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- Will It Blend? How a $50 YouTube stunt sent Blendtecâs sales soaring 700 percent
Will It Blend? How a $50 YouTube stunt sent Blendtecâs sales soaring 700 percent
From trade-show wallflower to a $56 million viral juggernautâbecause one engineer decided to pulverise an iPhone.
Blendtecâs big bet wasnât a budget-busting ad campaign; it was a single camcorder pointed at a blender shredding golf balls.
In 2006 that $50 experiment, christened âWill It Blend?â, rewrote the rules of product demos, pushed the company onto The Tonight Show, and turned a $400 kitchen workhorse into the most talked-about appliance on YouTube.
đ Snackable Stat â Six million views in five days
The first five âWill It Blend?â clips racked up 6 000 000 views inside a weekâlight-years faster than the 2006 YouTube average of 10 000 views for branded uploads. Those eyeballs werenât just rubber-necking: they lifted Blendtecâs monthly web traffic 650 percent and tripled direct-to-consumer revenue before the company spent another dime on production.
Put bluntly, every thousand views earned back â$145 in blender salesâa return most Super Bowl ads still canât match.
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The $400 Blender Nobody Wanted
In the early 2000s, Blendtec was exactly the kind of company youâd never hear about at a dinner party.
They made blenders. Great ones, actuallyâindustrial-strength beasts that could crush ice, pulverize grain, and survive a nuclear winter. But unless you ran a smoothie bar in Salt Lake City, you probably didnât know the name.
And that was the problem.
Blendtec had engineering chops and an unbeatable product, but their sales were stuck. Competitors like Vitamix and KitchenAid had cornered the consumer market with brand recognition and massive ad budgets. Blendtec? They had a few trade show booths and not much else.
Their flagship model cost $400âa tough sell when no one trusted the brand. Traditional ads were out of reach. Retail partnerships were drying up. The company needed a breakthrough.
What they had instead⊠was a guy in a lab coat and a box of marbles.

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Will It Blend? The $50 Masterclass in Viral Marketing
It started, as many legendary marketing moves do, by accident.
Tom Dickson, Blendtecâs CEO and resident blender whisperer, was running durability tests in the companyâs workshopâshoving 2x2s, rocks, and handfuls of marbles into the blenders to see what they could survive.
The marketing director walked by and had a flash of inspiration: This is completely insane⊠and kind of amazing.
What if they filmed it?
So they grabbed a $50 prop budget, a lab coat for Tom, and a camcorder. The premise was simple: take everyday (and not-so-everyday) objectsâgolf balls, rakes, smartphonesâand toss them into the blender. The segment was called Will It Blend? and it leaned into the absurdity.
Tom played the role of mad scientist with deadpan perfection. He spoke calmly about âtestingâ an iPhone as it was reduced to smoky dust. It was weird. It was captivating. And in 2006, it was perfect for this new thing called YouTube.
The videos werenât just slapstickâeach one delivered a subtle but powerful marketing message: If this blender can annihilate a glow stick, it can handle your kale smoothie.
And crucially, the team didnât just upload and hope. They optimized video descriptions with calls-to-action, linked back to product pages, and embraced the rising wave of blogs and social media. Tech sites, gadget nerds, and curious viewers couldnât stop sharing.
One iPhone later, Blendtec wasnât just a blender company. It was internet-famous.
What happened next was something no ad agency pitch deck couldâve predicted.

How Blendtec Crushed the Competition (Literally)
The first Will It Blend? video went viral. Then the second. Then the third. Soon, it was a phenomenon.
Millions of peopleâmany of whom had never even searched for a blenderâwere watching a mild-mannered engineer vaporize tech gadgets for fun. The series racked up over 290 million views and counting.
And hereâs the kicker: those views converted.
Blendtecâs sales exploded by 738% in the wake of the campaign. Revenue shot up to around $56 million, turning a once-obscure brand into a category leader. Not bad for a blender company that spent less on a viral video than most brands spend on lunch.
The impact wasnât just financial. Will It Blend? gave Blendtec an identity. They werenât just a blender brandâthey were the blender brand. Indestructible. Playful. Clever. Cult-worthy.
It also helped write the modern content marketing playbook. Before "virality" became a strategy and YouTube became a battleground for brands, Blendtec quietly demonstrated that great content + smart distribution = magic.
The product didnât change. The brand story did. And with it, Blendtec turned the humble blender into a meme machineâand their competition into dust.

đ« Power Numbers
$56,000,000 â Blendtec hit an estimated $56 million in annual revenue at its 2024 peak, showing how the once-niche brand has moved solidly into mid-market appliance territory.
694 â Headcount in 2024, implying a lean â $80 k revenue-per-employee ratio for a hardware manufacturer.
295,489,862 â Lifetime views on Blendtecâs âWill It Blend?â channel as of 24 June 2025, keeping the campaign among YouTubeâs longest-running branded hits.
6,000,000 â Views the very first five videos racked up in just five daysâon a total production budget of roughly $50âillustrating a textbook low-cost viral launch.
300 mph â Tip speed of Blendtecâs blunt stainless-steel blade, fast enough to pulverise ice without needing razor-sharp edges.

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