It is be­ing in­creas­ing­ly said that a loss can of­ten be a les­son.

Trinidad-born en­tre­pre­neur Shel­don Sci­pio can at­test to this, as he has turned his own frus­tra­tion over los­ing lug­gage in­to an av­enue for rev­enue, se­cur­ing a deal with Amer­i­can chain Wal­mart, whose rev­enue for its fis­cal year end­ing Jan­u­ary 31, 2024 was US$648 bil­lion.

“I worked a num­ber of jobs. At TSTT, I was in charge of Black­ber­ry. I was a prison of­fi­cer be­fore that. I’ve worked with na­tion­al teams as a phys­io­ther­a­pist, so I’ve done a lot of trav­el­ling, and I’ve lost some things dur­ing trav­el­ling,” Sci­pio told the Busi­ness Guardian in a Zoom in­ter­view.

“Some 25 mil­lion bags are lost at air­ports an­nu­al­ly. This is the this is what we can count. Be­cause most like­ly Trinidad is prob­a­bly not re­al­ly re­port­ing lost lug­gage. A num­ber of places are not re­port­ing lost lug­gage. We know that, so it’s in ex­cess of 25 mil­lion just at air­ports,” Sci­pio said.

He made the point that los­ing some­thing is prob­a­bly the one thing we all have in com­mon.

“We have all lost some­thing. Find­ing some­thing is some­thing we’ve all had in com­mon. But when you find some­thing, how do you get it back to the own­er? About 80 to 85 per cent of the time there is no way, the phone is locked, the lap­top is locked, the key, the keys are just a bunch of keys.”

In the past year, Sci­pio and his busi­ness part­ner, Mar­tin Wild, have been shop­ping their ex­per­tise when Hom­ing­PIN, a UK-based com­pa­ny, ap­proached them.

“We were hav­ing some fund­ing is­sues, etc. And while fig­ur­ing out where you would go next, Mar­tin called me up and said, ‘Hey, look at what this com­pa­ny is do­ing, lug­gage tags but dif­fer­ent­ly. And they are look­ing for fund­ing, and want to work with us. So we start­ed look­ing for fund­ing for them, and I ac­quired the Caribbean li­cence.”

How­ev­er, the jour­ney did not go smooth­ly as the com­pa­ny and Sci­pio did not share the same view in terms of busi­ness ap­proach.

“I de­cid­ed that the way the com­pa­ny was mar­ket­ing and sell­ing its prod­uct was not the ide­al way. We were be­ing eas­i­ly turned down by air­lines be­cause they al­ready have in­sur­ance and they have the pa­per tag that’s pro­duced etcetera by the sys­tem,” he said.

“So they are not in­ter­est­ed in putting out mon­ey for a more durable tag that lasts for the cus­tomer. They look at that as the cus­tomer’s re­spon­si­bil­i­ty. Let the cus­tomer choose what tag they want to use on their lug­gage.”

How­ev­er, when his mar­ket­ing pitch was not tak­en up, he sought out an­oth­er ear.

“They were not see­ing the vi­sion that we had. So that led us to not be­ing able to get fund­ing, not be­ing able to get cer­tain things go­ing, and we had to drop that.

“So ear­li­er this year, I called a quick meet­ing with Mar­tin and said, ‘Hey, I’m not pulling teeth with Hom­ing Pin again.’ We’ve proven that the idea is to sell the prod­uct re­tail. I need some­body who’s go­ing to work with me and see my vi­sion for it. And there was Re­bound­Tag. This com­pa­ny was just sit­ting there. It hadn’t done any­thing for two years. No­body could re­al­ly talk to them, so we made a con­cert­ed ef­fort to try to talk to them, and two days lat­er, the own­er re­spond­ed to me,” said Sci­pio.

Re­bound­Tag, is an­oth­er UK based com­pa­ny out of Ply­mouth, De­von. How­ev­er Sci­pio not­ed the com­pa­ny had large­ly been reclu­sive.

How­ev­er with some per­se­ver­ance, he was able to get a meet­ing with the com­pa­ny’s CEO Max Range­ley.

From there, Sci­pio’s pitch took flight as a con­tract was giv­en to his com­pa­ny, PIN-IT USA LLC, to push the Re­bound­Tag brand in­ter­na­tion­al­ly.

“We struck a deal by the next week where we would be glob­al dis­trib­u­tors and re­tail­ers for the com­pa­ny and start­ed to take over the run­ning of cer­tain things with­in the com­pa­ny, run­ning it from the be­gin­ning. We struck a deal to buy 75 per cent of Re­bound­Tag which we are work­ing on now. And Range­ley gave me the type of ac­cess need­ed to do what we’re do­ing now,” said Sci­pio, who ex­plained that the deal is worth about US$$75 mil­lion.

Sci­pio said he is cur­rent­ly ne­go­ti­at­ing with in­vestors for that as­pect of the deal.

His pitch in­volved a plan to move away from the likes of Ama­zon and in­stead try to get in­to ma­jor chains across Amer­i­ca.

“We de­cid­ed to try Wal­mart. Now, Wal­mart is tricky. You get one chance at Wal­mart, and they refuse many, many things that come in front of them. So it took us three pitch­es at Wal­mart, for Wal­mart to call me back,” he told the Busi­ness Guardian.

Fol­low­ing an on­line meet­ing three months ago, Wal­mart opt­ed to grant per­mis­sion to his com­pa­ny to have a brand store on­line with Wal­mart.

“This will be re­viewed in a year and a de­ci­sion to al­low us phys­i­cal shelves in-store will be made at this time or ear­li­er,” he said.

Sci­pio is con­fi­dent mo­men­tum will pick up from there as he em­pha­sised the prod­uct could be used for more than re­triev­ing lug­gage.

“The nice thing about it, that we learned that most peo­ple don’t know, is we are not lug­gage tags on­ly. We’re start­ing with an in­tro­duc­tion of lug­gage tags. It’s the eas­i­est thing to in­tro­duce, but we al­so do bag tags, which is a small­er ver­sion of the lug­gage tag, pet tags, and ad­he­sive stick­ers, so it’s more than one item. We do key fobs as well,” said Sci­pio,.

“We have a pack­age just for school chil­dren, a bag tag, plus a key fob. So we have nu­mer­ous items, which all work the same way, the same mi­crochipped way, if it gets lost, once some­one scans, it finds your lost item and it scans straight to the site.”

“Five to sev­en sec­onds lat­er, you get a text and an email telling you know that I have found your stuff, and you get a GPS lo­ca­tion,” Sci­pio ex­plained.

He said while the com­pa­ny had most­ly fo­cused on pen­e­tra­tion in the North Amer­i­can mar­ket, he was hop­ing to get the brand in­to Trinidad and To­ba­go as well, aim­ing to make cus­tomis­able op­tions which re­flect lo­cal cul­ture.

“I am Trinida­di­an, I am go­ing to launch in Trinidad and To­ba­go. I have that kind of pa­tri­o­tism for this coun­try, that kind of love for this coun­try. We’re go­ing to do a de­sign with a steel pan on it, and that would be out around for Christ­mas,” Sci­pio said, adding that the prod­uct could al­so be an aid in the re­trieval of stolen items as well.