West Hartford resident and HALO CEO Garold Miller and Glastonbury resident and HALO President Dan Weinstein plan to bring their products, which have broken sales records on QVC, to ‘Main Street’ in West Hartford and beyond.
HALO CEO Garold Miller (left) and President Dan Weinstein in the HALO conference room. Photo credit: Cheyney Barrieau
By Ronni Newton
Garold Miller is one of those guys who is always thinking, always looking forward, always trying to figure out solutions to make things work better or make tasks easier – and not only does he do it very successfully, he always looks to combine function with fashion.
Many local residents may not realize that Miller, who moved to West Hartford two years ago, and partner Dan Weinstein, are the people behind QVC’s most successful electronics line. But they will once HALO moves to “Main Street” and appears in stores in West Hartford, Glastonbury, and – Miller hopes – countless other retail centers.
Early Years
“I’ve always been an inventor. As a kid I would take apart everything in my mom’s house. I’d take her clock apart and put it back together. It drove her nuts,” Miller said.
The born inventor was also blessed with great business acumen. He didn’t grow up wealthy and in high school he started a business cleaning cars to earn some extra cash. He soon had eight guys working for him. By the time he graduated from Glastonbury High School in 1989, he sold the business – which is still operating as an automobile detailer – and had enough money to buy a house, a car, and pay his tuition at the University of Rhode Island.
The fashion angle emerged when Miller was bartending at the Cooke House in Newport one summer during college. “I thought I wanted to be a jet fighter pilot, but then I met these guys,” Miller said, regular customers who were in the jewelry business.
The world was in disarray, Operation Desert Storm was going on, and Miller came up with the idea for a gold guardian angel pin. He saved up $1,200 from bartending and spent it to create a model of the pin and have it cast. Then he went through the phone book and made a list of 300 gift stores and went door-to-door.
The 200th ordered pins, and Miller made $20.80. They reordered, and the Treasures and Trinkets Inc. business was launched.
“As an entrepreneur I knew time was of the essence. If I stayed at school I would be behind where I wanted to go,” said Miller. Once he had the business well-established, he dropped out of URI.
The company became highly successful, and he sold it, giving away millions to charity, he said. “Angel pins were a great way to give back.”
Miller and his wife, Katharine, formed a new company. Friends Marketing focused on costume jewelry, and created many “must-have” products like friendship pins (safety pins with charms) and Italian charm bracelets.
Miller grew Friends Marketing and then sold it but kept working for them while continuing to invent and at the same time realizing the growth potential for online and TV sales. One of his inventions was the EZ Hanger – an aluminum level with three marking points that’s now a QVC top-seller and launched the EZ Tools Brand.
So he bought back Friends Marketing and through the prayer bracelet brought Garold Miller Jewelry to QVC, where today it’s still a number one line. The prayer bracelets – stretchy beaded bracelets with a dangling prayer box charm – have meaning. The bracelets resonated with QVC customers who bought millions.
Fashion meets function in a powerful way
“I’ve always had a passion for electronics and gadgets, and I wanted to create an electronics brand,” Miller said. “I also have a wife and four daughters, and someone’s phone is always out of power.”
Miller was struck by the fact that high tech mobile electronics could only be charged by plugging them into a wall. He became the first in the world to file patents for portable power, but said initially it wasn’t an easy sell, despite his already proven success on QVC.
“I told QVC I wanted to start an electronics company. They said, ‘You’re crazy!’” This was about seven or eight years ago, Miller said.
He chatted about his ideas with his then-neighbor in Glastonbury, Dan Weinstein. “He’s an incredibly smart guy. He’s an electrical engineer,” Miller said, with a background writing code for EMC in Boston.
Miller told Weinstein about his two top ideas: creating back-up systems for personal use (this was in the pre-cloud days), and portable power. “Dan had just started a company doing back-up for mid-sized companies. He said it would cost $100,000 per user, not exactly a QVC customer.”
“I also said I wanted to create a power supply, that one day there would be more electronic devices than people,” Miller said.
In 2011, Miller and Weinstein partnered and launched Halo2Cloud LLC. “The HALO name comes from my first angel pin business. It’s protective and all about giving back.”
Miller said he shared his ideas with QVC in a Power Point presentation. He wanted to be able to control the heat and turn lights on an off from a phone. They liked the idea of having electronic backup from HALO Cloud Control, but what QVC, which has a female-intensive customer base, bought into was the portable power idea.
“Women’s lives are incredibly busy. They don’t have the time in their day to do one more thing. They need portable power. Maybe they don’t know it, but they do,” Miller told QVC.
“I handed them a brick-sized, duct-taped portable power supply,” Miller said. QVC said the idea was “cool,” but it had to be small enough to fit into a pocket.
“I said I want to sell it in pink leopard, in purple,” Miller said after creating the pocket-sized product, but at the time all electronic devices were black. QVC agreed to be “crazy” and sell the product in white. It was a complete failure.
“I went back to QVC. They never give second chances but we already had a 10-year relationship,” Miller said.
