Yes, Scrub Daddy got a deal on Shark Tank, and unlike many handshakes made on the show, this one shows up in the record afterward. Aaron Krause, an inventor from the Philadelphia suburbs, pitched his smiley-face sponge in Season 4 in October 2012 and accepted $200,000 for 20% of the company from Lori Greiner. In March 2024 Reuters was still describing Scrub Daddy as backed by Greiner. Fourteen years after the episode, it is a privately held cleaning-products company in Pennsauken, New Jersey, with Krause as founder and CEO. It is still in business. It looked into a sale in 2024, and as of October 2026 we found no announcement that one has happened. The harder question is how big it is, because the figures usually quoted for it measure different things.
What Aaron Krause pitched on Shark Tank
The product Krause pitched when he brought Scrub Daddy on Shark Tank was a round, yellow polymer-foam sponge with a smile cut into it. It is firm in cold water and soft in warm water, and the mouth cleans both sides of a spoon at once. According to the company’s own timeline, filming took place in July 2012 “after 3 long months of auditions,” and the segment aired as Season 4, Episode 7.
Shark Tank Blog’s recap of the episode gives the ask as $100,000 for 10%, which valued the company at $1 million (our post-money valuation calculator does that arithmetic for any ask; our guide on how to value a startup explains where the number comes from). There were very few sales behind the pitch. ABC News reported in March 2014 that the sponge had earned $100,000 in its first 18 months, mostly from QVC, and Greiner’s own website uses the same “$100 thousand” figure for what the company had sold before the show.
Did Scrub Daddy get a deal on Shark Tank?
Yes. Shark Tank Blog’s recap records that Robert Herjavec and Mark Cuban dropped out. Guy Raz’s March 2026 newsletter also notes that Cuban passed. Kevin O’Leary offered $100,000 for 50%, then a royalty structure. Daymond John bid as high as $175,000 for 25% before withdrawing. Greiner raised her offer several times, and the deal was set when Krause proposed $200,000 for 20% and she agreed.
The deal also held up after taping, which is the part that often fails on this show. Fortune reported in 2024 that he left the show with $200,000 from Greiner for a 20% stake. Reuters’ March 2024 report on the possible sale described the same terms and called the company Greiner-backed. Greiner still lists Scrub Daddy first among her Shark Tank deals on her website. One thing has not been made public: whether her stake is still exactly 20% today.
The buffing-pad business Krause sold to 3M
The Shark Tank pitch was not Krause’s first exit. He studied psychology at Syracuse University and, rather than take a conventional job, washed and detailed cars. He told Fortune his family’s reaction: “My mom was crying.” Damaging a car led him to invent better buffing and polishing pads, and that became a manufacturing company, Dedication to Detail.
In September 2008, 3M announced that it had acquired the business. BodyShop Business, reporting the announcement, described it as “a Philadelphia-based manufacturer of paint finishing systems including buffing and polishing pads,” whose “patented quick release double-sided foam and wool pads” were sold under “The Edge” brand, and noted: “Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Krause, the CEO and president, had co-founded the firm 16 years earlier with Saul Denenberg, that its 20 employees would be kept, and quoted him: “In fact, we’ll be expanding at our current location.” (Fortune’s later profile puts his move into Dedication to Detail in 1995, which doesn’t match the Inquirer’s account.) Syracuse’s alumni profile says he then worked for 3M for five years.
Krause has said the sale was hard-fought. The published timestamps for his March 2026 How I Built This episode include “refusing to sell to 3M based on EBITDA,” and Raz’s newsletter teases how Krause got “one of the biggest companies in the world to triple their offer during acquisition talks.” The price has never been disclosed, so that account cannot be checked.
How a “worthless” hand scrubber became Scrub Daddy
The sponge started as an extra-rough foam hand scrubber for greasy mechanics. Raz writes that Krause priced it at $4.50 and spent a year failing to sell it. The accounts differ on why it stayed with him. Krause told Fortune that 3M “carved [the sponge] out of the deal, and left it with me because it was so worthless.” The company’s timeline says a few boxes “considered to hold no value were left in his possession.” ABC News reported in 2014 that 3M didn’t need it because it already had Scotch-Brite.
