Leslie Jackson Bigger Deeds for Light-Up Beads Leslie Jackson thinks she knows the true acid test of a good entrepreneurial idea. Mention it to people, and they invariably say, "My God! You mean, no one's done that yet?" Or words to that effect.  Says Jackson, half jokingly: "If I had a dollar for every time I've heard that, I wouldn't have to sell beads to be rich." At Mardi Gras, beads are the de facto currency of the realm—at least when it comes to inducing shameless groveling and flesh-baring exhibitionism. The gaudier the necklace, the better. Anything to stand out from the crowd. And for years, revelers have attempted to do just that by demanding bigger, fancier, brighter beads.

Leslie Jackson (left) and friends ready to roll with the Krewe of Kosmic Debris.

Which helps explain why Jackson's Blinky Beads might seem, with the benefit of hindsight, almost stunningly obvious. Simply put, Blinky Beads emit flashes of light that can be seen at night from a distance of three city blocks. The strobe-like "blinky" effect is generated by light-emitting diodes (LEDs), a technology commonly utilized in electronic toys and automotive dashboards, and controlled by a microcircuit. The LEDs are housed within faceted beads—rendered in colored translucent plastic, they're designed to enhance the sparkling effect—or specially molded figures. Bundles of non-illuminated beads are strung in between these light-up beads/figures in such a way as to take the "load-bearing" off of the wire that distributes the electrical current—which makes for a durable product that can withstand the rigors of Mardi Gras-style street partying and balcony throwing. Key selling point: The necklaces have an on/off switch and run on replaceable batteries, which last 20-plus hours.

Will Mardi Gras ever be the same again?

Not according to Jackson, 40, a vendor at the New Orleans flea market who credits serendipity and "the god who looks out for fools" with having facilitated the transformation of her Mardi Gras fantasy into a marketable reality. "I would like to think that someone would really, really, really do a lot for these beads," she says. As in, bigger deeds for light-up beads.

Jackson has always had an affinity for gimmicks and gadgets. Growing up as a self-described Army brat in Eagle River, Alaska, she says her most treasured possession was a "10-in-one, little pocket scientist thing" incorporating, among other tools, a compass, magnifying glass and pocketknife.

Years later, Jackson developed something of a reputation among her circle of friends for being a source of endless entrepreneurial "enthusiasms."  "I've always been the million-dollar-idea person: 'Oh, they should do this.' Or, 'Wow! Wouldn't it be great if they did that?' But, says Jackson, "that was as far as it went. And as I've grown older, I got tired of just talking about things and decided it was better to do things."

Like relentlessly pursuing an inventive flight of fancy. Or dropping out of college to join the Army, which Jackson, then living in Lake Charles, La., did in 1985. "I'm a Leo," she says, by way of explaining her firm belief that life occasionally calls for an "all-out big gesture." 

Jackson's curriculum at the Army's Defense Language Institute included Russian language and training in the finer points of monitoring sensitive communications, as a "voice-intercept translator." "All of my roommates hated me," she says, "because I went out and partied every single night" yet still managed to place "well up there" in her class.

As far as her sergeants were concerned, Jackson—who acquired the nickname "Scruffy" because she didn't work hard enough at shining her boots—was anything but the model of a spit-and-polish soldier. She says that upon graduating from the institute, "in two minutes, I could do 100 pushups, because I got dropped so many times for stupid shit." 

" 'Jackson!' " she continues, mimicking a typical reprimand, " 'I don't like your boots. That's a bad polish. Drop and give me 20.' "

Exhibiting a Mardi Grasesque knack for mischief making, the young scrub would try to even the score. About once a week, at her barracks, she'd climb out a friend's 4th-floor window and shimmy along the ledge in order to sneak into a particular sergeant's office. Once inside, Jackson would surreptitiously reposition some object, such as a family photo, "just to mess with her." 

After graduating in 1988, Jackson relocated to Richmond, Michigan, where her parents were living. When the Army sought to assign her to a nearby unit, to work on repairing power generators, she said sayonara to the armed services.  Eventually she wound up in Baton Rouge, La., working for an environmental activist group called Citizen's Action.

But as if by some gravitational force of nature, New Orleans beckoned Jackson. Her formative impressions of the city had much to do with Mardi Gras. Back when she was living in Lake Charles, Jackson and her newly married friend MJ, along with MJ's husband and some other acquaintances, visited New Orleans for the festivities. Jackson and MJ raged while the rest of the group insisted on laying low, watching parades on TV in their hotel room. One morning, the duo got back to the room just as the alarm rang to wake everyone else up.

"It wasn't pretty," recalls Jackson. "They were like, 'Where have you girls been?' We were like, 'Ahh, everywhere.' Literally, we had been everywhere. I doubt I got more than 10 hours of sleep the whole weekend."

