Epson Opens New Headquarters, Executive Briefing Center
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“Today we’re here to celebrate the completion of a state-of-the-art headquarters,” Epson America president and CEO said at a recent ribbon-cutting event. He told about the process of acquiring and renovating the new space, located in Los Alamitos, California. After 25 years in Torrance, California, and 20 years in Long Beach, California, Kratzberg said Epson was “bursting at the seams.” With the goal of creating a new headquarters that would promote employee retention by staying near its previous facility, the company thought it would have to build a new structure but was instead able to acquire two buildings. “Adaptive reuse” of those buildings, he said, complemented Epson’s sustainability goals. It was a great start.
Keith Kratzberg, president and CEO of Epson America, leads a tour of the company's new U.S. headquarters.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic started. Kratzberg says the 650 employees based in Long Beach were sent home. With the help of careful IT planning, he says, those employees “were able to be productive right off the bat.” Construction moved forward: “We had 165,000 square feet,” he says, “and no people.”
In response to the pandemic, Epson America moved to a hybrid work approach, a move that allowed the company to shift priorities for the new headquarters, which was finished on schedule and on budget. That shift resulted in a 400% expansion of the size of its executive briefing center. The new headquarters and its executive briefing center, which includes ample room to highlight and demonstrate the company’s technologies, will benefit Epson’s teams, partners, and customers, he said.
Koichi Kubota, director of Seiko Epson Corporation, welcomed those in attendance on behalf of the parent company and shared that a key Epson goal is to empower its employees, customers, and partners to be successful, and to strive for excellence. He added that the new headquarters embodies that corporate goal to create opportunity, drive innovation, and help the company meet its 2050 goal to be carbon negative.
Benefitting the Community
Stating that Epson’s move to its new Los Alamitos headquarters is “good for the city, its residents, and businesses,” Tanya Doby, mayor of Los Alamitos, said the city is looking for more ways to strengthen its bond with Epson. She added the she looks forward to “seeing what we can accomplish together." Doby shared that at the height of the pandemic, Epson partnered with its new community, providing its parking lot space for a socially distanced event that gave residents the opportunity to join with friends and celebrate. “For that,” she added, “I can only say thank you.”
Executive Briefing Center
Among the applications on display at the new Epson facility were printed fabrics. In this case, for fashion.
A tour of the new facility, conducted by Kratzberg, started in a display area highlighting Epson’s key innovations, including “EP1,” a small device that kicked off the digital printing revolution, and a variety of inkjet printheads. From there, the clean, modern space branches out into the product areas Epson serves, including consumer products, business products, label/receipt printers, photographic printers, and projection systems. It also included technologies for the graphic communications industry: wide-format printers, production-grade label and textile printers, direct-to-garment printers and more, all centered around inkjet technology.
The technology on display demonstrated the breadth of Epson’s involvement in the printing industry, and the way its products are scaled to meet specific user needs. For instance, Epson’s line of dye-sublimation printers ranges from a small printer and heat press used specifically to image coffee mugs (for "makers"), to its Monna Lisa 64000, designed for production textile printing (for manufacturers).
About Epson and its new headquarters, Kratzberg described the inspiration underpinning the whole effort: "Throughout our journey, we wanted to stay true to Epson's global promise, and our reason for being. And our purpose is to enrich lives and help create a better world through our efficient, compact, and precise innovation."
Dan Marx, Content Director for Wide-Format Impressions, holds extensive knowledge of the graphic communications industry, resulting from his more than three decades working closely with business owners, equipment and materials developers, and thought leaders.
