Barry Becher and Ed Valenti…

You may not know their names, but you absolutely know their product even though ads for it haven’t run for decades: The Ginsu Knife.

From 1978 to 1984, they sold more than $30 million dollars in kitchen knives via short TV ads, one $10 sale at a time. Their company was so successful that Warren Buffett came knocking and bought it from them in 1985.

($30 million is more like $150 million today. In 1981, you could buy a 3 bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for $150,000. Not a typo.)

How did Becher and Ed Valenti come to invent this amazing product?

They didn’t.

They found it for sale in a supermarket for a buck. It was called the Fetzer, named for the man who developed and manufactured it in Ohio.

The pair came up with a new name, a memorable demonstration, a juicy offer, and savvy media buying – and the rest as they say is history.

Amazingly, there is no recorded interview of these two marketing wizards anywhere on earth – except for here in the System Club Archive.

Harvard Business Review did a case study of them, but otherwise no one in the “marketing world” other that us ever bothered to ask them to tell their story.