Keith Morton is the Founder and CTO of DisplayLogic, an electronics veteran with deep experience in factory automation and interface design. He is joined by Mike Schreiber, the company’s Head of Sales, who leads their customer acquisition and go-to-market strategies.

Nate Wheeler is the host of the popular Manufacturing Insiders podcast. He also owns weCreate, a nationally recognized marketing agency that helps manufacturers grow, save money, and become more efficient.

In this episode of Manufacturing Insiders, Keith and Mike explain their strategy for building reliable products that avoid the pitfalls of low-cost components. They detail how purpose-built engineering reduces points of failure and lowers the total cost of ownership. The conversation also covers the importance of diversifying manufacturing away from a single region to protect against tariffs and supply chain instability.

The pair provides a clear framework for how manufacturers can reduce long-term expenses by focusing on value instead of initial price. They share how gathering operational data from products in the field can predict failures before they happen, saving on maintenance and lost revenue. Read on to learn how to design more resilient products and build a supply chain that can withstand global disruptions.

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Nate Wheeler (00:01.153)
Welcome to Manufacturing Insiders. I have two exciting guests with me today: Keith Morton, the founder and CTO of DisplayLogic, and Mike Schreiber, the head of sales. Both have a lot of experience in their arenas. Keith has been in the electronics space for many years and has a lot of wisdom and tips that will help the listeners of this episode.

We’re going to cover a range of topics, including the supply chain and how tariffs and other market challenges are affecting business. We’ll also talk about effective ways to market and sell products into the industrial and commercial space. Welcome to the podcast, guys. Thanks for joining.

Keith Morton (00:51.946)
Thank you.

Mike Schreiber (00:53.247)
Thank you, and good morning, everybody.

Nate Wheeler (00:55.725)
Keith, let’s start with you. Our pre-podcast chat found that we have some things in common. You’re a big outdoorsman and see the value in getting away from technology to enjoy nature, which is something I’m extremely passionate about. In the long term, I’d love to start a business where I teach city-dwelling guys how to hunt and fish. I’d get them out into nature and show them things they haven’t been exposed to. I think kids would really benefit from that too.

Mike Schreiber (01:37.579)
That makes three of us, by the way.

Nate Wheeler (01:40.683)
The three of us that are interested in that, or the three of us that need that?

Mike Schreiber (01:45.811)
No, three of us are interested. I’m a big outdoorsy guy myself. I go camping once or twice every year and am huge into fishing, whether it’s freshwater or saltwater. That’s right up my alley.

Nate Wheeler (01:55.458)
That’s awesome. I think it’d be so cool. Honestly, I feel my best when I’m out in nature, which I’m assuming you guys can relate to. Keith, tell me a little about your background, how you got into the business, and a quick summary of what you make and who you’re selling to.

Keith Morton (02:18.919)
I’ve been in electronics since the eighties. I was involved in standup arcade video games, then moved into music and recording technology for a few years. After that, I went into factory automation. That’s when I had my first exposure to displays, touchscreens, and human-machine interfaces, which were mostly CRT back then.

There were some character module displays and other ways of interfacing with automation equipment. Later on, I moved more into engineering and then accidentally started in marketing. I answered an ad for a technical job that was posted incorrectly. We did the interview anyway, and I accepted the job as a product manager for an LCD product. It was an explosion-proof paint mixing scale for the automotive industry with a membrane keypad and an integrated monochrome display, something like a quarter VGA.

Then I got involved in electronics distribution, focusing on displays and running a value-added program. A little while after that, I decided to go off on my own and started DisplayLogic around 2007. That’s where I got involved with Mike, and we’ve been working together as partners for many years providing display solutions. What we noticed in distribution was a lack of standard solutions because displays themselves aren’t standard. Even if they have the same diagonal size, there are often different interfaces and mechanics.

It’s not like ICs, where I could buy a 74 LS series IC from ten different companies and they’ll all plug in and work. Displays are all pretty specific with different brightness, resolution, diagonal size, and contrast ratios. Then you have the touchscreen interface, which also has many different technologies, although it’s mostly PCAP and Resistive now. Our job is taking those together and making a cohesive solution that matches the customer’s application. We don’t want to over-design it so they pay too much, but we design it correctly for their market. This is combined with all the supply chain challenges for displays, which are so specialized that it’s not a typical supply chain.

Nate Wheeler (05:07.05)
Backing up, you mentioned a story about taking the wrong job that ended up being the right one. I just want to clarify, what was the job you were applying for?

Keith Morton (05:23.413)
It was for a Windows lab technician—Windows the operating system, not outdoor windows—at a company called Sartorius, a hundred-year-old German scale company.

