By the time he enrolled at CMC as an economics major, Joel's parents decided to pour out their cleaning secrets on Southern California. It was the mid-'80s and the timing was in tandem with Joel's long-term career goals. "My interest was in economics, and in trying to get a job that would give me experience learning marketing."

The Appels brought Orange Glo to the Los Angeles County Fair in Pomona (the largest fair in the nation), just a few miles from CMC's campus. Between classes and studying, Joel would bicycle over to the fairgrounds, pin on a microphone, and work the demo booth. "I'd try to sell a few units, make a few bucks, and then go back to the Claremont parties and spend it on them," says Appel, laughing.

In his senior year, Appel interviewed on campus with the Quaker Oats Company, and ended up working there for eight years, "most of it in marketing," Appel says. "It was fabulous," he says of the work experience. "I learned a lot of really terrific general business skills. But I spent a lot of time my last couple of years there thinking about what I ultimately wanted to do, and the business I might be able to get into—and control, because I wanted my own thing."

While at Quaker, Appel enrolled in evening classes at Northwestern University's School of Business to earn a master's degree. It was soon after graduation that he flew to Denver and hit up his folks with a business proposition. "I told them I'd like to take Orange Glo into stores, and put it on TV, and get national customers," Joel recalls. "But I wanted to start a new company together that I would own half of. I didn't want to just join the business. I didn't want any piece of what they had already created. I wanted to start on something new."

And so Orange Glo International was reborn overnight, with a new global mission, a new ad agency, and some needed sprucing-up of product packaging.

Joel knew getting Orange Glo on television was crucial to product visibility, and after a spot on the Home Shopping Network exceeded expectations, he found himself with enough seed money to produce an infomercial. Joel's coaxing convinced Max that households that had invested in the thigh blasters, professional cosmetics, self-improvement tapes, and fat burners already saturating the market had room in their budgets for a safe, orange-scented stain remover.

The gamble paid off. Once the infomercials began running regularly, the business was getting about 20,000 responses a week, with a steady 40 percent reorder rate.

"Our advantage over national branded companies like Procter & Gamble is that our advertising generates revenues. The national companies' advertising only creates awareness—they have to sit back and hope they generate sales through stores," Appel says.

But product awareness is important, too, Joel says. "At first it looks like you buy air time, and you try to sell goods, and that's the end of it. But it does make people aware of your product. We make a little money directly from the infomercials, but more importantly, chains like Wal-Mart and K Mart are dying to handle our product, once they see it on television."

Orange Glo's packaging got a face-lift when Joel Appel took over as company president.