SPRINGVILLE — Hal Wing and his Little Giant Ladder Systems are believed to have re-invented the conventional stepladder. Now he's hoping a concerted infomercial marketing effort will help the company climb back on top of the ladder market.
Little Giant recently introduced eight new product lines, and the company has built a sound stage inside the Springville plant to produce 30-minute infomercials designed to boost ladder sales. They are hoping to recreate the infomercial-fueled success of the original Little Giant articulated ladder.
The first new infomercial touting the innovations in the new Select Step stepladder is scheduled to debut in August, and Wing said he is in the process of hiring 100 new employees to meet the anticipated demand for the new product.
"I've always gone against conventional wisdom," Wing said. "We decided rather than hunker down we would ready to ride the curve as the country comes out of the recession. We are just totally going against the flow."
Wing is hoping that catchy names like Select Step, SumoStance and MicroBurst, as well as innovations such as "adjustable outriggers to increase stability" and a "magnetized utility tray to hold tools and screws" will generate increased sales.
The idea is to duplicate the success of Little Giant's articulated ladder, which Wing first introduced in 1972, when he would solicit orders from home and garden shows and then fill them from the carport of his Springville home.
"When I first created the articulated ladder, they told me I was nuts, that the ladder was too complicated and that nobody would buy one," Wing said. Instead, he built a successful business, thanks largely to one of the most successful television informercials ever made.
When the patent on that ladder expired, the market was flooded with imitations, so Wing said his company took the ladder back to the drawing board.
"We started reinventing the stepladder about 31/2 years ago," Wing said. "We said, 'Let's see what we can do to make the ladder safer and better and more useful.'"
The results are built into a variety of new ladder products Little Giant has introduced over the last year.
"We applied for 27 patents just last year," said company CEO N. Ryan Moss. The Select Step alone has seven patents pending, according to the company's promotional materials.
The company is relying on the new infomercial, created at the in-house sound stage, starring Wing himself, to sell enough ladders to justify expanding the current Springville work force from 300 to 400. Moss said the plant had as many as 500 employees during the "heights of the sales frenzy created by the first infomercial, but that's not sustainable in the long run."
The new products will be available in hardware stores, at trade shows, on the Internet and, most importantly, by phone orders generated by the infomercial campaign.
"The best marketing we do is via video," Moss said. "That infomercial made the product famous."
At the same time, Wing recognizes that selling ladders is an uphill struggle.
"Most people use the same ladders their fathers and their grandfathers use," he said. "Still, the ladder is older than the wheel, and look what we've done with wheels."
e-mail: mhaddock@desnews.com