A Sustainability Story for Epson UK
A corporate storytelling film for Epson UK, celebrating a 42 year old dot matrix printer still going strong and the loyal customer who kept it running.
CLIENT
Epson UK
SECTOR
Corporate · Technology · Sustainability
SERVICES
Interview filming · Location filming · Editing · Subtitling · Final delivery
The brief
It started with a letter. Roger Swann, founder of Cigol Controls, wrote to Epson to say his dot matrix printer, bought in 1982, was still working 42 years later, only now reaching the end of its life because his own customers had moved to email and PDF invoices. In an age of disposable technology, Epson’s marketing team recognised a genuinely rare story of reliability and sustainability.
Charlie, Epson’s PR and Social Media Manager, commissioned a film to tell Roger’s story properly. It was a genuinely unusual brief for Epson, not a typical product case study, but something closer to a human interest piece that happened to be about a printer.
The finished film needed to work as a piece of brand storytelling Epson could genuinely be proud of, one that celebrated the customer as much as the product.
The approach
Working with Epson’s marketing team, the priority was letting Roger tell his own story naturally, rather than turning it into a scripted product endorsement.
Rather than a straightforward product feature, the aim was a film that helped viewers understand:
- Why Roger kept the same printer for 42 years in the first place
- What genuinely changed for his business over four decades
- Why that story mattered to Epson as a sustainability message
- What it says about building things that actually last
Filming took place in two very different settings, a Devon village near the Seaton coastline where Roger’s story unfolded, and Epson’s UK headquarters in Watford, tying the human story back to the corporate perspective.
Production
The project involved managing filming across two locations and a genuinely tight editing turnaround. This included:
- Filming Roger at his home near Seaton, letting him talk through the printer and what it meant to him
- Additional filming at Epson’s UK headquarters in Watford for the corporate perspective
- Around 12 hours of editing, polishing the footage into a tight, genuinely engaging final cut
- Adding subtitles throughout to ensure the film was accessible to all viewers
- Signing off the finished film after just three rounds of review
Throughout, close communication with Epson’s marketing team ensured the finished film struck the right balance, genuinely warm and human, while still working as a piece of brand storytelling.
The result
The finished film gave Epson a genuinely distinctive piece of brand storytelling, one built around a real customer rather than product specifications.
It captured something Epson could not have manufactured on a brief alone, a genuinely loyal customer whose story made a case for sustainability and quality more convincingly than any marketing copy could.
By combining honest storytelling with a genuinely unusual brief, the project became more than a case study, it became a piece of content Epson was proud to share. It’s the kind of project that reminds you why some stories are worth telling well, whatever the subject.
Why this project worked
This project shows what happens when a brand is willing to tell a genuinely human story rather than a straightforward product pitch. Roger’s loyalty to a machine most people would have replaced decades ago became a story about care, sustainability and what it actually means to make something built to last.