Nate Wheeler (05:34.77)
So you applied for that job because of your engineering experience, and then you ended up in marketing for displays.

Keith Morton (05:46.901)
Yes, it was a product marketing job for a product with a display. It wasn’t just displays, but that’s where I got very involved in understanding them, how they work, and the electronics behind them. This was pre-internet, so from there, it was about adding the paper for a display product manager. That’s how I went from engineering to marketing.

Nate Wheeler (06:08.732)
That changed everything. If that hadn’t happened, you wouldn’t be here today. That’s cool. I want to touch on one other thing you mentioned, which was automation and its connection to displays. Could you draw a line between those two for me? I like to talk about automation on this podcast because it’s one of the most important things for manufacturers to focus on right now. The labor shortage is a big part of that, and we will always have international competition, tariffs or not.

So, could you share anything helpful about the discussion between displays and automation?

Keith Morton (07:07.509)
Sure. Mainly, it’s about displays in general because it’s the human-machine interface. At the time, we were designing production monitors and machine controllers for mail automation, which is probably one of the oldest forms of automation. After World War II, they had all these machines designed to mail massive quantities of draft notices in a short period. They didn’t know what to do with them afterward, and that’s where junk mail comes from. The idea was to just keep mailing stuff.

Automating also lent itself to credit card bills and things that required another level of sequencing because you might have a one-page or a three-page bill. A person might fold and stuff 50 bills an hour, but the machine would do around 3,000 to 4,000. Using the display, we would program all aspects of the machine: how thick an envelope was, how wide it was, and how fast you wanted it to go. We controlled for mistakes with error correction. If something didn’t get pulled, the machine could detect it, and the display would control everything about the machine.

You could control anywhere from 10 to 100 different aspects of the machine, and you need that control on the machine, not in another room. Small, integrated panel displays enabled you to build it right into the machine. We did start with CRTs, but they were huge.

Nate Wheeler (08:55.5)
I like to assume that everybody listening is as much of a dummy as me. What does the acronym CRT stand for?

Keith Morton (09:08.061)
Cathode-ray tube. That’s the old big picture tube TVs and computer monitors that weighed 50 pounds and took up a quarter of your desk back in the day.

Nate Wheeler (09:18.816)
And flat-panel displays refers to what exactly?

Keith Morton (09:25.343)
Flat-panel displays.

Nate Wheeler (09:22.307)
What percentage of the displays you sell are user interfaces versus just displaying information? Or is it almost always a mix?

Keith Morton (09:46.929)
That’s interesting. It’s probably 70% human-machine interface and 30% display-only. The display-only applications are probably more for digital advertising or things like bus stops. We’ve also been involved in fast-food order confirmation, which is a display-only application. It’s letting you know what you’re getting, but you’re not touching anything on the screen yourself.

Nate Wheeler (10:19.776)
Did you say Taco Bell, Mike?

Mike Schreiber (10:23.098)
Yes, we’ve been in Taco Bell for over 10 years now. To Keith’s point, it’s just displaying information. Somebody’s not getting out of their vehicle and touching it; it’s letting them know what their order is. We also have bus stop applications where there’s information telling you the timing and routes.

Nate Wheeler (10:49.482)
I noticed within the last couple of years that McDonald’s also invested quite a bit into those sorts of displays.

Keith Morton (10:59.872)
Yes, the big menu boards.

Nate Wheeler (11:02.25)
Who do you think they’re working with for those?

Keith Morton (11:06.837)
Samsung, directly. We have been noticing they’re having some trouble with their outdoor displays. We’ve seen a lot of them starting to fail.

Mike Schreiber (11:20.191)
They’re seeing delamination and yellowing of the display from UV.

Nate Wheeler (11:20.288)
They’re burning out from the sunlight. In terms of competitive advantage, I heard you both mention building a product that doesn’t have excess features to keep the cost reasonable, while also making sure the features they do need are exceptional. Obviously, you can’t have that screen yellowing over time.

Mike Schreiber (12:00.231)
Right. Our approach is to work with customers to really understand their application and use case. A marine display on a boat in Florida is going to be different than an indoor display at a hospital. It’s a very different use case.

We like to dive in and understand the application. We’re display agnostic and work with all the major display companies. We try to put together a solution, whether it’s full custom or semi-custom. Sometimes you can take an off-the-shelf display and do some things to it, like changing the backlighting or optical filters, to create a solution that will fit the customer’s application.

Nate Wheeler (13:07.262)
So when somebody comes to you, is it typically because they haven’t been able to find an off-the-shelf solution that does what they need?

