Lori Greiner (born December 9, 1969) is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and television personality. She is best known as a cast member of the three-time Emmy-winning reality TV show Shark Tank and has been called "one of the most prolific inventors of our time". She is also known as "The Queen of QVC" and the "Warm Blooded Shark". She has also appeared on Shark Tank spin-off, Beyond the Tank. Since 1998, she has had a program on QVC called Clever & Unique Creations Show. She is also president and founder of the Chicago company For Your Ease Only, Inc., which she established in 1996 and which does product development and marketing. She has invented more than 600 products and today helps aspiring entrepreneurs launch theirs. She holds 120 U.S. and foreign patents.
Video Lori Greiner
Early life
Greiner grew up on the Near North Side, Chicago, the second daughter of a real estate developer father and a psychologist mother. Her parents divorced when she was nine years old. She majored in communications, focusing on journalism, television, and film at Loyola University Chicago, and worked for the Chicago Tribune while in college. She was briefly a playwright and also designed and sold her own jewelry on the side.
Maps Lori Greiner
Career
Greiner created a plastic earring organizer with sliding rods that could neatly store 100 pairs of earrings. She patented this organizer. Using borrowed money, she created a prototype of the product which was picked up by J. C. Penney before the holiday season. She took out a $300,000 loan and in eighteen months had paid it back."
QVC
Greiner says "she never set out to be a serial inventor", but her success on the Home Shopping Network started her on that path. Shortly thereafter, she transitioned to QVC, a larger network, and in 2000, after she created an arsenal of new products, she landed her own show on QVC called Clever & Unique Creations.
Shark Tank
In 2012, Greiner joined the US TV series Shark Tank. In 2014, her investment in Scrub Daddy, a company that produces a texture changing household sponge (the material is stiff in cold water but soft when warm), was noted as a great success. On July 30, 2014, she sold more than 2 million sponges on QVC (in one day alone).
As of April 30, 2016, Scrub Daddy reigned as "the biggest success story in Shark Tank history" with sales over $100 million and a growing product line sold in a myriad of stores.
Other investments by Greiner in the top 18 Shark Tank deals, as of April 30, 2016, include Squatty Potty, Readerest, Paint Brush Cover, Hold Your Haunches, Drop Stop, FiberFix, Simply Fit Board, and Screenmend.
As of September 15, 2017, Greiner's Simply Fit Board (an exercise tool), Scrub Daddy, and Sleep Styler (comfortable hair rollers) are cited as 3 of the biggest Shark Tank hits to date.
In 2011, Greiner spoke at the first United States Patent and Trademark Office Women's Entrepreneurship Symposium. In March 2014, she published the book Invent it, Sell it, Bank it! - Make Your Million Dollar Idea into a Reality, which reached #3 on the Wall Street Journal's bestseller list.
Personal life
Lori is married to Dan Greiner and has no children.
Selected publications
- Greiner, Lori. Invent It, Sell It, Bank It!: Make Your Million-Dollar Idea into a Reality, New York : Ballantine Books, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8041-7643-9.
See also
- Joy Mangano, HSN inventor
References
External links
- lorigreiner
.com, official website - NPR interview with Lori Greiner, npr.org, January 31, 2012
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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