LiveStrong Sales Record Broken...
As you may already know, Lance Armstrong was featured on the Oprah show on Feb. 11th accompanied by Sheryl Crow. It was their first TV interview together. I was able to catch most of the show and it was pretty cool. There were a couple of part of the show I really liked. One of the best parts was about a women with breast cancer who had previously been in remission for 5 years only to be rediagnosed. It was her dream of meeting Lance and Oprah made that possible. It was very touching. As well, I enjoyed Sheryl's song at the end of the show about Lance. Other than that, the bulk of the information contained in the show was kind of old news except for one thing. Lance announced he would attempt another victory at this years Tour de France. You can tell he's not only hit the big time (which was obvious), but he is also working the press, even more so than in the past. Making such an announcement on the Oprah show is truely a sign of mixing his athletic stardom with big time marketing. It's got that Hollywood spin-like feel to it. Anyway, it worked, as do most of the things Lance does.
With Oprah's support and her vast legion of viewer, the Lance Armstrong Foundation was able to break the singe day sales record of the LiveStrong wrist bands. The previous record was 382,000 sold in a day. With Oprah's help, that record was smashed with the new record standing at more than 900,000. This brings the total number of wrist bands sold to 33 million, not bad considering they only figured on selling 5 million a little less than a year ago.
Of course, with any good thing comes hangers on and rip off artists. Click the Read More link to hear about that.
So, people are realizing the money in these little band and many foundations have jumped on board with their own renditions of the band. Susan G. Komen foundation has their own, as well as every other Tom, Dick, and Harry foundation. I supposed you can't blame them for realizing a good thing and implementing it for the benefit of their cause, but it's the groups who sell them at a profit who really burn me.
I found a large number of resellers of said wrist band attempting to pawn them for $4.95 with a disclaimer stating all the bands were purchased from WWW.LAF.org. So, it's cool they didn't totally rip off the public and LAF by selling fakes, but I question what they plan to do with the $3.95 of profit from each sale. One site mentions they regularly donate more money to LAF and Susan G. Komen but don't state how much. Making them seem even more shady, they attempt to benefit from the LiveStrong name by using it in their URL (http://www.livestrongbracelets.net/). NOT COOL in my book.
A simple search in Google for "research wristbands" resulted in 67,000 hits, amazingly not one link on the first page of results were for WWW.LAF.org. I did find, however, there are wrist bands for the March of Dimes, Lupis Research Institute, and even one for a child who will probably die within the week.
Anyway, enough on this rant. Support who you choose, but be aware of fake causes, people, and websites sell for their profit, not that of the foundations.
With Oprah's support and her vast legion of viewer, the Lance Armstrong Foundation was able to break the singe day sales record of the LiveStrong wrist bands. The previous record was 382,000 sold in a day. With Oprah's help, that record was smashed with the new record standing at more than 900,000. This brings the total number of wrist bands sold to 33 million, not bad considering they only figured on selling 5 million a little less than a year ago.
Of course, with any good thing comes hangers on and rip off artists. Click the Read More link to hear about that.
So, people are realizing the money in these little band and many foundations have jumped on board with their own renditions of the band. Susan G. Komen foundation has their own, as well as every other Tom, Dick, and Harry foundation. I supposed you can't blame them for realizing a good thing and implementing it for the benefit of their cause, but it's the groups who sell them at a profit who really burn me.
I found a large number of resellers of said wrist band attempting to pawn them for $4.95 with a disclaimer stating all the bands were purchased from WWW.LAF.org. So, it's cool they didn't totally rip off the public and LAF by selling fakes, but I question what they plan to do with the $3.95 of profit from each sale. One site mentions they regularly donate more money to LAF and Susan G. Komen but don't state how much. Making them seem even more shady, they attempt to benefit from the LiveStrong name by using it in their URL (http://www.livestrongbracelets.net/). NOT COOL in my book.
A simple search in Google for "research wristbands" resulted in 67,000 hits, amazingly not one link on the first page of results were for WWW.LAF.org. I did find, however, there are wrist bands for the March of Dimes, Lupis Research Institute, and even one for a child who will probably die within the week.
Anyway, enough on this rant. Support who you choose, but be aware of fake causes, people, and websites sell for their profit, not that of the foundations.
posted by Tony Rocha at
2/20/2005
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