From the Classroom to “As Seen On TV”

Ajit “A.J.” Khubani, CEO of the Fairfield marketing concern, says, “We are looking at final prototypes coming up in the next week or two.”

The new gadget is an “attachment that instantly converts any vacuum cleaner into a wet-dry vac. For small spills and cleanups, you don’t want to drag out the big wet-dry vac from the garage,” he says.

Khubani’s commitment constitutes a break for the students, because Telebrands is very good at what it does. The direct marketer’s products, widely seen in TV ads, include Ambervision, the ultraviolet blocking sunglasses that were one of the firm’s early successes. The company takes telephone, mail and online orders for the items, and sells them through retail channels.

Khubani, who’s always on the lookout for new ideas—he shops trade shows, specialty stores and catalogs—was present at the birth of this new product.

Last fall he was invited to give the first run-through of the Entrepreneurial Engineering class a real-world perspective on developing and selling products. “I had been working with [Khubani] on his own products and I pitched the [class] to him,” says Daniel Nosenchuck, an associate professor in Princeton’s department of mechanical and aerospace engineering who developed the course.

Khubani became chairman of the course’s industrial-directors board, which includes six businesspeople representing distributors, product developers and intellectual-property experts. Board members give lectures and provide feedback on the student projects.

“We give the students the opportunity to see what it takes to get their product on the shelves in mass distribution,” Nosenchuck says. Typically juniors and seniors take the course, and Nosenchuck recruits nonengineering students to inject the teams with different perspectives on product development and marketing. Average enrollment in the class is 20.

The team behind the wet-dry vacuum converter consists of Lawrence Azzaretti, who’s studying the history of science; politics major Robert Gonzalez; and engineering students Jonathan Brosterman, Robert Moore and Sameer Shariff.

“They have learned about market analysis, industrial design, globalization, and have been to Asia and spent about a week contracting with a manufacturer to build the prototypes,” Nosenchuck says. “They are developing their final prototypes which should be able to support a commercial being shot within a few weeks,” says Nosenchuck.

Large-scale production will follow after the direct-marketing commercials air.

While the product’s launch will be a major passage for the students, it’s another day at the office for Khubani. Telebrands is on the tube these days with the One Sweep Broom, which has bristles of polymer rather than straw; The Owl, a credit card-sized magnifying glass with an LED light for those needing assistance reading fine print; and Doggie Steps, which help animals climb onto a sofa or bed.

Khubani started the company as a one-man operation in 1983 while studying at Montclair State University. He graduated in 1984 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration.

He began selling walkman-style radios through print advertisements. Khubani says he imported the radios on credit from Taiwan and bought an ad for $7,000 in the National Enquirer using money from his personal savings.

“The print ad didn’t make any money. It broke even,” he says. “If I didn’t do all the work myself, I would have lost money.”

In 1983 he generated $80,000 in sales but no profits. By 1985, however, he says the business generated $250,000 in earnings on $1.5 million in revenue. The next year Khubani says he generated a profit of $3 million on $11 million in revenue.

Khubani began on-air advertising in 1987 with such products as the Ambervision sunglasses. While early attempts to reach into retail channels failed, Telebrands was able to get Ambervision picked up through the Herman’s Sporting Goods chain in 1988. The popularity of the Ambervision commercials help convince Herman’s to carry the product. Retailers like Wal-Mart and Target soon began selling Ambervision sunglasses.