Mike Schreiber (13:16.99)
Not always. Sometimes it’s about not being able to find a solution, and sometimes they’re in an end-of-life (EOL) situation where they need a drop-in replacement that we can match mechanically and electrically. Sometimes it’s about price. You can’t always ignore price, but we like to build on value. We’ve seen companies, especially startups, go belly-up because they went after price instead of the solution that truly would have worked for them.

Nate Wheeler (13:54.304)
The old race to the bottom.

Keith Morton (13:55.007)
Right. And on customization, you brought up paying for features you don’t need. For example, a laptop has maybe six or seven different connectors, and most people use one or two of them, but you pay for all of them. That’s not so bad when you’re only buying one laptop. But if you’re buying equipment for a machine, you might be buying 5,000 units. Paying an extra $5 on a laptop is not a problem, but paying an extra $5 on 10,000 pieces means you’d rather put that $50,000 back in your pocket.

Customization sometimes sounds expensive, but not customizing when you’re buying in volume is expensive. You’re better off making something designed to fit your need. I use Taco Bell as an example. They have a display 150 feet away from the restaurant. You don’t want to put the computer outside because it’s very hot and expensive to cool. They had about four different boards inside: one to extend video, one for sound, another to monitor temperature, and one for the microphone.

We integrated everything into a single board, taking it from 36 potential points of failure down to nine. It also reduced the assembly cost because those four boards all had interconnecting cables. They went from eight or nine cables down to just three. We also combined power and signal using Power over Ethernet as our interface, so the whole system only has a single connector. They told us we were saving them a million dollars a year in installation costs. To me, customization sounds expensive if you do it for one unit, but if you do it for thousands, it’s not. You pay the money upfront and save that money on every unit you build.

Nate Wheeler (16:22.676)
I really like the concept of focusing on points of failure instead of features. That’s an interesting way to think about it. I feel like there are many applications for that, but a lot of companies probably don’t think that way. They’re focused on features, not points of failure.

Keith Morton (16:43.135)
Of course, we think about both; the product has to meet the application. For the Taco Bell example, it had to be bright enough to be seen in the sun and handle some level of vandalism from angry customers. It also needed to withstand electrical and regular storms. We have two patents based around outdoor displays for optical bonding and display cooling. We don’t typically use fans outside, whereas most solutions use many fans to keep the display cool.

Nate Wheeler (17:24.628)
Solid state.

Mike Schreiber (17:28.385)
A good example of that is at the bus stations down in Florida. They have an outdoor display in direct sunlight with no fans. Keith, I think you should touch on the board a little more, specifically how it monitors the unit and sends information back to the company to report a failure before someone physically sees it in the field.

Keith Morton (17:56.383)
That was our first product. We were involved in the beginning of digital signage, and we were putting displays out in the sun that were never designed for that environment. We realized that these things were melting down and having all kinds of damage. The first thing we did was monitor the temperature, automatically adjusting brightness and contrast to get the best visibility without overheating. We noticed you get a lot of data back about how much power the display is using and what the light output is.

With thousands of displays in the field, you can start to do predictive analysis. You can see that 90% of displays are working in a certain range. When a display starts working outside of that range, something is starting to go wrong. It’s not broken yet, but you can send out tech ahead of time before the display goes down and before there’s lost revenue.

For example, in fast food, they want to get somebody through in about 45 seconds. If there’s no order confirmation display, they found it takes a minute and a half to two minutes because someone has to read your order back to you. If you’re looking at what you ordered, you can say, “Wait, that’s not what I ordered.” But if someone has to read it back, you might say, “What was that? I didn’t hear it. Did you say extra cheese?” It sounds silly, but fast-food restaurants make about 60% of their money from throughput during lunch hours.

Mike Schreiber (19:36.06)
If that display goes down for a couple of days, they’re losing tens of thousands in revenue. Being able to have that predictive analysis and see that there might be a problem ahead of time could potentially save the company tens of thousands of dollars. That’s not even talking about the installation costs that Keith touched on. A little bit of NRE tooling on the front end is pretty reasonable and could save a company a lot of money on the backend.

They’re getting a solution that’s fine-tuned for their specific application and not buying a generic unit with features they don’t need. On the topic of failure points, think about the component shortages during COVID. If you have all these additional, unneeded components on a board, it’s not just a failure point. If there’s another shortage crisis, those unneeded parts could prevent you from getting the product at all. If a board was designed specifically for your use case with only the inputs and outputs you need, there are fewer failure points and less chance of a supply chain issue with components.

