Graphics, photo and lenticular printing with Stan Freimuth, Tracer Imaging

Gary Pageau of the Dead Pixels Society talks with Stan Freimuth, chairman of Tracer Imaging, a leading provider of lenticular prints. Freimuth discusses his long industry career, spanning the photofinishing, graphic arts, and digital imaging, with companies including Pako Corp., Fuji Photo Film USA, Presstek and now Tracer Imaging. In particular, Freimuth talks about how different photo companies in the 1990s and 2000s responded to the digital challenge and the on-going intersection of the graphics industry with photo/imaging.

Tracer Imaging, founded in 2004, is one of the countries leading lenticular printers, providing services to commercial markets and consumers (through retail partners).

Tracer Imaging recently launched a web-based interface the Express Solutions interface allowing everyday users to quickly and easily upload their own images to create a lenticular print using several of the most popular lenticular effects (Flip, Zoom, or Flip/Zoom), the company said.

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Transcript

Gary Pageau  0:01  
Hello, and welcome to the dead pixel society podcast. I'm your host Gary Pageau. And today we are joined by Stan freimuth, the chairman of tracer imaging. Stan, welcome to the show.

Stan Freimuth  0:15  
Thank you, Gary. Pleasure to be here.

Gary Pageau  0:18  
Now, Stan has a long pedigree in the photo imaging industry and that's one of the things we're going to start with is talking about talking about where the imaging industry kind of got its start from Stan's viewpoint, Stan, where you started at a company that has a long storied history called Pico Corporation.

Stan Freimuth  0:40  
That's right, Gary. I began my graphic arts slash photo career back in the early 80s. When Paco which was a Minneapolis based company, was the world leader in high speed large lab photo refinishing equipment and graphic arts film processing equipment which of course, is long gone. And x ray dental X ray equipment. They were this little public company very small actually for a public company but the biggest in that field, right and amazing company amazing technology. way ahead of its time.

Gary Pageau  1:26  
Yeah. Well, I was gonna ask you, you know, let's put this in perspective. We're kind of chatting about this before we started recording about really, the logistics of mass photofinishing is really an art that today is probably under appreciated.

Stan Freimuth  1:44  
Yeah. You know, in in the pre mini lab days, the one on photo days. Everything came into these large labs and film by the hundreds of thousands of roles. The film, and they were all produced in continuous production on film processes, paper processes, sorting and packing equipment. If anybody still remembers Paco, you may remember something called the CP 6000 paper processor, or the photo pakka. The photo pack it was a multi million dollar piece of equipment, even then, highly computerized. It could sort every order individually in record time. The whole the whole thing was just very, very high tech, and of course completely died when one photo.

Gary Pageau  2:43  
So you took a highly mechanized, highly efficient, highly productive system and it was supplanted by a relatively low volume, low efficiency and higher cost a piece of equipment that's kind of magic. It was a very different value. proposition back then. So Stan, what was your role with Paco back then?

Stan Freimuth  3:04  
Well, I started off actually running all the European operations. They had six, six subsidiaries in Europe. That was sales and service subsidiaries basically. And I ran all of those and our primary distributor for graphic arts equipment at that time was ag first so I actually had a very good close relationship with ag for way back when but we sold our own Paco brand products too. And and particularly on the on the photo side, it was all all Pico brand. And then later, I ran all the international operations and it was kind of a my introduction to to the graphic arts and the photo world. If you could imagine, by the way, as well. Last thing, Paco, this this company in Minnesota had its own retail outlets that own photo retail outlets. My PE co produced prints from the photoshops. Right? They eventually sold the brown photo.

