Marketer Sticks With Faddish Products

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Trend setter Noah Bremen is on a tireless quest to deliver the next fad to the masses.

His Brentwood sales and marketing company, Bdirect Inc., has already put thousands of products on mass retailer shelves over the past 18 years, including Razor scooters, Snuggie blankets and Beats by Dre headphones. He expects sales this year for his 70 current clients to reach nearly $2 billion.

But he is already looking for the next winner in a sea of products and that requires his personal testing.

“I’m a guinea pig. I try every single thing,” Bremen, 42, said in his Wilshire Boulevard office, where he supervises the 60-employee company’s mission to help little brands launch themselves into the big time.

For those who can land on shelves of giants such as Wal-Mart, the exposure can be transformative, said Neil Saunders, managing director at N.Y. retail research firm Conlumino.

“These companies are the holy grail,” he said, referring to Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Costco Wholesale Corp. and Target Corp., which are all in the Bdirect pipeline, along with Walgreen Co., 7-Eleven Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. “The volumes you can sell are colossal.”

Those sales translate into revenue for Bdirect, which typically takes 3 percent to 5 percent of client sales.

“It doesn’t do us any good if something just sits on a shelf,” noted Bremen.

Family business

He learned the sales trade from his late father, Barry, a Michigan novelties salesman better known as “The Great Impostor” for famously pranking his way onto fields at high-profile sporting events by impersonating players. He was just as passionate about his work, and taught the younger Bremen to spot trends.

Noah Bremen studied marketing and advertising at Michigan State University, not far from his hometown in a Detroit suburb, but moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting. His Hollywood dreams quickly fizzled but lessons about facial expressions and body language turned out to be useful for pitching products.

The first item he sold was the ThighMaster, a workout tool popularized by actress Suzanne Somers. He soon founded Bdirect, just in time to discover Razor USA’s scooter, a best seller for Sharper Image.

That was nearly 20 years ago, and Bremen relied on personal persistence to get the item into stores by calling buyers every day and raving about the product. Now celebrity social media is a big part of Bremen’s cool-factor calculus. The hoverboard, for example, took off when Justin Bieber spontaneously posted a video with one on Instagram.

“The next thing you know, every kid in America wants this,” said Bremen, who first glimpsed the motorized boards at the New York Toy Fair last year and now represents hoverboard manufacturer Roam.

Bremen jets around the world to 50 trade shows a year when not at Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., where he spends about three days a week, or home in Santa Monica. Hunting for ideas in Los Angeles is part of the business, too.

“L.A. is probably the No. 1 city in the world when it comes to entrepreneurial gut feel,” Bremen said. “The second it works here, it’s amazing how it spreads.”

Fads, by definition, don’t last forever, though. Sales for the Snuggie, a fleece blanket with sleeves, dropped off after a couple of Christmases.

“It was the hottest thing for two years, and it died. Now it’s a seasonal, funky gift item,” said Bremen.

Once in a while, products bomb from the start.

When Five Hour Energy launched an energy-boosting supplement meant to dissolve on the tongue like Listerine breath strips, it boasted an endorsement from pro basketball star LeBron James. But shoppers didn’t bite.

“It just flopped,” Bremen said. “A Listerine strip to give me energy? It just didn’t translate.”

To avoid such fiascos, Bremen spends between six months and a year preparing new products for the limelight. In that time, he helps brands build loyal consumer bases and tests products at regional retailers and modest national chains to make sure they will sell. Then he makes a final push with buyers, leveraging long-established relationships with people who know they can count on Bremen’s taste.

Slow growth

When Bremen started representing Vita Coco coconut water in 2010, he said national retailers initially regarded it as “weird-tasting water.” But he won it mass appeal after emphasizing the beverage’s health benefits. Now the company has more than 60 percent market share in the United States and sells in 29 other countries.

“Bdirect saw the potential for coconut water as a nationally viable lifestyle beverage early on,” said Vita Coco Chief Executive Michael Kirban. “Bdirect opened doors with Wal-Mart and today that retailer is one of Vita Coco’s strongest partners.”

Over the past three years, Bdirect has doubled in size and Bremen said he hopes to continue growing at that rate, especially as he branches into international distribution.

Meanwhile, online shopping is shaking up traditional retail giants.

Wal-Mart, whose market value was overtaken by Amazon in July, recently announced it will close 154 stores nationwide. The chain will open nearly that many locations next year, but put a stronger focus on e-commerce.

That means the new fads will need to sell as strongly on the Internet as in stores, drumming up social media buzz and five-star reviews.

“Thank god 140 million Americans still go to Wal-Mart,” said Bremen. “But things are constantly changing.”

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