When Wearsafe co-founder David B. Benoit decided this spring to market his startup’s mobile app-enabled panic button, a friend’s recommendation led him to Middletown-based Reality Interactive.
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When Wearsafe co-founder David B. Benoit decided this spring to market his startup's mobile app-enabled panic button, a friend's recommendation led him to Middletown-based Reality Interactive.
Benoit says he has stuck with the 12-year-old digital retail marketer over the past few months because Reality Interactive has been able to connect consumers to the interactive tools that effectively promote Wearsafe's business.
In building an inviting website for Wearsafe, Reality Interactive made sure not only that business could be transacted online, but that the company's product and services — which can alert family and friends about an individual's personal safety — are succinctly described, Benoit said.
Reality Interactive also built Wearsafe an interactive trade show booth that included five mobile devices, an LCD screen and more. So instead of just talking about the product with company representatives at the booth, consumers got to try out the product and “experience it firsthand,” Benoit said.
“The value to us is their creativity,” Benoit said, “but more importantly, their ability to understand our product, the magnitude of what our product can do, very quickly.”
Reality Interactive President and co-founder Craig Martin and Chief Technology Officer Bryson Hyte launched the company from their respective basements in 2004, and the business evolved from a dozen employees through 2008-09 to 34 today, Martin said.
In 2003-04, at the end of the dot-com era, Martin said, he felt strongly that digital marketing would blossom, particularly in the retail and automotive arenas, so the duo pursued both.
Wearsafe has an ongoing contract with Reality Interactive, while customers like BMW have been clients for more than a decade, Martin said.
Originally, Martin and Hyte started the company in conjunction with an existing video production firm in New York City called Reality Pictures. That firm provided some client connections and a small amount of capital. In 2005, Reality Interactive bought out Reality Pictures' stake and paid back the funding, adopting the “Reality Interactive” name, Martin said.
The company has since developed a process it dubs “Retail Rugged” to describe its approach to ensuring that technology — be it websites or kiosks — works consistently day to day for its clients, overcoming any obstacles like online access glitches, outages and more. The Retail Rugged standard, which has been trademarked, includes a test — a 92-point check list — to make sure the installation of any technology is fit for the hectic retail environment.
The list Reality Interactive scrutinizes for each client covers everything from automatically restoring power after an outage to locking down a user interface for security purposes or hardening systems for the unattended retail environment of online transactions, he said.
One customer is Time Warner Cable, which recently approached Reality Interactive about wanting to transform its 400 payment centers, which they described, Martin said, as an unappealing cross between the DMV and a check-cashing facility.
“They figured they had a million customers a month coming in and wanted [them] to have a positive experience,” he said.
Time Warner had created a prototype store to solve the problem, but it was costly and unreliable. Reality Interactive worked as part of a team to redesign the prototype store and “scale” it so that it could be rolled out to many locations, reducing costs and improving reliability along the way, Martin said.
Using the “retail-rugged” approach helped with installing large format screens on walls, interactive work stations and other user-friendly features for customers so they'd work seamlessly, he said.
“We create retail-rugged deployments that work on day one and exactly the same on day 1,000,” Martin said. “We design systems that are efficient and maintainable for the life of the fixture and the program.”
That makes clients' fees of anywhere from $15,000 to $250,000 “affordable” because value is sustained over time, he said.
Reality Interactive has no plans to move out of Connecticut, but the high cost of living and scarcity of talent willing to put down roots here are problems the company continues to face.
With 16 awards to its credit in the last two years, and three consecutive awards from the Marcum Tech Top 40, however, growth is not a static condition. In fact, the next phase will focus on analytics.
Benoit said Reality Interactive's ability to help Wearsafe demonstrate its product at events through its interactive trade show booth has been effective. Educating consumers that just having a mobile phone isn't enough for personal security can be difficult, he said.
At the booth, a potential customer “can set off [distress] alerts and experience what it's like to use the product,” he explained, “so you very quickly understand the power of Wearsafe to respond to someone in a time of need and coordinate an immediate response.”