed you to digest the creative. I think the creative process has been stifled by now, now, now, now, now. You don't get a chance to digest something you create before building upon it. They expect you to build, build, build, build. But you really have to take a moment, step back, look at it, analyze and say, we could have done this a little better. We could change this. But because of they want it right now, they want it yesterday, you don't have that opportunity anymore to really flesh an idea out completely.

You guys have done a lot of that sort of TV advertising or that video based advertising. And the success rate is really low. Like right now, the numbers I've heard in the last few years, it's been 14 out of 15 failures rather. And if we're talking about one out of every 15 succeeds or I use the number seven out of 10 failures in product launching regularly. So three out of 10 successes We're still 30% or less, I mean, even at best, like those are really scary numbers out there. And is it because we're moving too fast that these things aren't occurring? But what it's also doing is in your case, it's opening us up to just being like people aren't really, the investment isn't high enough and they don't really care. So they'll just knock you off and see what goes and take a piece.

So today it's so much easier for people to come along, steal your video, your imagery, your marketing, your language, even your product name. and they can post anywhere on social media. They can set up a store on Amazon. And it's very easy for them to do that. Before, it was so much more control on video, for example, in commercial. If you didn't have the tape with the original master, then you wouldn't be broadcasting it on your own website. But now you can just go on and record anything. And this is what we found with our product, the Ripple Rug, when it was initially stolen. We discovered that The bad guys, the infringers, essentially took all our photography, our video, our marketing. Word for word. Word for word. They didn't change anything, so our cat.

Yoda was featured on all the pictures. She was in there, I was in there.

Our hands.

They stole pictures of us. Yeah. And they had no qualms. They basically took that information, made a website, put their own name on the.

Website, as though it were their product.

Photoshopped off our label. Photoshopped off our label. and then they sent an email blast.

To 963,000 people on December 3rd.

Targeting them very specifically the right target audience and then directing them to the website which looks almost identical to ours.

Same color, same look. It was our actual picture so it wasn't kind of sort of. It was our exact image. Total brand replication.

So and how long had you been selling the product before this?

We only launched 41 days prior.

And when you launched, what was your marketing launch like? What did you do?

Yeah, our initial launch actually involved a competition called the Next Best Thing. Next big thing. The next big thing, which was in conjunction with QVC. On the Today Show.

On the Today Show.

So for us, it was an amazing opportunity. Suddenly we would be featured on national television talking to exactly the prime audience, the targeted audience we wanted to reach. Showcasing our brand new product, which was the Ripple Rug. Fred and I both got the opportunity to appear on the show. Al Roker was one of the judges. We brought Yoda, our cat with us. We presented. And then when we left the studio, Fred's cell phone started going, bing, bing, bing, bing, as the orders came in.

So we were exceptionally excited about that. And that was on September 30th, 2015.

Wow, that's fast.

One of the first purchases when we were on the Today Show, actually I think it was like the fifth purchase of all purchases ever. was the bad guys buying it from us to immediately start the knockoff process. So by December 3rd, imagine they had 41 days, they stole all of our pictures, downloaded them, built a website, built a pricing model, structured everything, set up an email blast targeting 963,000 people and sent that out on December 3rd to December 5th, 2015, thereby pretty much causing havoc for our first Christmas sales wondering what happened. Everybody wanted to buy the 1999 version.

And they would be getting two for 1999. Whereas our product is 39.99 for one. And made in the US out of recycled bottles. I have to throw that.

Yeah. So, you know, that's so interesting. So, I mean, did they even have a product? Did they ship anything or did they not? So it was a total scam.

As we learned later on in our lawsuit, during the discovery phase, you get information from the infringers and they get all your information as well, which is quite a scary process, a story for another day. But we found out that they took our very own Ripple rug and they ordered it on QVC because they said it was more anonymous that way.

Literally, those are the words in their email.

And then they sent it to their manufacturer in China and they were communicating on a regular basis trying to get the product manufactured at a cost that would be viable for them to produce. They were aiming for something like three or four dollars per unit, which is impossible because our product is made of a heavy quality carpet and rubber base. So the materials we use are a formula that's specifically made to the use of the Ripple Rug. It's safety tested, it's toxicity tested, because we wouldn't want our own little fur babies to be on something that was dangerous. So our principle is we would never sell something that we wouldn't be happy for our own cats.

Play them.

And so they sent out this email blast to basically a million people to essentially gather awareness and see who would want the product. But the magic behind the devious plot that they do, and they do this for many websites, they build into the HTML, no index, no follow, which means that Google, Yahoo, and every search engine on the planet cannot see the site. It's hidden from the internet.

So that's to say, if I went onto the internet and said, cool carpet toy made out of rug, Ours would.

Come up, but there's what. And now these microsites are all made by a company called Digital Target Marketing in Florida, and they make hundreds of knockoff sites.

And they're experts at doing that for.

All kinds of people.

For all kinds of products.

Probably good ones too, but we found a lot of bad ones.

Wow. So they aren't really making any product.

Nope.

At the end of the day, these guys didn't deliver.

Right. So there is one lesson we can learn from them. They were doing this as a test to see if it would work. As a dry test. the product really was something that they could sell thousands of units and make loads of money from. So as it happens, our product tested off the charts. They actually got quite a high percentage of people who placed orders, even though there was no product available. So for them, that meant, yes, we're going to take it to the next part of our product launch, which is to make a TV commercial and launch it nationally. So just for newbie inventors, though, it's a great way of testing your product, but obviously you have to have a product before you can sell it, so it's illegal to sell something knowing full well you don't have a product to sell.

Right.

But an interesting lesson nonetheless because they really were product testing.

