Over the years, Mark Cuban has said yes and no to more pitches than most founders will ever hear. Most of the ones he passes on don’t leave much of a mark. But one company is an anomaly. It was a chocolate-covered pretzel business. He’s said that decision still pops into his head from time to time.
Mark Cuban on The Company’s Margins That ‘Drove Him Crazy’
Mark Cuban told a story about a business that still annoys him when he thinks about it at the Oxford Union in 2017. He didn’t share the name, but he explained why it bothered him so much.
The item sold for thirty dollars. It costs roughly fourteen dollars to make. Shipping was “free” for the customer, but it cost the company about sixteen dollars. Every order lost a dollar, even though the price sounded fine. He described watching the money drain away in real time and said the business should have been shut down much earlier.
The Painted Pretzel From Shark Tank Season 3
The details closely match up with Raven Thomas’s brand, The Painted Pretzel, from Shark Tank Season 3. She went in asking for a $100,000 investment in exchange for a quarter of the business.
She first made the pretzels at home in Scottsdale as handmade gifts. The response was so strong that requests kept coming in. As demand grew, her home setup stopped being enough. She even had to pass on a $2 million order from Sam’s Club. That’s what led her to look for investors on “Shark Tank.”
The Adverse Shark Tank Effect
The real impact showed up after the episode aired. Thomas shared in a 2016 interview that the traffic spike was so big it knocked her site offline. Orders flooded in. Emails and calls didn’t stop.
She said the business jumped by roughly 1,500 percent. It was thrilling. But it also created a whole new set of problems. Suddenly, she was running a very different company than the one she had walked into.
Thomas said the growth was intense and often disorganized. She moved the production to a large candy plant to keep up. Although Cuban wasn’t part of daily operations, Thomas has said he remained accessible when she needed support.
Cuban blamed the free shipping for sinking the business. Thomas saw it differently. She was focused on keeping customers happy. The problem was the math. The margins disappeared, and money kept going out faster than it came in.
The Painted Pretzel Shark Tank Update
At Oxford, Cuban put the pretzel company in a group of businesses he thought were functionally finished, even if they were still operating. He didn’t dismiss the product and had even spoken positively about its potential in the past. His concern was the model behind it, which he felt couldn’t be sustained.
There were hints that things were starting to go wrong. Food Republic reported that customers began posting about long waits, missing orders, and poor communication. Some said they even reached out to the Better Business Bureau after getting no response for weeks.
At one point, the company’s own site warned that shipping could take up to a month. As of 2025, Yelp was listing the business as closed.
The Difference Between a Good Idea and a Good Business
Thomas said she never really feared failing because she had already done it before and learned from it. She called that resilience.
When she applied to the show, she wasn’t even nervous about facing the investors. She just hoped she wouldn’t trip while walking in. Her audition video was very casual, too. Her husband filmed it at home in one take, and they sent it off as is.
Thomas didn’t see herself as someone chasing attention from Shark Tank. She also deemed her own product too simplistic for mass appeal initially. But Mark Cuban saw it differently. He pointed to her passion and the care she put into the work.
The Price of Ignoring the Math
Care and commitment couldn’t fix the math. Demand was there, and attention was close, but the margins and operations didn’t support growth. The product worked. The founder worked. But the business didn’t.
Nothing here failed because of effort or intent. It failed because the system couldn’t support the success it attracted. That’s a hard lesson, and a common one. Not every win on the surface is a win underneath.
