Want a new avenue to sell your products? Consider QVC.

By Cassie Kreitner

Entrepreneurs seeking new and innovative ways to distribute their products and create more revenue should consider QVC, the world’s leading home shopping network and online retailer.

For those whose products match QVC's customer-focused principles of quality, value and convenience, QVC can be a new channel of distribution for a company’s product line. Showcasing products on QVC can expand awareness of your brand dramatically, as the channel's 179 million phone calls and $7 billion in net sales in 2006 illustrate.

Tarte Cosmetics, a New York City cosmetics company that focuses on healthy products for the skin, partnered with QVC in 2005, almost five years after its products first debuted in stores.

Founder Maureen Kelly decided to expand her product line to the home shopping network after she realized “it’s a way of exposing my brand to millions of women at once. It’s also an incredible outlet because I get to tell my story without having it watered down or changed in any way,” she says. “I also get to reach a larger and more diverse audience.”

Before agreeing to the partnership, Kelly wanted to make sure her brand would be able to handle the inventory and operations changes that would occur once Tarte was introduced on QVC. Since the channel is so large in scope, she knew that the brand’s reputation would be at stake if something went wrong. “We didn’t want to mess up,” she says.

Today, Kelly typically appears on the channel twice a month to promote Tarte, while the QVC website also features over 80 Tarte products that can be purchased online. Tarte, which is sold in department stores, high-end boutiques and beauty stores, takes advantage of the wide audience and demographics of QVC viewers. Since the channel reaches approximately 96 percent of all U.S. homes with cable, women who might not have access to Tarte products in stores are now able to purchase them through QVC, where the audience is typically older than Tarte’s in-store customers.

QVC is such a lucrative opportunity for any company because it doesn’t charge a fee to evaluate a product or sell airtime to promote it. If a product is chosen to appear on the channel, a minimum purchase order of $30,000 to $35,000 per item at wholesale cost is placed.

With a set format of one product selling for eight minutes, or eight products grouped together in a one-hour segment, it is easy to see how quickly sales can add up on QVC. The company website says it is interested in products that are “highly demonstrable, solve problems, make life easier, appeal to a broad audience and have unique features and benefits [that] are of interest to QVC.”

Beyond beauty products, QVC can help any small business succeed. Over 1,600 products are featured each week, with themed hourly programming targeting different audiences. Product searches are conducted multiple times annually to evaluate new products that will continue to attract an “upscale discerning, and loyal customer base” to QVC and QVC.com.

Cassie Kreitner is a freelance writer in Syracuse, New York