Yeah. And imagine they kept sending emails back and forth with China saying, no, it's not good enough. They'd send a sample from China to New York to the people here and they'd say, no, it doesn't work as good as the other one. Let me order some more of the original ones to compare the new ones. They were literally back and forth trying to get as close as they could to ship. While at the same time, they already accepted orders for this fake product calling it the Perrin Play. And ironically, if you think Perrin Play, Ripple Rug, the alliterations within the double Ps, double Rs, all these things that they have, they're the same letter count.

Syllable count, it's total similarity. Wow. Oh my gosh, how crazy. So, I mean, so this is a cautionary tale and also very scary. Like it's very scary as to like how am I going to launch my product? Because as we were talking about the olden days, right? The days before the internet or early internet, even when I first started, is that you could soft launch something and you could do your own test marketing and you could go on out there and start to build your growth and not risk that kind of exposure. But today, they're targeting all the places where you do go out there and test, where you go out there and first launch like you're the next big thing or Kickstarter, as we've heard of many people there, or Shark Tank, as you know, I've written about. So, you know, all of those places are places that are, they're specifically targeting inventors in that process.

Well, you're the low hanging fruit in that capacity. You have no money, you're on a.

Shoestring budget, you're trying to get started. You probably don't have a patent or.

It'S not issued yet, even if you do have it, yeah, in process. They really know it's methodical, it's not haphazard. For lack of a better word.

No, we're used to that one here all the time, so yeah.

But they're very methodical. It is technically organized crime. The way they do it, it's a white collar organized crime scheme, and we.

Know all the players involved. That's so crazy. So the story of how you do it, I'm gonna make people read the book because it's worth reading. The story of how you uncovered everything was through serious investigative research. You watched videos frame by frame. You did a whole lot to investigate. It's amazing on what you've uncovered. But here's the thing where most people feel defeated, defeated by this process of there's so much against you. You guys became empowered. You started a foundation. You did that. What drove you to that?

Well, I think we spent a lot of money in legal fees in our lawsuit. And we realized that if we hadn't hired an investigator, it would have cost us two or three times the amount of work. We did a lot of learning about the rules of copyright protection, passing off. Everything really that a lawyer would have advised us, but because we did a lot of the research, we saved ourselves a lot of money. Yeah.

And then that was the real key to it is that both of us have very investigatory backgrounds and that we're inquisitive into things and we're both technologically sound. So we were able to do a lot of research on our own. And as she was saying, if we had to hire an investigator to do similar work, it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But I also don't think they would have done as good a job as you guys did on your own.

No, I don't think so.

Most lawyers, unfortunately, that work for big companies have multiple cases on at the same time. So there's a huge burden on them to know every single fact of every single case.

Well, but, you know, Tom and I found this in our experience of just patenting. So we have a couple of great attorneys that we work with again and again. And the reason we work with those patent attorneys is because they know us well enough to involve us in the process of patenting. so we get a stronger patent. And I think that that's a real big miss. There's many, many firms out there who don't involve you in the process of investigating. So you're in the investigation actually veers wrong and didn't really look for the right things or didn't even know what to look for where you guys know intimately, this is like the key factors in our product. If I see this, I know it's us. I know that's my cat, right? You know, like you guys knew what you were looking for.

Yeah.

And so to go back to your initial question, then we wandered a little away from it. So the reason we were inspired to help others was because we realized that there isn't good advice out there. There isn't someone to help you. Yes, you pay a lawyer, but unless you pay them hundreds and thousands of dollars, which realistically is a newbie inventor you just don't have because you're probably using your 401k to finance your launch. You know, we realized there was no one really there to help to give advice. And through discovery and finding out hundreds of other inventors whose ideas were completely ripped off and then contacting them in person and them saying, we don't know who that person is, but we don't know what to do and we can't fight it and we've lost 60% of our business. To us, it made us realize that the pain we've been through has been worth it if we can help someone else and steer them away from those horrifying situations.

And it is really, it's eye-opening to see how much these people go through in terms of the lengths to hide their trail or make it seem like they're doing good. In the case of ours, after all the damage that they did, they even had the nerve to come through a back door under another name called the Bargain Show and pretend to be our white knight and save us from certain death because our sales were stranded because of their own making. So that was like racketeering style.

So they tank you and then they say, oh, we'll buy you.

Yes, under another name.

Well, there's more irony to that because the people who run the Bargain Show were the people who shot the video of the fictitious which is parent play, which incidentally was a ripple rug. Yes.

Right. Yeah, because they couldn't still couldn't get the right thing. So what I do love about it from a product perspective, because I'm a product girl, right? At the end of the day, is that what you guys created as a product that's really impossible to knock off at a reasonable price than doing all that. And that's way better protection at the end of the day than is a patent, right?

Oh, yeah. It's hard for us to even we've made thousands and thousands of ripple rugs. And still to this day, every single batch of custom carpet that's made, they cut pieces, they send them to us, we test them. We often will reject carpet that doesn't meet our specifications because it has to be just right to be a ripple rug. And if it's not, we reject it because we have to maintain quality standards. And that's important.

The cat is scratching at the perfect moment, right? She's like, I'm gonna be making myself known right now. by the way, I love your cat's name. So anyway, yeah, so but that's usually a great protective layer is and we call that proprietary design, right? When you're designing something or you have a proprietary source, proprietary materials, and we like to build that into our designs in addition to patenting and copywriting and doing all of those good things, but having them is usually an added layer that usually prevents people from knocking it off, but they got a little over cocky and thought that they could do this is really the thing. They thought, this is a lot simpler than it looks. And that was where they fell apart in trying to actually make that thing. But the real is they did some tremendous brand damage to you because they didn't deliver. Yeah, no, it's irreparable what they did.

I mean, there's no way to- the.

