Mozzie bite led to 'mischievous' mates multi-million dollar idea: 'Really exciting'
Michael Jankie said the idea for the stickers was sparked after a trip to the Mornington Peninsula with his family. His young daughter kept getting bitten by mozzies in the middle of the night and waking up with welts on her body.
'I was like, 'What do I do? I don't even see these little mosquitoes, but they are biting her',' the 44-year-old told Yahoo Finance.
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Jankie said he was talking about the problem with his childhood best friend and business partner, Gary Tramer, when the idea to create the world's first mosquito-repellent sticker was born.
Since becoming dads, the pair said they were keen to avoid using chemicals on their kids and wanted to find natural, lower-impact alternatives.
'We both were getting quite excited about it and ended up talking about, what if you could blend an outdoor citronella candle or coil with something portable as a personal repellent,' Jankie said.
'At some point we landed on, what if citronella was infused into a sticker and the sticker was a diffuser.'The pair didn't come back to the idea until a few months later when the pandemic hit in March 2020, and they were working from home on their previous technology companies.
They enlisted the help of scientists to develop a formula and engaged Monash University to work on the technology of the patch material.
Within the space of a few months, they had their first iteration of the product and started testing the product on themselves.
In May 2020, together with co-founder Andrei Safonau, they launched their first product, BuzzPatch, into the US market in time for their summer.
The patch is engineered to release natural oils, including citronella, to keep mosquitoes at bay.
'It was a wild ride. We did seven figures in revenue in that first year and have just kept growing,' Jankie said.
The company hit eight figures of revenue in its second year.
Now, five years later, Jankie said the business was now roughly in the mid-eight-figure range.
Jankie and Tramer met when they were just three-years old and had grown up 'about 100 metres from each other'.
The pair said they "used to get up to a lot of mischief" growing up, and their entrepreneurial spirits started from a young age.
'The two of us probably ran our first business together at the age of 7. We were selling everything down the street from lemonade to cups of water, car washes, plants in pots, everything,' Jankie said.
Jankie started out his career in live events doing technical production, while Tramer studied behavioural and neuroscience at university before going into sales.
It wasn't until they were in their early 30s that they rekindled their business relationship and began running technology businesses, including PoweredLocal and LeadChat, among other ventures, before eventually co-founding NATPAT.
'We're always what you call dogfooding, where we were building something that was solving an internal problem that we had or solving a problem that we innately understood,' Jankie explained.
Tramer said there were benefits to being in business with your best mate.
'It is like a marriage, essentially. You spend a lot of time together, financially you are tied and you travel together,' he told Yahoo Finance.
'So there's a lot of dynamic that comes in and the fact that we've been friends for so long means we can have heated arguments, but we know it's really just about business and business isn't the most important thing.
'It's a very unique thing, not many people hear about co-founders that have been mates since they were three.'
Tramer said it helped that he, Jankie and Safonau had different skill sets and separate 'lanes' they focused on, with Tramer focused on the sales side and Jankie on operations.
Safonau previously worked as a data analyst on an e-commerce site that the pair previously owned, and they helped him migrate to Australia from Belarus in 2016.
'We do a lot of functions that are the same, but there's a lot of functions that we separate. We tend to move to the things that we enjoy doing,' Tramer said.
'Between Michael, myself and Andrei there is an organic division of where we're pulled in different directions and also where our skills lie. It seems to work insanely well.'
NATPAT has now expanded its sticker range beyond BuzzPatch, including its remedy range, outdoor range and pet range.
One of its most popular products is its SleepyPatch Bedtime Sleep Promoting sticker, which is designed to help calm kids before bed with a blend of mandarin, lavender, sweet marjoram and vetiver oils.
There's also the SunnyPatch UV Sensing sticker that detects UV and changes colour when it's time for kids to apply more sunscreen.
More than 100 million individual stickers have been sold worldwide, with the product available in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Europe and the UK.
In Australia, NATPAT recently launched into every Chemist Warehouse store across the country with eight of its products stocked. It is also stocked at Woolworths and Ampol Foodery outlets.
"Chemist Warehouse is an amazing example of what we are starting to see, really everywhere, retailers understanding what we are bringing to the table, and we're not a new entrant as much anymore," Tramer said.
"It's really exciting."
The pair said they plan to keep expanding, with NATPAT now in discussions with other major global retail chains, including in Europe, the UAE and China.Sign in to access your portfolio
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