In 2011, by the company’s and Fortune’s account, his wife Stephanie asked him to clean the lawn furniture. He found the foam in a box marked “scrap,” saw that it changed texture with water temperature, and tried it on dishes. “We’re missing the boat. It’s not a hand scrubber. It’s the best pan scrubber,” he told the Inquirer that year. Fortune reports he spent $150,000 to patent it. The product didn’t sell from a store shelf at first. Raz recounts that when it went on sale at a local ShopRite, nobody bought it (“Not one person”) until Krause demonstrated it in person. Three things changed that, in Raz’s telling: an Inquirer profile, QVC, and Shark Tank.
What happened to Scrub Daddy after Shark Tank
“The night the show aired, there was 30,000 hits to our website,” Krause told ABC News. He told Fortune that sales passed $1 million within 24 hours. ABC reported that in the 18 months after the episode, the company earned $18 million, compared with $100,000 in the 18 months before it, and that the sponge was in Walmart, Bed Bath & Beyond and SuperValu.
After that the company grew into a product line. Scrub Mommy followed in 2014. In January 2023, NJBIZ reported a co-branding agreement with Unilever’s Cif brand, timed to an update segment on the show. The company says it opened a manufacturing hub and a headquarters in Hungary in 2023. The Inquirer reported a 162,150-square-foot distribution center in Cherry Hill that October. In April 2024 Krause told the Philadelphia Business Journal that a new toilet-cleaning product would be a “billion-dollar product.” That is a founder forecast, not a result.
How big is Scrub Daddy? Read the numbers carefully
Each of the commonly quoted figures measures something different:
- Annual revenue. Reuters reported on March 28, 2024, citing people familiar with the matter, that the company had more than $220 million in revenue in 2023. Fortune separately reported, citing Krause, that the company had $220 million in sales that year. The Philadelphia Business Journal, as relayed by the Inquirer, said the company expected about $350 million in 2024. That was a projection, and we found no reported actual figure.
- Cumulative “sales.” Greiner’s website says the company has done “over $2.9 Billion in sales since airing,” with more than 165 products, 242,000+ retail stores and 75 countries. Shark Tank Blog’s recap of the January 2023 update segment recorded $670 million in retail sales. These are promotional, unaudited figures from the company’s investor and from the show. Both are cumulative, the show’s figure is explicitly retail sales rather than company revenue, and Greiner’s page doesn’t say which it means. They also disagree with the company’s own timeline, which says 47 countries as of 2023.
- Valuation. Reuters’ sources said a full or partial sale could value the company at “several hundred million dollars.” With no completed deal, that is still an estimate.
Who owns Scrub Daddy now, and is it still in business?
Scrub Daddy is privately held, with Krause as founder and CEO and Greiner as an investor. The size of each stake is not public. Reuters reported in March 2024 that the company had hired JPMorgan Chase to advise on whether and how investors, including Krause, should cash out, and that no deal was certain. Krause told the Philadelphia Business Journal: “It would be stupid for me not to explore what my options are and what the price available to us is. [That] doesn’t mean I’ll ever take it.”
As of October 23, 2026, we found no announcement of a completed sale or stake sale. Krause appeared on How I Built This in March 2026 as the company’s founder, and the episode’s published description doesn’t mention a sale. The sponge is sold through its website, Target, Walmart and Amazon, where the single Original Scrub Daddy is listed under the brand’s store.
The Original Scrub Daddy sponge
What founders can take from it
First, the product was right but the market was wrong. The same foam failed as a $4.50 hand scrubber for mechanics and then sold as a dish sponge. Second, a product shoppers aren’t looking for has to be shown to them. Krause’s in-store demos, QVC and Shark Tank all did the same job of demonstrating it. Third, the IP advice he gave ABC News in 2014 was more cautious than “get a patent”: “Lock down the intellectual property, invent a new process for making the product and then guard your trade secret with your life.” Last, before quoting the company’s numbers, check what each one measures. One year’s revenue, a decade of retail sales and an investor’s promotional total are different numbers, and none of them is audited.
