McMiller Party Games (It's Bananas!)

Key numbers

The product

It's Bananas! is a physical party game where players wear a velcro monkey tail around their waist and use it to scoop up cardboard bananas in slapstick races - no screens, no rulebook, immediate laughter. It sells for $19.99-$23.99 with a landed cost of about $3, giving the company exceptional margins for a toy. The lineup has grown to five titles, including Fish Fight (a cornhole-style game made from plant-based, plastic-free materials), Fire in the Hole, Cat Mitt and UpRoar, priced $9.99-$21.99. Games are designed specifically to be funny to watch, which makes them ideal TikTok content: clips have generated over a billion views and repeatedly sold out inventory in hours. Distribution is mostly direct-to-consumer through Amazon and the company's own site, expanding into independent toy retailers and wholesale via Faire after the show.

How they did it

David McGranaghan and Julian Miller met on a blind date in London around 2009 and both built careers as professional stage and film actors before moving to Los Angeles. Tasked with entertaining their families at Christmas, they invented physical party games and realized in 2020, stuck at home in Covid lockdown, that the jokes were the business. They launched It's Bananas! the same year as a side hustle, selling mostly on Amazon, and it generated nearly $1 million in its first year, convincing them to go full-time. They bootstrapped everything, keeping their $3 landed cost versus a $23.99 retail price, and grew from under $1 million to $3.2 million revenue in 2024 before projecting $5 million with $750,000 profit for 2025. When their Shark Tank episode (Season 17, Episode 7) aired in December 2025, their ask of $200,000 for 5% drew offers from four Sharks and a bidding war; they accepted Daniel Lubetzky's deal of $200,000 for 9% plus a $0.99 royalty. Total lifetime sales passed $12.5 million and one million units worldwide across their games.

Why it worked

• Games engineered for social video: every title creates slapstick moments that rack up billions of organic TikTok and Instagram views
• Extraordinary unit economics - roughly $3 landed cost against a $24 retail price, bootstrapped with zero outside capital
• Ordinary-founder authenticity: two actors solving their own family problem, which made the pitch and the brand relatable
• Multi-generational, language-light play that travels across age groups and international markets