Nate Wheeler (21:02.026)
I started thinking about my truck when you were talking about features you don’t need. How much did I pay for the seatbelt alarm and the automatic engine shutoff at every stoplight that I disable every time I get in? How much did I pay for this stuff that I don’t even want?

Mike Schreiber (21:24.88)
Don’t talk about trucks. I got a COVID car. I pre-ordered a 2021 Ford Bronco that I didn’t get until 2022 because of the shortages, and it’s had all types of problems.

Nate Wheeler (21:39.115)
It’s ridiculous. Nothing lasts as long as it used to. It seems like every conversation leads back to that. We’re so worried about the environment and green initiatives, yet we are building and buying the cheapest products that last two years when they used to last fifteen. If you want to talk about saving the environment, let’s build products that last.

Mike Schreiber (22:06.031)
This goes back to the conversation of price versus value. We like to sell on value, not price, though we are very competitive on price. But to your point, do you want a product that’s going to last you 15 years, or one that you have to rebuy in eight months when you no longer have support?

Nate Wheeler (22:27.848)
Just like McDonald’s—they could have bought yours first.

Mike Schreiber (22:32.225)
Well, Taco Bell’s not complaining.

Nate Wheeler (22:34.676)
You brought up another important point that should be emphasized to the audience: gathering data. The fact that you were able to gather data on these outdoor displays helps you understand their operating range. Maybe you don’t need it to be as robust on one end, but you need it to be more robust on another. Those are the sorts of decisions it enables. It also allows you to do preventive maintenance.

That data is valuable to anybody who can get it, and it almost doesn’t matter what data you’re gathering. If you have a CNC machine, you can measure its output in parts per hour. That indicator could give you all the information you need to make adjustments or know if something’s going wrong. To leverage automation and AI, the first thing we need is data. That’s where we need to start: getting sensors and any mechanism we can to gather it.

Mike Schreiber (23:41.933)
They say knowledge is power, and data is knowledge. This is why companies like Google and Meta have giant warehouses filled with servers just collecting data. There’s definitely a lot to that.

Nate Wheeler (24:05.578)
We are all aware, at least peripherally, that AI is the way of the future and will change everything. AI needs data to operate, so the more data you can collect, the more empowered you will be to leverage that technology.

Mike Schreiber (24:27.37)
It’s not just about leveraging it, but making decisions ahead of time. Like we said before with preventative maintenance, you can make key decisions based on the data you already have.

Nate Wheeler (24:40.148)
Keith, going back to your operation, how big is the company? What are you physically doing in-house versus sourcing externally?

Keith Morton (24:56.991)
We’re part of a family of companies that’s over $100 million a year in various technologies. We do about 20% of our assembly in our facility in the United States, and the rest is in either Taiwan or China. The decision is usually volume-based or technology-based because you have to be competitive nowadays.

We’d love to do everything in the United States, but tariffs have made it challenging. Tariffs have driven decisions that should be based on technology and capability, but the price differential doesn’t allow for it. We usually do the higher-quality, higher-end work in-house in New York. We have a 6,000-square-foot facility where we do assembly.

All our R&D, engineering, prototyping, support, repairs, and failure analysis are done in the United States. We also have people in China and Taiwan managing our operations there. They inspect the factories and perform quality control before products leave those countries, so you don’t have to deal with a lot of returns and the shipping associated with that.

Mike Schreiber (26:27.979)
To piggyback on that, we have DisplayLogic employees in China and Taiwan. They act as a filter on the product coming out of the factory, doing the outgoing quality control (OQC).

Keith Morton (26:49.583)
Unfortunately, the key part of an LCD, the cell or the glass part, is not made in the United States. You have a backlight, and then you have the LCD cell. The light projects through the cell, which changes the color and switches the pixels on and off. All LCD cells are made in Asia—either Korea, Taiwan, or China.

We have to get that part there. What we do with it afterward—the customization, packaging, and system integration—is our value-add. The LCD cell is probably about 10% to 30% of the cost of an assembly, depending on what we’re making. We would love to see a factory in the United States. We have the CHIPS program for semiconductors; I believe we should do the same thing with displays because you need to display the data somewhere.

Nate Wheeler (27:48.63)
So why do you think that hasn’t happened? Is it just cost?

Mike Schreiber (27:51.53)
Cost.

Keith Morton (27:54.293)
It costs about a billion dollars to build an LCD or TFT factory, and it takes about two years. We also don’t have the skill set in the United States anymore to manage and run those factories. The technology was invented here. For example, the largest LCD glass manufacturer in the world is Corning from upstate New York. The same company that makes Corning ceramic pots and Pyrex measuring cups makes a huge percentage of the world’s LCD glass. But they had to move those factories to China and Asia to be in close proximity to the rest of the manufacturing process.

