IT’S BEEN A LONG AND WINDING ROAD…TO SEE-MORE.

At 12, I delivered newspapers at 6 a.m. on a Mustang bike with a banana seat. At 14 years of age, I washed dishes in a shopping mall restaurant, often locking up around 1 am. At 16, I painted toolboxes with heated, magnetized paint and at 17 I sold Ferrari fold-up sunglasses from a gym bag at airshows, parks, and beaches across Ontario. At 18, I sold women’s shoes in a mall, at 19 I piloted a Riverboat and at 20, I damn near sold myself when I was approached to work for a madam.

Then Life got exciting and I ended up in advertising where I continued to sell everything from Front-End Loaders to Cadillacs, Fords, Toyotas, Whisky, Drugs and 3D Nuclear Imaging. And well, just to mix things up a bit, I became an inventor, patented a new consumer product and today I have begun to build a brand based on the idea of raising millions of smiles around the world. This is my SEE-MORE saga. It’s got a few twists and turns.

I was supposed to be a lawyer. I was in my early twenties and my attendance at McMaster University was all about getting ready to go to law school. But to be truthful I was miserable and my grades showed it. No one called me out. I just sat myself down, had a long, hard think about what I was doing, and concluded that if I ever did make it to law school or even worse, graduated, I might just be the worst lawyer in Canadian history. I decided I better rethink the path that I was on. I pulled out a sheet of paper and made a list: Things I Was Good At. Things I Sucked At. On the positive side of the page: I wrote well. Read easily and fast. People thought that I had a way with words and that I was generally pretty smart about figuring out solutions to problems. On the negative side of the ledger: I was weak at advanced math and sciences. I had no handyman skills or interests so I wasn’t much good at fixing things. I decided that I better start looking for a way to live where I could use communications skills like reading, writing, and thinking things through. I looked at career guidebooks and considered writing, journalism, PR, advertising, and broadcasting. I settled on advertising. On the practical side, I thought that I had the natural talent to succeed in that field. And on the silly side, I had a huge crush on Elizabeth Montgomery, the star of Bewitched, a television show about a witch (Samantha Stevens) who was married to a man in advertising. I now had goals! Break into advertising, and yeah, find myself a witch that looked like Elizabeth Montgomery. I’m still working on one of those goals.

But how to get into the advetising business? I had read stories about taxi drivers breaking into the business by showing sketched up ad campaigns to ad execs in their cars. But I was in my early 20s and lived in Hamilton, Ontario Canada. I had my doubts about that strategy, in that city. I had wasted two years at University so I was two years behind the business majors and I was in a hurry. I discovered advertising programs at two colleges. One had a three year and the other a two-year program. I chose Sheridan College because it had a two-year program, an advisory board of people who really worked in the ad business and it was closer to Toronto, the mecca of Canadian advertising, than the other school.

I excelled at Sheridan. I became the advertising manager of the school newspaper and broke all sales records, forcing the school to publish newspapers that were bigger than anything ever published in school history. And shortly after beginning Year Two, I created a very unique resume. This was the early 1980s and we were in a recession. It seemed that every MBA on the planet wanted a job in advertising so my competition was fierce and far better qualified than me. A Queens MBA far outweighs a College diploma. I treated my job search like an ad campaign. I strategically positioned myself as a brand. My brand profile?: creative, risk-taker, entrepreneurial, different. I had to get noticed and then be taken seriously, so my resume was…different. And in order to compete with the MBAs, I wanted my resume on the street in November — December prior to my grad year.

I mailed (Yes mailed, with envelopes and postage stamps) my resume out in three waves. Wave 1 — The 10 agencies I would give a limb to work for, The 2nd wave: Agencies that I would sever a digit to work for. The third wave; anyone crazy enough to hire me. Wave 1 worked! And I still have all my limbs. I accepted an offer from Maclaren Advertising in Toronto. They wanted me to come and work for them on The Imperial Oil business (ESSO) starting in January, on the condition that I simultaneously finish my College education. They told me to come to work Monday — Thursday and finish my school program on Fridays. With the cooperation of all of my professors except one, I pulled it off, finishing near the top of the class. The one professor who objected, downgraded me from an A to a C, because I was missing two classes a week.

