A new product to help people track down lost belongings made its debut in Arlington this week.
Falls Church accountant Dave Doctor is the entrepreneur behind LostAF — a brand of lost-and-found stickers with unique QR codes to help people contact those who have lost things.
After scanning the QR code to receive an activation email, users place the stickers on items that might get lost. If somebody finds one of these items later on, they can scan the QR code to let the owner know.
The message goes to the user’s unique LostAF email and is forwarded to their personal email account. This offers a way to recover lost items without revealing a user’s contact information or name, Doctor said.
“The convenience about these stickers, the LostAF stickers, is they tell people how to find you,” he said.
A limited supply of free stickers was available at Casual Adventure Outfitters in Virginia Square beginning yesterday (Wednesday).
Doctor said he came up with LostAF — short for “lost and found” — after thinking of ways he would improve similar lost-and-found identification products.
“I just was like, you know, I could do this better than Tile.com is doing it,” he said. “I could do it better, and I could do it cheaper, and so I just built a system.”
Doctor has received a provisional patent for the stickers, granting him 12 months to pursue an official patent application, he said.
If people can’t make it out for merch, the LostAF website also allows users to print stickers at home, free of charge.
These come in various designs and languages, with messages like “Help! Return this before my Mom finds out!”
“There’s some funny ones, and I’m just going to expand on that,” Doctor said.
Kits are also available on Casual Adventure Outfitters’ website and Etsy at $14.99 for a pack of 63 stickers in various sizes.
While Doctor said he has not personally lost many items, he is “definitely risk cautious” — and uses the stickers for belongings like his water bottle, credit cards and wallet.
In the near future, Doctor hopes to enter more partnerships with businesses and venues where items could easily be lost, like schools and airports.
“If it takes off, all the better, you know,” Doctor said.
