Helping Cardholders Read the Fine Print
When the dinner bill arrived, actor Jack Nicholson took out his credit card and a plastic magnifying lens of the drugstore variety.
“What are you doing?” asked friend and business partner Alan Finkelstein, who was dining with him at Abetone’s in Aspen, Colo.
“I am trying to see the bill so that I can pay the bill,” Nicholson said.
Then, as Finkelstein tells the tale, the proverbial lightbulb went off in his head.
Why not combine the two items into one--a credit card with a built-in magnifying lens?
What a simple solution to the problem Nicholson and others have trying to read the small print on restaurant bills, in phone books, even on food labels, when their reading glasses aren’t handy or they’d prefer not to brandish those telltale signs of aging.
And how hard could it be for Finkelstein to pull it off, given his access to more monetary resources than the average would-be inventor? A co-owner of the swank Indochine restaurant on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles, Finkelstein used to own the Monkey Bar with Nicholson.
“Everybody thinks, ‘Wow! What a simple, goofy idea,’ ” Finkelstein said recently. “They think that we just sat around and cut out little holes and glued in little lenses.”
It took seven years, several patents, several manufacturers, several million dollars and a bit of arm-twisting, but Finkelstein, who didn’t think it would take that long, finally has the credit card of his dreams in his pocket.
Chase Manhattan Bank launched the LensCard last fall at a party attended by Finkelstein’s celebrity pals Nicholson, Sean Penn and Michael Douglas. Finkelstein, who is 48 now and wears reading glasses, can see his card in Chase ads running in national magazines such as Scientific American. New licensing deals with bankers abroad are afoot, along with new patents that incorporate a security feature into the lens.
Along the way, Finkelstein ran into the same roadblocks that most inventors face: finding a manufacturer and landing a licensee.
Things got off to a deceptively easy start, though. Finkelstein had a mock-up of the card made, got a patent and made an early deal with a bank to distribute the card.
“We celebrated a little prematurely, because we found out three weeks later that no one had any idea how to manufacture it,” Finkelstein recalled.
He soon learned that no one was going to give him much help in figuring it out, either.
“It was like asking the Treasury Department what kind of paper they used to print money,” said Finkelstein. “No one was willing to talk to me about how credit cards are manufactured.”
Like any eventually successful inventor, he persevered. In his hunt for engineers to help him with the process, he called manufacturing heavyweight 3M Corp. (“I drove them crazy.”) Following 3M’s leads led him as far afield as Germany, where he flew to have coffee with the president of a company that manufactures machines used to make “smart” cards, which are embedded with computer chips that store information. He tracked down a major optical engineer, tool and die experts and others who might help.
He was still having trouble getting a card manufacturer to work with him. And he was beginning to learn why. A simple plastic card is built in a 20-step process that involves almost as many separate machines. Expensive, complicated machines.
“We had to try to integrate into their process, and re-create ink and adhesives, and pass all the ISO [international quality] standards,” said Finkelstein.
Manufacturers typically aren’t eager to share information or interrupt their assembly lines to experiment with, or incorporate, a new invention, agreed Jill Duggan, president and founder of Product Development Concepts Inc. in Scottsdale, Ariz.
“The learning curve is so expensive . . . and there’s no guarantee the damn thing is going to sell,” said Duggan, who works with King World Entertainment and other clients to bring new inventions to market.
It wasn’t until Finkelstein had the muscle of one of the largest banks in the country, Chase, that manufacturers began to pay attention, he said.
His relationship with Chase was formed through his typical “start at the top” approach to solving a problem. He contacted a New York advertising agency with several big banking clients. If the agency bigwigs liked the magnifying lens idea, he figured, they’d help him pitch it to their bank clients. The agency declined, citing a potential conflict of interest, but it did give him a name to call at Chase.
He was on his way to taking the next big step: finding a licensee.
His contact at Chase acknowledged that he wasn’t exactly bowled over by the idea of inserting a magnifying lens into a credit card. And he wasn’t the only one at the bank who felt that way.
“To be honest, and Alan knows this,” said Drew Otocka, a credit card marketing executive at Chase in New York, “I would say that there were more people on the negative side of the ledger, more people who said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding’ than people who would say, ‘God, this is great!’ ”
Preliminary market research showed Otocka just how wrong he might be. It reminded him, he said, that it’s not always smart to trust one’s gut instinct, even if one happens to be a marketing professional.
More formal market research gave the idea the highest rating of any Chase credit card product at the time, Otocka said.
That gave the two men the ammunition they needed to get the bank to help pay for manufacturing tests and the new machinery needed to make the card.
“They got behind the idea big time and put pressure on the credit card [manufacturers] to work with me,” said Finkelstein.
With the help of, among others, engineer Ron Gschwandtner, who shares credit on the most recent credit card patent issued to Finkelstein, the process was finally perfected.
In January, Chase mailed its first round of letters pitching the LensCard to its customers. More than 7% signed up, two to three times the usual rate for direct mail, the bank said. Chase won’t say how many LensCards are in wallets nationwide, but it said response to a second mailing continues to exceed expectations.
Banking proved to be tougher to crack than Hollywood’s legendary cliques for Finkelstein, but he doesn’t regret his bumpy road to inventorhood.
“All I can say is, it takes a little longer and it’s a lot harder than you expect, but I think it’s worth it if your heart is really in it, if you really believe in your product.”
Does innovation figure into your success? Tell us about it. Write to Mind to Market, Business News, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053. Or send e-mail to cyndia.zwahlen@latimes.com.
