 And welcome to this week's edition of Business in Hawaii. I'm Dela and Yanagita, and we are broadcasting live from the ThinkTech studios in downtown Honolulu. If you want to tune in live, we are at www.thinktechhawaii.com, and while there, please subscribe to our programs and get on our mailing list. The theme of Business in Hawaii is to share with you stories of local businesses by local people, and our guests share with us their journey to building successful businesses right here at home. In the ThinkTech studios today is Byron Riddle. He is no stranger to us, but today he is the sales consultant at JPEG Hawaii. He's a frequent guest host, as many of you have probably already seen right here on Business in Hawaii. So, Byron, thanks for jumping on the opposite end of the table. I know, it's so much different being over here. Thank you, Dela. Well, I thought that it would be really appropriate for us to find out what it is that you do outside of being our super awesome guest host. So, I know that you've been in Hawaii for quite some time. You graduated from? Kalaheo. Oh, very nice. I'm Windward Boy. Kaidu Boy. Very nice. Tell us a little about how you got into the industry, because you've been a loyal professional in this industry. Tell us about that. So I'll go back a little bit further, because what I started in the business, and I will say in marketing, I started at Eagle Distributors, which was Anheuser-Busch, Budweiser back in the day. So I was working there while I was in college, and I was with the marketing department. And so, from there, I actually got into sales, VP came up to me and said, what are you doing next week? And I said, well, I got two finals, three papers, blah, blah, blah, blah, and he goes, no, I want you to be my new salesperson. What do you know about wine? And I said, oh, red, white, and blush, he goes, perfect, you're hired. So that was kind of the start of my sales ability. But I always look back on to that, because there was a lot of things that I learned early on with the proper mentorship. I had a great leader, and the owner of the company was a great man, and the VP of the company was a great man, Ed Dodie and Phil Brown, and Roger More, who's now living on the mainland. But they were true mentors, and they gave me a lot of support and encouragement along the way. After I was in the liquor industry for probably about seven or eight years in total, maybe a little longer, I moved over to companies, I was working for another company for a while, and then I wanted to change up, and I was looking for something different. I was looking to get back into marketing, not necessarily sales. So I've done everything from yellow pages back in the day into other things. So I've done a lot of different things along the way, and I've gained a lot of different experiences. I was working for a company called Digital Light that was on Queen Street, and they did development of film, so slides at the time, and they were also doing scanning. And that's when some of the earlier days of some of the scans were in the digital print realm was coming about. So I kind of got involved with that. I had a friend that had a machine. He was operating out of his garage. I brought him into the shop, and we ended up breaking out and going on our own and starting our own company, so that was kind of the early stages of it. Wow. You're like a resident historian when it comes to marketing and print and its evolution. Yes, I'm old. I can't say that. We've had quite a few guests come to us with where they started their careers at Verizon, yellow pages. It was GTE when I was doing it. Okay, cool. So there you go. But it does seem that the subject matter expertise definitely has had a following, and that's where you agree your consultant likes. Yeah, they had a lot of training. I got to tell you, they did it good because they sent us up to Dallas-Fort Worth area. We had three weeks of training, and very in-depth, you came back, you knew everything you needed to know, and they spent the money to do it right. And then they had support. They had a lot of different things, a million different things that could help you with a shell. So it was very good. Nice. Well, we followed you through several iterations of marketing, print, design, those sorts of things. Honblue? I was at Honblue. I was in the Jet Graphics Division there doing large format. And then I went to another company. I was with Pacific Digital Science, which was brains, not printing, a little bit of a break. And now I'm back in large format printing, too. What does that mean to a lay person like myself? So what I know is you go to a coffee shop, and there are some pretty large fancy machines, some of which will say that they do very large print. How is that different if I walk into one of these print shops? How is that different than what you're coining as large print? So some of the coffee shops, they can do a lot of the different things. Most of the times it's cheaper and cost quicker, done down and dirty, what I would say. They do a great job. They serve us a great need. It's for someone that needs a banner for their kid's birthday. Well, you go there, it's cheap, it's done, they can do it in a couple days and you're in and out. But they are not able to do a lot of the more in-depth challenges and more unique projects. And I think that's where we come in, because we can do very customized art. We actually, at JPEG Hawaii, we are able to design, we're able to print, and we're able to install. So we not only do the large format printing, but we also do the more traditional print, the digital print and the offset print. We also do promo items, so there's a lot of different things that we can offer