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Brite-Strike Tactical Illumination Products, Inc. |
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June 22, 2015 Issue |
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The Most Powerful Name In Corporate News and Information |
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Tactical Self-Defense LED Flashlights |
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President
Brite-Strike Tactical Illumination Products, Inc. (BSTK-PK)
Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – June 22, 2015
CEOCFO: Mr. Bushee, what is the idea behind Brite-Strike Tactical Illumination Products? Mr. Bushee: In 2006 I worked as a part time police officer for the Town of Kingston, Massachusetts and John Neil was a full time officer and friend of mine who was going through SWAT team training, which I had done a number of years before. At this time, tactical flashlight manufacturing was dominated by one company, a market leader like a Microsoft type of thing. These lights were better than what was available, but still sort of a fragile design and very expensive. I was in sales with Coleman Powermate and later Sunbeam Corp. and had been taking trips to Asia for quite some time. We were ahead of the curve, before many US companies were familiar with China and operating over there. At this time, I was going over to Malaysia and Singapore and sourcing components and so on. In my travels I actually met someone that was very high up in the Philips organization. Philips purchased a company called Lumileds, which was on the west coast making LED’s. My Philips friend, who has five or six engineering degrees helped us get the latest LED technology. All manufactures used incandescent bulbs and were reluctant to make the switch as LED was a very new technology. They had a number of, what we call in the industry “yellow light engineers”, and these engineers were all incandescent lighting experts. Therefore, it was a sort of buggy whip maker when cars started to become popular. All of their technology, patents and intellectual property were based on how to take fragile filament type bulbs and make them less fragile. When LED’s came into the market it was just a matter of time before filament bulb technology would be obsolete. LED technology is basically impervious to all of those shock issues. We just happened to be at this juncture when Philips took over a California company called Lumileds and there was a culture clash. Philips wanted a player to lead the way. In 2006, I was having a discussion in Hong Kong with my friend and he informed me about the acquisition by Philips. He said, “Would you be interested in doing tactical flashlights? I know you have a back ground in law enforcement and it is something you understand.” I said, “Well, it is funny, because my wife Sarah and John Neil and I have been talking about just that.” We kind of got tired of just bitching about the high cost and issues of what was available in the market and thought that we could build a better flashlight. That is how we got started. We took the backgrounds we had in technical products and understanding it from a ground up standpoint as operators and combined it with the latest technology that we obtained through our connection with Philips. We were able to leap frog over the competition and produce the first flashlight line that had one hundred percent LED technology designed from the ground up. The big difference that holds true even today, is the operators run the company and set the design parameters, where as the other companies that we compete with are very engineering centric and design is driven by the engineers. In our case, the operators set the standards for the design requirements and then we work with the engineers to figure out how to produce those needed requirements.
CEOCFO: What are you offering today? Mr. Bushee: We offer a line of high end tactical flashlights, which from the beginning had some unique features that no other manufacturer had. Now those other companies have changed over time, and incorporated the new LED technologies. We still have a number of patents on our switch designs that we think are the best available in the market. Everything we make is designed for the professional operator, very simple to operate with only one hand. It is our belief “less is more”. We do not add a lot of non-essential features you cannot use under stress. That is because, for police and military and anybody working under stress, you just cannot use all of those bells and whistles. We make things that absolutely work every time. We use the highest grade selected LED’s from Cree and we have a lab sort our LED’s to make sure that we are getting the right color balance, very white light with no distortion. What has happened since we started Brite-Strike is that the tactical flashlight market has become a crowded field, so we have developed a number of other products that are unique to the marketplace that nobody else produces, that fit a niche. One of the key products that we developed is our APALS®, which is an acronym for All Purpose Adhesive Light Strips. These basically look like small band aids. APALS® are very thin, no thicker than a credit card, but highly ruggedized. We just had some press out about this product a week ago as we had several key patents issue and are waiting for a couple more patents on APALS® to issue. Having key patents issue does a couple of things for us Lynn; we are looking to basically replace chemical light sticks with the military (DOD). It is a twenty-five to thirty million dollar contract a year for five years at a time. We can out-perform chemical light sticks at about one twentieth of the cost per hour. The main advantage is that APALS® can be turned off, whereas a chemical light stick is a one-time use product. APALS® have strobe functions; a fast strobe and a slow strobe mode, which makes it much more effective for the human eye to detect when someone is in a helicopter or an airplane and is looking down and catches the blinking or strobing light over a steady light. APALS® can be shut off, the back can be resealed and reused again. We are not only getting runtimes of two hundred hours versus a one-time use product, but also they are brighter, smaller, lighter and more rugged than a chemical light stick. The first step with the DOD is you get what is called an NSN, a National Stock Number, which has been issued. We have replaced chemical light sticks already in Australia and New Zealand. We are working with several other countries to do the same thing. If we are able to take over all of it or even part of the US DOD business, it would be terrific and it has been our goal for some time. The total chemical light stick business is about a sixty million dollar business. We believe that because our APALS® are so much thinner, lighter and brighter, as well as more consumer friendly to use, the market potential for APALS® and all of its several variations, is somewhere around one hundred and twenty million.
