A partnership with Brooks Pharmacy marks the first New England account for videotape conversion
company LifeClips.
“The first time I heard the concept, it just stopped me dead
in my tracks. If the consumer doesn’t take action, they will lose something very
valuable,” said LifeClips president and chief executive officer Brian Poggi.
LifeClips, headquartered in Acton, Massachusetts, transfers home movies on videocassette
to the non-degradable DVD format. Poggi described the company’s partnership with
Brooks as “very important” to LifeClips’ business plan. “We’re a New England company,”
he said. “We wanted to go with a partner that could provide the quality and service,
and Brooks was a natural partner.”
Previously, Poggi was senior vice president and general manager, North America for the Polaroid Corporation. According to Brian Huart, Brooks Pharmacy’s Category Manager, Photo, the service is currently being offered in about 60 Brooks stores in New England, which Huart said accounts
for approximately 25 percent of the chain.
Brooks Pharmacy operates primarily in the six New England states, employing approximately 4,500 people at its stores, distribution center in Dayville, Connecticut, and corporate headquarters in Warwick.
“The intent on our end was to see if this could be rolled out smoothly into a
test market,” Huart said, and added that Brooks has begun advertising the service
in local media. The rest of the Brooks stores will have access to LifeClips’ service
soon, which should serve to differentiate the company from its many area competitors,
Huart said.
“Originally, we had planned to roll it out to the rest of the chain
after Labor Day, but it will probably be a couple of weeks after that,” said Huart.
Offering the service, Huart said, will offer another service to Brooks’ customers
as well as differentiate the chain from its competitors in the area.
For LifeClips, a traditional retail presence (the service started online at http://www.lifeclips.com
in January) is also important to instill consumer confidence in those not comfortable
in the relatively new world of e-tail.
“Some consumers have no problem ordering over the Internet, but most are more likely to take their film to a retailer than they are to send them in,” said Poggi.
In Tampa, Florida, LifeClips services are already available in Eckerd Drugstores and at Wal-Mart.
The fact that videocassettes degrade is not something the public spends a lot of time thinking about, Poggi
said, and that the most important reason to convert to DVD technology is preservation.
“A videocassette is nothing more than plastic, glue and rust,” he said. “Once
consumers understand that their tapes are degrading over time, they want to take
action.”
The company’s conversion technology is also able to detect when a video
camera was turned off. Using the stopping points as indexing points, “chapters”
of action are created allowing viewers to skip easily from one to another, similar
to the way CD listeners can skip from track to track.
Poggi said it is common for people to test the service with one videotape, and then ship the company their
entire video library.
The service costs $29.99 for a two-hour tape to DVD conversion
and $19.99 for additional DVD copies. The process takes three weeks from a retail
store and two weeks if initiated at the LifeClips Web site. Poggi estimated that
60 percent of the videotapes the company receives for conversion are weddings.
LifeClips was founded in November 1999 by Michael Goldstein when he obtained $3
million in venture capital funding from St. Paul Venture Capital. Today Goldstein
is the company’s executive vice president. According to the Consumer Electronics
Association, as of March 2001, over 16 million DVD players have been sold in the
United States since the technology was introduced to the consumer market in 1997.
A recent Cahner’s In Stat report predicts that annual DVD sales will equal that
of VCR sales in 2004 at 37 million units.
To accommodate what LifeClips anticipates
will be an increasing demand for the technology, Poggi said the company hopes
to partner with a national retail chain to offer the service nationwide, and expects
to make an announcement to that effect this fall.
