Five days before the taping, Oprah threw a Kashwére robe down on the conference table at a producer's meeting and just like that, the robe was added to the selections for '05, according to Pete Seltzer, CEO of Kashwére.

With such short notice, Seltzer knew it would be a challenge. "They tried to warn us," he said. But after Oprah's Favorite Things aired, "for six consecutive weeks we could not get a call out, the phones were hammered and we did thousands and thousands of Internet orders."

People "assume everyone on Oprah is like Nike or IBM, sometimes the burden on us is overwhelming."

Seltzer offered his staff pizza and brought in friends of friends to handle the workload in the months after the show. And Seltzer, a single father, said "there were plenty of times I brought my kids to work just to be around them."

And now? "My company now is a much stronger company because of it, we can handle bigger volumes and make it look easy."