Gary Pageau  4:07  
Right? Which I think sold two reds at one point or leave. So yeah. So from there he progressed, you moved on to another leading industry company and that was

Stan Freimuth  4:23  
Fuji would you film right? In those days it was still cool Fuji. Yeah back at that was in late 1983. And at that time, Fuji was just getting its graphic arts products off the ground in the United States. Right and they had a, they sold exclusively through a distributor in those days a company called Robertson Porter. And they decided they better do this on their own because they weren't getting anywhere. So when I joined Fuji the tyre graphic arts Products Division consisted of about five people do product managers, Secretary, me and a couple of Japanese technical staff and that that was it. Right. And so my job was to basically build this business for Fuji, which I proceeded to do with a lot of help a lot of very talented people and some some great products. So,

Gary Pageau  5:27  
yeah, and then they even I mean, we're gonna fast forward a bit but you know, they even branch out into making some product here, right and

Stan Freimuth  5:35  
Well, this was actually it's very good point because, you know, the biggest hurdle that we face Well, we hope face several but one of the biggest was our products were all made in Japan back in those days, and to we started selling printing plates, aluminum printing, printing place. So if you can imagine having to ship these things and keep the inventory right Be able to convince your customers that you weren't going to run them out of product. That was a mammoth task that we, we had to overcome. So the very first Fuji factory in the United States was a printing plate plant in Greenwood, South Carolina. And it was, it was my plan. Essentially, I didn't run it, but it was from my, from my organization. And that plant opened the floodgates because Following the success of that Fuji added six or seven more plants in Greenwood, South Carolina, you may be down there, Gary. Yes. And they were making everything from video tape in those days to X ray film to media.

Gary Pageau  6:46  
Yes, single use cameras made mega magnetic media. I was there when you open up the color paper portion of the plant. They had a open house kind of event for the industry. And very impressive.

Stan Freimuth  6:59  
Yeah. The complex was just superb. And it did so much for our standing in the US printing industry because now we could take our customers to the factory, they could see that they that we had invested a lot of a lot of resources into making this for them. You know, it just went from strength to strength once we had done that.

Gary Pageau  7:22  
And then I think I'm not sure the year but when we I think first met it was when you became responsible also for the photographic side of the business.

Stan Freimuth  7:32  
Yeah, so I'm in 2000, I became the chief operating officer of Fujifilm USA, with basically with the responsibility for all fujis US based businesses except the medical business and Fuji hung

the chemical side.

And I think I think actually the reason or one of the reasons I was chosen for that role Was that the graphic arts industry had gone through the the analog to digital transition in the previous 10 years. I mean, we had been, you know, we went from using film to, to plates computer to plate and we when we eliminated film we we've gone from analog color proofing to digital color proofing. Everything was getting digitized within the printing industry. And I guess there was some kind of feeling that maybe my experience going through that and in the graphic outside would help on the photo imaging side which was close by five G's most important business at that time.

Gary Pageau  8:40  
Right. Well that's it it's funny because it's, if you still look at some of the printing industry is still a lot of it is still analog though. If you look at it's kind of ironic, but yes, there's a lot of digital printing happening but there's still a lot of you know, web presses and things like that out there as well.

Stan Freimuth  8:55  
Yeah, yeah.

You know,

without getting in too technical though, but You know, the transition of actually taking camera shots of film on film and transitioning that and burning it onto a printing plate, that that was part of the transition going to digital. We didn't have to go through those steps to get to the, to the plate. And yes, you're right there. But the tech from that standpoint, the traditional offset printing technology is still there was a lot of much more assistance from digitizing data and so on that had been back in those days. But yes.

Gary Pageau  9:37  
So what were some of those early insights from the digital or analog to digital conversion that Fujifilm was grappling for at the time because i don't think i think in the early 2000s, no one really knew where it was going to go. I think everyone had an a clue that digital was coming. But there was a lot of question as to whether digital was If we're going to be good enough to print, whether digital cameras would ever be cheap enough for the average person, and of course, no one saw smartphones coming. So guys, let's go back into the Wayback Machine and you're you're tasked with Hey, now, you know, you've been in graphic arts for a while you've got some photographic heritage. Now steer helps steer the ship towards this digital Nirvana. At that point, did you start drinking heavily? Yes, I was very, very.

Stan Freimuth  10:33  
Yeah, that will What was interesting in that era in the early 2000s, it was still the tail end of you know, the big Fuji Kodak battles for

Gary Pageau  10:43  
my Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We're an amateur film.

