This post is in partnership with Entrepreneur. The article below was originally published at Entrepreneur.com.
By Geoff Weiss
Talk about a make-or-break moment. Upon learning that QVC had finally offered her a 10-minute spot on its airwaves following a tenuous, two-year courtship, the cosmetics entrepreneur Jamie Kern Lima instantly dissolved into an ecstatic heap of tears and prayer.
Lima, 37, had founded IT Cosmetics out of her tiny Studio City, Calif. apartment in 2008, after quitting her job as a local news anchor. Her Bye Bye Undereye concealer — developed alongside plastic surgeons and touting anti-aging ingredients — was a game-changer, she knew deep down, although distribution prospects looked slim and marketing costs were astronomical.
A relationship with QVC, however — an acronym for ‘quality, value and convenience’ — could tick both boxes in one fell swoop.
For two years, Lima had mailed her products to QVC merchants for consideration to no avail. But then one day, network executives stumbled upon Bye Bye Undereye at an industry trade show in New York City. Shortly thereafter, Lima found herself boarding a plane to West Chester, Pa., where QVC headquarters are quietly nestled, arriving one week ahead of her scheduled debut.
“The whole week before, I just came out to the QVC parking lot and sat there,” Lima says. “I stayed for a week at the Sheraton — which is the hotel everyone here stays at — just prepping for that 10 minutes, trying to process what was about to happen.”
The stakes were enormous. All told, 106 million American viewers tune in to QVC, according to Doug Rose, SVP of marketing and programming. And the platform’s vast reach as a retail channel is compounded by a unique ability to weave scintillating visual backstories.
“Our customers are shopping not so much because of a desire to buy something as they are engaged in learning about what’s new, meeting interesting people and hearing their stories,” he says. “We talk a lot about storytelling being one of our superpowers as a retailer.”
And when host and guest are firing on all cylinders, these superpowers can generate megabucks. The record for the most products moved in one day is currently held by the portable smartphone charging company Halo, with a staggering 300,000 units sold. Backstage in her dressing room before show time, Lima was sufficiently prepared, but rattled nonetheless. Time seemed to be passing in a sudden whirl. In hindsight, she remembers little other than her co-host, at one point, guiding her trembling hand out of a close-up shot, whereupon a producer in her ear coached her to “take deep breaths.” The next thing she knew, everything had sold out.
