Bob Kodner, CEO of a foundation repair franchising company, had an epiphany five years ago as he was sitting in traffic. The slogan “a dry crack is a happy crack” popped into his head, and he knew he had marketing gold.
Today, The Crack Team has parlayed that slogan into a Web site selling t-shirts and other paraphernalia that accounts for over 10% of the St Louis-based company’s business.
“I had to pull over I was shaking so much,” he says of the moment when he had the idea.
He took out ads on the backs of local city busses for a new Web site, http://www.mrhappycrack.com, and knew from day one he was on to something huge.
“The first day the ads came out, we had people calling asking if we had Mr. Happy Crack t-shirts, says Kodner.
Over time, the site expanded to offer products like bobble head dolls, thongs, golf balls, key chains, baby rompers, plush toys, hats and mugs. It now takes in about $500,000 per year.
The company now markets its merchandise primarily through search engine marketing, word of mouth and publicity.
“We put a lot of effort in to making sure we rank high on search engines by creatively using a variety of words that increase traffic to www.mrhappycrack.com,” says Kodner.
Kodner says his company has filled several thousand orders worldwide since 2002 and that his customers base “is a variety of male and female, older and younger.”
Online merchandising doesn’t seem to have hurt Kodner’s core business, the Crack Team, whose Web site http://www.thecrackteam.com receives an average 350,000 hits per month, he notes.
“In the last year, the percentage of those utilizing our Web site to request an estimate is up considerably,” he says. “Some come to the Web site for advice and expertise, some for the apparel and humor.”
Looking ahead, the company is exploring licensing deals for its merchandise with department stores, though Kodner says there’s nothing to announce yet. As for the Crack Team, the company now has 19 franchises now and hopes to bring that number up to 25 by end of this year and more than 50 by 2009
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