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Mediak
Moves Media
Charles, Darrell, and Junnie Create Their Own Niche
If Mediak LLC
executives Charles and Junnie Sublett didn’t
already know that they were onto something good with their line
of Kids Personalized Music CDs, five staunch businesswomen at a
British trade show squashed all doubt. Charles Sublett was demonstrating
to them the Mediak catalog of fun, educational and spiritual tunes
for kids. The seven-plus song albums on compact disc allow a child’s
name to be interwoven dozens of times into a number of enchanting
musical stories.
These businesswomen at the Baby Expo in Birmingham, England were
seemingly impressed with what they were hearing. They nodded to
the music and asked pointed questions. Then Charles began playing “Jesus
Loves You.” The gospel inspired album, copyrighted by the
four year old company (as are all its albums and tunes), began
filling the air with its multiple female and male professional
singers trading lines and harmonizing beautifully.
Suddenly, one of the women began crying during the middle of a
song. Soon another started to weep, and then yet another. Before
the song ended, all five ladies were in tears, standing there on
the trade show floor. “I keep a box of Kleenexes tucked away
at shows because that tends to happen every once in a while,” Sublett
said. “Sometimes, I get the tissues out before playing ‘Jesus
Loves You’ and say, ‘I think you might be needing one
or two of these after you hear this next one.’ And then when
they hear it, they know what I mean. It’s not a sad album.
It’s just really well done. It’s moving in a positive
way.”
But here’s an even more incredible story. There was an eight
year old autistic boy in Tampa, FL, who had never spoken his name
before hearing it on his Mediak CD. One day when Mom came to pick
the boy up from his weekly therapy session, she put the disc in
the car stereo on the way home, and to her amazement, her son pointed
to the radio and said his name for the first time.
What’s more is that the product has become a grass roots
phenomenon among the parental community of autistic children. One
Mediak dealer in Arizona gets enough business from this niche that
he donates part of his regular profits to autistic charities.
“There simply is no other product like ours on the market
that seems to get kids to react to hearing their names like they
do with our songs,” Junnie Sublett said.
Broadcast on Web
Mediak has partnered with around 100 websites to sell Kids Personalized
Music CDs. Quite conveniently, web marketers can sell the albums
without major changes to their backend technology.
Mediak provides an I-Frame to the website that allows customers
to select the album, pick the child’s name to be printed,
identify song tracks and preview the whole package before purchase.
To make the songs available to the website’s customer for
a listening preview, the tunes are actually downloaded from a facility
in Louisville, KY. In the end, compact discs are then printed and
shipped out to the customer.
“Just for fun, sometimes I visit one of our web retail partners
from a place like South Africa,” said Charles, from his office
in New Albany, IN, “and listen to one of our songs come over
the web clear as day and think about the fact that it’s actually
being streamed just across the river in Louisville, KY. That’s
astonishing to me.”
In the future, Mediak plans to offer web retailers the ability
to offer downloads that the customers can burn from their own computers.
The company, which will be redesigning www.mediak.com in the coming
months, also plans to offer retail entrepreneurs a full end to
end ecommerce and web design service package to complement its
Kids Personalized Music CDs offer. “The website has opened
international prospects for us, whereby in the past it was just
domestically related,” Junnie Sublett said. “We have
nine countries going on 10 right now.”
High-Tech Sales
System for Brick & Mortar
The Subletts
readily admit they didn’t invent the wheel.
After all, cassette tapes have been on the market for quite some
time, allowing parents to give their child a storytelling arrangement
of songs that incorporate the youngster’s name in the music.
But the couple certainly did modernize the process in a way that
has caught the attention of retailers around the globe.
Mediak has made the sales process easier, more cost effective and
highly intuitive. In order to sell the CDs offline, a retail store
or mall kiosk merchant can purchase Mediak’s affordable on
demand CD burning and label printing machine. And since all of
the music and names are stored in the compact unit, the only remotely
significant space the reseller needs is for a box of blank CDs.
“What we brought to the game was computerization,” the
chief executive said.
“Because of the software that we’ve
developed, we have over 2,000 potential names that can be applied
to the music in an on demand retail atmosphere. The names that come
with our product, according to our calculations, cover 97 percent
of the U.S. population.”
Interestingly, Mediak has a deal with Sam’s Club that lets
authorized resellers set up a product stand in one of the mega
grocer’s outlets. The Mediak dealers use UPC coded CDs that
shoppers can effortlessly place in their grocery carts and cash
out on Sam’s Club registers. The reseller will receive a
regular check for the invoice he or she builds up.
