Brush With Success

It's the ultimate prize for any inventor--a free two-minute infomercial introducing your product to the world. That's just a small part of what Joe Durek and Lou Lentine, owners of Orlando, Florida-based Lentek International, received as winners of the Inaugural Product Showcase held at the annual Electronic Retailing Association convention on October 17-19, 1999 in Las Vegas.

The product that helped the duo win by only one point is a waterless pet brush that keeps your pets clean and repels fleas. "Instead of using sprays and chemicals, the brush [uses an air purification system to remove odors from pets]," explains Lentine, 28, adding that the brush also contains an environmentally safe flea repellant.

"It's hard to estimate what this will do for our business, but because we won, [people from the] J.C. Penney catalog and Japan's Sony Trading visited our convention booth," says Durek, 52. In addition to the infomercial, the partners will receive a meeting with a home shopping channel to discuss selling their product.

This article was originally published in the January 2000 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Brush With Success.