Company Uses Computerized Labeling to Find a Niche

The concept is as old as your mother sewing labels into your clothes before you went to camp.

But add a bar code and a computer and you’ve got a company. At least that’s what Michael Chastek and Edward P. Herbert have done. They project that their Lost & Found Co. is going to be selling its computerized labeling service to 800,000 people by the end of 1996.

“At the start of 1995,” says Herbert, “we had about 3,700 subscribers. But we relaunched the whole product in July under the name I.D. Link, and we are now adding 400 to 500 members a week.”

The partners expect that pace to continue to increase as the company moves toward its sales goal.

Chastek is a Spokane-born entrepreneur who has been in the restaurant and real estate business over the past 20 years. Herbert is a sales consultant from New York who has made a career of helping entrepreneurs launch their ideas.

What Chastek and Herbert are selling now is a bar-code labeling system and computer database that is designed to help in the recovery of lost and stolen property.

The company is the refinement of an idea Chastek, Lost & Found’s president, acquired in 1992 when he bought a tiny Spokane company called Home Security. Home Security produced bar code labels with the idea of selling them to insurance agents. The agents would put the labels on their customers’ property, then store the bar code numbers on a central database as an identification system.

There were problems. Insurance agents, Herbert says, don’t have the time to run around labeling property. And if lost or stolen property is identified, the finder still has to go to a lot of trouble to track down and contact the property owner.

“What Mike discovered,” says Herbert, the company’s executive vice president, “is that there’s a market out there not for just a property identification program, but for an identification and recovery program.”

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Chastek made homeowners the focus of Lost & Found’s marketing efforts. He made the labels of a tough vinyl material and experimented to find an adhesive that makes them difficult to chip off. He added a toll-free number to the labels and expanded the database concept to include around-the-clock customer service people.

The system carefully protects the anonymity of the property owner, Herbert emphasizes.

So for $19.95, Lost & Found customers purchase 30 bar code labels and a membership number that identifies them and their labels in the company’s database. Anyone finding the property can call the toll-free number. Lost & Found will dispatch United Parcel Service or Mail Boxes Etc. to pick up the property, package it and return it to the owner. Members must resubscribe each year for a $19.95 fee.

With these refinements in place, subscriptions still moved slowly until the company shifted its marketing strategy recently.

Now Lost & Found concentrates on persuading neighborhood watch programs and police associations to recommend I.D. Link to neighborhood watch members. “One of these things that all neighborhood watch organizations stress,” Chastek says, “is property identification. Up until now, about the only alternative for that was an engraving kit.”

So far, Lost & Found has won the endorsements of Crime Stoppers International and the Colorado Crime Prevention Assn. Those endorsements, and the recommendations of those groups that their individual programs members buy I.D. Link, has driven the growth Lost & Found has enjoyed.

Now, the company has developed a software package designed to simplify police departments’ record-keeping where neighborhood watch associations are concerned. The company will give the package to any law-enforcement agency for an $8.95 fee that covers the cost of duplication, shipping and handling.