Meet Two Friends Who Went Searching For Bargains And Found Their Way Onto TV

By Shannon Hicks

Jan Bennett and Maryann Mark were having lunch in Danbury recently and decided to follow their meal with some shopping. The Newtown residents were eating at Red Lobster on Backus Avenue and decided to go across the street to one of their favorite stores, The Christmas Tree Shops. It is a store the ladies like to visit on a regular basis, and that afternoon they went in search of some new flower pots.

They ended up being videotaped for two Christmas Tree Shops commercials, and people in Newtown have been seeing the ads on the air for a few weeks now.

Camera crews were at the store in Danbury Square on April 17. Shoppers were recruited at random, and followed around the store while shopping. The recording process, says Mrs Bennett, is as spontaneous as the store’s commercials: People are filmed as they discover items for their carts and exclaim over prices, and then they offer what Mrs Bennett called “exit interviews.”

When they were at the store that afternoon, Mrs Bennett and Mrs Mark ended up finding some items — a pitcher and glasses, a candle and even a suncatcher — with flamingos on them. They think it was the fact that their cart was getting filled with similar items that caught a producer’s attention.

“I really think he liked that idea because they filmed us pulling one thing after another with flamingos on them from our cart,” Mrs Bennett said.

The entire process lasted about 90 minutes for Mrs Bennett, a retired schoolteacher, and Mrs Mark, who is an education aide at Newtown Middle School. Mrs Bennett currently works part-time at Baby Gap, and one of her co-workers was the first person to mention seeing the commercial.

“Now we watch TV not for the shows, but the commercials,” she laughed. The friends have seen their commercials on Channel 3 (WFSB) and Channel 6 (WVIT), and have been told by others that they have aired on Channel 8 (WTNH). The ladies appear in two commercials and Mrs Bennett can be heard in the background of a third.

“Coming from New Jersey, I have a distinctive voice and accent,” Mrs Bennett laughed. “I think that was a plus for me.”

Christmas Tree Shops send out crews to record 11 sets of commercials during the year, Mrs Bennett learned. There are 24 Christmas Tree Shops in New England, with more than half located in Massachusetts. Danbury’s store is one of three currently in Connecticut.

“They visit 11 of their stores during the course of the year, and do all of the recording in the stores,” Mrs Bennett said.

The two women visit the Danbury story a few times a year.

“We have a routine of which way we always go through the store,” said Mrs Bennett.

“We really try to curtail ourselves because it’s such a great store, we can spend too much time — and money — in there without realizing it,” said Mrs Mark. “It’s a fun place to go.”

The fact that these two regular shoppers stumbled into a commercial was a happy coincidence.

“It was just a fluke,” Mrs Bennett said of showing up the one day this year commercials were being filmed in Danbury. “We had no idea this was going on. We were just in the right place at the right time.”

In addition to appearing on television, the ladies also received gift certificates for the store for their efforts (which they turned around and used toward the new flamingo items they had found while shopping), and they were sent videotapes of their commercials.

While the ladies did find some Siberian iris plants in addition to their flamingo-themed items, they never did find any flower pots for Maryann’s house.