Stan Freimuth  10:46  
So, you know, there was an awful lot going on there. That was very, very strategic and important. From Fuji standpoint, and obviously from codecs, and and ours. Our strategy at the time was very heavily into partnering with many brick and mortar photo retailers with a combination of frontier many labs and color paper and chemistry deals. Yep. Which Kodak kind of backed off the mini lab program and and so so that gave us a lot of emphasis so we even in those early days we were still pushing very hard on the film, film side and and and the chemistry side and color paper. color paper of course was never going to completely go away as long as people were printing something,

Gary Pageau  11:35  
right. Well, Neil said the advanced photo system coming into play there around that time period there was there was a lot of innovation actually happening in the world back then. I remember you know, most people don't realize, you know, one of the reasons why single use cameras which I believe Fujifilm still takes credit for inventing. Is that is that because film So forgiving. And because printing technology could account for relatively over and underexposed images, and you still get a great print that that made single use cameras possible.

Stan Freimuth  12:11  
Yeah, yes, indeed.

And actually, well, well, I shouldn't go into that. But one thing I always found very interesting in those early days again, in the film business, was that we started making single use cameras here in Greenwood while our competitor was making them in China. And so it was a claim we were a domestic manufacturer versus our company competitive, it was no longer but, but that's a side note. I'm sorry.

Gary Pageau  12:42  
No, no, that's fine. That's just another example of sort of the sort of the sourcing discussions that are even happening still today with manufacturing.

Stan Freimuth  12:51  
Yeah. So the other the other thing is, though, I have to say that all you know, there's been all kinds of analysis done by many people. A lot smarter than me about how did how did the traditional film companies miss the digital thing so badly? And of course, neither of us missed it. I mean, everybody's coming. There was no chance it wasn't going to come. But the The question was, were we were we set up to be competitive in those markets? And the fact is, no, at that time, neither neither Kodak and Fuji were, that wasn't our primary business. And so we had to learn how to be competitive in those markets. And fortunately, the market just moved so fast that I don't think either company ever did very well in the digital digital camera business.

Gary Pageau  13:44  
Well, that was one of the you know, you kind of hit on one of my pet peeves is when you read these sort of looking back on digital photography articles, and or even YouTube videos of people and they always say exactly that. They always say things like, you know, Kodak dropped the fall or Fuji missed the boat, you know? And it was like, Well, no, not really. I mean, I mean, like you said, You guys were way in early from the get go from terms of core technology in terms of processes in terms of even products. I mean, it's, you know, at some one point Kodak had the top digital cameras in the marketplace and fujis were always super competitive. You're all you're always in the marketplace on that. And, you know, obviously printing images on silver halide, you know, media was an incredible innovation. But yeah, it's sort of interesting when people look back and they think, you know, Oh, if only Kodak had become a digital camera company, I don't know I you know, and, but actually, this one things that we should probably talk about is sort of from Fujifilm standpoint. You know, they pivoted very successfully because they really focused on their chemical heritage. And so you have even graphic arts these they're still very Very, very competitive and have a big, big presence there.

Stan Freimuth  15:03  
Yeah. I mean, I have to hand it to what Fuji has done. I mean, not just because I work there that was quite a long time ago now by the way, but the way they took advantage of the what they were good at, and and transitioned and pivoted into other industries. just remarkable and one day that is going to be a Harvard Business School case study of how the company did what Fuji did. So today, I mean Fuji is just just continues to go from strength to strength and all these other related industries are not so related industries. Sure. And and this still remains, you know, again, I can't speak for Fuji anymore because I don't I don't work there. But, you know, there's still a major factor in the graphic arts field impact, if not the top that one of the The top manufacturers in the in the printing plate business. And in photo as you know, the whole photo industry has changed so much. I mean, they're not they're not printing billions of prints anymore, but they're still printing a lot of prints. But more importantly, they're printing on every conceivable thing known to man, no matter what it is,

Gary Pageau  16:21  
and they're selling. They're one of the leaders in the in the luxury rangefinder category, which is another interesting twist.

Stan Freimuth  16:30  
Yeah.