that you may not get at a lot of these other places. What I'm hearing is what sets JPEG apart from the rest is the fact that you still can deliver traditional forms of print for marketing purposes if that's the desire. But you also have perfected the trade by bringing in technology and all of the advances. I know that in your former role, it was on screen. So is that digital? So yes and no. So having it on the digital screen, that's as far as it goes. You don't have any printing needs whatsoever. But being able to have print, you have some versatility in that. And there's a lot of different substrates that you can go on to. There's banners, there's outdoor signage, there's interior, there's exterior. So we do have some samples that we can bring up, some of it. What I really want to point out, because JPEG in the past is known for basically doing a lot of their own, they weren't printing a lot of their own stuff. They partner up with a lot of different printers and they're able to execute that way. What we do have now is we have our own printer in-house. So we're able to control that. We're still giving an excellent product. We're still providing 3M materials for the most part. And we're able to, again, execute at a high level and a quick turn. So we can do a lot of things. So you can provide it as a picture of that printer. Yeah, so let's take a look at that because it's a monster of a printer. Yeah. So this is the one that we're doing right now. And as you can see, this is actually taken from a still from one of our videos. We do have video capabilities as well. So we can do video content for our customers. So there's a lot of different things that we offer that you wouldn't be able to get out of. What we do is, again, we're printing on all different kinds of formats. We're customizing it to the needs of the individual company or person. We also do, when we're doing the traditional print side of the business, we're handling stationary items, everything, envelopes, letterheads, business cards. But we're also going into doing, like I like to say, we do everything from business cards to buses. Wow. So it's kind of everything encompassing. And then it's just a matter of finding out what your needs are. What I do love about JPEG, Hawaii, and we've had the honor of having Jean-Paul Gideon on the show where you interviewed him, that they are a very diverse company with very innovative ideas. The thing I love about Jean-Paul, of course, is that it's his energy and his openness and wanting to be able to deliver quality products in different ways to make our businesses very unique, put us out there in our way. Business in Hawaii, as you know, we have all kinds of guests on our shows from various startups to very large industries, nonprofits, state agencies. Tell me about, as a consultant, how do you tell me what I need? You're telling me that you folks can do screen and digital and print and all these different things. Do you just throw it all at us and say, OK, well, what do you want? Or is there a way that I can decide what's going to work best for me? Well, usually you have a need. So usually we'll start with that and we'll go from there. A lot of people, there's a lot of times they don't really know what they want. They know what they have or they're using someone else to handle some of their needs. They're not happy, they're not satisfied for whatever reason, whether it be pricing, whether it be delivery, whether it's product itself. So that's usually where we'll get the call. And when I go in, I will sit down with you and just actually do that. Just as a consultation, let's see what we can do. Let's see where we're a good fit and what we can execute at a high level for you. And so it may only be business cards to start off with. But later on, you know, oh, we need trade show. You guys do trade show? Yes, we do trade show. We got to do vehicle graphics. You guys do? Yes, we do vehicle graphics. So it's always ongoing. I mean, there's so many different things that people just don't think about on a normal, regular basis that they need, then they know they need, but they just don't think about it. Are you just here on Oahu or? We are nowhere, actually executing on all islands right now. So we can go all over and we're actually looking for more partnerships. So when we do, we do advertising in the media side too. So we're looking for malls on some of the neighbor islands to partner with us as well. I would love to get a little deeper and look at the work that you folks do, because I would have never imagined, well, I guess somebody has to create it. But to know that you folks are right here and local and you folks are doing beautiful work that I just never attached to the local organization. When we come back from break, we'd love to talk about some of those specific instances and some of the great work that you folks have been doing around the state. So we'll take a short break. This is Business in Hawaii and we'll see you back here shortly. Aloha and Mabuhay. My name is Emi Ortega Anderson, inviting you to tune in every Tuesday at 12 noon for a show of empowerment. We come on live 12 o'clock Tuesdays to your home. Our mission here at Pinoy Power Hawaii, we aim to enrich and lighten educate, entertain and empower. We bring you guests that comes from all walks of life who share their stories from rags to riches. It is indeed a show of empowerment. So I encourage you to tune in every Tuesday at 12 noon dito sub Pinoy Power Hawaii. Maraming salamat po and Mabuhay. Hi guys, I'm your host Lillian Cumick from Lillian's Vegan World. I come to you live every second Friday from 3 p.m. And this is the show where I talk about the plant-based lifestyle and