Suncoat Products

Yingchun Liu
Guelph, ON

The pitch

Yingchun Liu from Guelph, ON, pitched Suncoat Products in Season 10, Episode 19, asking the Dragons for $300K for 15% of the company.

Asked for$300K for 15%
Valuation$2Mimplied by the ask
OutcomeDealwith Michael Wekerle
Final deal$300K for 10%valued at $3Mplus a royalty: 10% royalty on sales for 10 years

Offers in the Den

Dragon	Offer	Result
Joe Mimran	Out - felt the branding was not strong enough for a highly competitive market	Out
Jim Treliving	Out - said he didn't know enough about the business	Out
Manjit Minhas	Out - felt distribution and marketing the concept would be too difficult	Out
Michael Wekerle	$300,000 for 10% equity plus a 10% royalty on sales for 10 years	Accepted
Michele Romanow	Advised taking Michael Wekerle's deal rather than making her own offer	Declined

Yingchun Liu, a chemist from Guelph, Ontario, pitched Suncoat Products, a line of water-based, non-toxic, low-odour nail polish for adults and peel-off nail polish for kids that she originally developed in her kitchen, asking $300,000 for 15 percent of the company. Products retail from $8 a bottle and are sold at London Drugs, Jean Coutu in Quebec, some Loblaw locations, and health food stores including Whole Foods; the company had done about $2.5 million in sales over the past few years, including about $500,000 (100,000 bottles) in the last 12 months, and Yingchun Liu was developing a water-based gel nail polish for the salon market, with a forecast of $750,000 in sales for the current year.

Joe Mimran, Jim Treliving, and Manjit Minhas went out, citing weak branding, unfamiliarity with the business, and the difficulty of marketing and distributing the product. Michael Wekerle offered $300,000 for 10 percent equity plus a 10 percent royalty on sales for 10 years; Michele Romanow encouraged Yingchun Liu to accept, and she did.

Pitch details from CBC’s Dragons’ Den pitch page.