Portable closure allows workers their privacy, partners say

03/30/2003

By CHERYL HALL / The Dallas Morning News

Bob Schmidt and David Vaughan want you cubicle dwellers to get some work done.

CubeDoor is an attachable door that rolls closed to keep would-be interrupters out of office cubes. And it's translucent, so bosses can tell whether you're hunkered down or just asleep at the wheel.

"We knew from Day One that companies wouldn't go for full blockage and that it needed to be see-through," says 40-year-old Mr. Vaughan, who dreamed up the idea while trying to do programming with constant interruptions.

There's a subtle difference between opaque and transparent, adds Mr. Schmidt, 41. "One looks like you're hiding and doing something inappropriate. The other is a simple message to go away because you're busy."

The partners of CubeSmart Inc. unveiled CubeDoor and its smaller brother, CubeBanner, in mid-November at the Comdex technology trade show in Las Vegas.

Who better to spread the word than 100,000 geeks who do daily battle with annoying distractions?

So far, they've sold about 500 units – about $12,000 worth – at $25 for a 40-by-32-inch door and $20 for the 50-by-18-inch banner. They plan to boost prices to $35 and $25 next month.

So they're not raking in megabucks. But Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Vaughan contend they will be if they get just a sliver of the nation's cube-sequestered workforce.

Mr. Schmidt, CubeSmart's president and CEO, is getting high-powered mentoring from Terry Jones, the founder of Travelocity .com who was his boss at Sabre Inc. in the mid-1990s.

Mr. Jones, who usually charges hefty consulting fees, is volunteering in this case because he likes both the guy and the concept.

"Everyone promotes open offices for creating a good flow between people," he says. "But there is empirical evidence that interruptions lead to programming defects. Bob's door basically sends a polite message: 'I'm on a deadline. Leave me alone.' "

Scott Adams, who created the popular cartoon strip Dilbert, says CubeDoor might need some high-voltage tweaking.

"Frankly, the people you really want to keep out will chew through concrete to bother you," says the 45-year-old cartoonist from his home office in Danville, Calif. "Nothing lethal, but electrical shock would be an appropriate upgrade, along with the roof that I'm sure they're already working on."

Early CubeDoor purchasers include a school district in North Carolina and Sprint Corp. in Las Colinas.

Others have ordered test units, including Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Hewlett-Packard Co. in Houston and Dallas, the Texas Rangers baseball team and Hunt Petroleum Corp.

'Happy points'

"These things have a huge imprint area, which is important in promotion," says Mike Ramsey, marketplace director of TicToc .com, which posted the cube closures on its business-to-business site two months ago.

The big question seems to be how far the pair can take CubeDoor without outside cash. The equal partners have sunk $100,000 of their savings into the project and avoided debt like the plague.

They'd love to attract an investor willing to swoop in with $750,000 so they can secure a stronger foothold before getting ripped off by copycats.

"We're building a Fed Ex-type brand awareness," says Mr. Schmidt, who operates the company out of his home office in Flower Mound. "That sounds like delusions of grandeur. Obviously, we're not Fed Ex. But when it comes to cubicle doors, we are the brand right now."

Last month, Mr. Vaughan used frequent-flier miles to go to Washington, where he stood outside the Pentagon – and its thousands of cubicles – holding up a CubeDoor like a placard. He quickly learned from two MPs that it is illegal to picket the Pentagon.

Undaunted, he went to a nearby nightclub that evening and gave the singer $20 to "sponsor" his music for the next 45 minutes. After each number, the entertainer said, "This song has been brought to you by CubeSmart."

Going back

Theirs turned into that rare friendship that flourishes despite distance and divergent paths.

In 1996, Mr. Vaughan joined Mr. Schmidt at Sabre in Fort Worth to help build internal Web sites and databases for American Airlines – and gave up a comfy office with a door in the process.

It took him less than a day to determine that working in a cubicle was going to be a major league pain.

"I'd worked in offices with a few small cubicles, but this was the first time I'd seen a whole farm of them stretched as far as the eye could see," says Mr. Vaughan, who is an Internet architect for Sabre by day and an entrepreneur at his Fort Worth home by night. "Within my first few hours, I was interrupted probably eight times by people poking their heads in to say hey or chat."

After work that evening, the duo headed to a local eatery, where Mr. Vaughan used a napkin to sketch a pull-across door.

"It was either Prozac or find some kind of door," Mr. Vaughan laughs.

Armed with the napkin, they headed to Wal-Mart and left with a roll-down kiddie car shade. "Only we needed it to be four or five times as big and turned on its side with some kind of attachment for cubicle frames," Mr. Vaughan recalls.

They had high hopes for turning vision into reality. In actuality, they were six years away, and their idea remained untended as both men's careers basked in the boom times.

Oh, they piddled with it, looking but not finding a manufacturer.

And they had to keep the idea a secret till they filed for a patent, which is pending.

Ironically, it took the recession to jump-start CubeDoor.

Mr. Schmidt left his six-figure-plus-bonus position at Sabre in 2000 to head up a department that did travel Web sites at Aivia Inc., a corporate Web site developer.

A year later, only days after 9-11, his department closed shop.

"I went looking for another job and realized in no time that there are more jobs for strippers than there are for over-40, overpaid executives in the computer industry."

So Mr. Schmidt started a consulting practice, working with companies to lower their travel costs, and refocused on developing the door.

"We finally found a manufacturer in Hong Kong who wasn't going to hold us to some exorbitant retooling fee or a 30,000 minimum order," he says.

Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Vaughan had limited product until mid-December. Then they really had product – 6,660 doors and banners, enough to fill a container seven feet high, four feet wide and nearly the length of a football field.

They'll break even if they sell 40 percent of that this year, which they say is doable.

"We want this to become so boring and such a non-novelty that nobody wants to interview us anymore because we've become as common as the computer screen saver," says Mr. Schmidt.

For now, they'll gladly take the free publicity.