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Sunday, January 29, 2017

BUCKS COUNTY

buckScountycourIertImeS.com @courIertImeS facebook.com/buckScourIertImeS

demonstrators gather locally, in d.c. as part of march for Life, a4, a14

the oscar contestLife, d1

by Peg QuannsTAff wriTEr

If there’s one thing that peeves Dr. David Damsker, the director of the Bucks County Department of Health, it’s parents who won’t vaccinate their kids.

“I get so annoyed,” Dam-sker said, when children get a preventable disease because their parents didn’t vaccinate them. Not only does it hurt their child, he said, but also threat-ens the health of other children in their school or daycare cen-ter who couldn’t get vaccinated

because their immune systems are suppressed.

While it is a rare condition, some children are born with severe combined immunode-ficiency, while others acquire a deficiency as their immune system are depressed by ste-roids used to prevent rejec-tion of an organ transplant or because they’re having an asthma flareup. Or they could be getting chemo-therapy or radiation treat-ments, which also suppress

the immune system, said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Edu-cation Center at The Children’s

Hospital of Philadelphia.“When you get a vaccine, you’re

protecting the other child as well,” Damsker said.

The Centers for Disease Con-trol and Prevention recommends children be vaccinated against 14 illnesses as young children and receive vaccines against the human

papillomavirus and meningitis B as adolescents or young adults, said CDC spokesman Ian Branam.

The Pennsylvania Depart-ment of Health said children must be vaccinated to attend public school except for three reasons: their health; their fam-ily’s religious convictions; or

“philosophical/strong moral or ethical conviction.”

During the 2015-16 school year in Bucks County, 2.7 percent of children weren’t vaccinated for those reasons, compared to 1.63 percent in the 2009-10 school year, according to statistics from the Pennsylvania Department of Health. In Montgomery County, the rate was 2.4 percent of children not vaccinated, compared to 1.33 percent in the 2009-10 school year.

Both Damsker and Offit said California allows parents to forego vaccinations for their children only for health reasons. Religious

by crISSa Shoemaker debreesTAff wriTEr

Rebecca Rescate has become an expert in marketing products that no one needs, but everyone wants.

A toilet training kit for cats. A pillow with a hood. A blanket with a “tail” that turns its wearer into a mermaid.

Rescate has thrived as a promoter and marketer of unusual products, thanks to a keen sense of what people want — and buoyed by suc-cess on two appearances on “Shark Tank,” the reality TV show in which inventors pitch their products to investors.

“It did not occur to me until recently that I’ve created a career in launching products,” said Rescate, who lives in Lower Makefield. “I can just create another product line and fill another need within the market-place and continue going. Yeah, this is what I’m doing for a living.”

Rescate has succeeded where countless others have failed.

An inventor’s path to success has always been a rocky one. It takes a combination of marketing savvy, financial prowess and technical skill to successfully bring a product to the masses. While social media and crowdfunding campaigns have made it easier to reach an audience, that same audience is being bombarded by more information than ever before, experts said.

“Taking a product to market is not an easy task,” said Nicole Lininger, director of communica-tions for InventHelp, a Pittsburgh company that helps inventors nationwide patent their products. “The success rate from taking an invention from an idea stage to get-ting distribution is a long process. It doesn’t happen for everyone.”

Despite that, the number of pat-ents for U.S. inventors has risen steadily over the years.

Technology gives entrepreneurs new avenues to succed, but the path is still a hard one.

PhotoS by chLoe eLmer / PhOTOjOurnALisT

Entrepreneur rebecca rescate, of Lower Makefield, poses in her Bristol Township warehouse with the

products she markets. At right, Top Dog Direct products, including a new reflexology foot massage mat, the

futzuki, are shown at the company office in Bensalem.

Promoting success

See Marketing, Page a8

Watch nowLower Makefield resident and “shark Tank” alum rebecca rescate knows what it takes to be a success in the marketplace. so does Bill McAlister of Bensalem-based informercial producer Top Dog Direct. They share some of their secrets.

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Experts: Fewer students being vaccinatedmore InformationMultiple sources provide information on vaccination timetables for both children and adults on their websites, including The Children’s hospital of Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Department of health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which people can call at 800-232-4636 for more information.

