Naked Juice Founder Now Tackling World of Wireless By SLAV KANDYBA Staff Reporter The former founder of Naked Juice has now set his sights on pioneering a huge segment of the wireless market. On Jan. 19, David J. Bleeden, president and CEO of Strathmore Investments, moved his company Wildcat Communications Group to a new 3,000-square-foot headquarters in Agoura Hills as part of a plan to be the “No. 1 brand in mobile communications products.” He wants to provide one-stop-shopping where consumers can get a wide range of products and services for all brands of cell phones. Included are high-end products with Bluetooth and WiFi capabilities but also novelty items such as color-flashing faceplates. He also eventually wants to make his own products. The company’s strategy will be Web driven. His Beverly Hills-based Strathmore Investments has acquired nine total Web sites which have more than one million users every month. He is putting an emphasis on multi-channel distribution, with consumers being one channel and business-to-business another. While it already has an office in Torrance, Wildcat will move its executives over to the newly-leased Agoura Hills office, where it will have five to 10 people total in sales, customer service, shipping and marketing; it has plans to add more eventually. The lease is for two years with an option for another two. Bleeden, who founded Naked Juice with a roommate at Venice Beach in the 1980s, is trying to carve out a niche for his new company by doing everything in the mobile communications market, and doing it well. In the fast-growing wireless communication industry, he said he sees “a lack of universality” and wants to do something about it. Lofty goals? Ben Bajarin, a wireless industry analyst at Silicon Valley-based Creative Strategies, thinks so but also adds it’s doable. He said, however, that consumers tend not to go to one place to get all of a particular type of product, unless it is something of a “community,” as Bajarin puts it. Such a Web site would offer something new and interesting to people that no one else provides. “What generally happens is people look at sites dedicated to specific phones,” he said. Short production cycles But that’s not all that stands in the way of Wildcat becoming to wireless what Microsoft is to PCs. Production time is becoming so efficient, it’s hard to keep up with supplying all parts to all models of cell phones being made. Bajarin said shorter product cycles result in up to three to five models released per year. A phone can be manufactured in three months after initial design. Bleeden’s competitors will be people like Sheldon Dubow, who owns Woodland Hills-based Discount Cellular Accessories, a family-owned firm that opened its doors in 1996 and has built its business around Nextel-brand phones, service and accessories. “We have a constituency of customers we worked hard to get,” he said. As a veteran of the burgeoning wireless industry, Dubow came out of retirement to start Discount. He said Bleeden may have a difficult time of it. “When you become a jack-of-all-trades without (specializing in anything), It’s a very difficult,” he said. “I think companies need to specialize.” Dubow’s company, like Bleeden’s, has a Web site set up to sell phones and accessories. But Bleeden’s latest venture is indicative of his entrepreneurial vision, which led him to be a pioneer in the bottled juice industry. Bleeden, now 42, was a graduate from UC San Diego playing gigs in a band with his roommate in Venice Beach when they founded Naked Juice, a freshly bottled juice company, to make extra money while playing in a band. Eventually they sold it to Chiquita. Bleeden then joined RhinoTek Computer Products, which makes heavy-duty computer products, and helped boost its sales from $25 to $45 million. He left in August 2003 to start his investment group, Strathmore, and right away closed a deal to buy privately-owned Amco Cellular Products. He renamed it Wildcat Communications Group, and bought Dallas-based G-Tel Wireless, a popular-brand wireless accessory and peripheral company. While Bleeden sees opportunity in the “huge market” he is entering with Wildcat Communications, analyst Bajarin said it will be a challenge. “It’s got to be marketed on what the vision is,” Bajarin said. “If you can tie all that in and market it in one side, you’re taking steps in the right direction.”