Yeah, so it's a it's a great story and I'm very proud of the time I spent there and hopefully contributed a little something to So speak speaking of your time there, it came to a close in what year 2007 I think

Gary Pageau  16:50  
okay. And from there, what did you do?

Stan Freimuth  16:55  
Well, I initially started

just doing I wanted to do something different Actually, I, I've always worked for, you know, Fuji, but I was there for 23 years. And I thought it was time to try my hand and some other stuff. So I wanted to get involved with small companies do some board work. And I did actually a lot of consulting for a lot of small companies initially. Yeah, including tracer imaging. You know, I can talk about that a little bit how I got involved there. Yeah. But I, well, while I was at Fuji, I was introduced to Steven Spiro, who is the founder and CEO of Tracer. And he was he showed me this amazing lenticular printing technology for consumer prints. And I was kind of interested in it and I shared it with a lot of my Fuji colleagues and we shared it with some of our viewers. retail customers. And, you know, we were hoping that we could get somebody to try to take this on as a customer. And we weren't very successful.

So one of the companies that I was talking to after I left Fuji was was tracer and They said, Would you like to kind of help us? And I said, Yeah, I love your technology, I'd happy to help in any way I can. The net result was I ended up becoming the chairman of that board and got fairly involved with them for a while. And I'll come back to what they do and what how they, how they do it. But then I, I had a, I was on the board of several other companies, one of which was press tech. On the graphic art side, and press tech CEO. Gentlemen, I named Jeff Jacobson, who used to actually run Kodak polychrome graphics at one time. He was the CEO and he had an opportunity to leave and go to Xerox says, Remember that?

Gary Pageau  19:53  
Yeah, you just up until recently. I think he's entered any charge of EFI right now.

Stan Freimuth  19:58  
Exactly. Exactly. So, Jeff. Anyway, Jeff and I had become friends over the course of time. And that was the reason I was invited to join their board. But when he got this opportunity to move to Xerox, the board asked me if I would step in and become the president, CEO and chairman of PressTek.

Gary Pageau  20:19  
So I did, and

Unknown Speaker  20:22  
I learned a lot about the the printing press business, which at that time was not a very robust industry. You know, that was an industry consolidation. Suddenly printing presses was not very easy. And after a couple of years, with the board's advice, I sold the company in a go private transaction to a private equity firm. Hmm. So and then a few years ago, three or four years ago, I kind of came back I was always Chairman of the Board of tracer, but I came back and gotten We're involved in the company again. And so that's, that's kind of my interim history.

Gary Pageau  21:06  
So, let's talk a little bit about before we get into the deep dive into tracer, a little bit about what we've talked about offline about the sort of the intersection between graphics and photography. Because from a technology standpoint, you know, the the graphics industry had a completely different user base, customer base workflow than photography, because photography, just completely different process. But as digitization has come into play, they're kind of merging together. What what are you did you did you have any insights in that through your career? Did you kind of see it happening? Or is this been a kind of surprise?

Stan Freimuth  21:53  
Um, well, it's certain things have been it's not a surprise, but it's not something I actually know. just happening while it was happening, but I can remember when when Benny Landa first introduced the Indigo presses way back and having rambling that was in the 90s. And we kind of in the printing industry, we in the printing industry at that time, kind of thought it was a bit of a joke. This, how could this possibly ever impact the, you know, the high speed offset lithography printing that we were used to. And especially when in those early days, if you had if you had a an indigo, you needed three of them so that you could always have one running.

Gary Pageau  22:41  
Right.

Stan Freimuth  22:44  
But that was very a long time ago. Yeah. But obviously as they continue to refine the technology and then as it moved on into HP's hands and so on, it's it's it's become a truly viable technology in, in short run and maybe not so short run, printing, commercial printing, so, and the same technology is available to and is used in professional labs and other photo labs. And it's, yeah, it's just the same equipment is there and you can do the same things with it, regardless of where you claim your, your space is.

We've seen a lot of examples of that, you know, where companies use that talking about photo labs, trying to use that excess capacity in quieter times to do digital flyers and various products for for commercial

Gary Pageau  23:49  
Commercial printing, essentially.