Problem is, as a newbie inventor as well, is that you don't have a sales history. We had just launched our product to market and we didn't have sales on a regular basis. That's what happens when you start. You work hard to generate awareness and get people to buy a product in word of mouth and so on. But we didn't have that. So for us, it's even difficult to determine how much damage and how much of a delay they actually put on our product. And by them bringing our product to a Chinese manufacturer, well, we all know the scenario in China. All the manufacturers share all the ideas together. They're all very close knit. And so consequently, we have thousands of mushrooms popping up, literally fake ripple rugs popping up every day. People often use our pictures, they often use the word Ripple Rug, and customers actually click on it because they think, yay, we found a cheap Ripple Rug. That's what I want for my cat.

And then they buy it and it's a piece of felt. Yeah. And if you imagine, had these guys not done it, sure someone else might have now because it's been so popular, but what they've done is what's called cause to create. They caused the creation of all of these manufacturers in China to make similar versions to try and sell. Now, we would have had it happen anyway, but it might have only happened six months later when we had enough grounding of our product that people knew.

Yeah, exactly. And what you're talking about is something that I have great experience in. So people are always asking me, it's like, well, if I take it to China, I'm going to get knocked off. And the answer is, no, probably not. Not until they see you with tremendous traction in the marketplace or a big box wanting to buy your stuff, then they'll knock you off. So they will they adopt a wait and see model as well. Just because you came to them, they still think you're a small player. They don't know if you're worth it. Tom and I have designed over 250 products just in the last decade alone. And in that time of going back and forth to Asia, we've only had two products knocked off and they happened because of Walmart and because of Staples because they both solicited the knockoff because they went out there and said, I want to put this product out for bid, make it, but not exactly like it, which at the end of the day, then they accept something that looks exactly like it, right? And so they are the ones who put out and were that cause to create. Unfortunately for us, we couldn't do anything about it because we were contract designing for another company. If they wouldn't say anything and wouldn't do anything about it, what were we going to do? But that's the only time it doesn't happen when you walk into the factory with stuff. It happens when you sell stuff and they see you're selling stuff and they want to have a piece of that. Yeah. Yeah.

But we, talking about protections of your product, though, we also found that your brand is a very big part of who you are. So by putting our own personality in, by openly sharing pictures of both our cats, Yoda and Spark, every day playing on the Ripple Rug, we feel like we've created a brand and awareness about who we are, what we're doing, the fact that we're so adamant to make the product in America, because we believe in supporting the community in which we live. Obviously, I'm English, so if we were in England, we would be producing the product in England. And another thing for us was environmental consciousness. so we decided to use materials and the carpet is literally made out of recycled plastic bottles. So for us it was important to have principles and philosophy in place.

And help the world instead of just take from it.

That would make a brand, a brand that cares, and we wanted to show people it wasn't always about profitability, it was about making a product that really made a difference, that stopped cats from getting bored, you know, and do it in an ethical manner, which we think businesses of the future should really be adopting.

Yeah, no, I agree. So you guys went about building your brand the right way. You went around. And in a way, actually, you did help your case, though, because there were so many personal touches. It was you, not stock photos. And, you know, you didn't have stock actors doing this. You actually helped yourself find you in a little better way and a little easier for you to tell that you were being actually knocked off and it was being stolen on top of it, all the imagery and all the brand identity. So you did help yourself in that way. So What has this done for your business? So where is your business today and how is the product going?

Well, I will say today is Prime Day on Amazon.

Yeah, so is it going well, I hope?

Well, we're number one best seller and we're not Prime. Amazon probably doesn't like it because we're a number one best seller on Prime Day and we're a non-Prime item.

I love that. That's awesome. Actually, I have a really good friend who just went on a speaking junket in New York. I saw him while I was out there. and he was talking about Prime Day and he thinks that Prime Day is at its close, like it's volatility in the marketplace of what it's done to it. This is just a glorified test for what products will do well at the holidays. That's all it is. It's not in the best benefit and the consumers and consumers are realizing it. And so they're not shopping anymore. I mean, I'm a huge Amazon shopper. I've been shopping with them since 1998 and I used to buy more and more and more every year, right? And so now I pretty much shop there. I would say about 90% of my shopping is done online on Amazon.

The problem is it's probably a counterfeit.

Anyway if you buy it.

Right.

But I know enough to spot that. Most people don't. I know enough to spot that. I know what that looks like. And it's just a convenience factor for me because I need to shop, right? I don't have time in my day. But I also would never respond to a single ad. Sponsored ads don't work with me because those are all pretty much as far as I'm concerned, the 90% of them are fake. Those are someone just out there putting money in it and pushing out and it's not the most legitimate product or legitimate brand. And so what I'll do is I get something offline, find something and look for it on Amazon. And that happens very frequently, which is why you should always have an Amazon store and a compliment to it, even if it's not the core of your business.

And I think you're absolutely right. You have to be on Amazon because if you're not, a high majority of people won't find you. But you're right, you need to have.

Something backing it up.

So we do sell on lots of different other outlets, but our website, we feel is a really good informational resource. We think it's fun. We ship We think it shows our brand, it shows real cats having fun. We have a wonderful Instagram. You do.

Your Instagram is very cute, by the way. I was checking.

We spend several hours weekly looking at them and laughing and going, oh, look at this one.

It actually is, let's say, a reward in the sense we get beat down on a very regular basis, whether it's Amazon customers being abusive or copycats trying to make knockoffs. That really can put a damper on your day, but then you see someone that has a cat with hypoplasia that is living a normal life or is a disabled cat that is blind or deaf and using a ripple rug and playing like a normal cat. Then we say to ourselves, you know what? We are doing good. It makes a difference.

And then you'll get someone who recently posted some adopted foxes and they are loving the ripple rug. Foxes. You scroll through the feed, you'll probably.