veganism. So we go through recipes, some upcoming events, information about health, regarding your health and just some ideas on how you can have a better lifestyle, eat healthier and have fun at the same time. So do join me. I look forward to seeing you and Aloha. Welcome back. This is Business in Hawaii. With us today is Byron Riddle from JPEG Hawaii. When we left to break, you rattled off just quite a number of ways that JPEG Hawaii gets out there and does work for our businesses to get their name out there and do a lot of promotion for them. Wanted to kind of take some time to focus in on some of those. I know that we brought up the Cycle City wall, but this is a beautiful piece of work. Can you tell me how JPEG does this type of work for businesses? So, you know, this one actually was at Velocity and they're working with JN, the JM group. And we did almost all the graphics within Velocity. So it wasn't just the Cycle City one, but it was just about everything in there. And we worked with the architect and we worked with the contractor from the early stages to get that done. So in the Cycle City portion, you're seeing that's three-dimensional lettering and just executing on a whole different level. Just so creative. Were there a bunch of regulations that go along with that? I mean, I know it's not a billboard in any way, but. Well, because it's all interior and it's not street facing, you're allowed to do a lot more. You allude to the billboard law and yeah, that does change a lot of things. And there are specific different areas and what you cannot do for signage and for decorations. There is some gray areas of what can happen, but depending on where you're at. I mean, if you're in designated areas like in Waikiki or parts of the North Shore, it's very limited to what you can really do. So even some of the hotels in Waikiki, that's why you'll see that they're pretty much maintaining their own older signs because if they are to change them, they may or may not get grandfathered in some cases. So, and they definitely can't go larger. So it's kind of, it's an interesting, it's an interesting thing. There's a, there's a give and take. Well, with all of your years in the industry, I know that you've had quite a few notable projects that you were able to work on. Why don't you talk to us about that so that your viewers get a taste of all the different things that they can do, small and a very large. Wow, okay. For me, I, I, and now this is over the years and working with a few different companies, but I had done most of the Roberts buses. I had done most of the Polynesian adventure buses. I had done the PCC on those buses. I had also done, I've done the international marketplace when they were first opening up from, from Calacaua to Cajillo and all three floors. So, but I've worked with a lot of small companies and I've done a lot of things. So it's kind of, you know, like I said, it's kind of almost customized to the individual and there's no right or wrong. It's just whatever they want to do, that's what we're going to do. You had mentioned international marketplace and, and it's, it's so beautiful. It's so airy. I know we have a, a couple of photos where you, JPEG Hawaii did like, like a structural barricades. That's really interesting. I know that was an opportunity for. Yes. So in the, in the case of a storefront, an empty storefront or a new building going in, say, there's a lot of different materials. There's a lot of different ways of doing that. But yes, we do that all the time. I've done a lot of different ones in the ward area. I've done, I've done a lot of different ones. You, you, you know, it's kind of almost, you know, look at that. You know, which one that was. Well, there, there's Mama Fall. So that, that's one of them. I believe that is at Kamakana Ali. I was not involved in that project. This is, well, here you go. This is some graphics that we did for obviously McDonald's. But again, these are just, these are a handful of some of the things that can be done. There should be one more exterior shot. Yes. There you go. That's, that's what we use as a vehicle graphics. And again, we're using primarily 3M materials with. So the longevity on these things is, you know, a minimum of five years. But I have some of the buses that I've been running around for 10, 12 years. And yeah, yeah. That's one of the main things everyone asks, how long is this going to last? Well, most people should probably should change it out sooner because their message changes, their logo changes. But it can stand there for quite some time. I know that you've done some other campaigns. There was, and I never thought about this, but there was the super, those supermarket separators. Sure. So when you, when you go to times, and this is, this is part of what we have is our media side. There is the dividers at times right now. And we're looking for other supermarket partners. But this is at times and this is our divider. We actually, John Paul came up with it, created this piece, had it marketed and, you know, he did everything behind the scenes on that one. But they also do wraps and they do other types of advertising at times. And it's very reasonable. It's a great way to get your message out in a different way. But there's also in the media, there's also other things that we can do. There's vehicles that we can wrap. There's the delivery vehicles that we have a team of that we actually will install your message on to delivery, depending on the areas that you want to go. And then we also do in the malls themselves. These are some of the directories that we can do. We can put the advertising in there. We can use it as wayfinding or directional. We can also actually help