Stan Freimuth  23:51  
Yeah. And, and it's, it's there, it's real and, you know, as things get tough and tighter for companies in both industries, you know, You're always looking for things that are adjacent adjacent markets where which are easy to get into, without disturbing your core business. Right. So yeah, it's almost inevitable that there's going to be continuing continuing consolidation or convergence in between those industries.

Gary Pageau  24:22  
So let's talk now about a little bit about tracer. You mentioned particular imaging or lenticular prints Can you kind of without obviously we're doing audio here so you can't really show anything, but can kind of describe what a what a lenticular print is.

Stan Freimuth  24:36  
Okay, so I guess there might be people who have no idea what color

Gary Pageau  24:41  
is most people gotten used to calling the 3d printers but I think when lenticular printers these is the industry term,

Stan Freimuth  24:47  
yes, it is and lenticular effects, which are basically for some people who might remember Clark Kent Superman rings and cracker jack boxes, bets lenticular But the the lenticular effects have been around for literally hundreds of years I mean artists back several hundred years ago, we're creating the illusion of depth of motion within an image. And that's essentially what this is. Basically today in modern day lenticular you, you do this by printing on a clear plastic sheet, which is called a lens in our terminology, and that that lens has tiny ridges and grooves on the viewing side. And on the back on the print side, it's very smooth, right, so those ridges are lenticular, are engineered with a viewing angle and lens radius so that when a printed image is viewed through the lens, it creates an illusion of depth or motion. And the radius of the lens allows your eyes to focus on different views of the image on printed surface. So that's kind of the technical explanation of what's going on.

Gary Pageau  26:06  
But anybody who's walked through an airport has seen a lenticular image base.

Stan Freimuth  26:09  
Exactly,

Gary Pageau  26:10  
exactly, because there's a wide variety of point of purchase displays and other material options that people have for using lenticular materials. Now there's other companies doing lenticular printing, but I think tracer has carved out a, a position in the industry as being one of the acknowledged leaders.

Stan Freimuth  26:33  
Yeah, I mean, Tracer's initial routes were totally lentcular. That's when Steven Spiro founded the company was because he had seen he'd been consulting on a project that included Kodak and he'd seen lenticular, being developed at Kodak. And while Kodak uses a completely or used a completely different technology than those Use today. The effect was stunning. And I seen many of those images from the I know what Kodak was doing

Gary Pageau  27:08  
It was amazing.

Stan Freimuth  27:09  
Yeah, it was totally, totally amazing. But the problem was that to do that, to achieve that quality of movement in an image and rip was so expensive. I mean, the equipment required to do it was incredibly expensive to the point where it just wasn't commercially viable. Nobody would have paid 20 or $30 for for basic print, for example, that might. So it they, Kodak basically stopped the development. And Steven picked it up in a different way. He founded a company on the West Coast that was using a different technology and and gradually grew the business from there. Yeah. The interesting thing was that that West Coast company was primarily involved in commercial b2b kind of work. Whereas what Steven envisioned was a consumer product just like we were talking about, where consumers could create their own versions of lenticular, whether it was in a video, you know, a couple of seconds of video on a card or flips three or four images on one cog.

Gary Pageau  28:22  
Or even 3d because I remember when Fuji had a 3d camera and I think they were offering 3d prints at the time.

Stan Freimuth  28:32  
Yes, they were.

Gary Pageau  28:34  
Was that through tracer was that through another vendor?

Stan Freimuth  28:36  
You know, we offered them the opportunity to do it through Tracer, they did it themselves actually. Okay. But it you know, it's an expensive process 3d is, you know, requires intervention. You can't just take an image and print it without doing something to it. Right. It is a it's an expensive option but but not expensive in the commercial space because it's one of the things that we would do as a as a printer lenticular.

Gary Pageau  29:07  
Well, plus you're dealing with, you know, a commercial aspect, right. I mean, if you're if you're going through the Las Vegas airport, and you're doing this eyecatching display for your casino using lenticular, if you get enough people to look at that and treat them you show up and whatever that costs you was worth it.

