28 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • JUNE 2018
WHOLLY MOLI
TWEEZERMAN TWEEZERS:
A PLUCKY SUCCESS
By NICK CICCONE
Dal LaMagna bent over — stark
naked — in front of a mirror in
1980 and discovered the pain in his
butt that would go on to make him
a millionaire.
“I was nude sunbathing, and I got
a splinter in my butt,” LaMagna
recalled in a speech in 2001,
according to The New York Times.
The tweezers he’d bought from a
local drugstore didn’t work, which
prompted him to start thinking
about what would make them better.
This was the start of Tweezerman,
now an international personal-caretool
brand launched on the North
Shore.
LaMagna burst into the
business world with tremendous
entrepreneurial spirit. That zest
was tested when he moved to Los
Angeles to become a filmmaker but
was initially unsuccessful. He had
other ideas before selling tweezers,
such as trying to engineer a baking
pan specifically for lasagna —
another failure.
The splinter in his rear end was
both his rock bottom and his saving
grace. He teamed up with a Swiss
cosmetics company, Dumont,
which eventually became the
multimillion-dollar Tweezerman
brand — but not before LaMagna
practically exhausted his life’s
savings. His early struggles ignited
his lasting intrigue in American
capitalism, about which he’s
authored a few books.
Racking up debt in the process of
building his tweezer empire, he
realized, “You can’t get capital if
you don’t have capital. It’s a closed
club, and that’s a problem.”
At the peak of the business’s
success in 2004, averaging
between $25 and $30 million
in annual revenues, LaMagna
sold Tweezerman to a German
company, Zwilling J.A. Henckels.
Tweezerman is still a Long Islandbased
company, headquartered in
Port Washington, and its products
are sold virtually everywhere.
His relentless work ethic also led
him to finance several of his own
political campaigns — he twice
tried to unseat U.S. Rep. Peter King
(R-Seaford) in 1996 and 2000; and
he ran against ex-Oyster Bay Town
Supervisor John Venditto in 1997.
LaMagna, now 71, is still an
entrepreneur. He is president and
CEO of IceStone, a company that
makes countertops out of recycled
glass and cement in Brooklyn. Even
today, LaMagna is known for his
dedication to the business world,
and for the quirky story of that
summer afternoon in his birthday
suit when he realized he was sitting
on a gold mine.
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