Enter the dragons
Sussex-based business hits a marketing home run with appearance on reality TV show

MATT WHITE is finding out that going viral can have a downside.

For the founder of New Brunswick-based Sussex Beard Oil Merchants, which produces men’s facial hair grooming products from natural ingredients, the downside is being crazy busy — thanks to a November, 2015 appearance on the popular CBC Dragons’ Den TV reality show. “We had 100 orders in the first 24 hours after appearing,” says White, who started the business in 2013. “Prior to that, we averaged maybe four orders a day.”

Such is the fate of a small business when it gets swept up in a social media tidal wave. White’s appearance on the show, where entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to a panel of five successful Canadian businesspeople in hopes of getting investment dollars from them, seems to have struck a chord with the public. However, only two of the dragons, Michael Wekerle and Michelle Romanow, struck a deal with White.

During his successful pitch, White came looking for $65,000 in exchange for 25 per cent of his company. In the deal agreed to on the show, Romanow and Wekerle got 30 per cent of the company and a five per cent royalty in sales. But White says both sides were still working out the particulars of the deal as this magazine went to press, and he hadn’t received any money from the dragons yet. “We want to use the money to take the business to the next stage and get the word out,” White says. “That’s where we were struggling. The quality of the product was not the problem.”

Thanks to Dragon’s Den, that doesn’t appear to be an issue for White any longer. Now he just has to figure out how to keep up with demand. It’s not a bad problem to have.