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Marketing - Gadgets to Go

Marketing
Gadgets to Go
Emily Lambert 06.05.06

Gadgets 2 Go

Zachary Kaplan and Keith Schacht collect obscure inventions, from scented plastic to self-heating cans, for companies desperate to innovate.
Keith Schacht flicks a cigarette lighter and holds the flame to a business card. He smiles when white letters and circles appear on the paper. The card's coating is embedded with thousands of microscopic hollow plastic balls that expand when heated. These "microspheres" were made by a division of Akzo Nobel (nasdaq: AKZOY - news - people ) in the Netherlands. The business card idea makes Schacht wonder whether the tiny balls might be added to a birthday card to reveal a surprise message when the card is held over birthday-cake candles.

"It's a conversation starter," he says, beaming.

And that means the card, pocketed at a trade show in Paris, gets added to a pile of intriguing but unsung gizmos that form the basis of Schacht's business. Schacht and his college pal, Zachary Kaplan, run Inventables, a firm that seeks out obscure, newfangled textiles, technology and thingamajigs for companies that otherwise might overlook them.

Schacht, 26, and Kaplan, 27, are new-gadget scouts who track down and try out hundreds of promising novelties in a year. Each quarter they pick up to 80 items to pass along to 100 consumer product companies, and each client gets the same collection of 20 gewgaws, delivered in a box. They include product descriptions and suggest other uses for each widget. For this Inventables charged $4,000 when they created the company in 2002. They gradually increased the price to $25,000. Recently, they jacked up the subscription price to $200,000 a year for the quarterly mailings and a consulting program. Some companies pay more for other services, for example, expanding the program for multiple offices. The company's revenue is at $2 million a year, FORBES estimates. Their clients include BMW, Boston Scientific (nyse: BSX - news - people ), Kohler, Motorola (nyse: MOT - news - people ), Nike (nyse: NKE - news - people ) and Procter & Gamble.

posted by Famous Quotations @ 10:09 AM