Dallas Robinson was a prom-bound boy when he started to worry about his sunburned, cracked lips. The always-outdoors teenager had some serious doorstep demons. “I knew if I had a chance to kiss this girl, I had to do something about my dry lips,” Robinson says. “I tried all the lip balms on the market — and I hated them. They were waxy and tasted gross.” So like any budding entrepreneur, he dreamed a dream. “I thought, ‘How cool would it be to have lip balm come in a set, and you give your date one of the flavors?’ It would taste great, protect your lips and create a tingly effect when the two flavors connect. A kissing experience!” That ultimate dream wouldn’t wake up until college, but KISSTIXX has been kismet. Since its founding in 2010, Robinson and his business partner, Mike Buonomo, appeared on ABC’s “Shark Tank” (scoring an investment from Mark Cuban), are in talks with the nation’s top retailers, and now conduct product testing with their wives. Oh, smack!
I knew I’d kick myself if I didn’t give this a shot. So I used KISSTIXX for a business presentations class at UVU. My classmates went nuts, and the professor told me to stay after class. “It is one of the most scalable ideas to come though my class,” he told me, “and I’ll invest if you do it.” That’s when I knew we had legs.
We had no money for chemistry formulas. We contacted chemists all over the country. We got bids for $30,000 and thought, “Ain’t gonna happen.” So we told them the idea and said, “Look, this is going to be huge.” The chemists loved it, so we had them sign non-disclosure agreements and told them if they came up with the best formula, we’d go with them to fulfill our line. It created a competition of sorts — and they all did the initial work for free. That’s how much they believed in this idea.
We had a number of different thoughts on how to spell KISSTIXX. Three S’es? Two S’es? Does it look like a ticket company? Should we add an extra X? We wanted to create a new word — almost like Google did. But most of all, we wanted a word that would catch people off guard.
Being a startup is hard. We’re both married, and I have a little girl who is 14 months. In the beginning, we both got jobs working at WinCo stocking shelves from midnight to 7 a.m. We’d sleep for a couple hours, and then go back to work at KISSTIXX. When you’re chasing your dream, you do what it takes.
The atmosphere at KISSTIXXis crazy. Our staff has a blast. We have one team whose job is to research kissing events that we can sponsor. Their job is hilarious. Kissing Specialists, we call them.
So … “Shark Tank.” We were out in Austin, Texas, selling security systems to make money for KISSTIXX. Mike and I met up all the time to talk how to get it off the ground. We were sitting on the curb one day, and it hit us: reality TV. “Shark Tank” happened to have an open casting call two days later in Dallas. So we took the day off work, stood in line for nine hours and got 30 seconds to pitch. It was the “American Idol” of business.
It was a crazy long process. But we eventually made it to the final round of filming. We were the most nervous we’d ever been in our lives. Here we were pitching billionaires in front of millions of people. The last thing we wanted was to get torn to shreds on national television.
We practiced our pitch one million times.Oddly enough, no one else was practicing theirs. Idiots. They were all out drinking while we holed up in our hotel. But once we started pitching, the nerves just left. The sharks were cool to us. They loved the product. And when we got Barbara and Kevin to try it out with a kiss? Gold! We knew we’d make it on the air.
Mark Cuban is great.He’s involved, and we talk to him at least once a week. He sees the vision and understands that we’re fun with an edge — that we’re lighthearted with a touch of crazy.
People are surprised to find out this kissing company is run by two dudes. But nothing’s cooler than seeing your dream become reality. And hallelujah! We don’t have to work at WinCo anymore.
We practiced our pitch one million times. Oddly enough, no one else was practicing theirs. Idiots.