Stan Freimuth  29:25  
Yes, exactly. I mean, some of the research that was being done over the years shows that the people's retention of a lenticular poster, for example, an ad is is many times higher than for a traditional print. It's just it catches your eye you tend to remember it's not just that catches your eye you do tend to remember and that's why when it's done well. A lenticular point of purchase display tends to boost sales of that product because as you're walking along and it's at eye level, have you suddenly noticed something is changing as you go by it? You're drawn to the product.

Gary Pageau  30:08  
Right? So, right now though tracer does have a consumer business where where people are, what kind of images are being submitted for a consumer application? What what kind of images are people supplying? Are they flips are they?

Stan Freimuth  30:26  
Yeah, right now, through we do sell our consumer products on our own website is called tracerpics.com actually, but we don't promote it. It's just there it's available. But people can through other retailers they can order online. And they, they, they we limit what they can do because we don't want to process too complicated to right now mostly two flips, maybe three flips because a You know, you don't want people to take too long to create these things or they'll get confused or fed up and stop. So all we have to do actually is is select the images, and they want to click between each other and they'll see what that's going to look like. But we do have, we do have plans to, to offer some significant enhancements in the future for what people can do as consumers in terms of creating lenticular prints, and it's amazing when you see what some people do on their own. I mean that very creative. 

Gary Pageau  31:39  
Yeah, that was always back then when Kodak was pitching this, their version of it I remember they were sending out sample images that were they were like zooms like you could zoom in on a on a section of the picture. And also they were there. I think they were they were saying it was up to 30 seconds of video was being captured basically it was like, on and so you can have a fairly interesting story within that thing. And that's one of the things I think for today's generation, if anyone ever can unlock that, the idea of capturing a video clip on a print I think with today's short attention span Video Creators, I think it'll be would be an interesting product for though.

Stan Freimuth  32:22  
Yes, indeed. In fact, we I mean, for years we have felt that and it's not 30 seconds, you can't do that but you can certainly get two or three seconds of video which is plenty, you know, in terms of showing your child's baseball swing or high scoring a goal on the soccer field or whatever that can be done. But, you know, we need to improve the quality we're working on improving the quality. So that will meet our standards we want to do this video is is really the ultimate goal but it It's got to be good, otherwise not gonna go anywhere and, and it's still, you know, still some work to be done to get it to the standards that we would like to be at.

Gary Pageau  33:10  
Oh, well, there's no shortage of video content being created now.

Stan Freimuth  33:13  
Exactly. Exactly. Amazing.

Gary Pageau  33:17  
So, tell me a little bit about your newest offering the Express solutions, which you've just done now.

Stan Freimuth  33:25  
Okay, well, thank you for because that's one thing I did want to talk about. You know, the problem with with for commercial customers. It's complicated to do lenticular Well, they need hand holding, they need us to help them and to design the right with the right lens and the right effects. It's fairly complicated. So what we try to do with Express solutions is to open this up to a much broader array of potential commercial customers, such as printers, artists, graphic designers, and brands themselves who either have never tried it, or who heard that it's too expensive or too difficult for their design applications. So what we created here is a very simple builder, which is not dissimilar to a typical photo builder. If you're doing creating something online, you know that they're very easy to use, you upload your images and see previews. And so this way we eliminate the moment we're making it very simple. we're eliminating all the upfront setup fees that are typical for having to create a you know, really good quality lenticular image and it's very quick and easy to do and they can see it an order without a lot The interaction from us. So if somebody wants to take a look at it, we have a lenticular dedicated website called tracer lenticular.com. And they can see how it works. It's very simple. And we're very excited about it because it's going to broaden the base for usage and applications of lenticular, we believe.

Gary Pageau  35:29  
So, the hand holding you said, what would be an example of the type of issue someone would have with a lenticular image that express solutions addresses?

Stan Freimuth  35:41  
Well, for example, I mean, we in the Express solutions builder that we have that you have to select How far away are you wanting this image to be? viewed from right makes a huge difference. If you if you creating a big poster there's going to be seen from 12 feet away, it will use a different lens and different have different attributes than something that's going to be looked at from two or three feet away, or a smaller inside. So all of those things are very simply placed there. So so you can select as you go and create a really good image in there.