See a video of the foxes. So I was looking at it. I don't have a cat anymore. I used to have, we used to have a lot of cats over the years, but I have a new puppy now. And she is, they told us that we needed to give her like a puzzle toy to like give her food so that she doesn't like eat food really fast. Like that's the way most dogs get fat, I guess. And she's a cocker spaniel. I hope, I mean, I don't think she's gonna get fat anytime soon, but It could happen. So they said, buy this puzzle toy. So I go out there and I buy a puzzle toy. I'm telling you that she figured it out in like a day. She was like eight weeks old and she figured the thing out. She had like the thing. So it's not even a challenge anymore. And I question myself every time I do it, but I think your Ripple Rug might hide treats and food really well and it might actually work for her. So I'm thinking about testing it seriously.

We did have an actual vet say that they love the product. They have it in their office. and they hide treats and toys and then they reconfigure the rug regular basis and it keeps the cats entertained because it's continually changing. And what we observed was cat behavior. They like to scratch, they like to bring their toys into an environment, they feel safe, they like to stick their paws into holes. So the carpet really fulfills a lot of their behaviors and we think that's why it's become very successful because it keeps them entertained and they don't get bored.

The reconfiguration factor that literally every day all day you can just change the shape and you don't even have to, the cat, or whichever pet is using it can press their body against the ripple or pounce on it and squash it and then go underneath it and scurry like under a bush and pop.

Out of a hole. So if you're listening to this and you can't see this, we will have links to some of the videos that they have because they're awesome and they're fun to watch the cat. I think it's just entertaining. Like I was doing my research and my girls were hanging around watching and they're like, they're just laughing over the how funny the cat is because the cat's like going in and getting all excited about it. You have some adorable videos, by the way. So we'll definitely link to them so people can find them.

I know we've talked a little bit more about the rug than maybe we would have liked to, but we're passionate about what we do and so are all inventors. And I think a mistake that inventors do is they get carried away about the passion of the product and they don't test it properly and they don't protect it properly. And we also feel that with Randy Cooper, we want to help educate people learn about how to test the product viability, how to protect it. So everything that we've learned through our experiences, we are eventually going to put through seminars, podcasts and everything like this into Randy Cooper. Obviously, we're just wrapping up our lawsuit, so it has taken a considerable amount of our time and effort from that. But that's definitely going to be a goal of ours moving forward.

As the lawsuit ended, so you're in closing on that. Have you won? Like, what's the result?

We're in appeals court currently.

You're an appeal, so okay.

Because they did what's called motion practice, essentially their liar lied, denied and delayed everything they could to cause us to spend over $200,000 in legal fees in a very short period, which she was not very happy. And we had to dismiss the case. So the case was dismissed in our favor without prejudice so that we can pursue it in the future as we build our funds and having this be our best year ever. We're Hopeful that's coming soon, but we dismissed it and it was in our favor. But then just to make it even worse, they appealed the judge's decision to dismiss without prejudice, thus causing us to have to pay another appeals lawyer 20 grand to sit on retainer to deal with our appeal.

So if the bad guys are listening.

We'Re not giving up. That's right.

We're still coming after you. Oh my gosh, yeah, that is insane.

That's all they do is lie, lie, lie. And they find ways and reasons of delaying or or just taking the subject off topic.

For argument's sake, what were this conversation we're having with you right now, this dialogue?

It's probably going to be part of their evidence.

Their lawyer is such a lying person that he will contrive this conversation into us saying or doing something different. I mean, he mischaracterized.

As if here you're disparaging them, right? And so, yeah, this is not unusual, though. I just want to put that out there is that countersuits and stalls and delays are very, very common practice in all lawsuits. Happens to us multiple times through everything that we have done. And they're all legal tactics because they usually don't have, you know, a case to stand on. If they felt that they were in the right, they would rush to court and they don't. So that's, they really aren't in the right. That's what I find most often is the case. So, well, That sucks, guys.

That's still going on. And what really made this thing go haywire and why we feel it went the wrong direction is that these guys actually, this company Opt for Communications, the bad guys, they actually have insurance for wrongful acts, specifically outlining all the things they did to us so that they're covered. So when we come after you and catch you for doing this to us, they're allowed to say, hey, insurance company, Pay the legal bills. So then you get a high-priced lawyer who runs the bill through the roof because he gets paid by insurance to $3 million policy. So they're just like, hey, the lawyer.

Bill was only 300 grand for us. So that's a win.

We still got more to go. Oh, my gosh. Amazing. And they took out their insurance policy the day after we sued the first party who were infringing against us, who.

Were their business partner. Strange coincidence.

So we believe it's insurance fraud, and we're trying to press that. Yeah, I'm saying that sounds like insurance fraud to me.

Wow.

Yeah, so does everyone else. Yeah, I mean, most insurance companies would be, you know, they err on the side of like, hey, we're not going to cover that if there's anything, you.

Know, anything going on. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to get the insurance company to bow out so we can take.

Them mano a mano and really go after them. Oh, my goodness. Well, you know, the best defense is of course a great offense. What have you learned that you would do different?

Well, we have learned from the get-go that copywriting is your best- the strongest.

Defense- the strongest defense.

Yeah.

Copywriting, your- Better than a patent, better than trademark. Copywriting is your best friend if you want to go out there.

And we say better than a patent because a patent is a great tool if you have a lot of money to defend it.

Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, so copywriting everything though is what you're saying. Your brand, your names, your copy, your photos, everything.

Every word on Amazon is copyright. The entire listing. But not initially. Not initially, but now it is. So we can do DMCA takedowns really quickly and get infringes removed from Amazon within a day. And they have to listen because we have an actual registered copyright for the Amazon listing.