“Most stores and kiosks pay for their initial investment in
the system in about a month,” Sublett said. “The system
allows the retailer to setup a listening station for the customer.
If you really encourage customers to have a listen like some of our
dealers do and promote the product, you can have the system paid
off in a week. We’ve seen such fast returns happen with our
more enthusiastic retail partners.”
In terms of the CD burn and print systems themselves, they are
built in-house by Mediak staffers. The systems allow dealers to
burn up to three different CDs simultaneously in only three minutes,
granting customers a quick gratification.
Moving forward, dealers pay Mediak $5 per the number of burns that
they order. The retailer can buy just a handful or dozens of burns
at a time. There’s no minimum number that need to be purchased.
Most of the albums have at least seven songs and normally retail
for $20-$25. That’s an extremely lucrative profit margin.
It should also be noted that Darrell Walisser, director of development
at Mediak, and a top notch support staff are available to work
with new or prospective retail partners on getting their CD sales
off the ground and flying.
“Whatever hand holding you need, we’ll provide,” Charles
said. “And if the dealer has an idea, they can talk to our
graphics and art people. They’ll design whatever it is for
no extra charge.”
One of the early challenges that the Subletts experienced was the
fact that many names are pronounced one way by some people and
a different way by others. Names like Anna, Andrea or Madeleine
can be verbalized differently.
“And people pronounce names differently from one region to
another,” Junnie said.
“We had to add some pronunciations
to our offering because kids don’t react to their names unless
the person saying it, or in our case singing it, pronounces it the
way that Mommy or Daddy does. We also learned that we needed to have
both formal and shortened names, for example, Sam and Sammy and Ben
and Benjamin, available for grandparents and parents with those needs.
Now, we’ve got nearly everyone covered.”
Worth mentioning is the fact that the songs on the Kids Personalized
Music CDs line are written and composed by professionally awarded
musicians. The professional vocalists have sung every single name
available in the system.
Each album is a mix of tempos, teaching the child rhyme and verse;
helping them learn speech, music and aspects of growing up. The
tunes educate the child about animals, colors, how to clean up
around the house, how to pick up their toys, etc.
For more customization than simply having the child’s name
printed on the CD, a three line message can be added. A birthday
or a Christmas note or something in the neighborhood of “You’re
So Special” or “Amber, We Love You. Grandma & Grandpa.”
“When you combine the name in the music and the message directed
to the child,” Charles said, “it becomes a personalized
and powerful gift.”
There are more than a handful of different albums to offer your
online or offline marketplace. Along with the previously mentioned, “Jesus
Loves You,” there’s, “You Are An Angel” for
infants, “Your Are My Friend,” for kids aged 1-7, a “Birthday,” disc, “Christmas
Is Coming” and “My Chanukah,” among others.
“These are great stocking stuffers for the holidays,” Charles
Sublett said. “This is the first year where we are going to
be able to seriously market ‘My Chanukah,’ as we didn’t
really have a lot of time last year in its introductory season. We
are very excited about it.”
There’s also a line of sports oriented discs that let the
child imagine he or she is a star football, basketball, baseball
or hockey player. In some cases, an Air Force jet flies over a
stadium at the beginning of the contest, the National Anthem is
sung and the play by play announcer calls the game in which the
boy or girl ends up being the hero.
And finally, Mediak is rolling out versions of its product
line in Spanish. Charles said that it took two years to
find the right Spanish singers. He visited Spain, Monterrey,
Mexico, and other destinations in order to find the right
voices and performers that were needed to make the Spanish
versions as professional and powerful as the ones in English.
“I think
the growing Hispanic market here in America is really going to
take to our products,” he said. “I am very excited
about the potential in the Spanish speaking global market as well.”
Contact Mediak LLC for more information:
Main Office:
2704 Paoli Pike
New Albany, IN 47150
Tel.: 1-800-797-7420 or 812-981-2750
Fax: 812-981-0984
Email: info@mediak.com
Website: www.mediak.com
General Inquiries and Retail Sales:
Contact: Hannah Gonzalez
Tel.: 812-981-2750
Fax: 812-981-0984
Email: hgonzalez@mediak.com
Prospective Dealers and Business Opportunities
Contact: Junnie Sublett
Tel.: 812-923-1166
Cell: 828-231-7760
Email: jsublett@mediak.com
Distributorship and Multi-Site Enquiries:
Contact: Charles Sublett
Tel.: 812-923-1166
Cell: 828-231-7725
Email: csublett@mediak.com
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