promote some of the shops internally. And basically all the numbers drop to the bottom line for the mall itself. So it goes all, it increases their numbers. It's very easy for them. There's nothing for them to do. We handle everything from A to Z. How do you guys make all of it happen? You handle it all from A to Z. How many divisions are within JPEG, Hawaii to make all this happen? I mean, obviously there's some creative minds behind it. And there's looks like there's actually some physical labor that's going to be involved. I wouldn't know how to put a sign up on a truck. Absolutely. So we have, you know, OK, and I'm the new guy on staff. I'm the old guy, but I'm the new guy there. And we have about 14 people now. We started out the year with four. So we've grown substantially in just this sort year so far. But we have people that are designers. So they'll put together the design. We have people that are running the printer. We have people that are doing the installations. We have people thinking about a design behind the scenes and putting pricing together. So we do a lot. So if I'm a startup and I just would like someone to design me a really nice business card, can I start with you? We can do that. We definitely can do that. That's not a problem. But sometimes I would almost recommend that you do go to someone that specializes in designing a logo just to get, because that's what they do. So we are able to do that. But it's not what I would say is our bread and butter. It's just do time consuming. Then tell me what does set JPEG apart from the rest? So if you came to me and you said, oh, I want to do posters. I want to do vehicle graphics. I want to do this. Then we can take everything. We can look at your marketing pieces that you're currently using. If you want to say, OK, how do you want to adjust? What's your current message? Where are you going from here? Where do you want to be in five years? And from there, that's what we'll start developing a whole program. We're not just going to come in and say, hey, thank you very much. I'm gone. That's not what we do. So we're much more looking for the long term, developing the relationship with the client and looking out for their best interests. So at the same time, when we have opportunities, say we have an opportunity at one of the malls. And hey, Dylan, guess what? We got an opportunity. I think it might work for you. Are you interested? Let's talk. And so we're doing much more than just being a passive partner. We're much more on your side. Which malls are you currently fashioning right now? We're in, we can always be in more. We have relationships with quite a few here on Oahu. But like I said, we are actually looking to develop a little bit more on the neighbor islands, especially in Kauai. What's neat for me is to be roaming around town and then recognize, wow, that's a JPEG work. Or now, I'm obviously going to pay attention to these trucks rolling by. And wondering if that was the innovative work of JPEG, I just never realized it was. Well, and that's the thing. It's meant to be seen. And usually, people don't know who's done it. They see it. And that's what I always said. I can tell you, you've seen my work. I know you've seen my work. But you just didn't know it was me. And so yeah, it's kind of out there. I mean, when you walk into a restaurant or you walk into a business, and you see right at the entrance where there's all their lettering and their logos, chances are it might have been us. What was your most fun or most exciting project? Wow, they're all fun and exciting in different levels, different ways. For me, I think I get the most satisfaction from being the happy client. And if I was going to target just one job, I would say it was a job. I did a bus wrap. And it was for Kauai. It was for Alu Aung Kauai. And the bus company was here. And they didn't tell them that that was going to happen. So they had all the pictures. We designed it. We put it all together. I did everything. Here, they shipped the bus over there. And they had a meeting with the full staff. And just as they were coming out, and they actually videotaped and they sent me a copy of the videotape so I could see it. But when all these people were coming out, they got to see themselves up on this bus. And they were so excited. And they were so happy. And I don't normally see that part of it. But that was pretty nice. That's exciting stuff. You went from marketing, turn employee engagement. And now you're building company culture. That's amazing. It's definitely a relationship. Unfortunately, we are kind of heading towards that time in the show. But I want you to tell everyone how they can find you because everybody wants to find you. So where can they find you? Sure. Well, my email's simple. It's just byrendbyron at jpeghoi.com. We also have websites at the standard WWUs. And we're on Instagram. And we're on social media. You can find us on Facebook. You can find us on Instagram. Just about everywhere else. LinkedIn. I think we're in LinkedIn. We have exposure in most areas. Fantastic. Well, we're going to keep looking for you and all the great work that you do. But thank you so much for joining me on the opposite side of the table. I really appreciate that today. Unfortunately, we are out of time. But thank you to Byron and for JPEG Hawaii for lending him to us. And a very big thank you to our production staff who's manning the entire production all on his own today. So thank you very much for your job well done. If you would like to be a guest on the show, please like us and subscribe. And leave a comment below. Business in Hawaii airs every Thursday at 2 o'clock. And we look forward to seeing you here next week.