Watch eCreamery try to close a “sweet deal” on Shark Tank (Video)

The co-founders of Omaha-based eCreamery appeared Friday on ABC’s Shark Tank, pitching the five “sharks” for a $250,000 investment in exchange for 33 percent of their company. “Who doesn’t love ice cream?” Abby Jordan opened the pitch. “However, no one in the $23 billion ice cream industry is positioning ice cream as a gift.” Ecreamery,…

(Click the video above to watch eCreamery’s appearance on Shark Tank. The video is queued to its pitch.)

The co-founders of Omaha-based eCreamery appeared Friday on ABC’s Shark Tank, pitching the five “sharks” for a $250,000 investment in exchange for 33 percent of their company.

“Who doesn’t love ice cream?” Abby Jordan opened the pitch. “However, no one in the $23 billion ice cream industry is positioning ice cream as a gift.”

Ecreamery, an online custom ice cream and gelato shop, plans to put the investment towards a production facility, an operation currently being run out of their brick and mortar store in Omaha’s Dundee district. “We really need the sharks so we can build this into the huge, multi-million-dollar business that we know it can be,” Becky App said on the show.

ECreamery got its start in 2007 with help from investor Mark Hasebroock, who put $600,000 into the company in return for a 70 percent stake. This fact, revealed by Jordan on the show, didn’t sit well with some of the sharks.

We’ll keep the lid on whether or not any of the sharks ate up what the co-founders called a “sweet deal,” but we will say the sharks dug into product samples with delight. “The best ice cream I’ve ever had, bar none,” real estate mogul Barb Corcoran said.

This hopeful positive response to its product was one of the reasons the co-founders chose to participate in the show, which was filmed in June in Los Angeles. “The exposure that custom ice cream gifts even exist will be a win for us,” App said in our recent interview.

In anticipation for that exposure – Fridays’ episode attracted 5.9 million viewers, according to HitFix – eCreamery has redirected its homepage to a 48-hour promotional site that encourages “no more vanilla gifts.” The site features comedic videos of a couple giving each other gifts, and is tied to a Facebook campaign that encourages visitors to share a “story of how giving or receiving a vanilla gift has gone wrong.”

To watch eCreamery’s pitch, tune into the 22-minute mark of the episode (queued in the video above).

 

 

Credits: Video from hulu.com. Screenshot from nomorevanillagifts.com.

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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