This story appears in the
January 2000 issue of
Entrepreneur.
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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.