It’s hard to believe that we sold twice as much product appearing on QVC at 4:00 in the morning than we did at 1:00 in the afternoon, but we did. Most people don't realize it, but QVC is on the air, live 24/7. After the show I spent a couple of hours talking to other QVC hosts to get their take on my product. It’s very important to listen to your customers and encourage feedback, what you learn can really help improve your product. One of themes that kept coming up was that the QVC customers want color choices and I needed to find a way to incorporate color into my product.

After I made the larger version and started steaming foods like salmon I realized it needed some type of heat insulation on the handles, lifting the grill out of a pot with oven mitts was just awkward. I looked at other kitchen utensils and saw that many were coated with brightly colored silicone. It wasn't hard to put two and two together, I purchased some modeling latex, designed finger pads for the handles and sent them off to China for prototyping.

I can't stress how important it is to listen to your customers. The most common thing I kept hearing from my customers, was how great the larger steaming grill was at steaming tortillas. My own testing showed that as long as the tortilla was smaller than the pot the grill was very effective, but for tortillas larger than the diameter of the pot it didn't work. That’s because the extra large tortillas choked off the circulation of the steam in the pot. The solution was simple; place a small dish upside down on the grill and drape the tortilla over the top. This allowed the steam to circulate around the edges. To add value to my product I needed a self contained way to accomplish the same thing. My solution was two perpendicular "C" shaped pieces that popped up and formed a frame that extra large tortillas could be laid over. With these simple improvements The Steamie was born.

At the same time I was developing the Steamie, I was also working on getting the Hotdog Ez Bun Steamer into a test market program that would have it hanging up in 50 to 100 grocery stores next to the Hotdog Buns in the bread aisle. This is where I always believed my product would be most successful. The distributor I was working with wanted me to send them 500 units for free to conduct the test program. In my retail career we always taught our salespeople not to devalue our products and services by discounting them. It was a tough pill to swallow, but after consulting with a few of my mentors I decided to give them the free product they were asking for. I always believed that my product would be most successful hanging up next to the Hotdog buns and at this point in the game the most important thing was to get my product on the shelf. After 3 months of negotiations I received an email that the distributor had decided NOT to go forward with the test program, stating that the economy was too bad to launch such an expensive product. What, a free $10 item is too expensive to test market! Once again the big deal eluded me and I was back to square one.