Tom Gray is working to make 2015 the year when the Handy Camel gets over the hump.
Gray is the American and Canadian license holder of the Handy Camel, a durable bag clip with a handle shaped like a camel’s hump. The locally made product makes it simple to securely carry, pour and store any bulk-item bag weighing up to 40 pounds, whatever its unwieldy contents—fertilizer, bird seed, charcoal briquettes, you name it.
“A lot of people at trade shows will come up to us and say, ‘It’s a giant chip bag clip for big bags,’” Gray said. “They’ll laugh and say we took it from a Doritos bag.”
A native of New Zealand, Gray started the Handy Camel with his wife, Amy, after they moved from Australia to her hometown of Kansas City. They live on a 20-acre farm north of the Missouri River, where Gray discovered the worth of the Handy Camel.
“I saw a big need for the product,” Gray said. “I started using it on the farm and really fell in love with it.”
Before becoming a Handy Camel believer, Gray owned an Australian company that manufactured and marketed a variety of licensed consumer products. When he sold that successful business, “we made some very good money,” he said. “So we have used that to invest 100 percent in this brand.”
So far, Gray has put $450,000 into the Handy Camel, which he licensed from a German inventor. The money has paid for the product’s development and tooling, as well as an initial round of TV commercials and a string of appearances on the QVC home shopping network. Now the company is looking for a major investor or two to help push consumer awareness over the top. Gray estimates it’ll take another $950,000 for a wider rollout.
“I’ve already done the work of getting in front of retailers and having them very interested,” he said. “We now need to prove to them that we can make it fly off the shelf.”
That will be accomplished with more TV commercials for the Handy Camel—“When you see it working, it’s a no-brainer,” Gray said—and further exposure on QVC, where early next year Gray will herald the kitchen-pantry convenience of the new Handy Camel mini-clip for bags weighing 10 pounds or less.
“QVC is very excited,” Gray said. “They’ve already put in a big order of 15,000 total units, because we’ve got a lot better color choice and a lot better price—one large and two minis for $19.95.”
Currently, Handy Camel bag clips are being sold as a test in 40 Tractor Supply Co. stores and to online customers of Home Depot.
“We’ve obviously got a long way to go,” Gray said. “This is a tough and exciting business. We’ve done it before on a smaller scale in Australia, and we know we’ll get there. It’s just a bigger fish to fry, that’s all.”
