Anthony Raissen is on the comeback trail in the breath-freshener business. And he’s got a personal endorsement from Larry King.
The former CNN newsman and his wife, Shawn, on April 7 announced they would be spokespeople for BreathGemz, a new brand of mouth freshener. A two-minute infomercial starring the Kings will start showing on cable TV on April 28. The plan is to sell the mints via TV and then get them on store shelves by summer.
BreathGemz will follow the same business model Raissen used for his first big success, BreathAssure, a breath capsule he launched in 1992. In four years, the Westlake Village-based BreathAssure reached annual sales of $29 million. However, Warner-Lambert, a corporation that owns competing brands Certs, Clorets and Dentyne, took BreathAssure to court in 1999 challenging its advertising claims.
A court found that “assure” in the product name was deceitful. It barred the company from using the BreathAssure brand. Ten months later, the company declared bankruptcy.
This time, Raissen is determined to do things differently.
With BreathAssure, the company claimed that the pill would neutralize chemicals in the stomach before they could cause bad breath. BreathGemz ads limit their claims to preventing bad breath caused by specific foods as they’re digested.
“With BreathAssure, we made claims based on advice we had received and when those claims were challenged, we backed down,” Raissen said. “With BreathGemz, we are making very specific claims – namely, that it reduces the effects of certain foods.”
Tom Haire, editor-in-chief of trade publication Response Magazine in Santa Ana, thinks the main challenge for BreathGemz is that the breath-freshener market has too many competitors, including mouthwashes, mints, strips and gums. (Raissen writes a quarterly article for Response magazine.)
“That market is more crowded at both the low end and the high end than it was when they launched BreathAssure,” he said. “Any other brand would make you wonder, but with Anthony and the Kings, they have a good shot.”
Immediate cash flow
Because King wanted to invest as well as endorse, a new company was formed. It’s called Breath Gemz LLC. The partners include Raissen, who serves as president; his wife, Lauren, who is chief financial officer; the Kings; and Bob Yallen, chief executive of Inter/Media Cos., a direct-response advertising agency in Encino.
The company has six employees at offices in the same building where Inter/Media has its headquarters. To reduce overhead, the functions of telemarketing, manufacturing and shipping have been outsourced to other companies.
The most important partner will be Inter/Media, which will buy time on cable TV, the major expense for BreathGemz. However, because the TV campaign yields immediate sales and cash flow, it greatly reduces the need for capital. Raissen said BreathGemz is self-funded by the partners and will need only a couple of million dollars, rather than the minimum $15 million the venture would have required if they tried a traditional product launch in stores.
BreathGemz has a revenue goal of $8 million in 2011. Raissen hopes to reach break-even within nine months. He expects revenue of $25 million to $30 million by 2013.
It was that kind of rapid success that landed BreathAssure in court 11 years ago. Response Magazine’s Haire doubts a similar fate awaits BreathGemz.
He said large corporations have a history of using the legal system to shut down direct-response competitors because the marketers in direct response have a reputation for exaggerated claims. But when marketers are careful to avoid overstating their cases, they rarely run into difficulty.
“I don’t think BreathGemz will face that kind of challenge again,” he said. “And if they do, they’ll be better prepared to fight it.”
Hailing the King
After the BreathAssure bankruptcy, Raissen moved on, eventually starting direct-response consulting firm InterQuantum in partnership with Inter/Media.
Part of his job was to look for product categories ripe for innovation. Two years ago, he noticed falling sales among breath fresheners and decided to create BreathGemz.
In 1992, Raissen had tapped actor George Kennedy as spokesman for BreathAssure and his performance was considered a factor in its success. When he started on his comeback, he spent 10 frustrating months looking for the right celebrity to represent BreathGemz. Yallen at Inter/Media suggested King, who had just announced his retirement from CNN, but Raissen thought it was impossible to land such a high-profile personality.
“It’s not every day you get someone of the stature of Larry King,” Raissen said.
Yallen met with one of King’s financial managers and sent him some BreathGemz. A few weeks later, Raissen was standing in front of the suspender-wearing interviewer.
“He’s approachable,” Raissen said. “He seems as comfortable talking to me as interviewing kings and queens. He turned to the manager and said, ‘I like these guys and I love the product. Let’s put a deal together.’”
The two-minute infomercial they’ve produced starts with the Kings bantering on a talk show set, then cuts to medical expert Dr. Anthony Dailley talking about the causes of bad breath and ends with the Kings at Cosmos Grill in Calabasas interviewing BreathGemz users. Raissen expects the commercial will run for six to nine months; after that, the company will switch to shorter ads that cost less money to air.
Raissen plans to have BreathGemz on store shelves by August after the ads have built product awareness.
“It’s difficult for lightning to strike twice in the same spot,” he said. “We’ve done market tests with positive results, but now it’s time to go out there and give it the old college try. Consumers are looking for something new in the breath category and we believe we have it.”
