Bob and Lisa are going crazy over a pair of apples - gooey, jumbo-size apples thickly coated with caramel and pecans.
Bob: "Mmm, good!"Lisa: "So sweet!"
Bob: "We're talking major chewy caramel!"
Lisa: "Oh, it's good!:
It's not Noel Coward, but it works: In four minutes, they sell 1,400 boxes of Mrs. Prindable's old-fashioned caramel apples, each box containing two apples, to customers watching on the QVC home-shopping cable television channel. At $19.55 each, that's $27,370 in sales. Eight hundred more customers are on the phones.
QVC, the live, round-the-clock electronic mall of jewelry, clothing and household cleaners, now has another typical mall attraction: food. The edibles run from steaks and olive oil to candy, cheese, fudge mix and asparagus. Food joined the lineup a year ago and is only a small part of the channel's $1.6 billion business, but QVC expects food sales to grow nearly 40 percent this year.
"We are competing with everybody who sells food, from catalogues to department stores," says Danielle Rudolph, the QVC food buyer. "Instead of shelf space, we have air time."
Maximizing air time is what television retailing is about. On this night, the prime-time hour from 7 to 8 p.m. is devoted to sweets. Bob and Lisa - Bob Bowersox and Lisa Robertson - are the hosts, QVC's equivalent of network anchors. Seven minutes into the show, they are still touting the apples. Sales reach 2,100 packages.
Tom Okuniewski, the line producer, acts as ringmaster and store manager for the program, which like all QVC shows is unscripted and unrehearsed. It is his job to decide how long a product stays on the air.
Okuniewski, who likes to say that he has worked more hours of live television than Milton Berle, sits in front of computer screens that keep track of sales, inventory and customers on the phones. He stays with the apples, a $1 million product for QVC last year, because
sales are strong, and inventory is
still high."Bite into it, Bob," Okuniewski says into his headset, which transmits into the hosts' ears.
Bob follows orders and goes, "Mmmm."
At 11 minutes, 2,700 packages of apples have been sold, and more than 500 callers are on the line. "We're moving on," Okuniewski tells the hosts.
Next item: Junior's New York raspberry cheesecake, for $23.34. In just under 4 minutes 535 are sold.
Selling food on television is not like selling jewelry or a mop. Hosts have to do more than talk up a product. They have to eat and emote. They need a talent for making what Ms. Rudolf, the food buyer, calls "a yum-yum face." In other words, they have to communicate what food tastes like.
"The facial expression, more than anything, is what sells food," says Bowersox, who was a singer and a chef before joining QVC, where his weekly show, "In the Kitchen With Bob," runs each Sunday.
"With candy, you want to look sort of dreamy. Your eyes roll up in back of your head and close a little bit. You sell angel-hair pasta with garlic entirely differently. Your face is more open."
"Making people hungry" is the mantra of Bill Lane, the QVC vice president and former Bloomingdale's executive, who put food on the channel.
"If you didn't get hungry from food you couldn't taste or smell, there wouldn't be food in every woman's magazine," Lane says. "But we're not like a magazine, where they paint the food and make it look delicious. We show real food, right out of the oven, and we have to be experts in how we describe it."
He thanks Bloomingdale's, where he was merchandise manager for gourmet food, for teaching him the power of presentation.
QVC is still experimenting with selling food on television. Besides shows devoted entirely to food, the channel also offers food in shows that sell cookbooks and cookware.