Tukaiz enters mobile app realm

The Defino family, owners of Franklin Park-based Tukaiz has helped to develop a personalization software that has led to one of Apple's favorite mobile downloads, PixyMe.

The app allows you to inscribe a name into any photo or image, as if it were already part of the environment. Your name could be written on a snowy car windshield, or in the clouds or even in leaves on a puddle. It was used as a marketing tool for some companies, especially with calendars that showed the client's name on each month's photo. One of Tukaiz' customers, State Farm, had its agents send such calendars to its customers.

Now, thousands of individuals have been downloading it for iPhone for $1.99 each. The app debuted about six weeks ago.

"We were contacted by Apple and they wanted to do some marketing with it," said Frank Defino Jr. of Carol Stream, a co-owner of the company founded 46 years ago by his father, Frank Defino Sr.

Once Apple promoted the PixyMe app, downloads soared from 30 a day to about 1,000 a day, Defino said.

The idea for the personalization software came a couple of years ago. Tukaiz (www.tukaiz.com), which provides marketing and printed materials, decided to form a partnership with Direct Smile of Germany, which had a basic personalization software.

Defino said his family's company licensed the software and then created all of the images used for the Web site, PixyMe.com, and the mobile application. Tukaiz also has some of its employees working in Germany at the software company's office, while Direct Smile has workers here inside Tukaiz as well.

The popularity of PixyMe.com and its app have opened up new product ideas and marketing plans for the company, Defino said.

"We wanted to put the technology into the consumer's hands and allow them to send a greeting with an e-mail, or on Facebook, or actually print a postcard and have it sent," he said.

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