RIGHT ON TARGET BLENDING UP AN INFOMERICAL SUCCESS.

Byline: Brent Hopkins Staff Writer

SHERMAN OAKS - The most potent weapon in Lenny Sands' arsenal is a blender.

Sands, a soft-spoken man with towering, spiky hair, runs a company that makes the Magic Bullet, which is not just any blender, but a device that promises to change your life in 10 seconds. It chops, blends, dices and purees, making dips, drinks and dinners in a spot that dominates the late-night infomercial world.

This whirring blades of this little appliance, about the size of a deflated football, have stirred up nearly a quarter of a billion dollars worth of sales in the past 17 months. With the holiday season approaching, orders should get even heavier, and Sands says he's just starting.

``We'd like to see this in every home in America,'' he said. ``This should be no different from your coffee-maker. Everyone should have one.''

Sands serves as chairman and chief executive officer of Alchemy Worldwide LLC, a holding company that oversees companies that sell everything from self-help CDs to nutritional supplements. He and his partners Brady Caverly and Jeff Clifford are seasoned infomercial experts, well-versed in the nuances of how to pitch a product, how to turn it from a commodity into a must-have item. They've sold enough bun-rockers, get-fit videos and weight-loss products to build Alchemy into a $200 million annual company, but none sells as well as the Magic Bullet, which has brought in $250 million in sales in the past 17 months.

One of the tricks in marketing the gadget - which is, at heart, a blender - is to never use such a commonplace description.

``You don't use the term 'blender' when you're selling it,'' said Caverly, co-president and a founding partner of the company. ``You say it's got a food processing use. It's a smoothie maker, a meal preparer. If people perceived it as just a blender, it wouldn't be special.''

It's those little nuances - and the $75 million spent in worldwide advertising - that make the device sell so successfully. Alchemy has transformed its pitch into 48 languages, selling it in 60 countries through its TV pitch, the Web and traditional retail outlets. At either $59.99 in stores or $99 for a pair plus 21 attachments via direct sales, the Magic Bullet logs between 70,000 and 80,000 call-in orders each week.

``With an infomercial, they put them on on the weirdest times of day and night, you find it by accident, then you have to be so enthralled, you watch the entire thing,'' said Steve Dworman, an infomercial consultant based in West L.A. ``By the end, you've got to be so enthralled you'll call the producers and give them money - that's a miracle that they can pull that off, and they certainly do it with the Magic Bullet.''

This is particularly striking, because, unlike many infomercial products, the Magic Bullet isn't a radically new gadget. With its collection of attachments and the promise that it can prepare an entire meal in 10 seconds, it takes a familiar device kitchen device and makes it new.

``A food processor's too much trouble to take out and put together for something like making guacamole,'' said Mick Hastie, the pitchman who's both vice president of new product development and the rapid-fire on-air host of the infomercial. ``You can do it with this in less time than it takes to take a knife out of the drawer. ... It's basically an extension of your arm.''

Brent Hopkins, [phone]

brent.hopkins(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Lenny Sands, second from left, chairman and CEO of Alchemy Worldwide LLC, shows off the Magic Bullet blender, with partners Jeff Clifford, left; Brady Caverly; and Mick Hastie seated at right.

(2 -- color) no caption (Magic Bullet blender)

Michael Owen Baker/Staff Photographer