Our DLC™; Duty Light Camera® is a covert video recording system built into a Mil Spec flashlight. The DLC™ has been adopted by the US Navy and used by Special Forces operators. The Duty Light Camera® is a much better option for police than a body camera as is very simple to use and download. We recently introduced a line of LED lighted dog collars for police K9 and consumer markets. I would suggest that your readers go to our website www.brite-strike.com to see our unique and innovative products.
CEOCFO: Do other potential customers pay enough attention? Do they look at that product and the types of products that you do as something that they need consider? Mr. Bushee: We are a little bit like Apple within our industry in that we create products that you really did not know you needed until we came up with it. There is a big difference though between the police and military mindset and the high tech guys. You hit on something, because in the police and military mindset people are very much like “why do we need them?” A good example of this was chemical light sticks back in the 1960s. It came from the consumer side and initially shown to the military they commented, “What do we need it for?” Another good example that I can give you, which was a thirty five to forty year “overnight success”, is Velcro. Velcro was actually something where the inventor had the idea prior to World War II, then came up with some working prototypes after World War II and did not have a commercial product till the early 1960s and it took another twenty years before it gained real traction. Of course we are sure we can accelerate that time frame. Some of the applications of APALS® as we migrate from using this as a military item to consumer use would be for things like bicycle helmet lights and lighted back packs for kids. Have you ever driven on the roads and seen those public safety workers on the street and when your headlights hit their jacket you see the reflective material they are wearing? That is called “passive reflective technology” because nothing happens until your headlights actually hit the reflective surface. We have a registered trademark on our APALS® and a second registered trademark on APALS-AIR®, Active Illumination Reflective. Now what happens on the street, particularly today where people are so engrossed texting while listening to their sound system in their cars is that they just do not see you. With APALS-AIR® technology a driver can see you up to a mile away. They can see this flashing light on the back of a firefighter, EMT or police officer. It gets them to look up from what they are doing to say, “What the heck is that?” As you get closer, your head lights hit the reflective surface, then, they realize that it is a person working in the road. The retail price of an APALS® is under five dollars. We are in discussions with people that make life jackets for people as well as pets to enhance boating safety at night. We have an OEM co-branded program for stand up paddle boards that are so popular today. The kids love to go out and paddle board with these at night. Paddle boarding is the fastest growing water sport and we have our OEM partners marketing these as paddle board safety lights.
CEOCFO: With so much opportunity how do you stay focused? How do you know what to pursue? How do you not get too scattered? Mr. Bushee: In our case, it is a matter of getting the right partner. We are a small technology company. We design and build the products. You bring up a very good point, because we cannot be all things to all people. We purposely stayed in the realm of DOD and specialty markets until this week when our key patents issued. You never submit your unpublished patents or the ones that are ready to issue. The one exception to that rule is that you would submit them to the DOD lawyers. The DOD lawyers looked at all of our patents that had issued and all of the patents that are pending. They made the determination that the patents were solid and we got sole source provider status. Many people do not understand the value of having a patent in the US. Nobody from the United States Government can purchase this product from anyone else, because they recognize your intellectual property rights. Having these key patents issue just cements the opportunities for us. These patents allow us to go out and go after these other markets through OEM co-branded partners. Our first co-branded partnership was with Coghlans out of Canada. They are actually the largest supplier of camping accessories in the world. They just do camping accessories and have distribution around the world. By partnering with Coghlans, we get mass retail distribution. We are in discussions with the largest kayak manufacturer in the US for fishing kayaks and paddles equipped with APALS®. To answer your question, we see co-branding as the best way to gain distribution across broad markets without diluting our focus. To go with the number one or number two player in a given market is the plan. For example, we do not have a deal on the table, but we would like to pursue Bell/Giro Helmet. Bell has about seventy five percent share of bicycle helmet market. We see opportunities with the major running shoe companies and outdoor apparel companies to incorporate our APALS® into their clothing for safety. We are not going to try to be all things to all people when we achieve it through co-branding. Remember when Gore-Tex started? That was the stuff that was in The North Face jackets that kept them waterproof. Today there are other manufacturers out there with a similar product and many of the early Gore-Tex patents have run out, but they are still the benchmark because they built up a relationship with The North Face and the two companies grew together. We want to work with people like Columbia and The North Face and Nike and others. There are opportunities with Bass Pro and Cabela’s. We have had initial meetings there with interest in several of our products that are derivatives of APALS®. We have a torpedo shape version that actually helps to catch fish. We see a big opportunity for both sport fishermen and the commercial fishing industry to help attract swordfish and tuna fish and things like that. We see our APALS® becoming a big business. I think that the number I gave you, one hundred and twenty million, is very conservative. There is a lot of growth opportunity over the next few years. It will not happen overnight because we want to make sure that we have got the right partners in place. Our margins are very healthy on this particular product line, therefore, we are still able to sell at prices that are competitive and make decent profit and also allow our OEM co-branded partners to meet their profit margin goals.