I love that. So that does involve a bit of work and time and energy because you update your listing and now you've got to re-register. So you've got to keep that accurate. But that's a really good lesson. How else would you test and launch yourself? Would you do it different?

We actually did a Kickstarter as well, which didn't make millions and millions, but we reached our basic goal, which enabled us to buy the tooling to make the Ripple Rug. And it was actually a scary but valuable experience because it made you realize you had an accountability to your customers. It made you realize that you had to have your brand language determined, our product, was so unlike anything out there for cats that we had to determine exactly what its benefits were. How could we appeal to an audience? The product itself isn't maybe the sexiest piece of furniture in your house by any means, but we had to learn how to present it in a way that people would understand the benefit of it and not be horrified by a piece of carpet.

Yeah, it was never built to be beautiful. It was built to be functional and great for a pet. And to them, It's Nirvana to a human. You're like, it's a piece of carbon with holes in it. What do you mean? And it's so much more than that.

So for us, it was, although we have a huge experience in marketing and advertising and creating language, it was a very good exercise for us because we had a deadline to meet. We had responsibility and we learned a lot about manufacturing because we approached several different companies and being small and not being able to do big batches, you get turned away by many, many companies because they don't want to take on the risk or invent or a new process to produce your product. That was a huge learning curve. The other thing I would say is we started off with Amazon Prime because we didn't want to have to deal with fulfillment. And when you do that, you give away a huge amount of control.

Yeah, and while it's excellent to get the awareness via Prime and being FBA, truthfully, FBA is the root of evil. FBA being fulfilled by Amazon.

Our listeners are usually pretty good on that. So you're good. But yeah.

Everyone.

Yeah.

Everyone we can steer clear of FBA. FBA is what will destroy your company.

That's really interesting because I advise differently. So I advise both. It just depends on your product and depends on the method for how you're going to it. But in the early days when you have a lot of expenses in your business and everything, it's like going out there and figuring out the fulfillment process and doing all of those things may actually tank your focus from the essential marketing and advertising which to me is your number one spend. If you're spending more on your product, you're actually spending too much. So I have a sort of rules of my percentages that I like to allocate and I like over 50% of the budget to be allocated for marketing and advertising. And then the other 50% is split between, and I'm not talking about your part cost, I'm talking about your overall launch budget cost, right? And so your launch budget in general. So I like to have the other 50% between tooling and inventory and fulfillment and the things that you do need to spend money on, like might be customer service and not the fulfillment side of things. So in that case, unless someone has tremendous capability and experience in there or connection to warehouses and other things that they could be utilizing, I actually do recommend doing an SBA model initially, but then backing off of that as you get your ground under you in your brand and your business.

And I think that's a very fair comment because there was so much for us take on board when we started that fulfillment for us was like a dream. We're like, Hey, we don't have to do anything.

Yeah. I mean, it's a huge cost structure. I mean, they're taking a lot of money out of that and the benefit to you isn't strong and there's exposure to you, the risk is high. But at the same time, if it's distracting you from doing the number one thing, which is driving the brand awareness and leads that you need into sales, then you're not going to make it anyway. And so that's why I advise that way.

It's simply because I've seen it go wrong too often. Yeah, and we did Prime for FBA for, let's see, December 15th to end of May. So we did basically- Gave it six.

Months in there, basically. Yeah, that's a good amount of time.

And in that six months, we had over 400 units disappear in Amazon's warehouses. We had arbitrage or steal our listings by the handful on a daily basis. We had returns compared to now. I'd say the returns back then were probably around 20% compared to now they're 0.86. which is where you should be.

By the way, everyone, you should be under two percent. You'll never make it in a big box. You'll never make it at mass and any retailer with your above two percent. So good for you guys to get that handle on that. Yes, you take a lot of risks and there are a lot of problems, but you maybe wouldn't have been able.

To handle that on day one. Exactly. That's the thing. And we did even run the whole gamut of multi-channel fulfillment with Amazon for our website and everything. When we pulled the reins back in, we actually emptied out our garage, filled it with warehouse shelves, conveyor belts and It became Shipping Central and we were shipping thousands and thousands of packages. The two of us would pack them up on a Sunday.

Our spare time would be packing boxes.

Well, that reminds me of that. Remember I was telling you guys the story before of our T-Tuls pens and our lawsuit and infringement with IDEO, which for listeners, there's a whole episode on it. So you can find that and we'll link to that from this episode as well. But in that story is like at one point, and so we started doing that in 1998 and to 2001, And at one point, my now 24-year-old daughter, she was probably about six, five or six or so when we first started in there. And one of her friends says, what does your mom do? And she says, My mom works for FedEx. And we were just dying laughing because every night we would make a FedEx run. We'd actually go down and take the packages to the post office and to FedEx and we would drop the packages off. So she's in her PJs, we would go and make the run and then we come back home and put her to bed. So it was like the last thing we did every day. So yeah, she thought I worked for FedEx, so I can relate to that.

Yeah.

Well, you know, you go through all of these things and you learn about what it takes to do it and it gives you appreciation of the struggles and a lot of work that other inventors put in into getting their product out there and how, you know, everyone says, oh, I have this great idea and look, someone else is using it. But you know what? It's not about the idea. An idea is not a sellable product. and that's a point that a lot of inventors don't get.

