In November of 2005 I accepted the position at UNICOUS Marketing. UNICOUS was a startup company with a great business concept. I was lured by the possibilites and the challenge.

I took the Metra train downtown and walked about seven or eight city blocks to the Sears Tower. I said I’d never take a job in the city but it was actually pretty good. The trainride gave me time to read my newpapers in the morning and catch up on some other reading on the ride home.

My Office was on the 54th Floor of the Sears Tower
What a great view of the city and the lake.

I accomplished quite a great deal in a short amount of time at Unicous. Our product was a paperless coupon. Our founders brought the idea from South Korea where their partner had it operational with great success. I was brought on board because of my knowledge of retail systems and my broad range of I.T. experience.
There was no blueprint for me to follow because there was very limited knowledge exchange between our founder’s and thier former partner. I thought that building an electronic coupon was pretty straightforward until I actually examined how coupons worked. I was shocked to find out how limited coupons were and how coupons couldn’t really force the action that was written on the paper. Then I found out how easy it was to commit coupon fraud and that was something that was not going to work for Unicous. I needed to create something that was enforceable and precise.

Ray and Dan (CFO) having a glass of wine at the end of the day.

For over a year we struggled with several bad business models. The first one was thrown out before I arrived in December of 05. The original model in South Korea paired our program with specific credit cards. You didn’t get the discount if you didn’t use the credit card of the retailer’s choice. That may have worked in Korea but in this country the retailers HATED the credit card companies. By the time I arrived the business model had become “all electronic payment” but no cash, checks or paper of any kind.

I created several working logos for our presentations. We used the Shop N’ Swipe logo until we changed our business model again. At that point we hired a professional designer for our final logo and product name (EZ-PIC).

Our product went from specific credit cards to all electronic payment and then NO credit cards and finally we took off all restrictions on the tender type. All a customer had to do was take it to the checkout and the discount was applied.

The selection of the EZ-PIC logo was an accident. A previous meeting with the designers was a free-for-all and everyone hated each design that was presented to us so we sent them back to the drawing board. In order to prevent that fiasco from happening again, we secretly received an advance copy of all the designs so we could agree before the meeting with everyone else took place. However, the numbering system that we used to select the winner was different from the numbering system of the design group. When then meeting took place, we were stuck with the one that “looked like a clown”.

I think this logo was the one our little group agreed upon
but it ended up in the trash.

From Left: Bob Longo, Jim Kempf and Jeff Wilcox.

December 2005 - June 2007

From Left: Me, Craig Richardson (Former EVP Sales), Sami Stromp, Jeff Wilcox.