By Scott and Ann Springer
      

Sometimes the best ideas come from the most unfortunate of circumstances. 

One such example occurred when an employee of Secure Connections LLC in McLean, Va., lost his dog while taking a vacation. 

The person who found the lost dog had trouble locating the owner because the pet identification tag listed the dog owner's home phone number.

"After this happened we said to ourselves, "We can make a better pet tag," says Secure Connections president Barry Stiefel. 

Fortunately, this story ended well, but not all pet owners who lose a pet have such a happy reunion. Last year over 6 million pets were lost and only 7 percent were returned to their owners, according to Stiefel.

The principals of Secure Connections used their expertise in pre-paid telephone switching technology to develop petFinder, a lost pet retrieval system. While it can be used as a stand-alone pet tag, it does much more than simply hang from a pet's collar.

PetFinder allows those who find lost pets to hear a pre-recorded message from the pet's owner and then be connected immediately to any of three contact numbers entered by the pet's owner. Additionally, a pet owner can make unlimited changes to the phone numbers and the messages.

Now approaching two years on the market, the response to petFinder has been phenomenal once the word reaches retailers about the product.

"We've been able to garner that the product has been received extremely well once retailers see how much sense it makes," Stiefel says. "We're not a huge company with huge ad dollars, so we've had to be creative as we educate people that a pet tag isn't just a slab of metal with a name on it."

Stiefel hopes that his company's pet tag will someday don the collars of dogs across the world. After all, he says, the product is so practical and affordable, there's no reason why it can't happen.

"Our goal really is that our pet tag will supplant the engraved metal pet tag," he says. "Besides, from a cost perspective there isn't a tremendous difference between the two."

Visit www.finderproducts.com.