“The key word is personalisation”, insists entrepreneur Alex Meisl.”‘Everyone’s talking about it. Look at cars with their optional extras list, things like people having union jacks on their roofs.” With this argument, Meisl puts forward his case for skins4things, a company looking to exploit this desire for all things personal by creating personalised ‘skins’ or covers for devices ranging from laptops to mobile phones. A tight fitting skin or jacket of vinyl, the product adds a degree of scratch resistance and a visual personality to consumer digitals.

Meisl was co-founder of Sponge in 2002, a successful mobile application development agency; amongst other campaigns, Sponge got themselves noticed via an SMS-utilising Walkers Crisps campaign to deliver the prize of a iPod to consumers every 5 minutes, which, according to Meisl, saw an incredible 7% of the UK population take part. This followed his work with Legion Telephony, so it’s probably fair to say there is some deeper passion for mobile technologies at work in his mind. Is this what convinced him and co-founder Dan Parker that skins4things would take off? “Unfortunately we convinced ourselves there were synergies!”, he jokes . “Superficially there are, but where Sponge is software and digital, with Skins we’ve had to come down to earth, dealing with certain things like stock!”

Despite the modesty, the company has already established some key contracts with brands ranging from Amnesty International to Toshiba, who are going straight for the promo approach. “Why not have the name of you company on staff laptops?, Meisl muses.
Where funding is concerned, £250,000 of the founders’ own money has been put in: skin in the game, so to speak, although there was discussion about getting external finding. “Despite believing we knew what we were doing, it took twice as long as we thought”, Meisl says, adding that many third party offers were ‘unreasonable’, considering the stake in the company that was being requested.

With the market in covers for products such as iPods and mobiles to grow on the back of growth of the products themselves, cmypitch will be watching closely to see if skins4things becomes a start-up star.