We could do it here, but it would take a big move. It’s automated, so labor cost isn’t an issue anymore. You can run an LCD factory the size of five football fields with about 20 people. That’s for the actual cell production, not the module assembly. Putting the backlight and the metal frame on still requires a lot of hands-on work. That’s why module assembly gets done in China, due to the low labor costs.

Nate Wheeler (29:23.348)
So we need to start advocating for cell production in the US. That’s very interesting. It seems like it would be an easy win because even if the final product cost 20-30% more, the proximity would make up for it. They would certainly gain market share.

Keith Morton (29:48.757)
Absolutely. We have a 55% tariff nowadays, so that eats up that 30% real quick.

Nate Wheeler (29:54.164)
Is that what it’s at right now?

Mike Schreiber (29:56.102)
Yes, that’s coming out of China specifically. Taiwan, I believe, is 10%.

Keith Morton (30:02.357)
It’s 10%, but I would say about 90% of all displays still have a country of origin of China nowadays.

Nate Wheeler (30:13.032)
What’s interesting and new in the field of displays? Tell me about micro LEDs.

Keith Morton (30:30.569)
Micro LEDs are extremely interesting. It’s similar to OLED, but OLED has technical weaknesses that affect its life. OLED is fine for a home television that you use for two or three hours a day, but for a medical or industrial device that might run 12 to 24 hours a day, OLED can’t handle it. Micro LEDs have no problem with that.

Micro LED is high-efficiency, high-brightness, and has a long life. It sounds great, but it’s very expensive because it’s new. When LCDs came out, they were about ten times the price of a CRT, even though CRTs had more material and parts. The CRT technology was mature, and the equipment was all paid for.

With micro LEDs, they’re still using pick-and-place equipment, which is how you make circuit boards. Each pixel is individually placed. It looks amazing, can go outdoors, and will last a long time, but it’s at least ten times the price of an OLED. As manufacturing catches up with the technology—I can’t say if it will be in three or ten years—that will be the prominent display technology.

Nate Wheeler (31:58.923)
If someone wanted to get in front of that, what would be needed from a manufacturing side to ramp that up in the US?

Keith Morton (32:17.069)
People are working on converting from placing individual pixels to making a matrix, where you can place, say, a 20×20 block of pixels or do the whole thing at once. Right now, LCDs are made with a lithographic etching process using masks, similar to how PC boards are produced but with different chemicals. We need to go in that direction with micro LEDs, where we either deposit or grow the LEDs right on the glass. I don’t think that technology is there yet. They can do better with semiconductor technology, just like we do with chips.

Nate Wheeler (33:12.042)
On the topic of new technology, it’s annoying that I’ve replaced old incandescent bulbs that lasted a couple of years with these new LED bulbs, and now I’m replacing them twice a year in any given fixture, even though LEDs are supposed to last longer. They’re the ones that screw into a regular socket, but I think it’s not the bulb itself that goes out. It’s the driver chip.

Keith Morton (33:46.997)
I haven’t had that experience myself. Maybe you need to buy a different brand.

Mike Schreiber (33:53.762)
You may have an electrical issue. I installed all the LED bulbs in my house and noticed something similar. It turned out there was a transformer issue, and they had to redo the electric for my house and seven others on the same line. It was blowing out bulbs left and right, and I had a couple of lamps plugged into the wall catch fire. Maybe you have fluctuating current coming to your house.

Nate Wheeler (34:31.274)
It might be. It’s very noticeable. The ones in my bathroom, I probably change each one of them twice a year. It could be moisture, but I don’t really notice any corrosion on them.

Mike Schreiber (34:38.786)
That could be from water, though.

Keith Morton (34:45.333)
It might be getting on the inside. LEDs should have about the same life as incandescent bulbs. LEDs may tend to go out completely, whereas incandescent and fluorescent bulbs get dimmer and dimmer. LEDs also get dimmer over time, but overall, they should be a little better. All lights dim over time. Incandescent bulbs also just go out when the filament goes bad.

Nate Wheeler (35:25.418)
With the tariff conversation, what’s your strategy? Are you meeting weekly and looking at each market to make decisions? How are you dealing with it?

Keith Morton (35:41.941)
We started preparing for this about a year and a half ago. We were pretty sure that tariffs were going to be an issue based on possible political changes and the general risk associated with China. If you go back in history, displays started in the U.S., then went to Japan, then Taiwan, and then China. So now, we’ve started moving back to Taiwan and Korea. Korea is almost 100% commercial for applications like televisions, but we started moving and beefing up our capabilities in Taiwan a year and a half ago.

