by Sean McManus
Staff Writer
“We don’t want to be the best price point in the airport. We want to be the best price point in the city.”
That’s Barney Freedman, co-founder of airport DVD-rental pioneer InMotion Pictures, the Jacksonville-based firm that is already in 16 airports nationwide and is about to parlay the power of its rental brand into a retail magazine for high-end electronics of all kinds.
“The hottest product we’ve got right now is a Panasonic digital camera,” said Freedman, a Jacksonville native who operates the enterprise out of a small office on Philips Highway when he’s not supervising the location at Jacksonville International Airport or visiting other sites across the country. “They finally started making them small enough and now they’re flying off the shelves.”
The $400 cameras, which include an mp4 video player, mp3 audio player, digital voice recorders and a memory chip that stores digital still photos, is actually perfect for businessmen like Freedman. That way, when a new InMotion location opens at the airport — LaGuardia in New York City is the most recent — Freedman can snap a picture and e-mail it to the contractor who can be looking at a visual by the time he lands.
“Businessmen love these things because they’re convenient,” said Freedman. “They’re perfect for realtors.”
Freedman never thought that retail would be a part of his business when he, along with his brother Michael and his cousin-by-marriage, David Knight, founded the company in 1998. Of course, they also never thought that really long waits at the airport — the result of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack — would lead to 300 percent annual growth.
But the synergy seems to make sense. In fact, InMotion is the No. 1 seller of portable Panasonic DVD players in the U.S., more than Circuit City or Amazon.com.
“We’ve got the perfect vehicle to sell certain limited kinds of electronics,” said Freedman. “People try them out on the plane, like them, want one and buy one when they land.” And their products are customer-driven so there is less room for error. They offer them from the rental side and when customers ask for them, they begin to offer them for retail.
Freedman noted that because InMotion is still primarily a rental company, and started as one, employees are more fluent and knowledgeable about their products and have a heavier focus on customer service that other retailers.
“We have to know these products inside and out,” he said. “If somebody can’t get it to work on the plane, they’re going to be really mad.”
Right now you can buy DVD players, high-end headsets, digital cameras, computer adapters, travel connecters that let you plug a DVD player into cigarette lighter, travel cases, Y-jacks that let you plug two headsets into one machine, and of course, DVDs. Last year, InMotion entered into a licensing agreement to carry Blockbuster brand DVDs. And Blockbuster owns a minority equity share in the company.
InMotion’s pitch for the new catalog is that a traveler can order something either by phone, the web or at one of the locations at the airport and pick any date for delivery that they want.
“It’s different from Sky Mall because they don’t schedule specific dates for delivery,” said Freedman, referring to the in-flight catalog that aggregates selected items from catalogs like The Sharper Image and Brookstone. “Travelers, especially, don’t want this stuff delivered to them when they’re out-of-town.”
InMotion is headquartered in Jacksonville but market analysis and flight pattern research showed that the smartest two spots to test the concept was Portland, Ore. and Minneapolis. Portland, according to Freedman, is an industry leader in the airport mall concept, and Minneapolis is progressive — they were the first airport to install things like self check-ins. That was before Sept. 11.
“Expansion grew by plugging in destination cities that fit into the Portland-Minneapolis matrix,” said Freedman. “So people could rent a video and DVD player for the flight and return it when they landed.”
From the beginning, InMotion provided something called “jet back” service, which allows customers to ship the DVD player and movies back to the airport where they were rented.
And jetback service partly led the customer-driven expansion. By checking the spot where the DVDs were mailed, InMotion knew what cities were most popular. Slowly, the company expanded to those cities. Denver and Atlanta each have two locations. Their phase one goal is to be in the top 60 airports in the U.S.
From its inception, InMotion planned to appeal to families as well as business travelers. The idea was that children were good in the gate area, when they had their toys to play with, but then got a little rowdy when it was time to sit still. Unless, of course, they had something to occupy their time, like a movie. This was where Knight came in; he’s got children.
And both Barney and Michael Freedman had experience working at Investment banks on Wall Street. Barney Freedman had actually defected to work for local start-up Themenus.com when the idea for InMotion was developed. His brother was still in New York working for Chase Manhattan Bank (now J.P. Morgan Chase). The brothers went to the University of Florida and Michael has an master’s degree from Columbia.
“Sometime the rules said absolutely no working during flights,” said Freedman, referring to the policy of major Wall Street firms to prohibit employees from using laptops in airports or on planes because of the potential for sensitive materials to be seen by other parties. “We both traveled all the time and needed something to do.”
And Freedman likes to contrast his company with the typical high-flying dot com.
“We weren’t all about marketing dollars,” he said. “We had steady, organic growth that was customer-driven and a revenue-generating infrastructure.”
Like every enthusiastic founder of a successful company, Freedman builds allegories from his experience. He sees himself standing amidst the dust, with the walls of the dot-com hopefuls crashing down next to him, not unlike the E-trade commercials from the Super Bowl two years ago. They relied too heavily on marketing and not on sound business principles, said Freedman. The dot-com he had defected to, Themenus.com, is now defunct.
That doesn’t mean InMotion doesn’t use the web. In fact, their website, which was launched November 2001, is a powerful part of their reservations system. Travelers can order the movies they want at the same time they book their tickets online.
“Our pricing structure means that it’s cheaper to rent a movie from us than it is from your movie store at home,” said Freedman. “And you don’t wait in line.”
The cost to rent a DVD player and a DVD from InMotion is $12 a day for a 5-inch screen and $15 for a 7-inch. If you want to go with the jetback option, it’s $20 plus $12 for each additional day. Because plenty of people have laptops that play DVDs, the movies alone are $5 for five days, which is cheaper than Blockbuster.
InMotion wants to make the whole travel experience more enjoyable. If people forget that they’re even on a flight because they were escaping into “Gladiator,” for example, then they’ll travel more and every travel-related business will win, including InMotion.
“Airports weren’t always thinking outside the box,” said Freedman. “They would say ‘yes’ to McDonald’s but with in-flight DVD rentals they weren’t sure.”
Since its inception, InMotion was voted by at least one marketing company as the Best New Specialty Retail Company in airports. And Freedman said they have won numerous customer awards. That means credibility, and now airports are calling them.
There have been missteps. The first digital cameras InMotion carried were big and Freedman said he wishes he and the other co-founders had known that people traveling really don’t want to buy big, chunky equipment. But one of the most promising aspects of InMotion is their flexibility. When asked what the next hot, new technology is going to be, Freedman said it didn’t matter.
“We update our fleet [of DVD players] every year,” said Freedman, noting that they are not a technology company but a rental and retail company. “So as long as it’s portable, we’ll get them.”
InMotion is flirting with some marketing initiatives. St. John & Partners is currently handling its public relations and they have purchased time on billboards in select cities near the airport. They’re talking about direct mail and the new retail magazine will, at first, be available at the location level. And the next locations are slated for Houston and Los Angeles.
Freedman said that right now they are about 50/50 in terms of business vs. leisure travelers. Of course, if it’s Thanksgiving or spring break, the numbers change. Regardless, InMotion provides entertainment for whomever wants it.
“In a time when people are scared to fly,” Freedman said. “We’re the No. 1 distraction.”