Capsules' sweet smell of success: BreathAsure brings South African formulation for oral odor relief to masses.

Eight years ago, Anthony Raissen's wife told him that she loved him very much, but couldn't stand his breath. Raissen recalled that he wanted more than anything to please his wife, but he couldn't give up his beloved daily snack of "pickled cucumbers" -- the suspected cause of the odorous problem.

So Raissen, an electrical engineer by training, started on a mission. "I tried different mouthwashes, different toothpastes," he related. But none passed his wife Lauren's nose test.

Finally, Raissen, a Southern California resident and native of South Africa, heard about some chemists in South Africa who were working on a solution to garlic and onion breath. He and a group of investors bought the rights to the product -- a mixture of sunflower and parsley seed oil.

Now, Anthony and Lauren Raissen stand at the top of a burgeoning bad breath empire. Encino-based BreathAsure Inc. has sold more than 1 million packages of the "internal breath freshener capsules" nationwide and the pleasant, slow-talking Anthony Raissen can be heard touting the product on radio states i all 50 states.

Raissen is candid about his former problem with bad breath and his love of problem-causing food, but is guarded about the financials of his company. He will only say that annual revenues are in excess of $5 million and the company is operating "in the black."

Raissen launched BreathAsure only two years ago. He and his wife set up a booth at the famous Gilroy Garlic Festival in July 1992. There they sold BreathAsure to a garlic-loving public.

The product, according to its advertising, "works with the digestive system, often the source of bad breath."

Raissen said that when he told garlic festival officials that he wanted "to go nose to nose with the consumer ... people wanted to put us into straitjackets." But, he said, sales started right away.

In the beginning, Raissen was selling BreathAsure to customers only through a toll-free phone number. After a few months, some health food stores began carrying the product.

But in the last several months, major nationwide food and drug stores have begu stocking BreathAsure, according to Craig Shandler, executive vice president in charge of marketing for BreathAsure.

In the last four months, the company has signed agreements to sell the product in Thrifty, Vons and Walgreen's stores, among others, Shandler noted.

That it is now more widely available in stores is important, because it is an "impulse" buy, for people who may have had garlic for lunch or have an importan meeting that day, Shandler said.

He added that it has become easier to get the product into stores in the last year because the name BreathAsure is becoming well-known.

In addition to Raissen, several radio personalities, including talk show hosts at Los Angeles AM radio stations KABC and KFI, do paid endorsements for BreathAsure on a regular basis.

The company also has television commercials, starring actor George Kennedy as its TV spokesman, running all over the U.S., Raissen said.

John Kogler, publisher of Jordan Whitney's Greensheet, a Tustin-based weekly report which tracks infomercials and direct response television commercials, said he thinks BreathAsure "is successful" based on the amount of air time the company is buying nationwide.

BreathAsure had made the Greensheet's top 10 list of direct response -- in whic consumers buy the product by phone -- television commercials at least a few times in the last two years, Kogler said. Making that list means that company i among the top 10 in the country buying that kind of air time, he said.

Kogler said that in order to make that list, a company is spending between $100,000 to $400,000 a week on television time.

In order to be successful, a direct response product needs to bring in sales about twice the size of its advertising budget, Kogler explained. He noted that he only follows television commercials and "they seem to be doing an awful lot of radio spots."

Radio marketing has been the key to success, Raissen said. "We're probably running somewhere in the region of 100 ads a day," he said.

Bill Handel, a KFI radio talk show host and BreathAsure's first outside spokesperson, said Raissen is "a marketing genius" for using radio the way he does.

Radio is a more "personal" medium than television, and bad breath is a "very personal" problem, Handel said.

"When you hear someone on radio say, 'When was the last time you had bad breath?,' you relate to your own experience," Handel said.

"When you're watching somebody on TV, you're watching someone else's experience," he added.

When talking about BreathAsure, Handel raises the specter of breath so bad it smells "like a hippopotamus died in your body."

He added that the stuff "really works" and it's the only product he endorses.

But not everyone's a satisfied customer. Steve Obradovich, a salesman with a Pasadena real estate title company, said, "The stuff doesn't work."

Obradovich said he bought the product because good breath is essential in sales and he was intrigued by "the guy on the radio." But after using it for a week, he said, "It doesn't make you feel any better or any worse."

Others disagree.

Jeff Green, owner of two convenience stores in a Miracle Mile-based office building, said he has sold more than 400 packs of BreathAsure to everyone from top executives to UPS delivery people.

"People swear by the stuff," Green said.

Whether or not it works, BreathAsure is growing.

Boxes and office files line the halls of the company's 4,600-square-foot office "We're negotiating to take a free-standing (8,600 square foot) building in Calabasas," Raissen said.

He said he has a couple of new products in the development stage. Raissen declined to reveal what these new products are, but said "they are in the healt and beauty arena."

Whatever they are, they are likely to be different.

"I have always believed that to be successful you have to look at making something in an area that has been overlooked," Raissen said.