BOCA RATON, FL.–It was on January 25, 1994 when TransMedia Group helped to arrange and promote a major media event for one of its esteemed clients, the unveiling of Rexall Sundown’s new headquarters in Boca Raton.
Celebrity spokesman Dick Clark was on hand when Boca Raton’s then Mayor Bill Smith presented the company’s chairman Carl DeSantis with a key to the city and declared Jan. 25, 1994 Rexall Sundown Day.
Thanks to Carl’s genius in creating products and our publicity that made them popular and top sellers when introduced, Rexall Sundown became king of the nutritional supplement market and it was then spurring construction of another distribution center at its new campus on Broken Sound Parkway, said DeSantis on that momentous day.
“I remember that glorious day well,” said TransMedia Group CEO Tom Madden, who founded TransMedia in New York City after he left NBC.
It was the reason Rexall Sundown had moved from Fort Lauderdale into Office Depot’s former 58,000-square-foot headquarters. The company was also completing work on an 87,000-square-foot manufacturing plant, a former IBM plant on 12 acres. The company’s distribution center had reached capacity and it needed additional space.
“This new facility, combined with our acquisition of a major manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania, puts us on a much higher curve for growth and profitability in the expanding markets for our high-quality, diversified product mix,” DeSantis said that day.
The move to Boca Raton made Rexall Sundown one of Palm Beach County’s largest employers at the time.
The maker of vitamins, nutritional supplements, over-the-counter pharmaceuticals and other health-related products went public in 1993 at $14 a share and its stock price hit $40 within a few months making it one of Wall Street’s hottest new issues.
With our publicity stoking the supplement fires nationwide year after year, the company’s annual sales zoomed from $150 million to over $900 million until Carl sold the company in 2000 for $1.6 billion. One year, TransMedia earned over $1 million in fees from one client, Rexall Sundown.
Just before that climactic happy ending when Carl sold the company, TransMedia published Carl’s hardcover book, Vitamin Enriched on December 1, 1998: A Mega Prescription for Wealth & Health from the Founder of Rexall Sundown.
“God bless, Carl, who’s still making money now with his energy drink Celsius, which of course contains a unique blend of vitamins.”