How To Fight Fakes On Amazon
Inc.|March - April 2019

One entrepreneur’s tale of his time in Amazon Purgatory— and how he finally fought back.

Jeff Bercovici
How To Fight Fakes On Amazon

In the late fall of 2017, Kevin Williams and Glenn Archer strode onto the set of shark tank. They’d been selling their Brush Hero, a water-powered hose attachment with a spinning brush head that cleans cars and outdoor equipment, since 2015. Archer, a trim F-16 pilot turned corporate executive, had provided the idea for the product and much of the funding. Williams, a onetime Caribbean dive boat captain and serial startup guy, handled operations, a role that included assembling the first batch of products in his basement in Arlington, Virginia, with an assist from his 70-something mother.

At that time, their annual sales were hitting almost $3 million, and the per-unit profit on their $40 product was hefty. The Sharks were impressed, but, realizing there were similar items on the market, they started challenging the $5 million valuation the co-founders sought for their company, RGK Innovations.

“You’re kind of in a race,” Mark Cuban told them, “because you want to get out there as quickly as possible before other people replicate you. That’s tough.” He declined to offer terms.

They left without a deal. Still, after the episode aired in January 2018, Williams and Archer quickly experienced what many Shark Tank hopefuls have learned: Almost any appearance on the show yields a tangible bump in sales. Americans don’t buy much outdoor equipment in January, but Brush Hero’s sales on the day of the broadcast spiked more than 500-fold, and subsequent rebroadcasts brought fresh surges. Almost as quickly, though, they discovered the downside of all that attention.

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