That turned out to be the right thing to do, with a 55% tariff in China and only 10% in Taiwan. Overall, I think it’s a good thing. It’s better to be spread out and not have one country hold 90% of the capacity. If there’s a potential problem with that country, you can’t get displays at all.

Mike Schreiber (36:49.566)
The tariff situation is like the stock market; one day it’s up, one day it’s down. We make sure we’re partnered with the right companies not just in China, but also in Taiwan and Korea, as Keith said. We’re also looking at places in Malaysia, India, and Vietnam to stay ahead of this global tariff issue.

Nate Wheeler (37:16.554)
That’s a really good point. A lot of companies think about diversification in terms of working in different sectors like commercial, industrial, aerospace, or medical. But diversification has more implications than just business development. Your supply chain also needs to be diversified.

Another area I like to talk about for diversification is the workforce, where you’re mixing in technology. Even if you don’t need automation right now, it will be needed in the future. It’s also important to have a mix of the younger and older generations. A lot of companies realize their workforce is aging and will leave at some point. Even if you don’t need that young person right now, you can get them in the door to familiarize them with the process and learn from the old hats. There are many different types of diversification, and I think the supply chain is a big one.

Keith Morton (38:31.753)
Absolutely. A single source can be a problem, and it happens all the time. Sometimes you don’t have a choice depending on your application. You end up pigeonholed because you need a certain size or resolution combination that’s just not available elsewhere, but that’s risky.

Mike Schreiber (38:52.296)
We can do almost any display size, but we like to find the sweet spot on socket size for displays where we can have a multi-source strategy with multiple display cells that are a good mechanical and electrical fit. We can get three different cell manufacturers approved for a customer and build them all into the same module. It’s like future-proofing their supply chain. Even if one goes end-of-life, they still have two others they’ve already approved that will be form, fit, and function compatible.

Nate Wheeler (39:31.818)
That makes a lot of sense. How do you get in front of these customers? What has your growth looked like over the past six or seven years, and what methods are you leveraging to grow your market?

Mike Schreiber (39:49.533)
I’ll defer to Keith on the growth part, but we utilize a number of strategies. We engage with a lot of customers directly. We do a number of trade shows every year and have had good results getting in front of the market, customers, and technology. It’s nice to go to trade shows because you start to see the future technologies that are going to take over the industry.

We keep a highly effective and experienced core team within DisplayLogic. We build good partnerships with reps from various networks and work directly with all the major distributors. I would say it’s a healthy mix between direct customer engagements through trade shows or cold calling—we still do some of that—and really good partnerships with reps who have feet on the street in almost every state. We also have good distribution partnerships.

Nate Wheeler (41:11.22)
Do your reps work directly for you, or do they work for a distributor?

Keith Morton (41:23.903)
We have our own regional reps, and then we use manufacturers’ reps who might have four or five people in a single state, whereas we’ll have one person covering multiple states and working with those reps. We also work with distributors. The other way we get business is through reputation. DisplayLogic has a reputation for getting things done, especially the harder things. That’s a double-edged sword because I’d like to get some of the easy stuff as well, but it seems we get a lot of business because we’re able to do the hard stuff.

Mike Schreiber (42:04.122)
And we get some customers through the website, too.

Keith Morton (42:09.951)
A lot of companies are really good at marketing, though they may or may not be good at what they’re marketing. Getting the word out is definitely challenging.

Nate Wheeler (42:25.642)
I’m always interested in the manufacturer’s rep conversation. Do these reps have multiple lines they’re representing? They aren’t dedicated just to you?

Mike Schreiber (42:39.467)
Yes. A lot of the reps are in the IC business, selling ICs, hard drives, and RAM. A lot of devices have some type of user interface that requires a display and touch. So for the same reps and companies they’re working with, if they have a backend board that needs video output like HDMI, there’s going to be some type of display or monitor on the front end. It goes hand in hand, and it’s an easy way to tap into display opportunities.

Keith Morton (43:32.853)
They tend to be more customer-specific, whereas we’re product-specific. They’ll sell a lot of products to a certain number of customers. Most reps have a good core of customers they support, and those customers look to them for many different types of parts. When they need a display, they go to their rep and ask, “Who do you have? Who supports you? Who gives good support?”

Nate Wheeler (44:03.048)
In my experience, a rep is only as good as their familiarity with what you do and their ability to identify a customer’s pain points to know when to apply your product. If you disagree, please tell me, because that’s my understanding.

Mike Schreiber (44:23.983)
I’ve heard a lot of people talk about reps in the same way. For us, we make sure any reps we partner with are educated on displays and touch technology if they aren’t already. Some of them have been in the industry longer than us and know displays like the back of their hand, but there is a learning curve.

