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Esprit Digital has been making and supporting custom display solutions for 20 years from facilities north of London, but the company recently took the interesting step of investing in their own manufacturing in China and expanding from LCD into LED.

The company has built up a reputation for putting together displays - from screens that line subway escalators to sidewalk totems - that manage to look sleek, but also have mission-critical reliability. Esprit  has, for example, a major, longtime customer in the giant Westfield shopping center chain, and also works with big OOH media companies and retail brands.

I was intrigued by news that Esprit was getting into LED displays - a market that's even more crowded than digital signage software - so I arranged a catch-up interview with owner Peter Livesey. I learned his angle is all about custom, or as Brits like him say, bespoke.

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TRANSCRIPT

Peter, thank you for joining me. We’ve done a podcast in the past, but that was, I don’t know, in 1977 or something like that, so things have probably changed. Can you give me a background on what Espirit Digital is all about and really what the last couple of years has been like? Cause it's been a little bit nutty.

Peter Livesey: To say the least. I think it was 1975 actually, but we won’t split hairs about that. 

So you were in your forties then, I think? 

Peter Livesey: Ooh, are we going to spar straight away? There are a lot of questions there. First of all, It's great to be back because I think that's where we are now and I think we, as an industry, as a world, are starting to come back to where we were a couple of years ago and we're still here, Espirit Digital, we're still going. We are stronger than ever. 

It's our 20th anniversary this month. So we're very proud of that. We're going to be doing some things to mark that and the reason we're stronger than ever considering our traditional customer base effectively shut up shop and put everything on pause for the most part for the last two years for all the reasons we know, is because we did a strategic pivot.

We brought a technology called InstaScan, which allowed people to get into buildings and get into public spaces, it took the temperature, and it worked really well. It was a cheap, lightweight item, could be wall-mounted or freestanding. Anyway, we sold thousands of them, made them all here just north of London and distributed them around the world to people like Costco and it was a good one. That's probably not the main reason we're still here, but it certainly helped us. 

It's interesting because in Q2 2020, I saw no end of press releases from companies saying we're selling these things now, and I did not see a lot of indication that there was a lot of take-up, but you're saying it, it went great. 

Peter Livesey: Yeah, absolutely. Particularly in the US, we did a lot of little big chains over there and it worked very well. 

Yeah, I probably just haven't seen them cause I've been locked in my room for two years now. 

Peter Livesey: In that igloo of yours, I know. Now we're back to what we really love, which is screen integration and our key verticals as ever digital out of home being number one, screens that generate money tend to tend to be the most interesting for us because everyone wants to push the envelope with every new project. So they always want new toys in the box and new sizes and new applications, and it's great for our R&D team. 

So your company would primarily be known for digital display totems, whether they're interactive or “static” in terms of not being interactive, but they're running video and all that stuff for street furniture, for shopping malls, that sort of thing, is that pretty accurate?

Peter Livesey: Historically, it's always been malls, metros and airports inside and outside. It doesn't have to be totems or kiosks or pods