Yeah, tangibility, you gotta hold it. Yeah, so with your work with what you're doing with the Randy Cooper Foundation, so you're gonna be providing education and resources and things like that. And I love that because what I think right now is happening is that so many of these inventors organizations themselves are part of the problem. That they have a lot of bad actors in their organizations. And Paula Bryson Phillips who wrote the book, A Stolen On TV, has some stuff that I didn't even know about, like how bad their statistics were of success rates. I knew it was bad, but because I've tried to write about a success story and I still can't find one. Like, you know, I've tried, I've put out bids, I put out, I don't know, I don't know how many help a reporter out Harrows that I put out, but I can never get anyone who will go on record with any success story. And so I was thinking there was, but she found some statistics that are just astounding. So if these inventors organizations are getting the attention and the hearts of inventors, but yet treating them so badly, how do we circumvent them? How do we stop that? And I really hope your foundation is able to do that in a really good way. Because I do, I see it every single day. When I have a phone call, there's a dozen things that they fallen victim to that I wish I could have just said, wow, if you had had one conversation with me, I would have stopped you from that. But I can't have conversation with everyone and you guys can't either. So how can we get it moving to make sure that that happens?

And that was part of the impetus of the Randy Cooper Foundation was when we were doing the investigation into these bad guys, Natasha came across the Noodle Head Sprinkler. I picked up the phone and called the company and talked to the woman who owns the company, which is Randy's wife, and explained to her that we believe we found your counterfeiters and she was very upset. 'cause her husband had died three years prior trying to find them, never having been successful finding who was really the bad guys. And we called her up to tell her we found these people not knowing what had happened. And it was shell shocking to her like, wow, this is what we've been waiting for for years. And here you are giving it to us. And then we with numerous companies where Natasha would do some research, give me some information, I would call people and we put the things together. And we found literally hundreds of different companies that have been targeted by the same methodology over and over and over. And these bad guys, this is all they do for a living. And we figured awareness really is the thing that people have to have because every Inventor Help company, whether it's InventHelp or any other name similar, they get you excited like, Someone's gonna help me, I'm gonna get my product out there and it's not gonna cost a lot. Well, the truth of it is they're like, well, that's a kind of a good idea while they're on this side saying it's great. In the other room, they're passing it to someone else saying, Go send this out and do a quick test. A perfect for instance is when we were on the Today Show, this other product was on the Today Show with us called the Pedicure Sand and they contacted us a month after we became friends at the show and they contacted us and said, oh my God, someone knocked us off. We don't know what to do. And because of this was well before we even knew anything was going on with our product, we jumped in and as investigators we were able to uncover who stole their product and it was The exact same group of people that did everything to us. We didn't know that.

We didn't know it was us.

Because they were just scrolling the show, right?

Yes, exactly. So they did it to them, they did it to us. We helped them get their bad guys down, unbeknownst to us, it was simultaneously happening to us.

We felt terrible for them. We said, oh my goodness, if this.

Was happening to us, how awful and little did we know. Then it does, it was simultaneously.

We didn't know it yet.

Oh my gosh. One of their friends received the email blast that they sent out to everybody with their product pictures. so it's the same everything.

Yeah, oh my goodness.

That'S why Randy Cooper is all about awareness, teaching people, educating them, giving them the empowerment to make proper decisions and not fall for the long con, not fall for the I can make you really rich scheme.

As an inventor, in particular, if you go on Kickstarter, you'll have a slew of people contacting you saying, hey, we'll make a video for you. We've hired James C. Jones. He's going to present your product. And obviously you get very excited because.

You'Re like James C. Jones.

Of course he can present my product.

Yeah, or Kevin Harrington, that's another one that gets involved in all the scamming going on.

All they do is the company hires them, gets them to say a few generic lines, they edit it together, get some footage of your product, and then they promise to air it on TV so they buy cheap, cheap spots in the middle of the night on an obscure TV channel, and then you get.

No traction from it, and you're wondering why have I spent 20,000 on something like that?

And it's like 17 to $20,000. we were getting solicitations with friends.

And I kept solicitation. I put a little folder of all these solicitations, and that's how we realized one of them was the bad guys coming under another name.

Yeah.

Oh, my gosh. You know, that's so crazy. It's a never-ending battle, though, for me, to get the inventors to listen, because they really, I mean, they're wearing their hearts and their inventions on their sleeve, and they get taken so quickly. It's something that I thought Paula wrote brilliantly in the book is like how badly all of us want to help them and then but it is their passion and their excitement for this that is getting fed by the machines that are out there.

Sometimes they don't realize that their product isn't ready. It's just a concept.

That's the part that I my job. My job is to tell people that their baby's not ready yet. Like it's not it's not ready to hatch. It's still a little ugly. It needs help. Like that's my job. And it's really and you know and I know when I tell them that they don't listen.

They have no brand. The brand is so key. I mean, like, when people start developing similar products, it's your brand that's going to make you stand out.

So, yeah.

So do you guys have a mass market future? Are we gonna get Snuggly Cat on the Shelf?

Well, we actually are in a lot of places right now, but we're trying to slowly and organically grow it because everybody keeps asking to buy it and stock it and put it in places. But the biggest issue is customers these days have been trained to buy something, use something for a period of time and bring it back and just get their money back and do it over and over and over. And we believe that once a cat touches a product, it leaves scents through its paw pads, it leaves a scent on a product. And as soon as you get it home and your cat goes on, you're like, well, my cat's really not that interested. Well, that's great, but it's now tainted. I can't give it to someone else or sell it.

And it could be unsanitary, like, you know.

Yeah.

So, I mean, yeah, I agree with you on that one. Yeah, I think that that's probably not The way to go. I mean, there's a lot of products out there in the marketplace. You can't return like that because of that sanitary reason.

So, yeah, if you imagine big box stores wanting our product, part of the rule of the game is whatever returns that come in, they deduct it for whatever they owe you in the outstanding invoice and, and they keep track. So if you have something that they love. And in our case, for instance, our biggest issue is that people don't realize you have to wash our product to maintain it. Just like when you wear clothing every day, you wash it. our rug is made of polyester, you have to wash it to maintain it being crisp and clean and good to use. If you just have a cat use it for months on end, it's going to get soft and floppy and oily. They'd rather return it, get their money back and order another one than wash it. And it results in this whole slew of returning. And if you have it on the shelves in Walmart, you'll have that constantly happening.