Gary Pageau  36:25  
Now, are there different pricing for that if someone does it themselves, they get a bit of a price break on that. So is that going to encourage people to like you said maybe artists, maybe different people to be involved?

Stan Freimuth  36:41  
Exactly. That's what we are hoping for that many people who will kind of inhibited by the pricing will find this much more cost effective. There's no setup fees. If you order three instead of one, there's a price break and that kind of thing. So the more you order, the the better the price.

Gary Pageau  36:59  
Stan, How big can you make a lenticular print? Well,

Stan Freimuth  40:10  
you can for one single print size, we can go as as large as 46 inches wide by 70 inches high. Wow, that was pretty large. And then of course, on top of that, you could tile them so you can create a much larger collage or wall. You can do a pillar complete wall. If you're so inclined. Wow.

Gary Pageau  40:35  
And the media can be shaped, right. I mean, it doesn't have to be square. It can be right.

Stan Freimuth  40:41  
Absolutely. Yeah. You certainly can cut it in any way you want. Yep.

Gary Pageau  40:47  
Well, that's great. So it looks to me like Tracers becoming more user friendly and trying to expand their markets these days.

Stan Freimuth  40:56  
Yes, absolutely. So you know, in The last three or four years Tracers actually broadened his business base to actually more into the photo side in addition to the core lenticular business and Tracer has now moved into the the personalized wall decor space. Having developed systems for retailers that are basically very cost effective, simple to make high quality for the in store production of personalized well they call it like Canvas metal prints really custom photo frames, those kinds of things. Yeah, it's, it's, it's become quite a large part of our business. And we actually have just launched a new product called tile pics, which is an eight by eight frame photo tile. But which differs from every other photon that's on the market right now because it has a very unique magnet based wall mounting mechanism, a very simple and very, very good wall mounting mechanism.

Gary Pageau  42:12  
But these these are lenticular?

Stan Freimuth  42:14  
no these particular none of this time, this isn't just your own prints. But again, these are currently available at a major photo retailer in in store, same day pickup. And this product was just launched probably a month ago.

Gary Pageau  42:41  
Where does tracer do its production?

Stan Freimuth  42:46  
Ah, well, we're in Austin and New York.

We have a relatively new facility we moved in there two years ago. We do all our digital lenticular production there. We also do some of our fulfillment of ship to home products that we sell in the wall decor space there we would produce product there. And we also have for very high volume lenticular, we have partners in the Midwest who actually will print for us with our people present during all the pre press work and so on. Okay, so it's and then on the on the other side of the business on the wall decor side, we do have manufacturing partners in in the Midwest and in Kentucky, and Tennessee, so we have a lot of production going on throughout the United States.

Gary Pageau  43:49  
Because that I mean, that's, that's really kind of a booming market right now. The whole wall decor space. I think people are really starting to exploit the advantages there. Especially with with knowledge Only shipped home but retail opportunities.

Stan Freimuth  44:03  
Yes. Yeah. It's a it's a nice business. We're glad we moved into it. And we, we think we have lots of opportunity to continue to expand there.

Gary Pageau  44:17  
So we need to keep an eye on Tracer is what it sounds like.

Stan Freimuth  44:20  
Yeah, well, we've got we're developing some interesting new products, you know, beyond what we have now. We hope to launch some really exciting photo apps in the near future over the next few months. may have to ask you to do a release on those if we when we launch them.

Gary Pageau  44:40  
So that sounds interesting. So it sounds to me like the company is broadening its base and looking at the new markets and looking at new platforms. That's that sounds great.

Stan Freimuth  44:51  
Yeah, the company is has done an amazing job in especially in this challenging time where right now we'd like medical We actually make tracer shields which we call other face shields that we called tracerShields along with all our other products, so, you know, we've done I think, a heck of a job ofkeeping the company in shape and reinventing itself as as things change.

Gary Pageau  45:22  
Well, thank you, Sam for your time and look forward to catching up with you later.

Stan Freimuth  45:27  
Okay, Gary, thanks so much. I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you and it's nice to catch up with you again. Thank you.