Poised to clean up

What an exhilarating week it has been for Aaron Krause, and not just because he's a guy with a sponge business at an especially soggy time.

Actually, that caused him considerable anxiety until he managed to get to his warehouse in Folcroft on Tuesday to find that Sandy had not destroyed his inventory of 300,000 Scrub Daddy cleaning disks - bright yellow circles of highly engineered polymer measuring 4 inches across, their centers carved into smiling faces.

After Krause arrived to find his headquarters on Henderson Boulevard bone-dry, he exulted in an e-mail: "The Scrubbing Gods are smiling like the Scrub Daddy on us!"

Indeed, they are.

A year ago, when The Inquirer first interviewed Krause, the Voorhees father of 7-year-old twins was having a tough time getting his cleaning invention on retailers' shelves. He was making pitches once or twice a week from a homemade sink display he would set up inside a friend's ShopRite stores in South Jersey.

He also had made some sales through the website of another business of his - a company that makes unique double-sided, beveled-edge auto-buffing pads and related products.

As of Oct. 15, 2011 - the day before the article about his Scrub Daddy ambitions was published - Krause had sold fewer than 400 sponges.

As of late last week, his total exceeded 250,000 - with the potential for phenomenal sales following his national exposure last month on ABC's popular competition show for entrepreneurs, Shark Tank.

After a high-energy pitch under blazing studio lights that had Krause sweating early in his 70-minute presentation before a panel of five judges and the cameras - of which the TV audience saw about 12 minutes - the 43-year-old over-the-top Flyers fan hooked a $200,000 investment from one of the judges, whom he gave a 20 percent ownership stake in Scrub Daddy Inc.

Lori Greiner is a Chicago-based inventor with 115 patents, an infomercial impresario, and a frequent QVC guest with an impressive sales track record.

So it means something when she declares, as she did on Shark Tank: "I can tell instantly if it's a hero or a zero, and I think what you've got here is a hero. ... It's going to be a gangbuster, a huge hit in infomercial."

» Watch Aaron Krause's appearance on ABC's Shark Tank.

With plans to make a Scrub Daddy infomercial soon with Krause, Greiner told him she would make him a millionaire within a year. Early indications suggest that might not be an exaggeration.

The new partners appeared on QVC the morning after the Oct. 26 Shark Tank broadcast, and "we killed it," Krause said. "We sold about 12,000 sets [each a six-pack of Scrub Daddy pads for $18.93] in six minutes."

That's $227,160 in six minutes - a wallet-busting $37,860 a minute.

"We sold out," forcing a planned eight-minute segment to end two minutes early, Krause said.

That same week, he got word from Wakefern Food Corp. that it would start carrying Scrub Daddy in 250 ShopRite stores in the northeastern United States within a month.

Krause is hopeful that efforts to get on shelves in 2,500 more grocery stores will conclude similarly. Total sales so far exceed $500,000, Krause said.

Greiner is confident that they will soon soar. In a phone interview last week, she said that "the sky's the limit" for Scrub Daddy. She has a proven sense about such things. Her most-famous invention on the market is a $159 full-length mirrored jewelry cabinet with an anti-tarnish lining that has generated more than $60 million in sales.

What sold her on Scrub Daddy, Greiner said, was its "many unique features," including that it changes texture based on water temperature, doesn't hold odors or scratch surfaces, yet can remove "burnt-on messes."

Because the product is meant to be used, thrown away and replaced, Greiner said, "it's hard to project exactly what sales will be."

But she gave it a try: "I know it will do millions and millions and millions."

"Since its debut, the Scrub Daddy has continued to do well for us," said Ken O'Brien, vice president of merchandising for QVC. "Thanks to its quality and great value, it is one of our top-rated products."

Such talk - and the trajectory Scrub Daddy has been on of late - has been the stuff of dreams for Krause, who also works as a consultant and developer for 3M, which in 2008 bought the auto-cleaning products company in Folcroft owned by Krause and a partner but kept him on to run it.

"I wake up at night and ask my wife, 'Is this really happening?' "

Watch Scrub Daddy inventor Aaron Krause's appearance on shopping channel QVC and click through to his appearance on ABC's "Shark Tank" at philly.com/business

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