We make sure we educate them so they can act as an extension of our company. They know who DisplayLogic is, what we’re capable of, and the types of enhancements and value we can add to a display or touch solution. Once they have that education, they can talk confidently and knowledgeably with customers.

Nate Wheeler (45:33.676)
That was going to be my next question. What is your mechanism for making sure that reps have the information they need? What does that education process involve? Is it intensive? Do you just give them printed material?

Mike Schreiber (45:54.002)
Every rep is different. Some have more experience in the LCD world than others. Sometimes it’s just a matter of sending over some white papers and information on touch and display technology. Other times, it involves a couple of calls and a training session to cover the basics. We don’t necessarily need a rep to know everything about displays and what we do. They just need to know enough to get a conversation going. If they run into trouble, they loop us in. They carry all these different lines; we’re the subject matter experts on this. They loop us in when needed, and we drop our knowledge.

Nate Wheeler (46:34.091)
Right.

Keith Morton (46:48.117)
I also look for a rep who can really manage communications. I think that’s very important. They’re never going to know our product line as well as we do. What sometimes happens is a rep gets a nice win in the display market and they like it because it has a pretty high average selling price (ASP). They learn about it through the process of handling an opportunity.

But even if they don’t, we tell them the minimum questions we need answered. We have an online configurator, by the way, that gives a graphical interface as you’re checking boxes, showing you what you’re building. It’s an online system builder. They can follow that to ask the right questions, but basically, we tell them to get us the size of the display, the resolution, and what it’s being used for. That’s 80% to 90% of the information we need. Then, get us on the phone with the customer.

Nate Wheeler (47:55.083)
Okay.

Keith Morton (48:00.021)
We’ll get on a conference call with them and the customer. We have a huge demo pool with over 200 demos, and we’ll send them the demos they need for that specific application and customer. With displays, seeing is believing. It’s a visual product. Specs are important, but you need to see it.

Mike Schreiber (48:20.539)
Actually, Nate, one of the bullet points you wanted to bring up was our strategies for getting our products in front of customers and accelerating the sales cycle. Keith just touched on that. We have a “first in, first to win” mentality. We keep a well-loaded demo pool and work with partners to maintain a fine-tuned supply chain with low lead times and low NRE tooling costs.

With those things combined, we’re able to get a proof of concept into the customer’s hands, even if it’s not an exact fit. It might be something in their resolution and display size, but maybe it doesn’t have the right brightness or viewing angles. It’s not a perfect fit, but it’s something close. They can see it, work with it, and load their own images to see how it will actually look in their end product. That’s been a winning strategy for us.

Nate Wheeler (49:32.149)
I like that a lot. I was curious if you have any thoughts on how another manufacturer might employ that philosophy. If you have a demo that’s not the right size but has the right technology, that’s an easy thing to hand someone and say, “This is generally how it’s going to work.” Is there a way to do that with a service-type manufacturer, like an injection molder? I suppose you could show a part of similar complexity and say, “This is the sort of thing we’ve done before.”

Keith Morton (50:11.381)
They should have good samples. We’ve worked with companies like that, and it is helpful. Enclosure manufacturers are a good example. They have samples of what they’ve done, and they can send them to you so you get an idea. When I first started working with injection molders, I wasn’t an expert, but I have a pretty good understanding now because displays often end up in injection-molded enclosures.

Understanding the capability, what the finishes might look like, and the different pricing and ruggedness is important. I would say having a good demo pool for them would be equally important. We see that with glass manufacturers, too. For example, with anti-glare, you have a matte finish and a gloss finish. How do you rate that? Different manufacturers use different numbers, and there are no standards. You have to see it and touch it.

We keep that in-house, but we had to get it from a glass manufacturer who had a frame with five different levels of gloss. The customer could take that and put it in front of their display. In any market, if you can have all the different options available, it cuts the process down quite a bit.

Mike Schreiber (51:42.369)
To add to Keith’s comments, depending on the size, we have in-house 3D printers that we use to make quick-turn enclosures for demos or prototypes. Having the right in-house equipment allows us to not have to rely on an injection molder. Most of the things we do are custom or semi-custom, so it’s rare that an injection molder would have an inventory of enclosures that fit a particular display size. We fall back on 3D printing a lot for quick-turn prototypes and demos. We have control over it, so we’re able to cut down on lead times. I think that’s another good mitigating strategy.

