‘How to Hang a Door’ Is Part of New Breed : S.D. Contractor’s First Video Seeks Its ‘Niche’

Jane Fonda’s Workout it’s not. But John Grimm thinks his video could be a godsend for weekend warriors who take hammer and saw in hand to tackle home improvement projects.

Grimm’s 23-minute video explains “How to Hang a Door,” and the San Diego contractor hopes to generate enough capital to make a second tape--”How to Install a Hot Water Heater.”

About 20% of the 60 million tapes sold in the United States during 1986 were “niche” videos, according to Ira Mayer, executive editor of the New York-based Video Marketing Newsletter. But the niche videos--including how-to tapes, exercise programs, children’s tapes and music offerings--could account for 30% of the 247.9 million tape sales expected during 1990, Mayer said.

A hefty percentage of those niche videos come from entrepreneurs such as Grimm, who believe they can turn their knowledge into best-selling videos.

But while sales of popular tapes, such as the exercise programs hawked by actress Fonda, are measured in the hundreds of thousands, for the niche players “a more realistic figure . . . might be 2,000 or just 200,” according to Mayer.

Grimm declined to say how many of his videos have been sold because he is in negotiations to raise capital for a second tape.

Grimm’s tape was produced by Stuart Craig Smith & Associates, a San Diego-based company that produces industrial and corporate videos and films. The company views Grimm’s tape as “a pilot that we hope other labels will pick up,” according to company founder Stuart Smith. “We won’t make a dime off of it, but everyone seems to love John’s video, and we look at it as an investment.”

Grimm, who is retailing his tapes through local hardware and door stores and a Monterey-based distribution company, turned to video because homeowners “are always saying to themselves ‘If I could just see how to do it, I could do it myself.’ ”

“It costs about $125 to have someone hang a door for you in Southern California,” Grimm said. “Now, a person can purchase the tape for $19.95 and save himself $105.”

Making a high-quality video can be expensive: Smith’s firm charges as much as $18,000 for a 15-minute production. Producing a video, however expensive, is easier than marketing and distributing the finished product because niche videos “aren’t big enough” to attract support from national distributors and major video rental and sale chains.

“We get about 5 to 10 new videos every day, and we have a staff that watches them,” said Leslie Roschke, director of marketing and sales for Video Schoolhouse, a year-old, Monterey-based wholesale and mail order company.

That flow of video programs is increasing as video equipment prices drop and more and more producers enter the market, Roschke said.

Fred Mintz, owner of FD’s Fitness in Pacific Beach, is marketing his weight-training video through Videotakes, a Red Bank, N.J., catalogue house that offers more than 2,000 “alternative” video programs.

The company’s selection is staggering. For example, a recent catalogue featured “Celestial Navigation Simplified” by William F. Buckley, and “Successful Whitetail Deer Hunting,” a sportsman’s video produced by the giant 3M company.

The “Fred Mintz Speed Improvement” video, which retails for $49.50, came about because “a picture is really worth a thousand words,” said Mintz, a former All-America collegiate sprinter who uses the video to market a weight training program.

“I thought it would be more entertaining if I could present my ideas on video with music rather than standing there talking about it,” said Mintz, who has sold about 300 copies of the video to a wide-ranging list of customers that includes the Philadelphia Eagles, the New England Patriots and the Chinese Olympic team.

Mintz, who operates FD’s Fitness & Sports Center in Pacific Beach, described the video as “potentially profitable if I had the time and money to do the marketing and distribution. But that involves a lot of up-front money.”

Stephen Cassarino and Lee Garovitz, who own a San Diego catering company, have sold more than 1,000 of their “Cookin’ With the Cleavers” video cookbook at $29.95.

Cassarino views the tape, which includes light-hearted directions for several meals, as a “product, a merchandising thing, for us. We didn’t think that we’d conquer the world with it.”

Rather, Cassarino and Garovitz made the tape as an adjunct to a locally produced cooking show that airs on Saturday mornings on KTTY-TV (Channel 69). The chefs hope that their show will enter national syndication and give them a platform to market what they envision as a series of cooking tapes.

“This industry still has room for the entrepreneurs,” said Videotakes’ Jenny Peters. “There is a proliferation of titles that are not getting into the video stores or being distributed by the large merchandisers.”

However, “you have to have a high-quality production level,” Smith said. “We’re talking about things like professional script preparation, visual pacing, a professional voice-over, things that aren’t explained in the instruction booklet for the eight-millimeter video cameras.”

Then, making the “quantum leap to a series is something else again,” Smith said. “Lots of people have ideas and lots of people have a minimal amount of capital.”

Cassarino acknowledged that it is tough to make a second tape, and that the video cookbook is being subsidized by the duo’s catering company.

“Without name recognition, advertising and marketing, you’re nowhere,” Cassarino said. “We’ll wait until we get that name recognition (through the television show) before we put out our second tape.”