Throwing things into a blender and seeing what happens

Raymond Chen

Manufacturer of commercial and home blenders Blendtec has produced a marketing web site Will It Blend? which features short videos of the company’s CEO and new Internet blending icon Tom Dickson throwing all sorts of unusual objects into one of their blenders, to see what happens. (The videos are also on YouTube, and of course they have a blog, cleverly titled Will it Blog?)

There’s a miniature profile of Tom Dickson in Utah Business Magazine.

When Jamba Juice told Dickson the $14,000 blender package was too expensive, he cut them a deal, asking simply for a nickel of every sale. Now, with 50 million smoothies sold each year, Dickson says it was one of the best deals he ever made.

“Will It Blend?” is sort of a blender-themed entry in the style of David Letterman’s crowd-pleasing stunts such as “Throwing things off the roof,” “Crushing things in a pneumatic press,” and “Will it Float?” (I suspect that only guys find this stuff fascinating.)

Raymond Chen

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