Upper Mac Resident Lands 'Shark Tank' Client

One Friday night in April, Danny and Reema Youssef of Upper Macungie Township were watching an episode of “Shark Tank,” an ABC reality show in which entrepreneurs pitch proposals to a panel of successful business tycoons and try to get them to invest in their companies.

On the show, Kim Nelson of Pauline, S.C., convinced real estate developer Barbara Corcoran to put up $50,000 to help expand her home-based Daisy Cakes business. All of the other sharks ate every bite of the cake Nelson passed around, but declined to invest.

Nelson also sold Reema Youssef, pregnant with the couple’s second child. But when Danny Youssef tried to order a cake for his wife through the Daisy Cakes website (www.ilovedaisycakes.com), he couldn’t get through to it. When the site remained down more than two hours after Nelson’s national television debut, Youssef realized something was drastically wrong.

Founder and president of DAY Vision, a Hellertown company that specializes in website development, e-commerce and online marketing, Youssef was confidant he could resolve the Daisy Cakes problem. That night, he e-mailed Corcoran and got the go-ahead to go to work the next day.

“We had the site back up by mid-day and fully operational within 14 hours of Nelson’s appearance on Shark Tank,” said Youssef. “We saved them from losing a lot of money.”

Nelson’s enthusiastic description of how she and her mother baked delicious, homemade cakes from scratch using her Aunt Daisy’s recipes had triggered 75,000 website hits--too many for the site to handle.

In addition to fixing the website problem, Youssef also traveled to South Carolina to advise Nelson on her fulfillment system and to work out better shipping rates with UPS for delivering Daisy Cakes products to customers nationwide.

“It was just Nelson and her mother making cakes by hand,” he said. “All of a sudden they had to hire customer service and bake 24 hours a day.”

“He saved us,” said baker Nelson from South Carolina. “He worked it out, worked with us, and fixed everything.”

Founded in Allentown in 2003, DAY Vision specializes in website development, e-commerce and online marketing. For the past few years, the company has been located in an anonymous-looking office building on Front Street in Hellertown, but Youssef, a 1991 graduate of Direuff High School, Allentown, says he could work from anywhere. His office is practically paper-free, with records backed up on servers and external hard drives.

After attending West Chester University on a football scholarship, Youssef graduated with a degree in business administration, and then went to work in sales and marketing in New York City’s fashion district. He tried to start a clothing line, then followed a passion for photography into fashion photography, all the while learning how to use the new and emerging applications of the Internet to promote his work. Soon other companies were asking him to do the same for them.

After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 happened, he decided to return to the Lehigh Valley, he said.

DAY Vision began as a marketing firm providing photography and graphic design, but as the Internet grew, customers began asking for e-mail blasts and search engine optimization.

“Our services are defined by the demand in the marketplace,” said Youssef. “We’re still in the beginning stages of the industry.”

Through its work for Daisy Cakes, DAY Vision has picked up another “Shark Tank” client, Cactus Jack’s Body Jac, a machine for doing push-ups.

“It’s a great show,” said Youssef of “Shark Tank.” “It inspires entrepreneurs and it’s good for the economy.”

So how are those Daisy Cakes?

"I still have yet to taste one," Youssef admitted. "When I went to South Carolina and spent time with Kim, it was so hectic. I was consumed with fixing problems. The last thing on my mind was eating cake. Even my wife says, 'I guess we're not going to get that cake.’"