One stop on the party trail was a bar frequented by drag queens. "At first they hated us," says Jackson, "because we weren't drag queens." But as the beers kept flowing, their highnesses warmed up to the out-of-town revelers. Jackson remembers one of them saying, "You girls are going to be alright. I'll see you at Mardi Gras again and again—I can just tell."

"I completely lost my mind," says Jackson, summing up the net effect of that first experience of Mardi Gras Madness. "I just had the best time ever."

Moving to New Orleans in 1991, Jackson ensconced herself at the flea market, working for various vendors selling everything from fossils and jewelry to hokey souvenirs. Later acquiring her own booth at the market, she traveled to Indonesia, making arrangements to export hand crafted-wood objects. And she continued to sell jewelry.

In early 1997, Jackson sat down to dinner with a friend who'd come to town for Mardi Gras, Chris Osborne Shaw, and who happened to be a toymaker. "He was talking about some new stuff he was doing," Jackson recalls, "and all of a sudden a bell went off in my head." What dawned on her was simply this: Mardi Gras beads couldn't get any flashier without incorporating new technology. "My huge moment," as she describes it, "was deciding that Mardi Gras beads needed to become electronic and more toy-like."

Jackson says she became "obsessed" with the idea, "boring every single person" she knew by "talking about beads for six months solid" before finally hooking up with a pair of whiz-bang business consultants who had the expertise to map out and execute a business plan. Together, they formed a partnership and managed to secure a bank loan.

Jackson's toymaker friend had already put her in touch with an American executive working for a toy company in Hong Kong. As luck would have it, he "was some kind of Mardi Gras fan from afar," according to Jackson. The relationship clicked, but the hard work—what Jackson calls "the brass tacks of engineering"—had only just begun.

How to bridge the gulf between Mardi Gras beads and electronic toys was anything but obvious. Bead manufacturers weren't well versed in electronics, and toymakers really didn't mess with beads

The early prototypes had transparent beads resembling elongated geometric crystals that lit up but didn't flash. But Jackson and her partners knew they wanted something more high-tech—something that would do for Mardi Gras beads what glitzy signage does for casinos along The Strip in Las Vegas.

One thing led to another, and after further experimentation and investigation, they hit upon the idea of utilizing an integrated circuit to generate and control an electronic signal circulated through the LEDs. Their timing couldn't have been better, as it was now possible to cheaply mass-produce circuitry incorporating a tiny microchip (for controlling the flashing sequence of the beads) and resistors (for converting the voltage from the batteries).

But if existing products offered something of a road map for deploying such bells and whistles, figuring out how to render the beads that would house the LEDs presented a more formidable challenge. Among the crucial variables involved: the size of the beads themselves, the type of plastic used to make them and the manner in which they'd be faceted—a process used to give the plastic a translucent, crystalline appearance. 

Over a period of approximately eight months, the manufacturer turned out 10 different prototypes. Jackson and her partners considered making compromises to produce a product in time for Mardi Gras 1999, but ultimately decided to spend the extra time and money necessary to achieve a more aesthetically pleasing result.

And yet, they weren't the only ones with visions of blinky beads dancing in their heads.

Virtually everyone who's frequented Tropical Isle, Funky Pirate or Deja Vu knows the Hand Grenade, probably the most notorious drink served in the French Quarter (it's made from a closely guarded formula that includes grain alcohol). The proprietor of these establishments has made a mascot out of a green hand-grenade character who adorns T-shirts, cups and medallions on Mardi Gras-bead necklaces, among other items. At Mardi Gras 1999, patrons were offered, for $7, a new electronic version of the bead. The character on the medallion had blinking red lights for eyes, whereas before his eyeballs had been painted to appear bloodshot.

Also signaling that Mardi Gras beads were destined to enter the realm of electronic gadgetry: Le Krewe d'Etat, a New Orleans Mardi Gras club. For its 1999 parade, members threw approximately 20,000 special beads with a jester skull medallion that featured... red blinking lights for eyes. For Jackson and her partners—still several months away from finalizing their necklace design and praying that big bead dealers wouldn't get wind of what they were working on—the Krewe d'Etat bead was a source of both affirmation and alarm. Recalls Jackson, "I just about had a heart attack."

No question: Blinky medallions suggested the possibility of fancier and more sophisticated light-up necklaces. Perhaps even a product that could merit patent protection.

In filing an application for a so-called utility patent, Jackson and her partners, in essence, asserted that its invention represented an entirely novel and unobvious use of existing technology. (In contrast to a design patent, a utility patent is based on technical functionality rather than aesthetic features.) The application, which is pending, is believed to be the first to seek protection for a necklace featuring light-up beads.

At Mardi Gras 1999, the necklaces with the blinking medallions came to be known as "blinky beads." But in naming their product, Jackson and her partners settled on a less generic moniker. Envisioning street vendors aggressively hawking the necklaces during Mardi Gras, Jackson hit upon the name HotBeads. She imagined them pushing their carts along the parade routes, yelling "HotBeads! Get yer HotBeads! Get 'em while they're hot!"

