Ready to Erase Whiteboards, IdeaPaint Lands 1,700 Lowe’s Stores
Morgen Newman and Jeff Avallon of IdeaPaint
Daniel Stanush
Morgen Newman and Jeff Avallon of IdeaPaint.
Morgen Newman and Jeff Avallon of IdeaPaint. Photographer: Daniel Stanush
Warren Prescott School
Tim Linberg
Warren Prescott School in Charlestown, Mass.
Warren Prescott School in Charlestown, Mass. Photographer: Tim Linberg
(Corrects the spelling of John Goscha’s last name. Changes the unit of measurement in the seventh paragraph. Changes the relationship of School Specialty from sole distributor to primary distributor in the eighth paragraph.)
In 2008, John Goscha was finally ready to find distributors for IdeaPaint, a new paint he had invented to turn any wall into a dry-erase surface for writing and doodling that can easily be wiped clean.
Having spent about $500,000 during the formula’s five-year development, he and Jeff Avallon, his vice-president of business development, were fretting about how to win enough orders to keep the Ashland, Mass., upstart chugging along. The natural venue -- NeoCon, the mammoth annual commercial interiors conference for architects and designers -- was just weeks away in Chicago, but there was a basic conceptual hitch: Exhibitors were limited to renting small booths. “There was no way we were going to be stuck in a 4x4 booth ... but I said, ‘I’ll buy as much wall space as you will sell me,” Avallon recalls.
For $30,000, IdeaPaint acquired more than 3,000 square feet of wall space during the three-day event. To stimulate experimentation among the 40,000 attendees, dozens of local art students were deployed to cover the walls of the eight-story venue with dry-erase marker doodles. The stunt led to the first of several commercial distribution deals, beginning with MDC Wallcoverings, one of the largest in its sector in the U.S.
Today the 23-employee company’s deceptively simple product appears to be on its way to steal a meaningful share of the $2 billion worldwide white board market. Backed by about $15 million in venture capital, it manufactures the paint in Illinois and has about 5,000 people working at least part-time selling it through its distributors, according to Chief Executive Officer Bob Munroe. After regional roll-outs last year, Lowe’s (LOW) started selling it in each of its 1,700-plus stores in April. “It’s a very intriguing product ... especially when you think of children’s rooms -- or even teenagers’ rooms,” says Karena Bailey, Lowe’s merchandising vice-president.
While many of Corporate America’s seven million conference rooms have white boards, IdeaPaint’s Chief Marketing Officer Marcus Wilson says its paint offers a quantum leap in creativity and collaboration. Coat a room with it and any meeting participant can chime in -- not just individuals nearest the board -- stimulating interaction. Professionals who work in areas that demand lots of collaboration, or at least large sketches, are normally the first to glom onto IdeaPaint. Interest often spreads throughout companies, says Avallon.
CONVENIENCE AND ‘COOL FACTOR’
Digital advertising shop HUGE has close to two-thirds of its Brooklyn, N.Y., office’s walls covered with IdeaPaint. “You can feel free with your ideas, and not all of them are going to be great. That’s okay -- you can just erase it and start all over,” says HUGE partner Michal Pasternak. Promising sketches are photographed before they are erased, then shared like documents. Flexible office space facility Cambridge Innovation Center in Boston started using the paint expansively last fall; much of its 130,000-square-foot space is covered now. “It definitely has the ‘cool factor’ that we strive to include to make our space unique and keep our clients coming back,” says Anna Whitlock, a customer ‘relationship manager’ at the space.
Schools are a further obvious target, says IdeaPaint’s Munroe, who says that the educational market may eventually rival the company’s commercial sales. There are 2.7 million classrooms in the U.S. alone, with one or two boards each. Many still use chalk, which is messy and aggravates asthma. Heavily used dry- erase boards periodically need replacing or recoating because they become riddled with faint tracings of previous writings. IdeaPaint, which can be painted over chalk boards and white boards, is 30 percent to 70 percent cheaper than white boards. IdeaPaint guarantees its $199.50-per-kit commercial version for life; its $175 home version is guaranteed for 10 years. (Each kit can cover 50 square feet.)
Breaking into the educational market won’t be easy. Buyers differ widely, from teachers to principals to facilities managers, across the nation’s 16,000 school districts and 140,000 schools. “Once we get to the decision-maker, frankly, it is a very easy sale. The trick is understanding who that decision-maker is,” explains Munroe. Supplemental learning product distributor School Specialty (SCHS) is set to kick off sales of IdeaPaint in June as its primary distributor for schools. Undaunted by budget cuts, Munroe says IdeaPaint can save schools money, citing Alaska’s second largest school district, Matanuska-Susitna. By installing IdeaPaint rather than new whiteboards, the district saved $650,000 across its 44 schools, he says.
In the commercial market, IdeaPaint has inked additional distribution deals, including Glidden Professional, part of Akzo Nobel, the world’s largest paint company, and Staples’s (SPLS) contract division, which accounts for about half of Staples’s approximately $24 billion in annual sales. Internationally, IdeaPaint is currently pushing its commercial line in only 20 countries. Ten to 15 new markets will be added next year, according to Morgen Newman, vice-president of international sales. IdeaPaint will offer training, not just for sales and marketing teams, but also for workers who will be applying the paint. International markets account for about 15 percent of total sales and Newman expects them to gradually increase to roughly one-third over the next several years.
A MARKETING DREAM FOR MUNROE
Why did Munroe, 50, a veteran marketer who spent 15 years in marketing at Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) and Procter & Gamble (PG), followed by a decade at Reebok (ADS:GR), join the management team of a company with only $12 million in sales last year? He’s giddy about IdeaPaint’s prospects, especially as sales are being primed by spending 35 cents of every sales dollar on marketing and brand awareness, compared to the 10 cents to 15 cents a more mature brand would spend. Projecting over $24 million in 2011, he expects sales to continue doubling annually through 2014.
If the projections become reality, David W. Riggs, president of CAS-MI Laboratories in Ypsilanti, Mich., will deserve partial credit. In 2006, IdeaPaint founder Goscha sought the help of that independent testing lab to improve his prototype after two other labs had failed to better it significantly. It was a “real challenge from a physics standpoint, in terms of adhesion, cohesion, surface tension,” recalls Riggs. Not only did the paint need to work with every dry-erase marker on the market, it also needed to adhere to a wide variety of substrata -- wood, metal, and chalkboard. “I would say if anyone deserves a lot of credit for making this product possible, I would say it is definitely CAS-MI Labs,” says Goscha, now 27, who is also grateful for the $300,000 line of credit Riggs extended to IdeaPaint at a make-or-break moment.
Protecting IdeaPaint’s intellectual property is critical, of course. It has had four patents published already and has applied for others. These precautionary measures -- aided by the Boston law firm Choate Hall & Stewart -- were enough to ward off one competitor when it came out with something that seemed to infringe. “I feel confident that we will get the patents that we have applied for and that those will have a substantial impact on this industry -- so far, so good,” says Goscha, who hatched IdeaPaint when he was a 19-year-old freshman at Babson College. While he serves as an adviser to IdeaPaint and remains a substantial shareholder, he left the company last year to start another venture. Goscha’s new business is based on another bright idea -- he hopes to improve on Edison’s incandescent light bulb.
To contact the reporter on this story: Ken Stier at kenstier@earthlink.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Nick Leiber at nleiber@bloomberg.net
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