Featured Image Credit: ABC
Topics: Business, Beauty, Film and TV
Michael Slavin
When it comes to Shark Tank, sometimes the best way to enjoy the show is to be able to watch it about ten years on.
Whether it be someone in the very first ever episode pitching an implantable Bluetooth device that would be attached inside your ear via surgery, or the Sharks being offered Ring before it became a billion dollar company, looking back can always be fun.
Sometimes those pitching look like fools in retrospect for insisting the thing they’re pitching will be the next big thing, and sometimes the Sharks look like idiots for not spotting a great idea before it blew up.
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And viewers have recently discovered a case where the investors just look plain foolish, with a company they were initially offered 20 percent of now being worth millions and being stocked around the US.
Not only did the Sharks turn them down, but Kevin O’Leary shockingly called them ‘cockroaches’, and suggested they might have a massive market share – ‘in the clown market’.
The company being pitched to the group of investors is called The Lip Bar, and are a cruelty free black-owned lipstick brand which, according to their website, came to be after CEO Melissa Butler became frustrated with the 'toxic one-shade-fits-most beauty industry'.
They did this by including extravagant colours for their lipsticks - ranging from purple to green - which was largely uncommon in 2015 when they appeared on Shark Tank.
Butler, along with her business partner and creative director Rosco Spears, went on the show to ask for $125,000 for a 20 percent equity share, valuing their company at $625,000.
However, none of the Sharks appeared to be keen to take a bite.
Whilst Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner were kinder, pointing to their branding and online distribution model as issues for them, O’Leary said: “The chances that this is a business are practically zero
"You can’t get share, if anybody thought you could sell purple or green lipstick they’d do it.
"They already have the shelf space, they’d just add another colour and they’d crush you like the colourful cockroaches you are.”
When speaking to CNBC about her experience on the show, Butler said: “They were really cruel to us.
“I had to reposition my thoughts in that moment, I had to reposition that anger and really use it to drive this idea."
She went on to say: “I couldn't allow someone else to be the authority on my dream.
The company is now estimated to be worth $15 million at the time of writing, and have products in Walmart and Targets across the country - including their main store in Butler and Spears' hometown of Detroit.
They've also broke into other areas of the beauty industry, now selling makeup brushes, eyeliner and foundation as well as their lipsticks.
The Lip Bar has also used their time on the TV show to their benefit, putting up billboards poking fun at Kevin O’Leary, also known as ‘Mr Wonderful’, with one saying: “Shark Tank told me to quit. 10 years and 2 million units sold. Thanks, Mr Wonderful.”
O’Leary later admitted in an interview with The Breakfast Club that he'd got it wrong, saying: “I’m proud of them for taking the heat. I’m proud that they’re entrepreneurs and are successful.
“It’s a wonderful thing to see that happen. They were facing an almost impossible task because going into the cosmetics industry is so difficult to get market share.
“But they pulled it off, so you gotta applaud them — there’s no question about it. "But that is a tough space because the margins are so high that the competition is just brutal.”