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Stuart Bain |
Stuart Bain talks to Steve Rogerson in our new series of interviews for CIEonline.
Stuart Bain had spent his working career in the printing industry before setting up his own consultancy in 2007. One of his clients was start-up company Design LED Products and he became the company’s chief executive officer in June 2009. Previously he had been global business director for printing company Worldmark for 12 years and before that a regional sales manager for Adare Printing.
1. When you joined Design LED Products, it was a very young company. Was that a difficult decision?
I initially left a medium sized Scottish printing company because I believed Scotland was full of tremendous IP but lacked the commercial skills and I wanted to help them. I started a consultancy with the goal of finding two or three clients that I could work with and Design LED Products was one of them. Design LED’s market place was so exciting that I abandoned the consultancy and became its full time chief executive officer.
The time acting as a consultant gave me a good period to evaluate them and I realised they had a strong market proposition.
I am hugely passionate about Scotland and we are a country that is very strong technically and engineering wise but lack when it comes to taking these products to market.
2. How has Design LED Products found the necessary finance during a recession?
When I joined, we were at the stage where we wanted to take the product the market. We made a decision that we needed to finance that. As such, we took our core IP on a commercial basis into Scottish government and European projects in which it fitted. This also helped us to find customers for our core products.
3. What is so different about Design LED Products’ printed light guide manufacturing technology?
It is extremely thin and is flexible, and uses industry standard manufacturing processes and materials. This replaces thick physical plastic or acrylic light guides that use injection moulding or stamping processes.
We use polycarbonate or polyester materials and we basically print light extraction features.
The competitive advantage is that it is thinner, you can bend it rather than it being solid. It is an efficient way to deliver the LED light to the application.
It is very power efficient so gives power and energy savings. It is also lower cost because of the materials used and the traditional printing technology used to make it.
4. In February you secured an order from AMI Marine in collaboration with IGT Industries. What is the nature of the collaboration?
This was the first implementation of our technology in a marine application. IGT in Southampton is one of two licensed manufacturing partners and they are responsible for our only product to market so far. In November, we signed another manufacturing deal with Parlex of Hong Kong, though we haven’t announced that yet, though I guess we have now. They have manufacturing facilities worldwide. They have facilities in Europe, the USA and China and they give us a global manufacturing platform.
5. What are your goals for 2010?
We have two extremely significant applications of the technology that we will be launching in the last quarter of this year, but I can’t say anything more about them.
We also have a growing business development team. We want to use this team to create a growing global customer base. We want to get our product out of just the UK market. The UK is a great place for technology but we need customers with volume requirements and they are in Europe and the USA. That is why we have done the deal with Parlex.
