Getting a chance on ABC’s “Shark Tank” demands tenacity. Les Cookson, the CEO of LucidArt, has learned that lesson twice.
Cookson demonstrated it on Friday’s program, winning a $300,000 investment offer from Daymond John for his California-based painting firm. Cookson had proposed a bib for carsick children to the Sharks in 2011 but walked away without an agreement.
“Every time I saw an entrepreneur come in with these incredible figures, they stated it was because of social media,” he remarked. “So I sat down and watched [episodes] for hours and learned how to do it.”
He also spent four years designing LucidArt’s most popular product, the Lucy Drawing Tool. Cookson claims that the tool, which is fashioned after the camera lucida, a device used by some artists since around 1806 and can help “make everyone an artist and any artist a master,” can help “make anyone an artist and an artist a master.”
The device attaches to the side of a table and projects an image of an object on the table onto a surface in front of the artist, who may then trace over it. Cookson said that in the 12 months leading up to the recording of the show, he sold $2.3 million worth of the sketching tool and that his company had made $10 million in total sales since its inception in 2009.
