AN UPDATE:

Since I originally posted on the Dragon’s Den £29.99 Magic Whiteboard pricing fiasco (double the market rate at that time), Dragons’ Den-backed Magic Whiteboard now do a 4 for 3 offer, bringing their price down to £22.50 a roll…

Great news for consumers.

This is close to the price now offered by Magic Flip Chart at £22.99 (with free pen!). However, the web-site of MagicWhiteboard gives no clue as to the company behind this venture. Just click the comment on <a href=”our blog to get a sense of their sales approach…

Meanwhile, the original Instant Whiteboard continues to sell, in theory, at £14.95…but sadly have run out of stock of plain whiteboard…

What’s actually going on here is anybody’s guess. Market forces at work.

You can still get squared whiteboard at £14.95 – for now. So get it while you can, I guess.

Four of the dragons were interested and two of were impressed enough to invest in it.

Odd, then, that I have been buying the identical product from the UK web-site of Instant Whiteboard Ltd for the last year, to conduct workshops and creative brainstorms. It’s a great product.

The real sting in the tail is that Instant Whiteboard charges just £14.95 not £30.

Instant Whiteboard also has the advantage of actually being visible on the front page of google if you type “white board + electrostatic” or “electrostatic whiteboard”. It comes up via the link at lean enterprise academy. Or at least it was there, before I posted this.

It’s pretty bizarre that stationery guru Paphitis hadn’t come across the product before, but Magic Whiteboard obviously struck lucky. Deborah Meaden has now advised them on branding (hence the strapline, maybe?) and Theo Paphitis’s Rymans stationery chain is stocking the product too. Magic whiteboard is off to a flying start. Consumers are the only losers here.

I’m guessing market transparency will sort this mess out of course, but maybe the dragons should be doing a little more due diligence in the first place…

If it were me I’d start by googling for the product if I was thinking of buying the company.