[00:00:01] Speaker A: Want to protect your business, the time is near. You've given it heart, now get it in gear it's Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: I'm Richard Gerhardt, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks and copyrights.
[00:00:20] Speaker C: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart. Not an attorney, but I work at Gearhart Law doing the marketing, and I have my own startups.
[00:00:25] Speaker D: Welcome to passage to profit everyone.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: The road to entrepreneurship, where we talk with startups, small businesses, and discuss the intellectual property that helps them flourish.
[00:00:35] Speaker C: And now we are on to our next presenter. Alex nice. With such a cool name. It's called hostage tape.
[00:00:42] Speaker D: I almost wanted to say it first. You could say it hostage tape.
[00:00:46] Speaker E: Okay, Alex, got to get some grit in there. Hostage tape.
[00:00:50] Speaker C: Alex, tell us all about it.
[00:00:51] Speaker E: I'm sure the first thing that everybody's thinking right now is, why would you call it hostage tape? So I'm going to get to that in a moment. So what is hostage tape? We've really built it as it's the strongest, comfortable mouth tape on the planet.
[00:01:04] Speaker F: Okay.
[00:01:04] Speaker D: Mouth tape.
[00:01:05] Speaker E: It's mouth tape. So on my face right now, I've got a nose strip. So this is actually our secondary product. So when people go to the site and they buy mouth tape, we give them an add on, an upsell to be able to use our nose strips, too. Because really, when you're talking about keeping your mouth shut, then people's minds, their questions always go, what about my nose? Because I've got a deviated septum, or maybe I have trouble breathing out my nose. So that we thought, well, let's come up with maybe a cooler way to have a nose strip. So when you sleep, as we get older, we tend to sleep with our mouth open, and that's not good at all.
[00:01:41] Speaker C: So we should keep our mouth shut when we're sleeping.
[00:01:44] Speaker E: Yeah. So that's the issue. The issue comes down to just keeping your mouth shut.
[00:01:47] Speaker F: Right.
[00:01:47] Speaker E: We want to be breathing through a nose most of the time, except when we're talking or we're eating. So now let me get back to why did we call it hostage tape? Okay, there's two really core reasons why we did it. One was we're tapping into this core emotion that people feel by not being able to get sleep because of their partner or because of themselves, they feel held hostage. Now, secondly, on the other side of that coin is funny story was when I first discovered malletaping, I just went and I bought some just really cheap stuff. I would put it on my mouth at night and I would warn my kids, hey, I'm going to warn you. I'm going to put some tape on my mouth. It's going to look like I'm being held hostage, so don't freak out. I was inspired by so James Nestor wrote a best selling book called Breath, and he talks about mouth taping, and you could just get like, three M MicroPort tape, surgical tape. You can get it really anywhere on Amazon or at a Walgreens or something, right? And so I just bought some of that and tried it. It's really uncomfortable. It doesn't always work for everybody if you have facial hair. So when I did that, you look like you're being held hostage. Right. So that's kind of the joke. When you do it, you look really goofy. You look funny.
[00:02:57] Speaker D: You've been kidnapped or something.
[00:03:00] Speaker E: You totally do.
[00:03:01] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:03:01] Speaker E: And so in this era of, like, liquid death, right? If you guys know what liquid death is, it's this up and coming brand who they've made their name on flipping, marketing on its head, going the other direction with it and getting attention. And so we said, that's what we're going to do. We're going to take this concept of hostage tape and lean into those things I talked about. But we know that it's going to get people's attention. It's going to inspire men to start the conversation, to think, what the heck is this? And anybody that sees it remembers it.
[00:03:33] Speaker D: Why just men, though? I would think that all genders would be interested in hostage tape, right?
[00:03:38] Speaker E: Well, okay.
[00:03:39] Speaker D: Like a lady's version or a guy's version?
[00:03:42] Speaker E: Well, certainly from my point of view, I leaned into, the demographic that I resonate with was all right. For most of us men, the issue with this in general is a lot of people will say just use a little strip or just a little bit of gentle tape. But the problem is that doesn't work. That doesn't hold for a lot of us men, right, that have maybe strong jaws. We just pop that right open. So it's not good enough. That might work for some people, doesn't work for everybody.
[00:04:07] Speaker C: And I can see how the name would appeal more to men because they're, like, always watching the Bruce Willis movies.
[00:04:13] Speaker D: I don't want it for sure, but men may be snoring more than women. I don't know if there's any statistics.
[00:04:19] Speaker E: There are. Yeah. Statistically, like 75% of them are men. It's mostly men, but certainly women are, too. But also on the flip side of it, you could look at it and say, well, women would be buying this for their husbands, too, and they certainly do. We just wanted to make sure we were leaning into and we were marketing to this segment of men that, quite honestly, men are certainly cheaper to market to the cost of advertising for women. Middle aged women is a heck of a lot more expensive than it is to men. So we said we're going to lean into that. We want to lean into men who we are and make something masculine that you don't see. You do not see this kind of branding out there on a product like this for men. And so we did it, and it's.
[00:04:59] Speaker C: Taken on think dave wants to say.
[00:05:02] Speaker D: Yeah, Dave, take that hostage tape off.