CEOCFO: Would you tell us about going public? Mr. Bushee: I put about $1.2 million of my own money to start the company. Development costs and everything was going as planned and business was growing, this was before the markets all tanked in 2008. I was running out of my own money to put in and we had a few people that wanted to invest in the company. I had a friend, my old college roommate, who takes companies public. He set it up for us and we did it. I guess, if there were things like “Go Fund Me” and those types of avenues available back in 2008, I might have gone that route. However, Brite-Strike is a closely held company with only about 15% of the stock in the float. Most of the shares are held by myself, my wife and several other investors that have been with us since the beginning. Our investors understand that when you are pursuing military contracts it is a lengthy process. Some of the things we are working on, we have been chasing for over three years now and we hope that several will come to fruition this year. It seems to be somewhere between a three and a half to five year cycle in military contracts, It’s the nature of the beast.
CEOCFO: Has it been difficult to get a foot in the door to talk to various partners? Do you see that changing now for you? Mr. Bushee: It is yes and no. Our COO is a retired Brigadier General from the U.S Marine Corp. is a very knowledgeable, highly decorated with a lot of time in the field. He was the one that was able to open up the military connections for us. Without him, it would have been impossible to get the DOD opportunities as well as overseas military tenders. When it comes to certain specific OEM partners, some of the guys we work with are kind of niche and small. That has worked out pretty well for us so far as we hope to grow with them. Now the time is right for us to go after the bigger players, such as Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s. We had discussions this past year with both companies. Like any big box retail company, they are already planning a year from now or a year and a half out, what products are going to be in their catalog. That is fine with us. As already discussed, we wanted to make sure that we had all of our patents in place before we pursued the mass retail segment. Not only do we have patents on the technology, but also we have kept our supply chain highly secretive. It is sort of like Coca Cola in that only a few people know the final recipe. We buy parts from all over the world and we bring the parts in and then have a machine that we had custom built for final production. No one can quite figure it out. The Hong Kong SWAT team buys APALS® from us. We have had people in China try to knock us off. They just cannot figure out how we are doing it. That is not a bad thing. It is great to have patents, but it is about two million dollars to defend a patent today. |
“We were able to leap frog over the competition and produce the first
flashlight line that had one hundred percent LED technology designed from
the ground up. The big difference that holds true even today, is the
operators run the company and set the design parameters, where as the other
companies that we compete with are very engineering centric and design is
driven by the engineers. In our case, the operators set the standards for
the design requirements and then we work with the engineers to figure out
how to produce those needed requirements.”
Brite-Strike Tactical Illumination Products, Inc. (BSTK-PK)
Contact: Glenn Bushee 508-746-8701
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Tactical Lighting, Brite-Strike Tactical Illumination Products, Inc., BSTK-PK, CEO Interviews 2015, Glenn Bushee, Tactical Sef-Defense LED Flashlights, high end tactical flashlights, LED technologies, for police and military, APALS®, All Purpose Adhesive Light Strips, DLC™; Duty Light Camera, LED lighted dog collars, Industrial Companies, Recent CEO Interviews, All Purpose Adhesive Light Strips that look like small band aids and replace chemical light sticks with the military (DOD), APALS® can be turned off and reused, whereas a chemical light stick is a one-time use product, APALS® have strobe functions; a fast strobe and a slow strobe mode, which makes it much more effective for the human eye to detect when someone is in a helicopter or an airplane APALSs are brighter, smaller, lighter and more rugged than a chemical light stick, DLC™; Duty Light Camera® is a covert video recording system built into a Mil Spec flashlight, the DLC™ has been adopted by the US Navy and used by Special Forces operators, the Duty Light Camera® is a much better option for police than a body camera as is very simple to use and download, LED lighted dog collars for police K9 and consumer markets, Brite-Strike Press Releases, News, Industrial Stock, Companies looking for venture capital, Angel Investors, private companies looking for investors, tactical lighting companies seeking investors, Led Flashlights companies needing investment capital |
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Glenn
Bushee