ShamWow Guy

You've seen it on TV a million times, and maybe you've even considered buying it: ShamWow is the super-absorbent towel featured in one of the most popular infomercials ever made. It's all the work of Offer Shlomi, best known as Vince Offer, even bester known as simply "the ShamWow Guy." But the history behind Vince Offers innocent and funny infomercial, makes his appearances more sinister.

Offer Shlomi, known as Vince Offer or Vince Shlomi, is an Israeli-American infomercial pitchman, director, writer, and comedian. Offer's first major work was the 1999 comedy film The Underground Comedy Movie. Offer owns, produces, and appears in television commercials for his products "ShamWow!", an absorbent towel; the "Slap Chop", a kitchen utensil; a lint roller called the "Schticky"; a liquid cleaner called "InVinceable"; and another kitchen utensil called "Crank Chop". He has also officially advertised other products that he does not own, such as Quicky Grass.

#### Early Life

Offer Shlomi was born in Beersheva, Israel and grew up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York. As a child, he was fascinated by Crazy Eddie commercials. Offer would shovel his neighbors’ driveways as a teen, working until the night. He dropped out of high school when he was 17 and moved to Los Angeles, changing his name to Vince Offer.

In 2006, Offer began to market a cleaning product that he saw in flea markets, an absorbent towel that he called the "ShamWow!" The title of the product derives from the French pronunciation of the chamois, pronounced "shammy" in English. Offer visited the factory in Germany where the product is made, and he decided to incorporate that fact into the TV pitch. The advertisement, filmed in the summer of 2007 with a budget of $20,000, received critical praise.

Slate's Seth Stevenson praised Offer for his "impressive and subtle mastery of the pitchman's art" (with lines such as "you know the Germans always make good stuff"), and wondered if Offer's "abrasive manner might also mark a unique, new strategy in the annals of pitchdom." Stevenson compared Offer to earlier, "more upbeat" television pitchmen like Billy Mays and the Home Shopping Network hosts and concluded that Offer's "smooth-talking condescension" was more suited to the present "zeitgeist" than the "earnest fervor" of spokesmen like Mays and Ron Popeil.

Consumer Reports reported that the infomercial for "ShamWow!" initially featured Offer claiming that the product held "20 times its weight in liquid". Later, the infomercial was changed to Offer claiming the "ShamWow!" held "12 times its weight in liquid", then again to "10 times". Consumer Reports did its own test on the product and found that it does indeed hold 10 times its weight in liquid but no more.

Pitchman Billy Mays had been promoting a similar product called Zorbeez two years prior to Offer's "ShamWow!" product. Mays noted that the "ShamWow!" commercials use many of the same product demonstrations as the earlier-produced Zorbeez commercial. Popular Mechanics tested the absorbency of the two towel products and declared "ShamWow!" was the more effective of the two, but noted "If you have reusable cloth rags (and a roll of paper towels for backup), then neither product is necessary."

If you watched the video, everything from even the smallest details are pin point accurate. Take him throwing the ShamWow into the laundry, compared to the Zorbeez towel being thrown in the laundry, everything in the ad had to have been planned, and studied.

Upon seeing the infomercial, Mays got so furious that he decided to handle the situation like a WWE wrestler -- here's Mays calling Offer out in a radio interview, dismissing ShamWow as a clear knockoff, dubbing himself the Ultimate Pitchman and challenging Offer to a "pitch-off," which we can only assume is infomercial slang for a cage match.

#### Slap Chop

Perhaps wisely, Offer chose to avoid his legitimately mad opponent. Instead, he went about, and later, “invented" a kitchen utensil called Slap Chop ... and started marketing that by taking potshots at Quick Chop, an earlier, identical product also sold by Mays.

In December 2008, Offer, who had previously sold kitchen utensils at swap meets, appeared in another kitchen gadget infomercial, advertising the Slap Chop and the Graty. The Slap Chop is a hand-held chopping device with internal blades; to operate it, the user places it over a food item and slaps down the button on the top. The Graty is a cheese grater operated by placing the cheese inside and then turning the outside housing of the utensil which causes the cheese to be grated. Offer's aggressiveness and use of double entendres like "you're gonna love my nuts" have been noted by AdWeek, and, according to an Adweek blog, helped make Offer "the man who could beat Billy Mays at his own game."

Mays had been promoting a similar product set which included the Quick Chop utensil and the Quick Grater utensil prior to Offer's Slap Chop/Graty product set. Mays again noted that the Slap Chop commercials use many of the same demos as the earlier-produced Quick Chop commercial. Mays said in the same Adam Carolla radio show interview in February 2009 that Offer stole not only the Zorbeez product idea, but also the Quick Chop idea.

The commercial makes many references to his other two commercials for the ShamWow and the Slap Chop, with Offer saying many of his catchphrases. He also pokes fun at his 2009 arrest by posing for a fake mugshot.

Sources:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding\_Nemo
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vince\_Offer