Lori Greiner

Lori Greiner was born in Chicago on December 9, 1969, and grew up on the city's North Side. She studied communications at Loyola University Chicago, working for the Chicago Tribune while in school, and spent her early twenties as an aspiring playwright, selling jewelry on the side to make ends meet. Her business career began by accident. In 1996, she designed and patented a plastic earring organizer, a simple fix for a problem she had herself. JCPenney picked it up ahead of the holiday season, and the resulting sales let her pay off a $300,000 loan in eighteen months. That single product became the foundation of For Your Ease Only, Inc., the company she founded the same year and still leads today as President and Founder. What followed was two decades of building an unusually prolific product business. In 2000 she launched "Clever & Unique Creations by Lori Greiner" on QVC, hosting the show for the next twenty years and earning the nickname "Queen of QVC" for the sheer volume and variety of products she brought to market, organizers, kitchen gadgets, travel accessories, and jewelry storage among them. She has created and marketed more than 1,000 products in total and holds over 120 US and international patents, overseeing the entire process herself, from concept and patent through manufacturing and retail placement. In 2012, Greiner joined ABC's Shark Tank as an investor, where she quickly earned a different kind of nickname: the "Warm-Blooded Shark," for an investing style built on mentorship and encouragement rather than pure combativeness. Her Shark Tank record includes two of the show's most celebrated deals: Scrub Daddy, where her $200,000 investment for a 20% stake became one of the most successful outcomes in the show's history, and Squatty Potty, where a $300,000 initial investment (later doubled to a 20% stake) helped build a product with hundreds of millions in lifetime retail sales. She remains on the panel today, one of the longest-tenured investors in the show's run. Greiner is also the bestselling author of "Invent It, Sell It, Bank It!," a practical, national-bestselling guide to turning a product idea into a real business, and the founder of Good Place Entertainment, her production company, through which she has expanded into film and television work. Alongside her business career, she is an active philanthropist, funding full scholarships for underprivileged women and supporting youth and first-responder programs, work for which she received the Sherry Lansing Woman of the Year Award.