Lexington, KY - The year 2012 presented Christopher Manzo with a new wife, a new business and a new city. A transplant from St. Louis, Manzo moved to Lexington over the summer. He is an architect and educator by trade and training, but has turned his professional attention to smartphone technology with a new product called Kit.
Manzo’s invention integrates accessories into smart devices. It began not with a dream, but a beer.
About a year and a half ago, Manzo was an adjunct professor of architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. Out with some students one night, they needed a bottle opener to open a beer, but nobody had one. “Everyone had a smartphone, but no tools for the good stuff,” Manzo said.
Kit
Thus, the idea to integrate practical, tangible tools into smartphones.
Kit’s protective case works as a wallet for cash and credit cards, and a storage container for a house key. It contains an emergency battery, a multi-functional tool similar to a Swiss army knife, connection cords for charging the phone, an earphone holder and a flash drive. The plastic shell also has an external charging mount and a series of connection points for accessories (a camera, e.g.), the way a USB port works for computer cables.
Initially designed for the consumer electronics market as a retail product, Manzo wants to take the product into the medical and industrial fields, equipping smartphons with modular sensors for blood analysis, glucose monitoring and other medical testing, or accessories like bar code scanners for manufacturers.
“We feel can become very versatile in terms of branding, and can go into different fields and markets,” he said.
Kit is currently in beta mode. Manzo has a prototype and is working on refinements before taking it to a manufacturer, which will cost around $100,000 to tool the product and make it ready for a product launch.
To raise funds, Manzo has a Kickstarter campaign running through Jan. 2, in the hopes of raising $45,000. Kickstarter is an Internet-based platform for crowd-funding of creative projects in the U.S. and U.K.
“I thought Kickstarter might be a good opportunity to promote the product and raise some funds, to fund the initial tooling for the product,” he said. “It’s an ambitious goal.”
When he was working on the first prototype and approaching investors for funding, Manzo admitted to being pretty shocked when venture capitalists thought he had a cool concept but quickly dismissed the idea itself. It seems they just wanted to know how Manzo’s company would make money for them.
“When you’re launching a product, you're launching a business,” he said. “As an architect, ‘business’ was never the conversation.”
He worked for architectural firms in St. Louis and had his own professional practice for the last 12 years but—as most solo practitioners know—there’s a lot to learn about the business side of being an entrepreneur. Fortunately, Manzo is a quick study.
A few months ago he was walking in downtown Lexington and saw a sign for Awesome Inc. “I went in and introduced myself to those guys and they said I should talk to Warren next door,” he said.
Manzo stepped over to the Commerce Lexington building on Main Street and found Nash, director of the Lexington Innovation & Commercialization Center. Manzo credits Nash and ICC with helping him get his new business, Skipping Stone Technologies, off the ground. Nash helped Manzo schedule a pitch for the Bluegrass Angles, which happens in February. If he is able to launch Kit in the spring and get some sales rolling in, Manzo would really like to consider the television show “Shark Tank” as another venture capital avenue. “That would be really fun to do,” he said.
Manzo gave his business and product two different names on purpose. “I think we’re going to do more things than the one product,” he said. Designating the product as “Kit” was as short and pointedly descriptive as could be for the smartphone case. “It’s so fundamental,” he said. “When you have your kit together you have everything you need to get on with your day.”
The name Skipping Stone Technologies is a tribute to Manzo’s architectural aesthetic.
“I like the beauty of a simple object,” he said. ”A skipping stone is the perfect stone you find on the beach. It fits in your hand just right; it skims across the water just right, and that's the kind of value, the provocativeness we want our product to have.”
In addition to founder Manzo, Skipping Stone Technologies consists of designer David Ward in Lexington, financial officer Joe Camp in St. Louis and sales executive Bob Williams in Atlanta. The company is working with Bullhorn Creative for videos and other marketing endeavors.
One of biggest issues with smartphones is obsolescence. Accessories that make it function as a camera or video player are typically designed for one model. “When you switch from an iPhone 4 to an iPhone 5 or to a Samsung, those accessories don’t work,” Manzo said. “They become waste.”
The purpose of Kit’s connection system is to carry all accessories forward through different brands and generations. The case itself has to be device-specific for physical specs, but the point of connection remains constant. “You can reuse your accessories in cross-device platforms,” Manzo said. “This is the true value.”
But wait. Doesn’t this already exist?
“No one's brought it all together,” Manzo said. “No one has thought of it as architecture, to house functionality. That's what we have our patent on, the whole connection and technological platform of integrating accessories in a modular way.” His company has two patents, along with multiple trademarks including Hard Apps, for his branded accessories that transfer from one device to another and carry forward to upgrades.
Manzo hopes to manufacture and distribute Kit out of Lexington. In the first quarter of 2013 he’s looking forward to searching for an office space. “I cannot wait to have that problem,” he said.
Learn more about Skipping Stone Technologies at www.kit-case.com.
Kathie Stamps posts grammar tips at www.facebook.com/GrammarTips.