Business Opportunities Weblog

March 2, 2007 by Rich Whittle | 2 Comments

eCommerce-Guide:

Brooks Lambert, who runs TheBeerbelly.com as president of Under Development Inc., is also someone who might have been viewed by some as having a less-than-perfect business model for his venture. But — after the press picked up on his contraption and he got 1 million hits to his fledgling site, as well as about 80 calls from offline media, including CNN and the like — he sold his electronics company, turned toward inventing full-time and his beer belly is jiggling as he laughs all the way to the bank.

Lambert also uses a potent mix of marketing savvy and passion, spiced with some serendipity, to run his site. The Beerbelly, by the way, is a neoprene bag that fits under a shirt and can be used to avoid paying $9 for drafts at sporting events.

“Honestly, I didn’t think I was inventing a product,” says Lambert. “I’m a closet inventor, my buddy’s an industrial designer, and one day we’re hanging out drinking beer and I have teen-age kids and I was saying how they’re awesome, not like me, who went to games with beers in my socks. So we were goofing around talking about how to sneak beer into places and I’m a surfer so I cut up a wet suit and stuffed a water back-pack into it and we’re joking around about how it looks like a beer belly. It was just a fun afternoon.”

They enlisted the help of a friend, who saw one of them wearing the prototype at a party, and refined the design. “We decided to put up a Web site to see what happened. I sent one e-mail to Gizmodo saying, ‘Hey, take a look at this.’ They did a huge thing and it got picked up by the press and we had 3 million hits in two days.”

What ensued was a “brutal six months” of handling the traffic, orders and fulfillment, but eventually Lambert arranged for an overseas manufacturer to make his Beerbelly. His site now gets anywhere from 4,000 to 20,000 to 100,000 unique visitors a day depending on the season and press coverage.

Photo by Under Development Inc..

In Ideas, Internet, Invention, Niche | 2 Comments