Watch now: Bill Clement joins the flyers

Talk crew to discuss the team’s chances of

making the postseason

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Partly sunny. Clouds tonight. B3

by chrIS engLIShsTAff wriTEr

As a teacher at a Catho-lic grade school and a mother with a child in the same school, Michelle Wold sees the experi-ence from different perspectives.

They’re all good, she said.

“As a teacher and parent, I was looking for a school that would support their morality as well as their academics,” said Wold, a second-grade teacher at St. Andrew School, a prekindergar-ten through eighth-grade Catholic school in New-town Township.

“I felt my child at St. Andrew would develop into a well-rounded per-son, emotionally, intel-lectually and spiritually,”

Wold continued. “At a public school, the spiritu-ality is left out. In today’s society and its immediacy

of information, it’s important that children remain grounded, and remember where they came from and what is important.”

As millions across the country get ready to observe National Catho-lic Schools Week,

which starts Sunday, par-ents, students, teachers and other advocates of Catholic education said its value will never be out-dated because of the rea-sons expressed by Wold.

“Parents looking to send their children to Catholic schools are

Catholic education sacred to many in Bucks County

Watch: Vaccine

hesitancy can cause

serious illnesses

See Vaccines, Page a9

Catholics prepare to

celebrate the combination

of the spiritual and the

scholastic.

See school, Page a15

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The U.S. Patent and Trade-mark Office received a record high 288,335 applications in 2015 from U.S. inventors, and awarded 140,969 patents. That was down only slightly from the 144,621 pat-ents awarded (out of 285,096 appli-cations) in 2014.

How many of those products have been, or will be, successful, however, is largely unknown.

“The success rate for inventors is very small,” said Lininger. “And we as a company, we don’t evaluate inventions. We won’t say this is a good idea or a bad idea. Because we don’t know. It comes down to the marketplace and what consum-ers are interested in buying.”

For Bill McAlister, a successful product is one that solves a prob-lem, has an audience and can be sold at a good price.

“You have a gut instinct,” said McAllister, founder and president of Top Dog Direct, a Bensalem-based company that produces the ubiquitous “as seen on TV” commercials.

McAlister, who launched his career in product sales as the first host of what was then a fledgling home shopping network called QVC, has used his “gut instinct” to lead him to such successful products as Urine Gone, a clean-ing spray that removes pet odors and stains; BeActive, a “patented pressure pad” knee brace for back pain; and Spray Perfect, a line of spray-on nail polish.

Top Dog is among a number of “direct response” companies that work with inventors to market and sell products directly to con-sumers, usually through a series of clever infomercials that almost always offer two for the price of one. That’s a necessary tactic, McAlister said, to cover the rising costs of television air time.

“If you have money, you can buy media anywhere, on any chan-nel,” McAlister said. “It’s a lot eas-ier than it was back then. Here’s the problem: There are so many channels, but media is two to four times more expensive. We’re at a breaking point where, it’s very hard to make any money on televi-sion as an infomercial marketer.”

Bringing a single product to market, too, has its hurdles.

“The industry has matured,” said John Yarrington, publisher of the Response Group, a California-based magazine and expo for the direct response industry. “You used to be able to take a product to a retailer and say, ‘Hey, I’m spend-ing some money on TV,’ and the retailer would get excited. Now, the retailer says, ‘I don’t want a single (product), I want a product line.’ “

Online, too, has changed the nature of the business, experts said.

“No question, (crowdfunding site) Kickstarter is a game-changer for people who had no money,” said McAlister. “You can put your product on Amazon. It’s easy to buy ads. It’s a lot easier for the inventor.”

More than two-thirds of Top Dog’s business is now online, too, driven by millennial consumers who forgo retail channels in favor of online shopping, McAlister said.

“The internet is the future of our business,” he said. “No doubt about it.”

The internet helped Chris Hindley launch the HoodiePil-low — an “adult security blanket” that combines a pillow case with a hooded sweatshirt — about seven years ago. A resident of Florence, New Jersey, Hindley and his wife first began selling the hooded pil-low cases online and on Amazon.

“Without the internet, and without the technology we have today, it would take far more for somebody to accomplish what we were able to accomplish,” Hindley said.

With its quirky name and fun backstory — Hindley and his wife created the product to provide peace, quiet and comfort after the birth of their triplets seven years ago — HoodiePillow was an early success, with strong buzz online and on national talk shows. The HoodiePillow exploded, however, after Hindley appeared along-side business partner Rescate on “Shark Tank.”

