This weeks pitches on Dragons’ Den were:

• Tidy Tree Sack - Which is a “Two-in-One Christmas Tree Skirt & Tree Removal Bag”. Looking for £150K investment in return for 40% equity. I can see it selling, I’d buy one, but I don’t see why an investment of £150k would be needed. Nor do I believe that it would provide a good return for an investor.
• About Time - a board game in which players compete to win the most tokens before the end of the game by guessing closest to the year of an iconic event. It didn’t look like a good business opportunity at all as they were predicting losses for the first two years and a relatively small profit for the third year.
• Love Unzipped - was next but we hardly got to see any of the pitch. Turns out it’s an adult board game about relationships.
• Black Hole - Another board game which combined Scrabble with Monopoly, again not much of a pitch to comment on, but a terrible choice of name as they are never going to get noticed on search engines and may find it difficult to protect.
• ROSS - The Reverse Osmosis Sanitation System was like a breath of fresh air, a good pitch, a good idea, letters of intent and a clear understanding of their market. Best of all it’s a product that will save lives. I hope it works and I hope the investment gets their product out there saving lives. They walked away with an investment from all five of the Dragons giving them £50k for 10%.

What did you think of the pitches?

After a shorter than usual set of pitches we were treated to an update on the progress of several of the businesses that had pitched earlier in the series, they were:

• Yoodoo Doll from episode 2 is now being made in China, the packaging has be redesigned as suggested and the sales have tripled.
• Gaming Alerts from episode 2 for some reason Theo Paphitis hasn’t pulled out of this deal after due diligence so he’s now signed the cheque and moved them into his London offices.
• Cream Cutie from episode 5 is apparently now selling 12K bottle a month and has found a private investor to come on board. She still doesn’t seem to understand that no one doubts her ability, it’s the value of the investment that was in question.
• Midas Touch from episode 1 has rebranded and changed to focus to the gold plating of retail products (iPods for example) and is selling them in Harrods.
• Tangle Teezer from episode 3 is now apparently selling 1K per week.
• Concentrate from episode 3 doesn’t seem to be selling much, instead focusing on new ideas.
• Cuddle Dry from episode 3 found a private investor and is now expanding into pets! I think they ought to master one market before expanding, but they believe they are on target to hit the level of business they suggested in the den.
• Fit Fur Life from episode 7 is now busy fulfilling orders having brought in more stock.
• Ben the Bin from episode 4 has move to new premises, retooled and is taking lots of orders.
• Chocbox from episode 8 has lots of new retail orders and is shoring up it’s IP protection.

A shame they didn’t show any failures, not because I want to see people fail, but because I do think that there are people out there risking their homes on flawed ideas and it would be good to give them a reality check. What do you think?

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