So what about line expansions? Are you guys going to expand into new other cat products?

We love Snuggly Cat, we love our cats, and we've learned a huge amount through this process. But our passion is our creative ideas. We creative thing because we like bringing tangible elements to other people's products and services. We've been doing it for years. One of our companies, Ruckus New York, actually helps brands basically sell, help small and big companies sell their brands and their products.

Let's stay on topic. She asked if we have other products.

No, no, no, no.

Yes is the answer to that.

No, but keep going, keep going Natasha, I want to hear this.

I mean our ultimate goal, while we love the Snuggle Cat element, is that we want to expand and help other companies and a lot of what we want to do as well as put our experience into Randy Cooper. So I think one of our focuses.

Is going to be in that area. That's great, good for you guys.

We've had products now for literally two years waiting to go. Excellent fun toys, tested them with people. Our cat, one cat is just hysterical. We made this new type of wand toy and it's been now we've had the same one in use for over a year and she loves it so much we'll be sleeping with her. And we're like, what is that? And she'll have dragged this long six foot long wand toy all the way up the stairs, around the side and into our bedroom and drop it on the floor to be like, play with.

Me, play with me. I got it, I got it.

And it's incredible. So we sent five different prototype products down to our people that we work with and said, hey, we need to cost out what it's gonna take to make these. And of course we wanna make 'em in the US. And so we are trying to get that. But amidst all that going on and the excitement of, oh my God, we got this and this and this and this and all these accessories, we had to deal with these bad guys. So they completely took us out of the innovation. They basically shut the innovation machine down. because all of our money that was going to go into new tools to make new products and all these new things all had to go to paying lawyer after lawyer after lawyer. And we had eight lawyers last year.

Yeah, the damage and the distraction to your business, that's why it's so high. This is what Tom and I have gone and I've given a lectures to, I don't know how many inventors organizations or local meetups and things like that. And the number one thing I say is that even when you win, you lose. And that when you go into it, you'll lose in the amount of business you lost during that time period. the distraction to your business during that time period. In the case of when we won our Stylist Pen, we settled and we actually won and we got our royalties and everything like that. We got like two checks and then they shut the product down. So they made it so we wouldn't get any future royalties. And they blocked us from the industry, blocked us from a major cataloger. So these things you still lose at the end of the day. And so that's where it's so hard of do I fight it or do I let it go? And I love that you are organizing because that's actually the best way to fight it.

You are really damned if you do and damned if you don't. Had we not pursued this, they would have put us out of business with their practices. So while it was stressful and arduous tasks, constantly sleepless nights, really upset days, if we didn't really take them to the mats, they would have put us out of business without question. I mean, it would have been inevitable. that we would have gone under because what they were doing was using all of our own marketing, which was excellent against us at a price point 75% off. So there's no way to compete against that. It's great marketing.

We're kind of going a little long here, but what I really wanted to say also to that though is that this is a trend that we're seeing again and again. We're seeing decline in Facebook ads, decline in advertisements and push marketing in all kinds of arenas. And I believe it is because, well, My personal direction on this is that women buy or control 85% or more of the market, buyer influence, 85% or more of the market. And when you get non-delivery, we get very suspicious quickly. So when there's a lot of non-delivery, when there's a lot of quality problems, when there's a lot of those things and it happens with different companies, it's the Facebook model that's broken. And we get the pattern really quickly. This is untrustworthy. So what I've actually did, I just did a sort of informal survey. of a bunch of people and I asked them, have you bought on Facebook, anything off of Facebook, anything from a direct sell ad in the last 90 days? And I did this three months ago and I just did it just recently. And the decline in the number of women is very, very high and the increase in the number of men is very high. But also the other telling part is most of them got it really delayed, if at all.

Yeah, well, a perfect right on point with what you're saying. Natasha took lead on this because it really drove her nuts. We had, I want to say two months ago, a constant barrage of counterfeits using all of our own videos, pictures, customer videos, and they made a whole mashup website and posted on Facebook to buy our product. Now, we do Facebook advertising, so we know well how much it costs for views and all of that.

They have thousands, thousands of views.

A hundred plus On this video that was our cat. There was Yoda playing. It was our cat, our videos that they were saying, buy this cat activity play mat, flooding Facebook, flooding Instagram. She was constantly sending messages to Facebook, take this down, this is fraudulent. Facebook would take it down, it would come back under another name the next day. And it was for a couple of weeks, it was like whacK-A-Mole. One would pop up and they were just everywhere and we're like, what's going on? Instagram, people were sending me pictures all around the world. This came in my Instagram feed. this is your cat. People were like, I recognize Yoda. This is a fake. And I'm like, thank you. And I was telling people, we had people all over the world sending us counterfeit people sending Facebook ads. And you ask yourself, how is Facebook not liable when they are perpetuating sales of counterfeit goods using our real product as bait?

You know, there's new regulations going in. Amazon has just been identified as Retailer in a different way than they used to be. And so, you know, I think it's only a matter of time before that happens with Facebook as well. And that we'll shut it down quickly because they will be so liable, they won't be able to control that. And so they will shut down their shopping is just essentially what they'll do.

Well, and it really comes down to the bottom line is safety. People are buying products that are unsafe, untested, using real products as the bait. to get you to buy it and you receive it. And the beauty of it in the Facebook ad world of what's going on, these guys would have you buy this product, which is garbage. And if you got it and you're like, oh, this is crap. I want to send it back. Well, they're in China. So for you to send back that $15, right? Of is 60 bucks. They're like, screw it. I'll just eat the 15 bucks and not spend the money to send it back. And they win. And if you multiply that times 50,000 people, They've now diluted the market for us and they've got all these people buying products that are crap. And furthermore, someone else says, oh, did you see this great product, the Ripple Rug? And they show them a picture like, I ordered it, it was garbage and you don't want to get it. It's a cheap thing. It's nothing like what it looks like.