It was a safe bet that in the bead-and-bauble paradise that is New Orleans Mardi Gras, the flashing trinkets would turn plenty of heads. Less clear was whether the average reveler would be willing to cough up for what was far and away the most expensive Mardi Gras bead ever. Most street vendors were asking $10 a pop; in the French Quarter, retailers were getting $15 and up.

Though not exactly provoking a mass feeding frenzy, HotBeads were nevertheless hard to miss at the festivities after nightfall. Whether draped around the necks of float riders, worn as belts by marchers in the satirical Krewe du Vieux parade or used to dress up the bridals of horses appearing in the Knights of Hermes parade, their sparkling orbs became instantly recognizable.

But apart from adding a visual twist to an already gaudy and garish spectacle, the new breed of bead represented a signpost of sorts in the cultural Zeitgeist. Walt Handelsman, the Pulitizer Prize-winning cartoonist with the New Orleans Times-Picayune, memorably captured the product's iconic quality in a strip that ran in the newspaper the day before Fat Tuesday.

In it, a bespectacled, professorial type muses about "giant floats" and "light-up beads." "Mardi Gras has gone high tech!" he observes, only to be interrupted by the sound of a ringing phone. "Hold on...," his canine companion, shown holding a furry object with an antenna to his ear, says in the next panel. "I have a call coming in on my coconut..." (Coconuts painted gold and hand-decorated by members of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, who parade on Fat Tuesday, are generally considered to be the most sought-after "throw" item at New Orleans Mardi Gras.)

About two weeks earlier, the newspaper had featured Jackson in a write-up on the front page of the business section. " 'Hotbeads' creator has crowds begging for newest throws," the article proclaimed.

Mardi Gras may have been the ultimate test market for HotBeads. But almost from the git-go, Jackson and her partners envisioned their invention not so much as a Mardi Gras bead but rather as a high-tech novelty item appropriate for any nighttime occasion calling for an attention-grabbing touch of ornamental festivity. Since the necklaces could be customized, the niche-market opportunities seemed promising indeed. Medallions could be emblazoned with logos. For events like Halloween, the Fourth of July and St. Patrick's Day, the colors of the beads themselves could be customized and the necklaces adorned with plastic icons (i.e., flags, shamrocks and jack-o-lanterns).

But alas, after Mardi Gras, Jackson and her co-partners found themselves at odds over how to exploit these opportunities and, more broadly, over how the business should be run. Says Jackson, "We had different visions on the future of the beads. We had different ideas on business."

Upshot: Jackson resigned from the partnership and effectively took her share of the pending patent with her. She was, after all, listed on the application as a co-inventor, and as it turned out, the exclusive right to expoit the pending patent had never been assigned to the partnership.

Content to let her former partners continue selling HotBeads, Jackson proceeded to apply for a trademark to the name Blinky Beads. She also formed an alliance with Dan Kelly, a leading designer and importer of beads and other Mardi Gras parephernalia. Based in Harahan, La., he operates through Beads By the Dozen, a company he owns and runs with his wife, Teresa, and Kern International. The latter is a co-venture with Blaine Kern, whose Kern Studios is the largest builder of Mardi Gras floats.

Kelly didn't need much of a sales pitch: He'd already had success wholesaling HotBeads to two of his clients, Zulu and the Krewe of Endymion, for Mardi Gras 2000. The black-and-red Zulu HotBead included a medallion design by Dan Frolich, an artist with whom Kelly has an exclusive arrangement. A total of 1,500 were produced; every last one sold out. Members of Endymion bought 5,000 non-customized HotBeads. The necklaces incorporated four gold faceted beads with red LEDs and two green faceted beads with green LEDs, positioned in between clusters of metallic purple, green and gold beads.

To Jackson's way of thinking, if anyone was qualified to take the light-up bead idea to the next level, it was "Medallion Man" Kelly. For in the business of customizing beads for large wholesale accounts, he is king.

The jewels of his trade can be found in abundance in the conference room at Beads by the Dozen: hanging from all four walls are a trove of customized medallion beads he's done for the likes of Harrah's New Orleans Casino, the Jazzland amusement park in East New Orleans and the Universal Studios Florida theme park. "Dan has a tremendous eye for beads," notes Jackson, "and fantastic connections throughout the industry."

By late summer 2000, Jackson and Kelly had worked out a deal giving him the right to source and distribute Blinky Beads. In almost no time, his supplier in China began cranking out an array of new designs, including a Halloween bead with blinking pumpkins. By Mardi Gras 2001, Kelly expects to have 35 styles of Blinky Beads on the market.

If Blinky Beads represent, as Jackson says, "the first of a wave" in the convergence of Mardi Gras beads and technology, there's really no telling where it will all end up. Anyone for hologram Blinky Beads? Or how about Blinkys with medallions that play MP3 files of Mardi Gras songs?

"You're going to see a lot more interactive stuff, no question about it," says Jackson. "There's no where else to go with it."