Demand for technical nous sparks growth at Wideblue
FIFTEEN years ago, Russell Overend had the unenviable job of closing down the Vale of Leven plant that had been making film and cameras for Polaroid since 1965. While its division producing sunglasses would continue for another decade, the rise of digital technology had inexorably dismantled the market for Polaroid’s flagship instant photography products.
The assignment fell to Mr Overend, who first joined Polaroid in 1993, in his role as operations manager at the Scottish plant. Such tasks are “never very pleasant”, he says with palpable disquiet.
“At the time Polaroid was declining year-on-year,” he recalls. “At its peak there were about 2,000 people working there, but by the end there were only a couple of hundred.”
It was against that backdrop that Mr Overend, a graduate in physics from the University of Glasgow, joined three fellow managers in a six-figure buy-out of the specialist design development department within the Polaroid plant. Known as Wideblue, it delivers projects for organisations ranging from start-ups to multinational corporations in fields such as imaging, optoelectronics and bio-medical engineering.
The business began with 15 employees specialising in areas from physics and electronics to software and mechanical engineering. Headcount now stands at 24, with plans to hire a further four people this year, but there have been “ups and downs” along the way.
Having been hit hard by the recession that followed the banking crisis of 2008, Mr Overend said the firm didn’t know what to expect when Covid took hold early last year.
“It has not all been easy,” he says.
“At the start of the pandemic we had one customer who had their funding pulled, and they almost went under. A lot of projects were delayed, particularly if the clients were dependent on access to university labs.”
Those initial concerns faded as efforts to combat the coronavirus bolstered demand for Wideblue’s skills. Last year’s turnover of £2 million was up 25 per cent on the previous 12 months, leading to the addition of six staff.
“We have a couple of good examples where Covid has brought us new opportunities,” Mr Overend says. One of the latest of these was announced in May when Wideblue linked up with Microlink Devices and the Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult to develop an autonomous Covid-19 surface disinfection system for hospitals.
Known as Project LUSS, the consortium is creating a device with a mechanical arm that automatically sweeps across a surface, such as a door panel, each time after it is used with a powerful ultraviolet light. The UV light breaks down the cells in viruses and bacteria, eliminating Covid and other bugs such as MRSA and C.diff.
The project has been part-funded by a grant from Innovate UK, part of the UK’S Research and Innovation Agency. The competitive funding scheme has been a significant source of work for Wideblue.
“They have been quite good for us,” Mr Overend said. “We have won quite a few over the years.”
The calibre of projects secured through Innovate UK is another important factor, as they tend to be in the fields of emerging technologies. Mr Overend said this is a real boost when hiring staff, because people from the academic community that Wideblue recruits from are keen to work with the latest technologies.
With turnover for the current year on course to hit £2.7m, Wideblue is taking on extra space at the West of Scotland Science Park, where it has been based since leaving the Polaroid building in Dumbarton in 2014. This includes the
addition of a new medical and optical clean room, along with manufacturing, test and development space that will be used for small-volume start-up production for clinical trials.
Mr Overend is the last remaining shareholder from the original management buy-out team that was headed up by Jim Hall, Wideblue’s first chief executive, and also included Grant King and Hugh Gill.
After taking on some of the shares of his retired colleagues, Mr Overend’s stake now stands at 25%. The remaining 75% is owned by Pivot International, a Us-headquartered product design company that bought into the business in 2018 when Mr King retired.
That relationship has led to the introduction of new clients from the US and Canada. About two-thirds of Wideblue’s work is for overseas customers, and its biggest individual markets are the US and England.
Travel restrictions from early last year have created some challenges for the business, whose staff would normally get together with clients at key points in the development process. Some of this activity will resume as circumstances allow, but Mr Overend said other changes to cope with the pandemic are expected to have lasting effect.
“It has made us realise there was a lot of non-value-added travel out,” he said. “I can’t see us ever going back to as much travel as we did before, certainly not for a couple of years.
“It’s the same with remote working. I think if Covid disappeared tomorrow, we would still have a lot of people working several days a week from home.”