Invention Puts Woodland Hills Man on EZ Street

For years, bringing home new compact discs meant an irritating struggle with plastic packaging, not to mention broken nails and bits of wrapper lodged uncomfortably between teeth.

Brian McCracken, 36, knows all about it. The budding Woodland Hills entrepreneur spent exasperating moments wrestling with shrink-wrapping while amassing a sizable CD collection--all inspiration, he says, for an invention that slices effortlessly through plastic, sticky labels and that pesky little metallic stirrup known in packaging parlance as the “dog bone.”

Called EZ-CD, McCracken’s gizmo is really nothing more than a tiny razor blade mounted beneath a U-shaped layer of colored plastic.

In the past year, sales of the EZ-CD and a line of products he calls “CD Essentials,” have taken off, turning what was once a part-time labor of love into a lucrative business that operates from a Chatsworth warehouse.

In 1993, when McCracken launched his company, Mactec Products, he worked out of a spare room at home. Then a software engineer at a Woodland Hills company, McCracken built his business during off hours rising at dawn, working late and during lunch.

“A lot of us have ideas about something that would make life easier,” McCracken said. “But either we’re too busy or we literally don’t know how to take the first step to create it. It really takes persistence--and a flexible job,” he added.

Persistence appears to have paid off. Mactec grossed $1 million last year and is filling orders from stores such as Tower Records, Sam Goody and Fry’s Electronics, where they retail anywhere between 99 cents and $1.99.

“They’re a really good impulse buy and they’re not very expensive,” said Kathy Ramirez, a manager at Tower Records in Sherman Oaks.

“It’s like the Pet Rock,” said Steve Moses, merchandise manager at Sam Goody at Universal CityWalk. “We use them in the store to open CDs and they sell pretty consistently.”

In addition to record stores, EZ-CD is proving to be a hot promotional item. McCracken has sent the openers to computer companies, radio stations, magazines, even a Christian group that requested the devices inscribed with the words: “open oneself to the word of the Lord.” And a mortgage company that wanted to “unleash the power.”

With “EZ-Openers,” McCracken has expanded his product line to cover video and audio cassette packaging. In one case, a British company ordered the openers, then turned around and marketed them as a great way to cut open plastic on cigarette boxes.

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McCracken grew up in La Canada Flintridge and attended high school at nearby St. Francis. He went to UC Berkeley where he earned a computer science degree before returning to the area where he helped start a company specializing in software for commercial real estate.

During that job, he started toying with the idea of products to help organize his music collection.

The first device was a plastic divider to slide between CD covers that helped with alphabetizing and categorizing. Then there was a design for storage racks and disc wipes.

But the home run came one Saturday in 1994 when McCracken came home with a CD and went looking through the utensil drawer for something to open it with. Noticing several openers in the drawer, he said, “The light bulb went off.”

McCracken has been plowing most of his profits back into the business. But with the orders piling up, he believes 1997 will be his “breakthrough year.”

Of course, not everyone has embraced the EZ-CD with open arms. One record chain in Massachusetts refused to stock the devices for fear they would aid shoplifters.

“It was really silly,” McCracken said. “Why would a shoplifter buy one of these when they could walk in with a knife or a razor blade?”

Already, he says, people are approaching him with new product ideas, some of which he now is marketing, such as a CD case without hinges and a mail service that fixes scratched CDs.

As for the future: “We produce a billion new CDs a year and they all have shrink-wrap,” McCracken said confidently. “This will be to the CD what the peeler was for the potato.”