Portable power supply called the HALO Couture 5000 in Rose Gold. Photo Courtesy of HALO
He and Weinstein believed in the product, and personally financed the production of 60,000 pieces. “They sold out in two minutes. They were pink leopard and purple. It was the first time electronics had been done in crazy colors, but I had that jewelry background,” Miller said.
The idea was to make a product that was incredibly fashionable targeted to women. “We just need to get it into her hands, and then she’ll see how useful it is,” Miller said. He knew that once someone bought the product they would realize how cool it was.
Spurred by the initial success, Miller asked QVC about their sales record. When he found out it was 190,000 pieces, Miller said he would sell 300,000. “I knew I could do it because I had the data.” It was scary as an entrepreneur to take a risk with that much product, he said, but a good calculated risk.
QVC ordered 305,000 pieces of the HALO 2800 – and sold out in 4 hours on Black Friday weekend in 2012. “It broke the record, shut down their computers, their servers crashed.”
Miller wanted to sell a million pieces the next year, but QVC balked and said their servers couldn’t handle it. But they did agree to 380,000 sets of two chargers which also sold out, once again breaking a record. HALO is in the QVC Hall of Fame.
“Today there are more than five million HALO users, and many are HALO heroes,” Miller said. He loves hearing great stories about people helping others in emergency situations by offering a charge, and there are plenty of those to share.
One of the newer HALO products, the HALO Bolt 57720, fits in someone’s hand and can be tossed into a purse but is powerful enough to jumpstart up to 215 cars – and then still charge a cellphone. It’s sold in black graphite, but also blue Moroccan and pink floral.
Miller said he’s heard thousands of stories about the devices. He shared one from a woman who offered to help a guy whose pick-up truck wouldn’t start. “What are you going to do with that flowery thing?” he asked her as she pulled a HALO device from her purse. “Start your truck,” the woman said. And she did.
Powering it forward by way of Main Street and giving back
HALO CEO Garold Miller and President Dan Weinstein in the HALO conference room. Photo credit: Cheyney Barrieau
HALO is now co-branding their products with high-end companies like Louis Vuitton and Bvlgari, companies that rarely if ever co-brand anything.
Today HALO is a global brand, the world’s largest portable power manufacturer, with a reach that extends to England, France, Italy, Japan, and Dubai. The international business has experienced 350 percent growth year after year, Miller said.
HALO continues to give back, and Miller said the company has donated more than $5 million to charities like OCRF, the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund Alliance. A “super Saturday” in the Hamptons last year alone raised more than $800,000 for OCRF.
“I think it’s very good karma to do it. I definitely believe in giving back to the community,” Miller said.
“Powering it Forward” is HALO’s goal for the future, and “Power your Favorite Cause” will be a new feature of their website, and integral to the company’s future as well.
As for the direction that sales is taking, Miller said that’s becoming community-focused, too.
“We’re getting back to Main Street. We want to be in West Hartford, showing support for the community, saying ‘this is your brand, this is your hometown,’” Miller said. Most people see HALO as a tech company that’s growing all over the world, but don’t know it’s locally-based.
HALO has had its headquarters in Glastonbury but purchased an 1850s (that’s not a typo) building at 6 Central Row in Hartford. “We are super-excited to move on Jan. 1,” Miller said.
They are also getting involved with the community by sponsoring events, donating “power to socialize,” creating special edition HALO devices like the We-Ha branded charger. “We’re excited to be involved with We-Ha, and Vineyard Vines,” he said.
Miller said he’s looking into collaborations with local restaurants, too.
“It’s harder to make the product in limited quantities, but we’re going to do it.” He encourages organizations to contact the company about involvement in events.
Miller bought a 1930s home in West Hartford two years ago and restored it. He loves living in West Hartford, and said his wife and four daughters do, too.
“They love the town, the restaurants and cafes. It’s all so close,” he said.
People see a product on TV, but Miller thinks these days many are more likely to buy it if it’s available locally, on their own main street.
One other focus is educating consumers, and sending the message that people shouldn’t just plug anything into their phone. There are plenty of copycat portable charger products, but Miller said there’s a big difference between those and what HALO sells, and many could ruin a phone or other expensive electronic device.
Miller laughed as he talked about the lecturing on entrepreneurship he’s doing now at Brown University as well as Endicott College, where one of his daughters is a student. His mom is shocked, but he told her that lecturing was the only way he could get there.
“I went to the school of hard knocks. If I had had school smarts I could have gone further,” he said. He tells his kids that it’s better to do both.
Miller said that two of his daughters are very creative and aspire to be entrepreneurs. One wants to be an FBI profiler and his 13-year-old wants to be a doctor.
“I made it to the Ivy League, even though I dropped out.”
To view the version of this story that also appears in West Hartford Magazine, click here to read the flipbook online version of the magazine.
Like what you see here? Click here to subscribe to We-Ha’s newsletter so you’ll always be in the know about what’s happening in West Hartford!
