Wallwerx Investomercial - Shark Tank Meets QVC
Wallwerx participated in the first ever Investomercial by Venture Asheville, and hosted by Jeff Kaplan. It's in the style of Shark Tank meets QVC, in front of a live audience, and geared towards raising awareness of Asheville-area consumer product companies to investors.
Transcription:
(upbeat music)
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Hey, welcome to Venture Asheville's Investomercial. It's our first time doing it here at the Wedge Brewing. We got a whole bunch of folks inside. Got five companies. We're really excited. Do you want to come with us? All right, let's go, come on.
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(upbeat music) (crowd cheering) Oh my gosh, come on in. Can you believe this?
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This is the best idea. Oh my gosh.
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I feel like, I feel like Arcenio Hall. This is wonderful. Thank you all so much for being here with the first Invest Immersion. You ready to kick it off, meet some of our companies?
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(crowd cheering) All right, great.
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Hi, and welcome to the 2023 Investomercial Summer Series from Venture Asheville. This series is all about consumer products. I'm Jeffrey Kaplan, the director of this program at Venture Asheville, and broadcasting to you live from the wedge brewing in beautiful Asheville, North Carolina.
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(crowd cheering) Give it a ask for me.
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Now, ever since my wife and I settled down at home and had a few kids, we've really embraced that domestic life. We've got youth sports, my wife's garden, my project car, kids crafts in every corner of the house, and the mess is driving me insane. I am losing it at home. We've tried organizational TikTok. We've got these Pinterest boards that we share. We've tried Marie Kondoing, but guess what? Even Marie Kondo recently quit Marie Kondoing. That is true.
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Everywhere you look, there's clutter. It's giving me anxiety. I get gesbokish in my kiss kiss, if you know what I'm saying. And so, we have today a really exciting, very cool, innovative organizational tool. I'm about to introduce my friend, Dominic Taverniti, from Wallwerx, who's gonna help us organize with ease and store with confidence. Dominic, welcome.
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(audience applauding) - Thank you.
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My name is Dominic Taverniti, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Wallwerx. Wallwerx is the storage and organization solution for garage, pantry, and craft room. We are revolutionizing wall organization, and we are breathing new life into the age-old pegboard, already installed in millions of homes across the US. Now, the story that I'm about to tell you is going to be very familiar.
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You decide to take on that home project. You're gonna hang a picture, maybe fix a hinge, and you can't find that screw or washer or small item that you're looking for. You probably start by going to the junk drawer. Come on, I know, we all have one. But it isn't junk, is it? It's the small items that you just don't know where to put, so you toss them in the drawer. Well, the day of reckoning is finally here. You have to find it. What's your technique? Do you hunt and peck? Maybe sort in the front of the drawer or excavate from the back? It doesn't matter, you can't find it. Well, Wallwerx is helping people to organize small items and tools in plain sight.
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(audience applauding)
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Our product is based around, well, let me first start by saying it's more secure than the hooks and hangers that always fall out.
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It's also significantly less expensive than the proprietary rail systems. Now,(...) the secret sauce of the Wallwerx system is the patented modular base plate. - Wow, that's right. - Our attachments, like our flex bracket, simply twist into place and it's secure and ready to use.
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(audience applauding) Wallwerx offers easy item identification, dust-free storage, and grab-and-go functionality.
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Our product is currently on the shelf at 60 Home Depot stores in the southeast and available online at major retailers like Walmart, Home Depot, Michael's, and of course, on our website.
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Wallwerx is gonna be a household name. If you wanna join us at the ground level as we take over the home organization space, please let us know. (audience applauding)
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- Good job, so cool.
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I probably like a lot of you who have these pegboards in my house, and I gotta see how do they work. Can we see it close up?
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Probably come in and get a close up. - So the base plate comes with two plastic brads.
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It's as easy as lining it up on a standard pegboard
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and pressing in the brads.
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- Attach it, it's ready to go. - Nice.
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Flips in, it's so secure, it's so easy to do, and this is what I have at home right now. I've got these plastic bins, those long metal hooks, it just doesn't feel secure and safe for the expensive piece of paper. - Does this feel familiar? (metal clanging) - I know that very well, absolutely.
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But you're a pro, this is your company. You make it look really easy. Can I try it out? - Yeah, give it a go. While you're doing that, what was the last project that you took on at home? - I just had to replace some deck boards on my porch. You know, it was long, flat. - Yeah. - That was easy.
