Seeing Red

He who laughs last, laughs best -- so Randy Wise doesn't mind the inevitable reaction when he tells people about his contact lenses for chickens. That's right, for chickens.

Think about it, he says. Tinted red, the lenses cause changes in the behavior of egg layers. They eat less, produce more, and don't fight as much. The lenses will remake the economics of egg farming, raising gross margins by 400%. And the last laugh may be Wise's.

Say what you will about the notion of chickens wearing red-tinted contact lenses -- and just about everyone, including Johnny Carson, has said something. To Randy Wise, it's a matter of simple economics. A commercial egg farm is a commodity business: the price of a dozen eggs is set by the market, and the expenses -- for feeding and housing the chickens -- are almost impossible to alter. Your average egg rancher makes do with profit margins on the vanishing side of thin.

But Wise, a 40-year-old Harvard M.B.A., thinks the contact lenses made and marketed by his company -- Animalens Inc. -- will change the rules. Over the years tests have shown that chickens wearing red-tinted contact lenses behave differently from birds that don't. The chickens are calmer, less prone to pecking and cannibalism; the mortality rate is lower. For a variety of reasons, some not fully understood, they also tend to eat less feed while producing, on average, the same size and number of eggs as other chickens (even a bit more). In financial terms, Wise predicts, the savings from all this improved behavior will add up to a quadrupling of chicken-ranch profit margins. And once farmers know that, Wise figures, he'll be off and running.

He could be sitting on a gold mine. The U.S. population of commercial egg-laying chickens -- layers -- is currently around 250 million. Because it isn't practical or safe to recycle old lenses at the end of a layer's yearlong productive lifetime, chicken farmers would buy new lenses every year and install them in new birds. Once a few key egg producers adopt the product, Wise thinks others will follow out of fear of what would happen if they didn't. "Nobody will want to be left behind," he says. The lenses might also be sold to farmers whose business is breeding chickens. And down the road, Wise believes, there are opportunities for related products. Though he'll begin in this country, the global market could be 24 times the size of the domestic one. And the U.S. market alone, at a lens price of 15¢ a pair, says Wise, is $37.5 million.

There aren't many new businesses that have been on the drawing board as long as Animalens, in Wellesley, Mass. In the early 1960s Wise's father, Irvin, was managing a chicken ranch north of San Francisco and became involved with a California start-up that planned to sell a highly unusual product: contact lenses for chickens. The start-up's founder, a medical supply salesman, had known a local chicken farmer who had some birds with cataracts and had discovered that the vision-impaired chickens were easier to handle than their sighted counterparts. It dawned on the salesman that there could be a market for a lens that blurred the vision of chickens. The company was called Vision Control Inc.

Vision Control -- which for a short period employed Wise's father full-time as vice-president and his mother part-time -- did write some orders. But the lenses, molded out of plastic, were inconsistent: they tended to irritate the birds' eyes, and though designed to be permanently installed, many of them popped out. The company soon went out of business, but not before the principals collected a good deal of data. When the lenses fit, Wise remembers, the product performed beautifully. "The chickens were easier to handle and they laid more eggs.'

In the fall of 1966 Wise went East to attend the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, and in 1972 he started business school. He encountered many opportunities there, but the contact-lens business had hooked him. In fact, during his second year at Harvard, he investigated the market for a company he proposed would follow in the footsteps of Vision Control; the research became the basis of a business-school case study still in use. Like the original lenses, the product he had in mind would impair vision. What was the potential? He didn't project sales. But, if successful, Wise said, "We will have revolutionized the business of animal behavior in much the same way that IBM revolutionized the processing of data.'

When Wise tried selling the idea to venture capitalists, nobody bought it. For one thing, he hadn't pinned down details as to how the lenses would be produced and how much they'd cost. The venture capitalists were polite, Wise says. "But they tended to see it as a shaggy dog story." He was 25 and inexperienced.

Instead of abandoning the idea, Wise kept it in the back of his mind for almost 15 years. During that period, he held a series of high-paying consulting jobs, specializing in marine transportation. In 1981 he founded a graphics software company in Boston. All the while, Wise did his best to keep informed about the chicken business. He read Egg Industry magazine and other poultry trade journals. And he commissioned research into a new lens design -- one that relied on color instead of distortion. "Hardly a week went by when I wasn't thinking about contact lenses for chickens," he says.

Each year thousands of business-school students were exposed to the idea through the case study. Wise says it wouldn't have surprised him if someone had beat him to the punch. It was a concept waiting to be executed. But to his relief, nobody ever touched it.

Between 1979 and 1984, when Wise incorporated Animalens, he invested nearly $15,000 of his own money. In 1985 and 1986, when he sold his graphics software company to Lotus Development Corp. for a reported $12 million to $15 million (he owned about 20%), he put up another $100,000 to pay for prototypes and new molds. For the design work, he retained a well-known professor from Virginia Polytechnic Institute named A. T. Leighton Jr. The challenge, says Leighton, was to get the right depth and thickness of lens. The lens had to stay in the bird's eye for life. In January 1988 Wise felt they had a product that overcame the design flaws of the earlier lens -- and one that fell within the cost parameters he had targeted. The patent application was in the mail. Wise was ready. Now, all he had to do was sell it to the chicken farmers of America.