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A new promotional product does double duty
Every time Fred Antonini set down his cell phone, it slid away—across the table, out of his grasp and into electronics peril. After losing his first “brick-like” handset to a watery grave while tubing with his daughter, he bought a thin, sleek cell phone. It slipped out of his pocket time and time again, but he didn’t want the bulk of a belt clip or case. It was the aggravation of losing his cell phone that inspired eGrips, an application that keeps his electronics in place and functions as a promotional product at the same time.
Antonini, a retired executive from the flexible materials industry and founder of eGrips, Carrollton, Texas, realized it wasn’t a simple case of butterfingers that lost his phone. Sensing a market for a stay-put application, he called several industry contacts to plan a thin, adhesive label made of a textured, “grippy” material. “I took a few trips to Germany and started evaluating materials, but the upshot was there wasn’t a material with a high enough coefficient of friction to stop the sliding.” Those initial frustrating searches eventually yielded a product popping up on phones across the country.
eGrips looks like the surface of a basketball, but feels more elastic with deeper grooves. After three years of trial-and-error, the 1- x 2-inch pieces are made of silicone, which can be cleaned. There are different shapes for mp3 players, phones with QWERTY keyboards and the side face of the devices.
“eGrips are the best marketing tool we use,” says Sara Hinds, the Cingular marketing manager for Good Technology, a cell phone service that competes with Blackberry. “Otherwise, we give Good reps familiar tchotchkes, stress cubes and balls, sticky notes and probably every pen design known to mankind. But in terms of straight branding, eGrips is it.” Hinds said she and other marketing managers for Good chose eGrips several years ago to differentiate the company in branding efforts. The application is stuck on Hinds’ phone and lists speed dial combinations, shortcut functions and displays the Good logo. “It’s pretty cool,” she admits.
The eGrips application is attached to a postcard and sent through the mail. Each component can be customized. The Good Technology ones are branded with the company’s specific information—Cingular, Motorola or Verizon.
Good hasn’t measured the ROI, Hinds says, but the marketing managers are confident the brand awareness boost helps the company. “The reps ask for a stack of them when they go out to do proposals and meet clients to do demonstrations. They absolutely love it and we get good feedback, so we know it’s working for them,” she says. Good has ordered eGrips about 10 times, Antonini says.
eGrips has been selling the product online since April 2003, which Antonini calls the “beta test” years. End users were the primary customers, and the eGrips weren’t branded, just plain. It was “pure serendipity,” Antonini says, that the silicone he decided on came out clear. It was a natural follow, he explains to find an adhesive label and cover the top with the grippy silicone. Now, about 95 percent of his customers are distributors who use them as promotional items with an imprint.
The company’s first order came through a distributor friend who put 9-1-1 emergency line instructions on them for the Texas state government. A recent order came from a distributor at a trade show, Antonini says, buying for a large concrete company. He was skeptical at first, but learned that the company would give away the eGrips to keep contractors’ phones from slipping out of work pants.
“The trouble is, the silicone’s so expensive that the only way to print it cost-effectively was to use an Indigo, so there’s almost no waste,” he says, which has turned into another serendipitous discovery: variable printing. He can upload barcodes, photos, numerical features and more—he’s recently done headshots of real estate agents and insurance sales reps. One of their newest applications is TrackitBack, a service (several dollars per phone) that connects lost phones to their owners for a reward. Each eGrip is printed with a unique number and URL. The finder logs onto the website to return the handset.
Antonini can’t track his return customer rate, but estimates it’s more than 50 percent. “The business is really growing. In the promotional products business, it’s so unusual anyone buys the same product over and over. In the first quarter of 2007, we did as much business as we did all last year.” The applications last six months to a year, he says, but he’s met a customer who stuck an eGrip on his phone in January 2005.
—Rebecca Trela