Advertisement
Advertisement
Keeping Phones and Making Names
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.
1 | 2 | Next Page »
Post A Comment
To submit a comment you must be registered with Print Solutions Magazine. Please click here to
complete our short registration form.
