By Kim Kalunian, WPRO News
At 27 years old, Max Winograd is the president, CEO and co-founder of a company that’s raised $14 million in private capital in the last six years, all by eliminating that pesky piece of paper that serves no other purpose than to cover the sticky part of a label.
What Winograd and his team do at NuLabel Technologies in East Providence might go above most people’s heads, but at the end of the day, Winograd’s “activatable chemistries company” makes adhesive labels that are only sticky when you want them to be.
“We’re eliminating always sticky, always messy glue that cause a lot of extra cost, waste, hassle and production delays for big and small companies alike,” said Winograd when reached by phone last month.
The company was founded in 2009 by Winograd and fellow Brown University graduates Ben Lux and Mike Woods. By 2013, NuLabel held their first production trials of their glue-free and liner-free labels. By the fall of last year, they had launched their products. Today, they label millions of products each month.
Some of their clients include Bell’s Beer and other craft breweries. Winograd said they’re also launching a new product for shipping labels for packages.
But before Winograd was the CEO of a major chemistry company, he was an undergrad at Brown. That’s where he met Lux and Woods, and started learning about the ways that always sticky labels cost companies money.
“Companies big and small have to deal with this backing to peel away and throw away,” he said. “We were able to come up with a new proprietary system that met all the criteria of being zero waste to landfill and less expensive.”
NuLabel’s system uses a special adhesive that’s activated by patented water-based spray. Instead of rolling on glue, vacuum suction holds the label in place until the adhesive is activated, and the label applied.
Winograd said the budding company received helped from local entrepreneurial incubator Betaspring, investment firm Cherrystone Angel Group, and other locals – he says it’s a big reason they kept the company in the Ocean State.
“The human capital was the biggest asset to drive …us to stay in Rhode Island,” said Winograd. “When you start your business, especially when you’re starting right out of a school, you have no idea what you don’t know, and what we had to do was plug into as many mentor networks and networks with investors and entrepreneurs as possible to come off the learning curve quickly.”
Winograd said once he had to make pay roll and be responsible for his workers, he didn’t have time to fail.
In addition to private investors, NuLabel also received a local guarantee in 2010 from the Job Creation Guaranty Program, the same, state-backed program that gave 38 Studios their now-infamous $75 million. NuLabel received a $1.5 million loan guarantee, but let the loan lapse and never used the line of credit. Winograd said using the loan wasn’t the best financial move at the time, since they were raising private capital anyway.
With clients across the country, a team of workers and proprietary technology that’s patented in the US and overseas, it might seem like Winograd has a lot on his plate for a 27-year-old. But he says age is just a number.
“I don’t think that age really is a hindrance,” he said. “And I am getting older every day.”
Winograd said it’s less about how old he and his team are, and more about the results they deliver. As for other young folks looking to start their own companies, WInograd says, “Just do it.”
“There’s no reason to not start. The worst case is it doesn’t work out and you try something else,” he said. “The only way to learn what you’re doing is to go and do it. A pilot can’t just read about flying in a book, they’ve got to get in the plane and fly.”
