This year marks our 21st Birthday celebrations! How things have changed over that time, such as our newly revamped studio & office space. We have developed our digital solutions with a view to simplifying media production for our clients, so we amalgamated our systems under the Renaissance umbrella, bringing together the Media Production Management (MPM), Digital Asset Management (DAM), and the Product Information Management (PIM) elements to help our clients streamline their multi-channel deployment, alleviating the need to log-in to multiple systems, with easy monthly SAAS payment packages, even more clients can utilise our knowledge to power their production.

January 2021 saw another industry leading, technology release by ec2i. Developing a new ‘check in/check-out’ function within our Renaissance DAM, addressing various production issues faced during the pandemic by our clients. With people now working away from their offices, the new upgrade facilitated effective working from home for both ec2i staff and clients teams. February 2021, now halfway through the Covid pandemic, ec2i moved a mere metre to our brand new built studios at… No 19 Aviation Way!

A remarkable year 2018 turned out to be for ec2i. After winning more clients and gaining even greater recognition in the market for our innovative bespoke development, we add Dalim Dialogue into our systems, allowing clients greater annotation functionality. The same year, ec2i’s development team began work on a new Application Development Platform (ADP) which will bring even greater efficiencies to our clients processes.
A new chapter in the history of ec2i begins.

January 2017 saw the start a major investment upgrade program to our systems and infrastructure. After installing Nutanix 2 years earlier, ec2i double up the power and purchase a second Nutanix cluster as part of our Disaster Recovery strategy, ensuring that our complete infrastructure is robust, secure and future proof. ec2i’s Renaissance DAM had upgrades and v2 is released to the market, along with PIM v2 with new ‘sticky board’ and 'squinch' analysis tools, proving again we are ahead of the field.

Winning more brand clients due to our technology offering, ec2i continue development of our Renaissance system. Production Planners are added, along with a Adobe InDesign Plugin, resulting in even more efficiencies for our customers. October 2015 saw a revolution with the addition of one of the advanced market PIMs (Production Information Management.)
This was ground breaking and allowed clients to manage and deploy their product data more effectively across their marketing, catalogues and campaigns. ec2i purchase their
first Nutanix Primary cluster infrastructure system.

By early 2014, Renaissance has helped ec2i become a top player within the industry, allowing clients to sync Lowres or Hires files to their own servers, a major industry breakthrough. Along with an API being added to Renaissance, our clients are seeing a real benefit of the system, speeding up their production and making cost savings in the process. By 2015, flatplans and page turners were added along with Tags, providing a way to add notes to files, outside of the normal metadata fields allowing easy searchability in Renaissance DAM. Another industry breakthrough!

February 2012 Renaissance goes live internally, replacing the File Maker system and although having limited functionality, ec2i sees a 400% increase in page production through the system which is now integrated with Dalims' industry standard Twist software. In November 2012 ec2i’s DAM system, Renaissance, allows our clients to annotate their pages and PDFs. In the same month Renaissance integrates with other internal systems allowing our clients even more functionality & production speed.

July 2011 Renaissance is presented to all staff & company Directors to demonstrate the power of the new system and to highlight how clients could better produce their marketing and print collateral and rigorous testing begins before implementation across the company. October 2011 saw ec2i named runner-up Creative Repro Company of the Year in the Printweek Awards. And in 2012 is named Creative Repro Company of the year again, repeating our triumph of 2009.
After that, they dropped the category as we were too strong to compete against!!!

With the rapid digital transformation of the print & media industry, ec2i stops offering ‘web site’ creation, replaces our in-house built email marketing system with Dot Mailer and starts to focus on developing our own Production Management system, Renaissance is born!
In October 2009, we are named Creative Repro Company of the Year in the annual industry Printweek awards, our first year of entering. A year later 2010, and ec2i is named as runner-up Creative Repro Company of the Year.

By 2003 we replaced our existing analogue Cascade system with a newly launched digital product, which enabled ec2i to offer our clients online services for the first time. In late 2004, while most companies were still offering film output, we embarked on a new digital route creating PDFs for final output to printers and prototyping our Production Management Database. 2005 saw another major development with the creation of a bespoke FileMaker system to replace the existing database system.

In November that year, ec2i is launched!
A company for the digital age born out of a great heritage of pedigree parents Essex Colour Services and The White Dove Press. Bringing the two companies together to create a new digital technology focused offering, ec2i started to be known as a leader in its industry, gaining more brand clients and increasing members of our production team. With the future in mind ec2i soon became a implementor of new digital technologies.

The intervening years saw many innovations and developments. Our recently retired chairman,
Mark Dane (who still consults and visits) joined the family.
Our present day joint MDs, have over 60+ years joint experience across our services. Steve Fitzgerald has always worked tirelessly behind-the-scenes developing our successful, in-house data systems and Gray Sergeant, originally a typesetter, was, for many years, Production Director and still fronts many of our large accounts.

As the business continued to grow, and after three further moves to progressively larger premises, we finally bought a piece of land on the perimeter of London Southend Airport and had our own state-of-the-art, building erected at 18-19 Aviation Way. The picture above shows our grand opening in the summer of 1986 when the ribbon was cut by the late, great Spike Milligan.