[00:05:04] Speaker F: And say what you're going to know. I would like to try it because I read something one time where they said the average human being swallows like a thousand spiders in their lifetime.
Their mouth is open.
I'll let Alex speak to that. But yeah, I mean that's another variation.
[00:05:27] Speaker D: On the walk thing.
[00:05:28] Speaker F: You can eat spiders and good idea. Spiderwalk.
[00:05:32] Speaker E: I like that.
[00:05:33] Speaker C: But it works with facial hair, right?
[00:05:35] Speaker E: It does, yeah, exactly. And that's one of the really key differentiators is that with this tape, we designed it in a way that it's going to work with facial hair. It's going to be able to still adhere to whiskers, all of that which most men have some sort of facial hair. And so that's always the first question men will ask is, I can't mouth tape because I've got facial hair.
[00:05:54] Speaker D: Rest assured. But this then basically stops snoring, right. So even if you're sleeping by yourself, you would still want to try this just because wake themselves up when they snore.
[00:06:05] Speaker E: So the more important thing is it is mouth breathing, right. So when you keep your mouth shut, it can reduce and stop snoring for many people. It doesn't always stop snoring for everybody because some people still make noises in their nasal passage. It still happens. Right. But really the most important thing is that we are not breathing to our mouth, we're breathing to our nose. So that's at the end of the day, the most important piece of why the tape exists and what it's trying to do.
[00:06:33] Speaker C: Yeah, because I think to Dave's point, you don't know what's going in your mouth.
[00:06:37] Speaker F: So Alex, are you getting more oxygen that way too, in terms of healing the correct way. So that make a big difference in and of itself.
[00:06:44] Speaker E: Yeah, the studies say that you get up to almost 20% more oxygen and it really simply comes down to this. It's the relationship of CO2 to oxygen. And what most people don't understand, I mean, even I didn't understand it until I learned it, was that we need CO2 in our body in order to take in oxygen into our muscles. So if we're mouth breathing and we're exhaling too much CO2 and that's leaving our body, then we have less ability to take that oxygen into our muscles. There's a one for one exchange of CO2 to oxygen, right. So think about that. Now if I shut my mouth and the amount of CO2 in my body is at a good amount now, the oxygen I am breathing is able to go into my muscles.
[00:07:29] Speaker C: Oh, that's interesting.
[00:07:30] Speaker F: Fascinating.
[00:07:31] Speaker D: Oh, that's another reason not to be a mouth breather.
[00:07:33] Speaker C: Right, but how are you selling this? What's your main channel of commerce for this?
[00:07:37] Speaker E: We purposely did not go on Amazon. In fact, Amazon actually just banned mouth tape. So we can't even get on Amazon. We're in the process of trying to work with them on it because ironically, our tape is actually FDA approved. We have a class one FDA approval on the tape, but we sell primarily on shopify. So we've got a shopify, people go to the site and we spend a lot of money on Facebook marketing.
[00:08:01] Speaker D: And so you also have though you're wearing right now. So for our listeners who want to go to our YouTube channel Passage to Profit Show and they want to see Alex with a piece of tape over his nose that also helps when people.
[00:08:14] Speaker E: Look at the mountain, one of their next natural questions is, well, what about my nose? What if I've got a deviated septum or I'm having trouble breathing out of it? So we just figured, like, all right, as a business, how can we increase the order value while also giving people a really valuable product? Because now they trust us. And we just thought, all right, well, let's take a nose strip and make it look really cool with the same branding that we have.
[00:08:36] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:08:37] Speaker D: What about earplugs?
[00:08:38] Speaker E: Yeah, we talked about it. It's certainly in the realm of the things that we want to do. We're trying to find all these different ways that we can help improve sleep in a very non invasive way.
[00:08:49] Speaker C: Yeah, I like that. So do you have any testimonials from anybody that choose your product?
[00:08:54] Speaker E: Oh, yes. So if you go to Hotchestape.com and go to the reviews, go there and look at that. We've got over maybe 2500 reviews at this point, but a lot of reviews. And I think the most common term that you're going to see, and Dave actually mentioned it earlier, is life changing. When people discover Maltaping for the first time, most people describe it as being life changing for them because now they're actually getting sleep.
[00:09:18] Speaker F: Right?
[00:09:19] Speaker E: And sleep is probably the most valuable thing that we're all getting or not getting that can really make the biggest impact on our lives on a daily basis. So think about that, right? If you're getting bad sleep and it's stacking over and over and over again, and then when you finally start to get good sleep, it really jolts you and you realize how poor you've been sleeping up to that point.
[00:09:40] Speaker C: Wow, that's excellent. Well, again, the website is hostagetape.com. Thank you very much, Alex.
[00:09:48] Speaker B: Before we go, I'd like to thank the Passage to profit team. Noah Fleischmann, our producer, Alicia Morrissey, our program director. Our podcast can be found tomorrow. Anywhere you find your podcast, just look for The Passage to Profit Show. And don't forget to like us on Facebook and Instagram. And remember, while the information on this program is believed to be correct, never take a legal step without checking with your legal professional. First Gearhart Law is here for your patent, trademark and copyright needs. You can find
[email protected] and contact us for a free consultation. Take care everybody. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week. It's.