And it's not our product. And it's not our product. And it's not your product. Right. So, you know, this is funny because I have, we have a good friend on the platform who Joe Tarnowski of ECRM or, you know, a range me is also the other name of the company that they work through and work with. And the funny part is, is that he was doing this event where he was gonna get to announce the keynote who was this famous guy in the food industry. And he had a whole line of t-shirts and he, you know, he was like a big name and had these great cool looking t-shirts. So Joe goes out and he buys the t-shirt and he gets it and he's wearing the t-shirt and he's like getting his photograph taken next to this guy who he idolizes. and the guy says, you know that's a fake, right? And Joe was just devastated. Exactly. And he thought he bought it from a legitimate retailer and he didn't.

And so imagine in that same vein, this is what a Ripple Rug really looks like when you get it. Yep. It's huge, well packaged, it's extremely demonstrative and colorful. Yep.

This is a Ripple Rug by the Counterfeiters. Oh my gosh, that's terrible. Well, and that's what I keep saying to people. It's like you get stuff with no instruction sheets, no brand information, nothing, then You should be suspicious.

Well, the other version upstairs actually has a picture of our cat in it, and it comes with our cat. With our Amazon description on the counterfeit with our cat.

Oh, my gosh. That's even, that's so awful. So, yeah. So, I mean, oh, I hope you all listening have just gotten a lot out of Natasha and Fred and all of the just great information that they provided you to be thinking about. And we don't say this all to scare you. We say this to make you aware, right? I mean, Yeah, empower you to do things different, to ask twice, to get references on the people you're going to work with. So really, you know, this is the thing. It's like, had you investigated maybe somebody else who had been on the next big thing, you might have found out they had already been knocked off. But most people don't even know they were knocked off.

They don't even know yet.

But maybe someone would have, like, I hear this from kickstarters all the time. Like, I hear more horror stories about Kickstarter or Shark Tank, which is why I write about them frequently, right? I hear more horror stories than I hear successes, you know? And so making sure you ask questions, ask around, don't get all into the hype about this stuff. Ask some more deep questions, dive in deeper, do some investigation, because that's something you guys have done amazingly well on. And it might help you find better partners, better resources, like the Randy Cooper Foundation, and it might make you a better shopper too, right? You're gonna be a little better at what we buy nowadays.

Yeah, I think getting people aware about the high level of counterfeit products, I mean we're a cat product and sure that's one thing but I'm sure you may have seen in the news about counterfeit textbooks. It was in the news about a medical book having an issue. They're saying the printing of the counterfeit book was so bad they couldn't see if it said the dose was one or seven and they were afraid people were gonna overdose by taking so much. or not take the right amount of medication because counterfeit books are proliferating. Children's supplies with it. Yeah, the pencils and pens on Amazon. Oh my gosh, yeah. I mean, imagine your kids in school chewing on a pen and getting lead poisoning and you're saying, I got these great deals on all my school supplies on Amazon on Prime Day and guess what? They're full of lead and all kinds of toxic things that your child is carrying around. Even they said backpacks had high levels.

I have been in some fat backpack factories and rejected them. And because I have a big experience in textiles and had to reject them because of the processing and the materials, the Coatings that they're putting on. And it's the coating that is mostly the problem on those. And it's very toxic. Some of the things that are going on in there. People don't know.

People see a deal and they say, yes, yes, yes. And they don't think with their head, they think with their wallet. And they think, if I save money here, I can go shopping over there and buy something else instead of why is it so cheap? Maybe something's not right. And as much as people don't like paying the real price of something that's American made, the difference is things that are made in America are safety tested. They have to pass tests. Otherwise, you're really in trouble. But things that come from the China Post, they bypass customs, they bypass all regulations, and they just...

I want to clarify that and just to nitpick the way you said that. So, It's not things made in China that is necessarily bad. It's the brand oversight of that that is the bad part when you're not taking control of your brand. Because I've made hundreds of products in China that have turned out to be extremely good, better quality than you could have gotten anywhere else, but also at a price point that we could sell enough of it, you know, make it to Costco shelf. So, you know, so you have to be careful about that. But it's if you don't have a brand integrity on top of that, like you guys do, that dictates where you're going to make it. how you're gonna control who's making it. And it can go bad in the US. I have actually honestly seen just as many bad products come out of the US as I have out of China. Yeah, because of how people manage that and your brand integrity is what really matters at the end of the day. And your integrity as inventors and as brand of personalities, you're doing all of those things together. So we really value that. And I can't thank you enough for coming on the show. and thank you enough for sharing your stories with everyone and being so honest and open about all of it that, you know, we wish you well. We want you to succeed. So, guys, be really careful out there. Buy the right Ripple rug. Go buy it. Go check out Suggly Cat. We'll have all the links to them. You'll be able to see the real stuff. So, you know, if you're going through a link on my site, you're going directly to Natasha and Fred, the real thing. So, and we'll be sure to push it out on social media the same way to make sure that the real.

Stuff is getting out there. Thank you for asking great questions. You obviously have your finger on the pulse of what's pertinent for inventors, so we appreciate that.

It's important that people get the information they need, not the information people want to pump them with. And I think you're doing a great thing.

Well, thanks everyone for listening. This has been Tracy Hazard on Product Launch Hazards, and we'll be back again next time with maybe another cautionary tale, maybe another success story. Who knows what tip will come next time? Maybe we'll be diving deep into some.

Of more of the hazards of product launching.

Thanks again.

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