OhSnap CEO Dale Backus spent his teen years in Cary as “your classic nerd with glasses in his room, tinkering on computers his whole life.”
All of that screen time paid off. After graduating from high school, Backus, 40, skipped college and followed his curiosity. “Being a sort of technologist and tinkerer, I was constantly building things in the basement,” he says.
Backus teamed up with friend Wes Phillips to start a film production studio. Starting with cold calls, the pair created spots for car dealerships and other local businesses. Backus then spotted a Frito-Lay ad on the internet promoting a competition for homemade commercials about its Doritos chips. At the last minute, he entered the contest.
While on rollerblades, Backus filmed the 30-second “Live the Flavor,” a boy-meets-girl slapstick spot filmed in the Waverly Place shopping center in Cary. While driving, a man is opening a bag of Doritos with his teeth when he spots a woman (Backus’ wife Cori) carrying her own bag of chips. With eyes glued to her, he rear-ends a car and crushes the bag of chips between his face and the steering wheel. As the woman rushes to his aid, she narrowly misses getting run over by an approaching vehicle. Then she trips, slamming her face into the side of the man’s car. She’s on the pavement surrounded by fiery orange chips strewn from the bag.
Two years later, another commercial — this one featuring a dog using its shock collar to outwit a man for his bag of chips — won a prize of $600,000. It enabled Backus and Phillips to start SmallHD, the maker of high-definition monitors attached to cameras of professional filmmakers. They sold the company to British conglomerate Vitec Group in 2014.
Backus joined the company, now called Videndum, but departed when he realized his entrepreneurial bent clashed with the conservative approach of the publicly traded company. “They were very stringent on letting us take risks and take bets on things that wouldn’t have immediate payoff,” he says. “It was always chasing the quarterly numbers.”
GETTING A GRIP
Pondering his next step, Backus made a personal pact: he’d only design, make and sell products he actually uses. During a visit to CES, the annual Las Vegas trade show of the Consumer Technology Association, he spotted what he believed was an emerging category of accessories: grips affixed to the back of phones.
Depending upon the design, users hold the circular component with a finger or two, giving them a tighter grip on their phones. The grips allow phones to be propped up for tabletop viewing.
“The products are simple, but they’ve got high-scale potential, big-volume potential,” Backus says. “Phones are going to continue getting bigger and more expensive and therefore justify a product like this more and more.”
With his share of proceeds from the sale of SmallHD five years earlier, Backus started OhSnap in 2019. He believed he could create more innovative products than established players such as Boulder, Colorado-based PopSockets and pump out edgy, in-your-face marketing to win sales from phone users in their teens, 20s and 30s.
“Phone accessories that don’t suck” became OhSnap’s tagline. It explains Backus’ belief that “today in the marketing landscape, especially in a commoditized market like phone accessories, you have to stand out. What holds people’s attention is sometimes just being a little bit edgy and humorous and a little self-deprecating.”
OhSnap plans to spend about $8 million on marketing this year, according to Backus. For every $1 spent on marketing, the company generates $3.50 in sales.
Phone accessories compete in a global market generating annual sales of hundreds of billions of dollars. “The vast majority of that revenue is from brands that don’t really market,” he says. “If we can make a name for ourselves through slick marketing that gets people to pay attention for more than five seconds, then we can leverage that success into then growing our channel.”
Since 2020, OhSnap has generated cumulative revenue of about $55 million. Backus projects sales of about $23 million this year, an increase of 35% year over year. He predicts 2026 will be a breakout year, with a doubling of sales. That would put OhSnap on a trajectory for a sale, possibly in 2028, that would allow Backus to stop working before turning 45.
The pace at which OhSnap boosts sales and profits will dictate the timing of the company’s possible sale, the CEO says.
“You want to sell at a point where you’re still in this upward trend, but before the knee of the curve, before you start to flatten out a plateau,” he says.
“I want to see how next year goes and if we can hit our goals, then I’ll probably keep going through 2027 and maybe in ‘28 we can start looking to exit at that point,” he says. “I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t know, but the idea is to sell at some point.”
COMMAND AND CONTROL
A sale depends partly on whether Backus is still having fun. He’s having a blast right now, gearing up for the introduction of MCON, a mobile game controller for smartphones. It’s a new category for OhSnap and a big contributor to sales projections. Backus predicts an additional lift from other new and established accessories, international expansion and wider distribution at retailers such as Best Buy and Target.
“The past couple of years have really been sort of buildup years,” the CEO says. “I think 2026 is really where the rubber’s going to meet the road for us as we roll out MCON, expand our retail presence, expand globally and add product lines. We’re starting to scale for the first time in pretty much every category. This is where you start to see some compounding effects occur with more products, more channels, more regions.’’
If this sounds like a whirlwind scenario, that’s how Backus’s mind works. He connects the various aspects of his 20-employee company — design, sales, finance, distribution, the Chinese supply chain and marketing — in seamless, rapid-fire succession that mimics the inner workings of the phones around which he’s built OhSnap.
The company generates three-fourths of sales online, the rest in stores, Backus says. That mix is headed toward 50/50 as it expands into more brick-and-mortar locations and gains shelf space. A Target display reset is giving OhSnap more space after the No. 2 discount retailer “took $1.5 million in product from us,” he says.
OhSnap competes against rivals including PopSockets, which generally charges lower prices. OhSnap wallets holding one to eight cards were priced on Target’s website at $80 to $100 in mid-November.
Backus touts the advantages of his grip, such as a thinner profile and continual innovations such as stronger magnetism for sticking “your phone to your refrigerator or gym equipment or anything steel.”
“We developed a product that’s expensive for the category, but it’s also very unique for the category in the sense of what it does,” he says. Even so, “there’s absolutely an argument that we’re pricing ourselves out of a large portion of the market.”
As a result, the company is going to offer grips costing less starting next year. Plans also call for the introduction of the MCON game console before the holidays.
“We’re launching that product into the world,” says Backus, listing western Europe, Australia, Japan and South Korea as destinations for the game console and grips.
As MCON neared mass production this fall, Backus focused on testing the console’s software. He splits his time between brainstorming, designing and testing products, filming videos and CEO duties such as finances, HR and “chasing the next fire.”
Finding success in business depends on “so many factors and a lot of them you can’t control,” says Backus, who doesn’t have a conventional education. “But the one thing you can control and the thing that moves the needle the most is the people that you surround yourself with.
“That’s the core of what business is — finding great people you align with and have a good work ethic and are smart and can figure things out,” he says.
“If you can put yourself in a room with enough of those people, you’ll find success because inevitably any business is going to require pivoting, adapting and moving quickly.” ■
