Signed, sealed, delivered, locked

Entrepreneur's mailboxes don't leave letters open to ID theft

11:14 AM CST on Saturday, January 10, 2004

By CHERYL HALL / The Dallas Morning News

Bobbie Cox thinks your New Year's resolutions should include securing your mailbox. After all, she contends, your financial health is as important as shoring up your physique.

"If you leave home with your mail unlocked, it's like leaving your wallet and credit cards with a sign saying, 'Come use these while I'm gone,' " says the 48-year-old owner and chief executive of Postal Vault Corp. of Dallas. "Why not start out the year by giving yourself peace of mind?"

Ms. Cox's answer to the mounting problem of identity theft is her patented mailbox that keeps incoming mail out of thieves' reach.

Go on vacation. Don't ask the neighbors to retrieve your stuff, even if you're gone for weeks. It'll be snug in a four-foot-tall, locked receptacle when you return.

Her Postal Vaults range in retail price from $199 for the basic model to $450 for a stainless steel version and $900 for copper. She also has slip-on covers made of polyurethane coated with stucco or granite that cost about $500. Or a mason can brick one up.

Ms. Cox is not one to think small or be easily discouraged.

She's invested $1.5 million from past business successes and spent almost that much from family and friends to get the company to just $95,000 in 2003 sales.

But she projects sales of $2 million this year and $11 million by 2008 with a straight face and a detailed business grid.

"There are 60 million unlocked curbside mailboxes in the United States," she says. "If I get just 1 one percent of that in five years, that's 600,000 units."

One reason for her optimism is that her boxes have U.S. Postal Service approval, which is a daunting process. Because all plants making certified mailboxes have to be USPS inspected, she doesn't expect to worry for a while about knockoffs.

Postal Vaults are sold in about 20 stores, including Meletio Electrical Supply Co., Elliott's Hardware, Nob Hill and six area Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouses.

Lowe's recently agreed to stock Postal Vaults in 50 additional stores nationally. If that proves profitable, the North Carolina chain could add them to its entire system.

Big is better

Skeptics wonder just how many people want big, bulky, expensive boxes in their front yards.

But Alan Fishman, owner of Westside Kitchen & Bath on Lovers Lane, says big, bulky and expensive is de rigueur in affluent neighborhoods.

"Postal Vaults are a hot little item," says Mr. Fishman. "Home builders love them because they can just brick around the unit, and the homeowners love them because their mail is secure."

Ken Reiser, president of Meletio, agrees. In the last two months, he's sold about 100, mostly to luxury builders.

"Soon this will be a standard building material that all custom builders use," he predicts. "The great irony of some of these expensive homes with guard gates and security cameras is that the mail is still left unlocked at the street."

With the current Postal Vault models, you can't safely leave outgoing mail, since the front hatches of curbside boxes have to be accessible to carriers without using keys.

So Ms. Cox is toying with toll-tag technology that would automatically open locked boxes when a mail truck drives next to it.

Want to secure parcel packages instead of leaving them unattended on your doorstep? She has a larger Delivery Vault for that.

"With people buying more on the Internet, crooks just follow the delivery trucks," she says. "They even steal the little yellow sticky notes and then go pick up the parcels."

She also has a prototype that uses a germicidal light bulb to nuke anthrax spores – but that's on the backburner.

"Her mind thinks in so many variations and directions I hate to come to work in the morning for fear of what's on my to-do list for that day," quips Chuck Hosier, Postal Vault executive vice president and her close friend. "It scares the heck out of me."

Singing another tune

Bobbie June (as she was known growing up) was born in 1955 in Statesville, N.C., to June and Bobby Lee Weber, one of the early bass singers for the Oak Ridge Boys.

Her parents settled here in 1972. Bobbie June, who graduated from high school a year ahead of schedule, enrolled in Texas Woman's University to study music, thinking she'd be a singer, too.

But at age 19, she married Jim Cox and got into the construction business.

Together they built 17 Frito-Lay distribution centers in California, completing each ahead of schedule, she says. That earned them significant bonuses on top of their $100,000 to $200,000 general contractor's fees.

She and her husband, who died in November 1999, always worked the outside angles.

When Frito-Lay converted its delivery fleet to a different type of truck, the Coxes bought the abandoned versions (some practically new for practically nothing) and quickly resold them to Lance Potato Chip drivers who had to provide their own wheels.

When Frito-Lay stopped building distribution centers, the Coxes bought a 40-foot motor home and spent 18 months following the NASCAR circuit.

From that came their next venture, a travel agency for race fans.

They returned to Dallas in 1989 so their daughter Ashley could start kindergarten at Hockaday School.

They got into product development looking for all sorts of gizmos worthy of exploitation.

In early 1999, Mr. Cox went to see a man in Fort Worth about a newfangled pooper-scooper, more to get the guy off his back than from any real interest. On his way out, Mr. Cox noticed an odd mailbox sitting on a garage shelf.

That rudimentary prototype, which the Coxes bought, became the seed behind Postal Vault.

"Jim had real foresight," she says. "All of this was before 9-11 security concerns or anthrax scares, and identity theft was just beginning to pop up."

Unfortunately and unexpectedly, before the Coxes could do much more than make a real prototype, Mr. Cox died in his sleep. His death came just seven weeks after her father's.

Emotionally crushed, Ms. Cox and her daughter drove to her family's Appalachian mountain retreat to recover.

"We had a Postal Vault prototype installed out front, so I didn't have the stop the mail," Ms. Cox recalls. "We came back on a Saturday, and there was three weeks of condolences waiting for us. Instead of having to go to the post office on Monday, we had all weekend to look at the cards."

She now believes God sent a message in that stacked-up mail. "I made my mind up right then that I was going to go out every day of my life to make a success out of this."

Enthusiastic reception

Three months later, she wheeled in three bricked-in models to the National Association of Homebuilders convention in Dallas and hired Mr. Hosier, a former director of marketing for McDonald's Dallas region, to help hawk them at the show.

The vaults were a hit. But just about that time, the Postal Service announced that it was changing its mailbox regulations, throwing Postal Vault in limbo for more than two years, Ms. Cox says. "It didn't make sense to really market a product that might soon become obsolete."

Now, with that hurdle behind them and certification in hand, she and Mr. Hosier are going full bore.

Last week, they were in Minneapolis and Wisconsin pursuing buyers at Target Inc. and Menards Inc., a chain of 180 home improvement stores.

The initial reaction, Ms. Cox says, was highly favorable.

History on the horizon

"I intend to change history," she says, not jesting in the least. "When you think of mailboxes, there's no Kleenex that pops up. I'm going to be the pioneer who brands this category of a mailbox security system."

She's also looking for a strategic partner with megabucks who wants to make history with her. With additional backing, Ms. Cox says, she can handle a sales tidal wave should one occur.

Leggett & Platt Inc., which makes her 18-gauge steel boxes at its Plano factory, has plants nationwide capable of producing as many mailboxes as she can sell.

Last year, marketing students at Southern Methodist University and the University of Alabama took on Postal Vault as class projects.

Marketing instructor Michael Little at Alabama checked out the mailbox competition before assigning Postal Vault as a senior project.

Other products had inferior and flimsy construction, he says. For example, the drop-slot in one box was so large that you could reach in and pull out the mail.

Postal Vault, on the other hand, is the real deal, says Mr. Little, whose students won the 2000 national contest sponsored by the American Advertising Federation.

One of his favorite slogans for Postal Vault was a billboard with an open mailbox and the message, "You had mail."

"Think about all the stuff you're told to shred," he says. "But what about the mail you never get?"

E-mail chall@dallasnews.com

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