Eleven Eleven Productions is a Fortune 500 company, which does business in 18 countries with over 3000 employees...OK, you can tell that's a lie by just looking at our crappy website. Here's the real story...sort of: In 1997 national touring stand up comedians, John Heffron and Joel Zimmer, formed Eleven Eleven. Our first product was John's comedy CD, Kid With A Cape (still available at johnheffron.com). It was a huge success...in that we didn't lose money.
In 1999, not knowing anything about the novelty business, let alone business in general, we decided to give it a whirl and dump our savings into a hope and a dream. After a trip to the CoinStar machine, we had our seed money in hand and launched our first product. However, it quickly became clear the Funeral Confetti wasn't going to be the hit we thought it would. We then considered a long list of new ventures including, a 24-hr condom delivery service, a photocopy center that serves alcohol, and a realtionship break-up service. We eventually settled on the concept of That Guy! game and formulated our company motto: "Not To Suck As A Company." (Catchy, huh?)
The ball got rolling when our comedian/animator friend Darin Brege, agreed to do the fantastic artwork.
The game hit the market in July, and was an instant success. In our first week we sold nearly 2. It occurred to us that the company Christmas party would just be the three of us standing around a deli tray. So based on that realization, we decided to partner with marketing, sales, and licensing companies...and slowly we're building oue massive empire, which will soon control everything in your life...muuh ha ha ha ha!
When That Guy! Game was released it was the first bachelorette card game made for playing on the town. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then consider us extremely flattered. Since the release of our game in 2000, no less than 4 companies have produced bachelorette card games which have drawn heavily from our concept. However, none of them even come close to the patented play of That Guy! and thus it remains the best selling bachelorette game on the market.
2006 is shaping up to be an exciting year for Eleven Eleven as we have planned launches for other versions of That Guy!, and a few more bachelorette/wedding shower gifts which will all bear the hallmarks of our product: Unique, fun, and trend-setting.
So the bottom line is we're still just a couple of comedians with a bucket of change and a dream. But if you the visitor, could possibly buy 1000 decks, and get 10 of your friends to do so too, then we could stop our trips to the CoinStar machine. Heck, if you buy 1000 decks we'll invite you to the company Christmas party, too.
- Joel and John
