Vince Offer

Offer Shlomi (עופר שלומי; born April 25, 1964), better known as Vince Offer or Vince Shlomi, is an Israeli-American infomercial pitchman, director, writer, actor and comedian.

He changed his name to Vince Offer in 1986.

Offer would do sketch comedy and submit sketches to public access television channels.

He would call these series of sketches The Underground Comedy Show, which he later adapted into his film.

In 1991, he was contacted by Tamara Rawitt, the executive producer of In Living Color, where he was hired as a writer for several skits.

In 1996, Offer directed and appeared in The Underground Comedy Movie, which was met with extremely negative reviews.

DVDs of the film were marketed via television infomercial.

The film also led to several lawsuits.

Offer's first major work was the 1999 comedy film The Underground Comedy Movie.

Offer is the President and chief executive officer (CEO) of Square One Entertainment, Inc. He owns, produces, and appears in television commercials for his products "ShamWow!", an absorbent towel; the "Slap Chop", a kitchen utensil; a lint roller called the "Schticky"; a liquid cleaner called "InVinceable"; and another kitchen utensil called "Crank Chop".

He has also officially advertised other products that he does not own, such as Quicky Grass.

Offer Shlomi was born in Beersheva, Israel.

His mother, who spoke broken English, was originally from Russia, while his grandfather was a Syrian Jew who Hebraized his name from Salomon to Shlomi after making aliyah.

When Shlomi was aged 5–6, his family moved to England, where he lived for a year, later moving to Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York, where he grew up.

As a child, he was fascinated by Crazy Eddie commercials.

Offer would shovel his neighbors’ driveways alongside his friends as a teen, working until the night.

He dropped out of high school at the age of seventeen and moved to Los Angeles.

Although the film was released and screened in 1999, Offer was bankrupt by 2002 and home video distribution plans were shelved.

Offer, who had previously been a successful vegetable chopper salesman and businessman, resumed selling vegetable choppers at swap meets to support himself and raise money to complete his film project.

Offer was inspired to promote his film via infomercial after seeing trailers for Girls Gone Wild and aired them on Comedy Central between 2:00 AM and 4:00 AM.

Within a few months, he had earned enough to resume production, and the movie was finally completed, released, and marketed entirely on late-night infomercials that Offer paid for with his earnings from the swap meet vegetable chopper sales.

The film has sold in excess of 100,000 copies and Offer has used the proceeds from sales to file a lawsuit against the Church of Scientology.

He is an ex-Scientologist.

In 2006, Offer began to market a cleaning product that he saw in flea markets, an absorbent towel that he called the "ShamWow!"

The title of the product derives from the French pronunciation of the chamois, pronounced "shammy" in English.

Offer visited the factory in Germany where the product is made, and he decided to incorporate that fact into the TV pitch.

The advertisement, filmed in the summer of 2007 with a budget of $20,000, received critical praise.

Slate's Seth Stevenson praised Offer for his "impressive and subtle mastery of the pitchman's art" (with lines such as "you know the Germans always make good stuff"), and wondered if Offer's "abrasive manner might also mark a unique, new strategy in the annals of pitchdom."

Stevenson compared Offer to earlier, "more upbeat" television pitchmen like Billy Mays and the Home Shopping Network hosts and concluded that Offer's "smooth-talking condescension" was more suited to the present "zeitgeist" than the "earnest fervor" of spokesmen like Mays and Ron Popeil.

Consumer Reports reported that the infomercial for "ShamWow!"

In 2010, he advertised Eminem's Recovery album.

In 2011, he appeared as himself in the Adam Sandler film Jack and Jill.

Title character Jill, played by Sandler, referred to him as "the ShamWow guy".

In 2013, Offer released the universally panned InAPPropriate Comedy, which he directed, wrote and appears in as a character called 'Peeping Tom'.

The film was originally envisioned as a sequel to Underground Comedy Movie.

The film features stars Rob Schneider, Michelle Rodriguez, Adrien Brody, and Lindsay Lohan.

Examples of film sketches include comedian Ari Shaffir as 'The Amazing Racist', with deliberately offensive hidden-camera encounters with members of different minority groups, and Brody as 'Flirty Harry', a Dirty Harry spoof.

Offer funded The Underground Comedy Movie with his own money, but had difficulty selling it.

He put the trailer in an infomercial, and claims to have sold 50,000 copies via direct order and 50,000 more in stores.

In 2020, Eminem celebrated the 10th anniversary of his album, Recovery, by introducing merchandise and sharing the original commercial starring Offer.