Plastc Card

» see plastc.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the smart-payment-card cohort of 2014 through 2017 was a US-and-EU consumer story. plastc pre-sold to about 80,000 people worldwide but the actual retail channel it planned to ship through was american. it also depended on a magnetic-stripe fallback path that was already being deprecated on turkish point-of-sale terminals by the time the card was supposed to ship. i watched this one at a distance, mostly by reading tech-crunch reports about the pre-order number.

ryan marquis and mark stubbs founded plastc in palo alto in 2012, having previously worked in industrial design and mobile payments. the pitch was a single programmable card with an e-ink touchscreen on the front and a rewritable magnetic stripe on the back. bluetooth to a phone app was standard. NFC was on the way to shipping. one plastc card would consolidate every card in a user's wallet, from credit and debit through loyalty and gift cards, into a single physical object.

the pre-order campaign opened on 7 october 2014 at $155 per card, cheaper than coin's competing product and pitched as a superior technical implementation. the first week did $5.2 million. by the time pre-orders were paused in the run-up to a promised ship date, the total had reached around $9 million. plastc was structurally self-funded by pre-orders through its whole life. that was the marketing hook (no venture money, community-backed) and it turned out to be the thing that killed it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the pre-order flood ~

plastc was the second wave of smart-card products, arriving after coin had already taken pre-orders in november '13. coin actually shipped to a small number of backers in mid-2015 with a very rough first-generation product and reviews that flagged battery life and reader-compatibility issues. that partial-ship-then-partial-fail loop was still fresh in the market's memory when plastc opened its pre-orders, and plastc positioned itself as the "we saw what happened to coin, we will do it right" alternative.

the tech pitch was denser than coin's. a full e-ink display instead of a segment display, a stronger rewritable stripe, and an on-card fingerprint sensor planned for a v2 skew that never got prototyped. these were real design improvements on paper. they also added months to the engineering timeline every time a spec revision hit. plastc kept shipping updates to backers throughout '15 and 2016 explaining why the shipping date had slipped again. the community was patient because the alternative was writing off $155.

~ the actual end ~

by early '17 the pre-order cash was mostly gone. plastc had been running production tooling and prototype iteration off the $9 million, on top of payroll for about thirty people, with no additional funding closed. in february 2017 a $3.5 million series A round fell through in due diligence. the company then found a bridge investor for $6.75 million and lined up a close date in mid-april. days before the wire, the investor withdrew.

on 20 april 2017 plastc filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy. the statement told pre-order pledgers that their orders would not ship and that no refunds would be issued through the company. anyone who had used a visa credit card was directed to their card issuer's chargeback process. anyone who had paid by other methods effectively wrote off the money. a class-action suit followed and produced no meaningful recovery for consumers. the company had spent every dollar of pre-order money on the version of the card it was still trying to finish.

~ the smart-card graveyard ~

in fairness, the whole smart-card category died within a two-year window. coin sold to fitbit in may 2016 and its second-generation card was killed in early '17. plastc filed the same month. stratos card wound down in '16. swyp closed in 2017 without shipping. the value proposition of "one card that is all your cards" collapsed the moment apple pay and google pay landed on phones and delivered the same consolidation as a software layer with no plastic manufacturing risk attached.

plastc is remembered mostly as a lesson in why pre-order-only funding works badly for hardware. venture capital brings adult supervision along with the money: milestones and board seats, plus diligence on burn rate. pre-orders are a bank loan that the borrower gets to spend before figuring out whether the thing they promised is actually shippable. plastc took $9 million on that arrangement, spent it, and shipped nothing. the pre-order pledgers absorbed the loss.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »