customer base, we d have to take it on the road to get more feedback. thank you very much for your help. have a great day, ladies. reporter: denise traveled to austin, texas, to hand out surveys and conduct a focus group at the taking control of your diabetes conference, where janet, her husband, fred, and daughter, karen, had a booth with a pretty steady crowd. well i was surprised in austin, there were a lot of people who reacted positively to the bag and more people liked the name. i didn t expect it either. and the catch phrase yada yada yada was made legendary in one of the best known tv shows of all time. the popular culture tame from seinfeld where wasn t it elaine that i think first said. i met this lawyer, we went out to dinner, i had the lobster bisque, we went back to my place, yada yada yada, i never heard from him again. and it just popped in my head. i said let s call them yadabags. with our hunch about changing the name of the business wrong, we wondere
started at the dining room table, with janet sewing the first prototypes one by one. i kept cutting up different linings to see what would fit and what it looked like. the first one took about two months to really just sew and create. once she felt she got the design right she hired someone to do a small but costly production run to see if people would buy the bags. after getting some sales, she was optimistic and ready to produce more. but when she looked into manufacturing in china, which she thought would be cheap, she found that she d have to make 1,000 bags to get the right price. that put her in a chicken and egg situation. i m not willing to risk retirement. if i can get orders and i have to put money in to get product that i know is going to sell, i would do that in a minute. with an order for a thousand bags unlikely at this point, we set out to find a solution for her chicken or egg problem, by doing what she thought was impossible, finding a domestic small batch manu
janet believes she has the makings to make a successful business with the yadabags. when you talk to her it s hard not to be taken in by her enthusiasm. it s a colorful lining because the line something the pick-me-up. exactly. i don t like dull. but right now the fledgling company is little more than a few steps beyond the idea stage. there is an actual product but the numbers don t add up and there isn t a clear plan on how to turn that around. we have an unusual situation here right now. every bag we sell we lose money on because it cost us more to produce it than that. this is not terribly unusual at this stage. especially for a business that
i couldn t retire, truthfully, and sit around and just play bridge or sit by a pool. i get antsy. i like to be busier. reporter: when we met janet she d already invested $60,000 of her own savings, but she was a little lost. she believed wholeheartedly that there was a market for her business, but didn t quite know what to do next. so we enlisted a team to try and help her out. coulda dabags really be a successful company? or should she end it here and not throw good money after bad. our first call was to marketing expert denise blasovic from the s3 agency. denise and i had a heart-to-heart. we d both been a little skeptical that the company could work. i want your honest opinion. when you saw the yadabag the first time you thought not a bag for me. so did i. reporter: but we were just a focus group of two, and not the target market. so we decided that if we really wanted to know if this bag had a
she d feel confident about dipping back into her savings. that means you got to throw spaghetti at the wall, you have to think of every single place that you can sell them. um-hum. marketing is great, but it s not great if nobody is seeing it. right. i got to get them out there. so your homework is think through where you would find a bag like this. um-hum. go introduce yourself. give them some bags to put on their shelves, to sell. you could give it to them on consignment if they didn t want to buy them from you. right. prove to them there s a market out there. to help janet find marketing and get her bag into the hands of customers we introduced her to several key players that would serve as an informal advisory board like suzanne, a diabetes educator who also started make a bag for supplies. her business didn t make it but she wanted to make sure that janet s does. hi. hi, janet. how are you? okay, suzanne. how are you? and we introduced her to