Background:
Everyday, men in plaid shirts thank the stars for FiberFix, founded and invented in 2012 by Eric Quinn and Spencer Child—as they should.
We would say we liked FiberFix before it was cool—but that would imply it wasn’t cool at some point—and it always was. So instead, we’ll tell you the meet-cute of FiberFix and Harmon Brothers.
When we were working on a campaign for VidAngel, we came up with the concept of shooting hundreds of paintballs at a family as a metaphor for all the swear words catapulting onto you from the tv.
We searched high and low for something strong enough to protect the actors from those paintballs so our ad wouldn’t, y’know, send an innocent family to the hospital. The answer to our prayers was the strong-as-steel repair tape, FiberFix. *Cue angel music inside your head.*
Products rarely hold up to the hefty claims they make, but FiberFix did. It was the superhero of repair tapes, so much so that it saved our first paintball VidAngel campaign—and we weren’t the only ones impressed by this duct-tape-on-steroids product. When FiberFix was asked to be featured on Shark Tank in 2014, they were baffled because no one on the team had even applied. Some loyal fan of FiberFix apparently submitted for them, determined to give FiberFix the limelight they deserved.
As Spencer told us, Shark Tank gave FiberFix a big burst of sales, but it wasn’t sustainable growth. In fact, it created new backend problems with staffing, supplies, etc. The FiberFix team discovered they needed campaign growth they could control. Turns out, a Harmon Brothers ad was exactly what they were looking for.
The Campaigns:
If you’ve only seen one Harmon Brothers campaign, it was probably this one. In the first few seconds a lovable, mustache-wearing hick drives a car with a duct taped roll-cage off a cliff. Not surprisingly, it crashes to bits. Then you see the same set-up, but this time inside a FiberFix wrapped cage—and the cage stays together—protecting the car, and undeniably proving FiberFix is "strong as steel."
A second ad for the campaign is filled with redneck jokes, fun visuals, an annoyingly accurate reenactment of what it's like to fix the plumbing for a kitchen sink, along with all the various uses for FiberFix. All of it was made possible because FiberFix is an incredible product that lives up to its promise.
About five days after launch, the initial video went viral. It was like the Redneck ad version of Fast and Furious. In that short time, FiberFix went from 0 ecommerce sales to 5,000+ online purchases. We tried to push it via ad-spend, but we didn’t even have to—viewers were pushing it for us. We were stoked for what this would mean for FiberFix.
And then, Facebook had a global outage associated with their ad manager. We woke up the next day and…suspense….more suspense……the video ad with already over 16 million mostly organic views just disappeared off of Facebook.
Everyone on the Harmon Brothers team was—pardon our french—freaking out. We did some low-key detective work and found out that it was indeed a Facebook glitch. We refused to let FiberFix down, so we wiggled our way up to the VP of Facebook at the time to see what he could do. To nobody's surprise, it was nothing. We talked to lawyers, and looked for any way to save the momentum of our first video.
Finally, the only option left was to re-upload the video. Round two gained organic traction, but as we suspected, it didn’t match the virality of the first ad release. Of course, that didn’t mean we'd give. We were invested in the product, the founders, and the campaign. The Harmon Brothers team delivered yet another video ad funded our of our pocket. And we're happy to say all those efforts paid off. Their online sales grew to a million bucks a year, and found even more success on Amazon and in retail. In 2018, the FiberFix team agreed to an acquisition by adhesive industry titan J-B Weld...we're told "for a very satisfying price."