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- Were you able to find everything you needed for the job? - Almost, I had my drill, I had the torque screws, but I couldn't find my torx bit. So I had to do Dominic, I had to go down cold blocks with Ace Hardware and buy a replacement torx bit. Yeah, like that exact one.
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But I just couldn't find the one I had in my drawers, in my junk drawers.
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- It shouldn't have to be that way. I can't give you back the time it took to try to look for the bit or the cost to buy something you already owned, but Wallwerx can help make sure it doesn't happen again.
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- It's nice, very good.
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(audience applauding) Yeah, it feels like,
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it really feels like you put all of my gear in one place and in my face. - That's right. Right in your face, where you can find everything you need. - So we're seeing the mason jars, we're seeing the hooks, we're seeing the plastic, that's really strong. You really can't accidentally twist it or break it off. And it's gonna last a long time. It's that really high quality plastic. What else can you attach other than the mason jars? Can you talk us through some of those? - Well, all of our products are made 100% in the United States, so they are very strong, great quality control.
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(audience applauding) So if we start here, we're looking at the garage. So we can hang wire and tools and utensils. We have a magnet bar. And in the pantry, we can hold pots. Also, as you mentioned, standard mouth mason jar for foodstuffs.
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Coming around to the craft room, we can hold brooms and more tools and glue sticks. And then finally, we have all of our attachments here that we're gonna be bringing to market, as well as a mount for your tablet. So you can watch an endless loop of how it werx.
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(audience laughing) And here's an example of our product that's currently on the shelf now. - That's so quiet. Yeah, it's very impressive. You've got a really impressive set of products here.
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I'll tell you my favorites. I love the way the broom clamps in, how easy it is to pull it out and put it right back in. It clamps so securely, piece of cake. I love this tablet mount, but the magnet bar, I think, is so cool for even the quick things as you're going in and out, you need a direct line of sight, it's great. - Good luck finding one in the marketplace. Our founder and my partner, Mark Zalmi, has developed these products out of his frustration of not being able to find what he needed. And so he went to work with 3D printing and creating the entire product line and brought what we have on the shelf today to market. And now we're gonna be looking to bring all of these prototypes to market as well. - So is that what you're doing with the C-mount? - That's right.
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(audience applauding) - I'm sure we're getting more about that. I'm so excited I'm getting ahead of myself.
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You already said it before, say it again, because I'm ready to set up my pegboard with the system. Where can I buy these? - Well, as I mentioned, we are on the shelf at Home Depot in the Southeast, and we are on michaels.com, Walmart,(...) Lowe's, Wayfair, MSC Industrial Supply, and we're adding new retailers every day. - Fantastic.
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(audience applauding) This is like the highest applause for the investment we've had. So if you at home or you in the audience wanna join on the seed round, please contact Dominic through our show notes. And I'm sure some of you have some questions, and what he has on them, have your microphone over, yes. - Yeah, great product. What do you guys plan on doing with your funding? - Great question. Well, as I mentioned, we have these products here, except this is what's on the shelf today.
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And we are going to be bringing out these new products. These are 3D printed right here, and we need to go to manufacturing with them. Now the reason we're making the move
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to put more products on the shelf is our customers love the modularity of the product. They're ready to hang the rest of their items. But also the buyers and merchandisers at our retailers are asking us for the product line, and they will give us shelf space when we have it in market.
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- Fantastic, great. (audience applauding) - Yeah. - Do you have a question? - Yeah.
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So you're already in stores and online around America. What's the secret to your viral success? - You know, it's filling a gap. We have these products out in the market today. We have dollar items, but they're insecure and they're not safe. Our product fills that gap, so you're getting a modular system at a low cost. On the other end, it costs hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars to put the proprietary rail systems in place, and ours is really fitting a neat gap there.
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- Fantastic. (audience applauding) - Yep, yep, yep. One more question. - Yeah, thank you. Can this item be purchased on a website anywhere, or is it strictly in retail? - Yep, we are selling direct to consumer as well on our website, wallwerx.com. What we often find is users are buying our case because they don't need to just organize two items, and so they usually buy a case of 12 to start, and we have about 25% repeat buyers off of our website. Yeah. - That's great. - One more time for Dominic, and Walwerx. Great job, man. Well done. Very, very well done. We'll see you there. (upbeat music)