My time at Maclaren was exhilarating and…strange. Advertising is everything Mad Men made it out to be. I’ve worked for advertising agencies big and small in Toronto and Montreal and the creators of Mad Men nailed it. Maybe that’s why the show was so successful. But advertising is also home to some very kind people who are not nearly as crazy as the ones you watched every week on Mad Men. If you are considering a career in advertising, I highly recommend the industry. It’s still all about the people and their ideas. No matter what has happened technologically, people still make advertising, and trust me, you want to be around those people. They are fun, smart, passionate, weird and for the most part decent. There are exceptions. I’ve met a few monsters. But I expect that is just the way it is in every business.

My mentor, John McNally once offered me this guidance; If you want to own your own business, do it before you’re 40. By that time, you will have acquired too much to risk the potential failure of your business. John ended up offering me ownership of his agency when I turned 35. I had to turn him down because I was in the process of leaving Toronto to be with the love of my life in Montreal. But four years later John’s words were burning a hole in my head as I turned 39. And that year, serendipity struck and an opportunity to be an owner landed in my lap right after my wife announced we were about to have our first child.

In 2000 I left the employ of a large multi-national agency (Marketel/McCann) in Montreal and started my own agency from the basement of my home with a newborn making her voice heard! Over the course of the next 15 years, I built Commotion Communications from the basement up, found a business partner, learned the hard way about the trials and tribulations of ownership, and in 2017 stepped away from it to invent something that had been gnawing on my brain for years.

The idea for SEE-MORE began to percolate during The 2007 President’s Cup golf tournament in Montreal. I couldn’t see the action because the crowds were so big. My solution was to bring an empty milk crate from home and use it as an extremely precarious perch. I rose up from 6ft to 7ft tall and had the time of my life from the back of the crowds. People actually offered to buy that old plastic crate and offers ranged from $20 to “Everything I’ve got on me ($70)!” I said no to every offer and I still have that beat-up old red milk crate to this day!

Fast-forward to 2016 and my daughter Olivia is at a massive comedy show in downtown Montreal. Sugar Sammy was performing and 100,000 people showed up. My daughter was disappointed because at 5ft2inches she had to watch the show on the monitors. No matter where she wiggled her way to, she just couldn’t see over the heads of the taller people in front of her. I remembered my own experience from years before and thought, there must be something I can buy that would be better than a milk crate. So I did the research, and guess what? The best solution is a footstool. And footstools are not made for use at crowded outdoor events. They are small and VERY TIPSY.

I then started sketching solutions, engaged an industrial design firm, got to a design that I loved, and then prototyped for two years, during which time I relied on my advertising background and connections to name and brand my product. BRILLIANT Montreal Artist Paul Abraham came up with the SEE-MORE logo and brand character during an exhaustive development-collaboration process. I field-tested in Montreal (Jazz Festival, Just For Laughs, Pride Parade) and in Philadelphia (Super Bowl victory Rally) and people tried to buy SEE-MORE prototypes from under my feet. The positive feedback and compliments I got about the brand character were amazing. Kids love the friendly little alien and moms find SEE-MORE adorable.

And now here we are in 2022. We’ve had no crowds, anywhere, for almost three years.

But I am persistent if nothing else. So, I plan to launch my SEE-MORE invention in summer 2022. In the meantime, I have created SEE-MORE design apparel for little ones and their families. Because SEE-MORE has already raised so many smiles, I have a SMILE objective. Through SEE-MORE, I want to raise 1,000,000 smiles in 2021. As I grow the business, I plan to bring SEE-MORE into the lives of as many children as possible by visiting hospitals and partnering with charities and children’s foundations.

The SEE-MORE Story continues on and I will keep you posted as it evolves. I hope to meet you and introduce SEE-MORE in 2022. Until then, you can keep tabs on SEE-MORE here.

Apparel Website: www.meetseemore.com

And if you want to take a peek at what I am doing on TikTok, you can find me here, @montrealskeptic trying to help small businesses in Montreal survive the pandemic.

Lawrence Binding, SEE-MORE Inventor

STAND TALL …SEE-MORE…SMILE MORE