Brown University senior David Emanuel garnered some attention for a student business called Lock’d when he won first place in the statewide Elevator Pitch competition at Johnson & Wales University’s Harborside Campus in Providence on Dec. 5.
Emanuel had 90 seconds to pitch Lock’d to a panel of judges from the Rhode Island business community. The annual contest is sponsored by the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition and supported by private businesses, colleges and universities and nonprofits.
Winning the Elevator Pitch competition fired up the team’s enthusiasm for following the business plan and bringing Lock’d and its idea for a security cover for backpacks to fruition.
Emanuel and his team at Brown expect to have a working prototype by the end of this year’s spring semester.
PBN: What was the inspiration for the company called Lock’d being developed by you and the other students on your team?
EMANUEL: The idea sparked from a project my team had in a class at Brown called “The Entrepreneurial Process: Innovation in Practice” during fall semester 2012.
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PBN: How did the idea for this particular business and this specific product take shape?
EMANUEL: Me and my four teammates sat in a room with a big whiteboard and started writing down everything and anything in our lives that wasn’t perfect. We came up with a lot of totally ridiculous ideas.
PBN: Was it simply a brainstorming process, or did you have guidelines or required goals? PBN: Did that seem possible to you? PBN: How did you get to developing a business model and zeroing in on a product? PBN: How did the team get from suitcases to backpacks to a business plan for Lock’d? PBN: What is your product? PBN: Why do think people will buy it? PBN: You won the Elevator Pitch competition. Did that have any impact on your plans? INTERVIEW
EMANUEL: We had no idea what our project was going to be, but one of the conditions of the class was that we had to have a business plan that would have revenue of $100 million dollars in five years.
EMANUEL: At the beginning of the class it seemed totally outrageous. As the semester progressed, we looked at a number of case studies. One of the main things my team learned in that class was to not to be afraid to think big. Don’t be afraid to come up with a big idea just because you think you can’t do it. If you’re going to have investors, you’re going to have to have a business that can grow to something really big.
EMANUEL: When we came up with the idea for Lock’d we weren’t going to target urban backpackers. One member of the team told about her mother traveling with a suitcase and it was broken into and all her electronics and jewelry were stolen.
EMANUEL: It’s really because we have an international team. That’s really worked to our advantage. And all five members of our team bring in different skill sets. Amanda Lee is from New Zealand and she’s majoring in visual arts and psychology. She’s making our PhotoShop mock-ups of our prototype. Now we can talk to manufacturers and say, “This is what we envision our products to look like. Joseph Stall is from Oklahoma. He’s an economics major and has had internships in accounting and project management. He’s in charge of making connections with manufacturers. Mehves Tangun is from Istanbul and her major is engineering and economics. She has a lot of internship experience in financing and media. A lot of her responsibility is customer-acquisition research, looking into how we are going to get … and retain customers. Matt Klimerman is our financial mastermind, the wizard behind our spreadsheet and our balance sheet. He’s from New York.
EMANUEL: It’s a lightweight cover that slips over and secures the entire backpack. The challenge with backpacks is there are lot of zippers and the fabric can be cut into, so the goal is to make sure people can’t get into the zippers or slash the fabric. It’s like a portable safe because it secures all the contents within the bag. It’s like a bike lock in the way that the user can attach it to a hostel bed or a train seat.
EMANUEL: Over 90 percent of urban backpackers know someone who has experienced having their passport, laptop, camera or irreplaceable photos stolen. We found, on the average, backpackers travel with $3,000 worth of belongings in a single backpack, often for several months. One of the problems with urban backpackers is they go on long-distance train rides where they fall asleep and can’t protect their gear.
EMANUEL: It definitely got us ramped up and ready to go full force this semester. It opened up a lot of possibilities. We have contacts now with people who have experience in manufacturing and in business. •
David Emanuel
POSITION: Brown University senior
BACKGROUND: As an urban backpacker and global adventurer with dual citizenship in the U.S. and Australia, Emanuel knows the backpack traveler.He spent last summer doing research at the University of Aachen, in Germany, which gave him the opportunity to spend weekends backpacking around the country, as well as to destinations including Warsaw, Poland. Staying in hostels, the need to keep valuables safe in a backpack and the extensive reports of stolen items from fellow backpackers, gave Emanuel fresh, on-the-ground experience to use when the time came for a student-innovation project launched last fall.
EDUCATION: Mechanical-engineering student at Brown University on track to graduate in May 2013.
FIRST JOB: Junior counselor at Jameson Ranch Camp, a working ranch outside Bakersfield, Calif.
RESIDENCE: Providence (family residence is Los Angeles)
AGE: 21
