Howie Busch, an inventor from Roslyn, was admiring his wife’s robe after she took a shower when he had an idea: “Why isn’t there anything for me to wear after the shower?”
So the entrepreneur gave his tailor some fresh towels and asked him to turn them into a hoodie and sweatpants. Impressed with the result, but not the look, he had sweatshirt material sewn onto the outside. The gear — a robe on the inside, sweats on the outside — became the prototype for DudeRobe, a product he pitched on ABC’s Shark Tank on Sunday night.
“When I came up with the idea for DudeRobe, I knew I had something special,” Busch said in a Kickstarter campaign that raised $657,498 to get the product off the ground last year. “Something was just different. I couldn’t stop thinking about it…I just had to get it to market.”
The towel-line lounging apparel for men, as Busch and his partners call it, isn’t his first retail success story, but it is his first time on Shark Tank, where he hopes backers will take DudeRobe the next level.
“It’s my gift to you, the dudes of the world,” he said. “Now you can dry off and chill in lounging apparel designed just for you.”