“The exposure from ‘Shark Tank’ is a substantial boost to any consumer business,” Hindley said. “Companies on there that are ser-vice driven, they get a great press hit. But those of us who are selling the internet during air time, it’s a substantial push for the business. It really, really pushed our busi-ness to new heights.”

While HoodiePillow received an offer on the show from shark (investor) Robert Herjavec, Hind-ley and Rescate said the deal was never signed. The appearance, however, gave them new avenues for business — including a pro-motional products segment that’s thriving.

“That was almost an accident,” Hindley said. “We had some com-panies reaching out to us while we were trying to keep up with the consumer rush. We had companies say, ‘Hey, can I put my logo on 1,000 of these?’ “

HoodiePillow also launched a series of new products, including a travel pillow, a beach blanket and a

children’s line.Yet, with success, come chal-

lenges. Both Hindley and Rescate said they fight a constant battle against copycats and counterfeit-ers, some of whom are backed by direct-response marketers that have more resources to pay for television advertising.

“We launch a new product, and we know our window of it being proprietary to us is months instead of years,” Hindley said. “Fifteen, 20 years ago, they get a few years of life before copycats start rolling in. We’ve seen products of ours copied our counterfeited to two different types of competitors. We see that sometimes, within weeks of when we launch something ... We have a huge advantage of launching these quirky businesses with the tech-nology we have, but we have chal-lenges with that technology being accessible to everybody else.”

For Rescate, the competition

has almost become a price of doing business. She’s been dealing with counterfeits since she launched her first product, the CitiKitty cat toi-let training system, in 2005. In the first five years, she sold roughly 40,000 units to cat lovers fed up with cleaning litter boxes. That jumped to 10,000 orders in the month following her 2011 “Shark Tank” appearance. A deal with shark Kevin Harrington landed CitiKitty on the shelves at Wal-greens for a short test period, but the partnership didn’t continue.

Yet CitiKitty sales pale in comparison to Rescate’s latest endeavor, Blankie Tails — a part-nership with entrepreneur and blanket creator Hattie Peze — a popular line of cozy mermaid- and shark-tail blankets that was on track to see between $8 million and $9 million in sales last year. Blankie Tails has had stiff compe-tition from copy cats, including

the All Star Marketing Group, which has added “Snuggie Tails” to its line of Snuggie blankets.

“You could say it’s a danger, but when the direct response companies put massive amounts of dollars in advertising behind a product idea, it also bolsters up this marketplace that this is a great product to buy,” Rescate said. “They’re educating the market for you and you’re not paying for it, so you maybe rest easy. I like to always spin things positively. Is it fun being knocked off? No, abso-lutely not, but that’s part of being in business.”

While Blankie Tails, CitiKitty and HoodiePillow are distinct businesses, Rescate and a small team of employees handle office tasks and shipping for the three products (as well as a fourth, Res-cate’s 365-day goal setting calen-dar, the Top Down Planner) from warehouse and office space in Bris-tol Township.

So what does it take to have a successful product? Know what people want, Rescate said, even before they know it themselves.

“One of the important parts of being an entrepreneur is always be willing to pivot, and listen to the market on what people like, and what they’re looking for,” she said. “I never thought I was going to start a company that made a pro-motional product, but HoodiePil-low is definitely that.

“ ‘Shark Tank,’ Kickstarter and IndieGogo, for consumers, it’s opened up the idea that you don’t have to buy from large com-panies,” Rescate added. “A small mom-and-pop company or a single entrepreneur, they’ve got great ideas, too, and they can figure out the manufacturing. Your money is safe with them and you can invest.”Crissa Shoemaker DeBree: 215-345-3186; email: cshoemaker@calkins.com; Twitter: @CrissaShoemaker

From the Front pAge

marketingContinued from Page A1

Bill McAlister (center), founder and president of Top Dog Direct, marketing director Jackie Bloemker, and chief marketing officer Steve Silbiger show the company’s newest product, the Futzuki, a reflexology foot-massaging mat, at the company’s Bensalem facility.

photoS By chloe elmerPhoToJournAliST

Kim Atkinson, of Philadelphia, packages the CitiKitty, a toilet trainer for cats.

Top Dog Direct products include a flexible bonding agent and a self-tanning lotion.