Philadelphia Weekly Online: Philips switched from a 9-to-5 job to one as an independent consultant building intranet infrastructure for pharmaceutical companies. And one warm summer day in 2004 he pulled his Mercedes up to a light in the western suburbs and began chatting with a cute girl in a Jaguar next to him.
The light turned green. She drove away. He never saw her again.
It’s the usual boy meets girl, boy likes girl, girl drives away and he never even gets her number story.
“It was a great little talk,” Philips says. “And the light turned green, and I never saw her again. I didn’t want to follow her and do any kind of stalker thing.”
Instead of chalking up the experience to a missed opportunity and moving on, Philips decided to do something about it. He merged two of the biggest automotive fads of recent years: flirting (always a fan favorite) and those oval stickers from European license plates, adapted as U.S. tourist secret code: OBX (Outer Banks, N.C.), LBI (Long Beach Island), WW (yes, even Wildwood).
“It took me about a week to put the two together,” he says. “I thought, ‘What if I put a number on a sticker and put it on cars?'”
Philips bounced the idea off a few friends and a few strangers in bars. He says eight or nine out of 10 people gave him positive feedback on the idea. And after debt from a divorce forced him to file for bankruptcy last September, he figured there was no better time to launch his business.
He developed FlirtingInTraffic.com. The premise is simple. A user signs up and gets a sticker in the mail. The person puts the sticker on their car’s bumper, and waits for the emails to roll in from interested potential dates encountered in traffic.
Collision Course… for Love [Philadelphia Weekly Online]
Drivers’ Romance
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This is great. I used to work for a consulting firm and was on a team that built platedate.com, which was exactly the same concept. That was many years ago and the site never took off, but to this day I think the idea is sound. In my previous life I was Director of Development at Match.com, and I always thought we had so many members that pass each other on the street everyday that could meet their match…if only they had a bumper sticker!