Nate Wheeler (52:39.402)
That’s fascinating. I like to talk about 3D printing because I feel like that’s the way of the future. I envision a future where if you want a new iPhone, you pay for the file online and then use your at-home printer to print it. You guys might appreciate this: I interviewed a company a couple of weeks ago that has a patent on a highly conductive material you can use inside any 3D printer, even one off the shelf at Walmart. There are some conductive materials available, but they have very low conductivity and limited applications. This one is just as good as any copper wire.

Mike Schreiber (53:27.267)
So they’re printing gold and silver?

Nate Wheeler (53:30.764)
It’s not even gold and silver; it’s a specific compound of copper that acts like a solder.

Keith Morton (53:38.079)
Speaking of printed, we’ve been involved for a number of years now with printed displays. We’re using screen-printed electrochromic displays and also printed OLED, which is cutting-edge technology right now.

Nate Wheeler (53:57.003)
I was wondering if that would be a solution for not having the manufacturing capabilities for micro LEDs. I don’t know if that’s possible.

Keith Morton (54:10.229)
Inkjet has a lot of capabilities because it can put down chemicals. The big advantage of printing is that it’s an additive process, not a subtractive one. For example, if you’re going to CNC a 3D object, you’re starting with a block and cutting away a lot of material, which you then have to process. It’s the same thing with circuit boards. You start with 100% copper and etch away what you don’t want. Now you have these toxic chemicals with copper in them that you have to dispose of or recycle.

With printing, it’s additive. You only put what you need where you need it, so it’s way more efficient and cost-effective. Because it’s new technology, it’s not perfected yet, but you will see printed OLED and regular displays made with high-speed inkjet. Then you could start seeing an incorporation of the traces, the circuits, and the display all in one. I believe, like you, that you’ll be able to print an entire, fully working circuit right on your desktop. Maybe not Star Trek replicator level yet, but we’re moving in that direction. I think that’s very exciting.

Nate Wheeler (55:33.985)
Imagine what that would do to Amazon. Very interesting. Well, I thought we covered a lot of really cool topics here. I think we did a good job of bringing it down to the level of any manufacturer being able to kind of use the information and hopefully be able to apply it to their business, which is always good for me. I love to help guys out and really just make US manufacturing more of a success. We certainly have our challenges.

Mike Schreiber (56:09.168)
If I’m thinking selfishly, I don’t want to give our competitors the secret sauce.

Keith Morton (56:17.437)
Just a little taste.

Mike Schreiber (56:18.182)
We’re glad to have the conversation and to help out. We bleed displays; it’s in our blood. These are the exact types of conversations we love to have.

Keith Morton (56:33.269)
We would definitely like to see manufacturing come back to the United States in a big way. It kills me to see stuff that we actually developed and invented—like the transistor, LCD displays, and touch screens—all manufactured in other countries. I think we’re doing the right things to bring manufacturing back. We don’t have to have all of it, but we shouldn’t have none of it.

Mike Schreiber (56:57.702)
They’re building that big chip factory out in Arizona, so that’s a huge start.

Keith Morton (57:02.229)
That’s a start.

Nate Wheeler (57:04.876)
The high-value-added stuff, I definitely think we could be doing here. Even the low-value-added stuff, we need diversification as an economy. We have to be able to have at least some of it here to deal with geopolitical instability.

Keith Morton (57:22.559)
And shipping costs. The amount of product we have shipped is unbelievable. That’s wasted energy, packaging, cardboard, and plastics that are not needed.

Mike Schreiber (57:37.607)
It’s funny because most companies are all chasing the bottom dollar on the front end and putting logistics as an afterthought. But if you really look at the total cost, are they really saving money?

Nate Wheeler (57:54.624)
You could apply that statement to an unbelievable amount of things, even back to our earlier conversation about buying low-quality products that only last a couple of years. I think somehow we need to change the American consumer’s mind to change everything else. We have to get people out of this idea that buying the cheapest crap and collecting more and more of it in your closet is the right way to go. It’s just not.

Mike Schreiber (58:22.95)
I think about tools, for instance. I do a lot of woodwork at home, and I have tools from one of my grandfathers that still work perfectly. They’re awesome tools. But the new drills and other things I’ve bought in the past five or ten years always seem to break down. His tools never break down; they just work.

Nate Wheeler (58:41.694)
Built-in obsolescence. I learned that term in a previous conversation, but that’s exactly it. They want to build products so you can sell more of them in a couple of years, and it’s garbage. Hey, guys, thanks a lot for coming on today. I enjoyed the conversation and meeting you all, and I wish you the best of success. I think you have the right business philosophy and product, and I believe you’re going to do well.

Keith Morton (59:15.413)
Thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Mike Schreiber (59:17.122)
Much appreciated. Thanks for having us on.