How Toupee Tape Created A Business Opportunity That Came Unstuck

Why your next business idea might be right under your hat. Some people just some to have a knack for spotting opportunities. They can look into a half-empty room and see a dozen different business ideas just based on the formation of the chairs and the napkins on the tables. Sue B. Zimmerman is one of those people. She’s had a long list of business ideas that have included the little plastic gizmos that people put in their Crocs. While other people were wondering why anyone would want to wear ugly, rubber clogs, she saw footwear worn by the young and the old, by men and by women. “They had the crossover appeal of jeans and baseball caps,” she recalled. But one of her strangest ideas came from the other end of the body. While she was teaching an art class to children, a friend turned up with a roll of sticky tape. It wasn’t just any sticky tape though. It was toupee tape, the stuff used to glue wigs to people’s heads. The children took the tape. They decorated it. They cut into funny shapes. They used it in their artworks. And they had fun. “I said this tape is magic,” Sue recalls. “No one was crying. No one was getting covered in glue and they were making some cool projects.” At the time, America was going through a scrapbooking craze. People were buying all sorts of accessories that they could use to decorate their photos. So with a little creativity, that toupee tape sold in wig shops became Treasure Tape, and after a bit of pushing, it was sold in Michaels and AC Moore outlets. That should have been satisfying enough but then QVC came calling. Sue’s toupee-fixing Treasure Tape had the Wow Factor that the television show was looking for. She spent a day at QVC’s school learning how to sell on television and which of the seven cameras to look at during the broadcast, and was then told that she would be on air at… 1am. Despite the early hour, she made her numbers, selling 5,000 units a minute during her five-minute slot. The show asked her back. The television appearances were Treasure Tape’s peak moments. Sue hadn’t taken out a patent on decorated toupee tape, and it was easy enough for companies in China to copy her idea and flood the market. It wasn’t long before Sue was moving on to her next business idea. But in the meantime, she had learned three valuable lessons. First, she had learned that there really are opportunities everywhere and that they can turn up at any moment. You just have to seize them, make them happen and run with them as far as you can go. Second, she learned that you can’t always protect your business. Products come and products go, and you always have to enjoy it while it lasts and be ready to move on to the next big thing. And thirdly, she learned that sometimes that next big thing can be bigger, better, and closely related to what you did before. Sue B. Zimmerman is now a leading expert on Instagram marketing, delivering talks and teaching businesses how to create viral hashtags and market themselves on Facebook’s image-sharing platform. She’s gone from helping people to decorate printed photographs to helping them to decorate digital photographs. And she’s still spotting opportunities in half-empty rooms. Listen to the entire interview with Sue B. Zimmerman on the FUN podcast

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