Meet the man who brought the infomercial to the UK

Household names from Harrods to Asda now sell “As seen on High Street TV” branded ranges. Fans of the Zumba exercise craze are also High Street TV customers. The company owns all the Miami-based brand’s licensing rights in the UK. “Retail partners love us, because all our products are winners,” he says.

He’s keen to differentiate the High Street TV offering from live shopping channels such as QVC and Ideal World. “The age of the people who regularly tune in to those channels is 45 and up,” he says. “They have a picture on their sideboard of their favourite presenter. It’s a small percentage of the viewing public.”

That small percentage packs quite a spending punch, he admits. QVC and Ideal World combined turn over more than £600m a year. High Street TV’s target market is mainly channel surfers, who flip on to an infomercial and get hooked. To appeal to this casual customer, the company exclusively sells products that solve an everyday need or problem. These range from health supplements and acne solutions to exercise videos.

A consummate salesman, Malcher can’t resist demonstrating one of his new products during the interview. “What would you like to drink?” he asks. “Tea? No. Let me make you a juice.

“This is our new product, the NutriBullet,” he says. “It’s trending, this. It’s flying off the shelves. It’s so difficult to find the time to make your own juice, but it’s how I stay young. Look at me, I’m actually 80!” he jokes.

Malcher gesticulates exuberantly as he gives a potted history of his career. He and Coleman had their break in the mid-Nineties when they spotted an opportunity to buy up TV airtime in the middle of the night. “Remember when the screen used to go all fuzzy at midnight?” he says. “We went to the TV companies and started showing American infomercials.”

Despite the broadcasters’ scepticism, the model was a hit with late-night channel hoppers. “We brought the Atkins diet craze to the UK. We turned the book into a video and an audio cassette, put a 30-minute infomercial on TV, and the Atkins phenomenon exploded.”

In 1999, Malcher and Coleman launched the UK’s first American-style shopping channel, which was followed by Golf TV, a niche shopping channel for golf products. That channel was sold to JJB Sports for an estimated £3m in 2006.

High Street TV now owns three dedicated shopping channels and purchases airtime on more than 50 other stations. It broadcasts 120 hours of infomercials a day, across the likes of Sky Sports, More4, ITV 2 and the Discovery Channel, all from its headquarters in the spa town of Harrogate in Yorkshire.

High Street TV is more than a TV shopping business, however. It’s a multi-channel retailer that spans TV, mobile, web, high street and print. “Wherever our customers are, we are,” says Malcher. “We enable them to purchase on their own terms, wherever is most convenient.

This “all things to all men” strategy is paying off. Growth at the company now stands at 100pc year-on-year, and sales this year “are absolutely screaming,” says Malcher.

High Street TV has only scratched the surface of its potential in the UK, he goes on. While US retailers devote whole aisles to “As seen on TV” products, their UK counterparts were harder to convince. Malcher admits: “Thirty-minute commercials were seen as cheesy and tacky by retailers. People think it’s a scam. Infomercials do have that stigma. But the infomercial’s time is coming around. People want that level of information now, and they want options on how and where they buy.”

Malcher enlisted some celebrity names in the early days to add credibility. When High Street TV began selling the Shake Weight — an exercise gadget “for ladies’ bingo wings,” he explains — it was endorsed by Alex Gerrard, the footballer’s wife. “It made it on to Jonathan Ross, Loose Women, Made in Chelsea … John Lewis took that product. That became a real calling card for us: when a high-end retailer starts selling a TV infomercial product, you know that perceptions are changing.”

Malcher is now set on world domination. “We’ve proven the business domestically,” he says. “We’re established at every major retailer. We get all the leading products from America. 'As seen on TV’ is a viable product category, and it’s highly exportable.”

The company has a research and development division working to launch own-brand products under Malcher’s own banner. At the moment, 20pc of High Street TV’s range was conceived in-house. He wants to increase this figure to 50pc to improve margins. By becoming a manufacturer in its own right, the company could start selling back to the US giants and to other distributors all over the world.

“There are companies like us in 78 territories around the world. We launched our international division last September and we now have over 55 active countries that we’ve sold products and infomercials into.”

Have any of his products failed spectacularly? “I can’t think of any, no,” he says evasively. “It may sound too good to be true, but it’s like if you have a number one single in the States, with rare exceptions, it’ll make the top 10 over here.”

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