A few months ago, I was talking with my smart girlfriend Gail about the poor quality of so many consumer products these days, and I admitted I'd been wrestling with Flippy's retail price. Like a lot of small businesses, we'd had to raise prices this year just to make any money at all — but I still believed the value was there.

So many products in our category are cheap, poorly made knockoffs of our concept. We, on the other hand, had even earned one of Amazon's hard-to-get badges: "customers usually keep this item." Flippy is made in factories monitored for worker health and safety, using 100% new, fresh foam and custom-dyed textiles. We ship it full-sized — never mashed into a tube and degraded — so it arrives in perfect shape, ready to use right out of the box. And much of our supply chain is US-based, so we help employ Americans across the US.

Since we sold out on QVC in November 2018, we've sold hundreds of thousands of Flippies. That means some customers have been using the same one for eight years. Put another way, owning a Flippy costs them roughly $5 a year — under 50 cents a month — to use every single day. At about $40, it's essentially free on a per-use basis after the first year.

All of this lined up with what Gail and I had been talking about: how we were both trying not to buy a continuous stream of crap. It's hard on the environment and short-sighted about what it does to your discretionary income over time. Then Gail said something that made me laugh out loud.

Isn't that perfect? Cry once — and then use a well-made product for years and years. It's just the smart thing to do if you can.

That's our whole philosophy with Flippy and as long as I'm still running the company it always will be.

Cheers-