Lost & Found Firm Puts Bar Codes To Work Identifying Personal Property And Foiling Thieves

The concept is as old as your mother sewing labels into your underwear 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. And 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.”

Herbert and Chastek 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, equipment-leasing and real estate businesses here over the past 20 years. Herbert is a sales and marketing 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 data base 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, and then store the bar code numbers on a central data base as an identification system.

But 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 through a label, or name or address, 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.”

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. Then he added a toll-free number to the labels, and expanded the data base concept to include around-the-clock customer service people at the company’s Spokane headquarters. 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 data base. 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 for a third time earlier this year. Now, Lost & Found concentrates on convincing neighborhood watch programs and police associations throughout the U.S. and Canada to recommend the I.D. Link product to their neighborhood watch members.

“One of the 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, and that’s pretty tough to pass around from house to house.”

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

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.

Chastek and Herbert believe the new marketing emphasis will put Lost & Found on a fast-growth track. Chastek says the company has 9 employees now, and that will grow to 25 during 1996. Herbert says the company will have 1.5 million subscribers by the end of 1997, and from 1998 and beyond, will add up to 2 million members a year.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo