A time machine comes with a health warning

Ron Estey, managing director of Aprilage Inc., can tell you what you’ll look like when you’re 95.  He can tell you with precision just how much deeper those lines and creases that characterize your face will be because you’ve been a smoker, or a sun worshipper. And he can also tell you how those extra 15 pounds might mask certain wrinkles.

Sample from Aprilage’s age-progression software

Not surprisingly, given our general preoccupation with appearance, this ability is a money-maker. Aprilage has been a profitable three-employee company since its inception thanks to its software, which can age photographs of people based on a five-year study of more than 7,000 faces of different ages, ethnicities and lifestyles.

But some of its most profitable applications are far from superficial. For instance, one of Aprilage’s most promising markets is police forces who use the tool to try to find missing children years after they’ve disappeared.

That’s a far cry from what the product was created for. As Estey says, “we came out of the brain of a fellow by the name of Dr. Hooley McLaughlin, the director of visitor experience at the Ontario Science Centre…He wanted to do something about time, and his idea was to take a kid out of the audience and make them grow old in front of their face. He looked for about a year for something that would do just that. And he could find nothing.”

At the time Estey was working in the movie business as the president of Core Digital Pictures, a special effects company. “We got the call to do a special effect,” he says. “And we said ‘sure, it’s a special effect and we can do special effects.”

The age-progression software eventually usurped the special effects business, and Aprilage was created. And right from the start much of the demand for its tools has come from outside of Canada. The challenge, Estey has found, is how best to tap into that.

Ron Estey, managing director of Aprilage Inc.

How did you know the product had other applications beyond science for kids?
A woman by the name of Pat Hysert who was doing some work at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo and runs a program called the Task Force for Tobacco Free Women and Girls was looking for trigger points: what would cause a 13-year-old girl not to take up smoking? And appearance of course is a significant trigger for all of us, let alone a 13-year-old girl. And she phoned us because she thought that this was her eureka moment. She said “can you trick this out to do a side-by-side of a girl if she smokes and if she doesn’t.” As we continued to go through this we started to get some interest from health educators.

And were your customers primarily in the U.S. to start?
Yes. It evolved in really a not particularly strategic way. We responded to opportunities. We really thought the market at that stage would be constrained to the smoking-cessation or anti-tobacco market—school boards and local health departments primarily. We do have lung associations, for instance we just sold a copy to the Manitoba Lung Association, the Saskatchewan Cancer Society has a copy of it.

And how did you find customers beyond North America?
The market for us really began to turn on a trade show that we did. We looked at a few trade shows, and I love the name of this one–it’s called the National Conference on Tobacco or Health, because you can’t have tobacco and health. And so we got a booth and we went down and set up our business and we started doing agings on the floor. You take a photo of an individual, put them in the software, add some personal characteristics of age and ethnicity, and then fundamentally the software does the rest.

What happened?
On the floor of the trade show we came across a woman by the name of Cecilia Farren who was running a company in the UK called GASP, and they provide non-smoking tools to schools, posters and black lungs in bottles and that kind of stuff. And she thought that this would be a good addition. So about four years ago we entered into an arrangement with GASP and they became our UK distributor and did famously, and are still one of our largest clients.

Did you have to make changes to the product for the UK market?
None whatsoever. The great thing about developing the database in Toronto is the range of ethnicities we have here.

What happened next?
At that stage, we felt the international market was where we should concentrate. So we basically went online for our sales outside of the U.K. To some degree, this is because of our inability to find a local distributor in each market. We continue to look for that – we’re actually in discussions with a number of individual distributors. We want to find a distributor in each major market or region. We’re actually talking to people in southeast Asia now to try to get a distributor; we’re talking to two people in the U.S. – I think we’re still underrepresented in the U.S. market. Right now we fundamentally sell directly online using two devices: our main website, Aprilage.com, and we go to trade shows and conferences to get ourselves into situations where buyers will be present.

Who is the typical buyer?
We serve basically three fundamentally different markets. The law enforcement market offering is quite different than the science museum offering. (The third is the health-education market). One of the things we grapple with is making sure it’s very clear what the product does and what the featuring offer is. There are different derivations of the product. For instance, for science centres we do a kiosk photo booth version where a person goes into the photo booth and it’s fully automatic. For health education, you want to facilitate it, so the health educator can sit down with the child and say ‘okay, see these wrinkles.’ How we distinguish the individual markets is taking the base products and making those minor variations to address specifically what the software is intended to address.

What are you looking for in a distributor?
For other GASPs and companies that specialize in a particular area that the software can be used in. For middle schools and health departments we’re looking for health educators, companies that distribute education products. For the law enforcement market we’re looking for companies that distribute facial recognition software or facial reconstruction software and we can pair that with age progression software.

You experimented with an overseas office?
We opened an office in Ireland in 2007. We did this for strategic purposes in terms of being in Europe and at that time Ireland was a hot location to be. We operated there for two years then reconsolidated the operation in Toronto. It was much more successful all being in Toronto than trying to operate a tiny company, basically a startup, across two continents. Ireland was more expense and administration than we really needed at the time. So, if you ask what I would do differently, I would try to work through distributors as opposed to trying to set up in markets on an individual basis.

You also developed a site for individual people who want to see their photos aged?
Around 2006 we went online with Ageme.com, where an individual can upload their photo and do agings. And it’s interesting to see the international use of that, you can actually see the world turn around sales that are coming in online because the agings when they get to the server here in Toronto are date-stamped.

Where is most of your revenue coming from?
About 20% of it is individuals, but the desktop or laptop version is still the most popular, it’s an industrial product at that level. We just sold a number of copies to the Polish police force.

How do most customers find you?
By Googling us or responding to our presence at trade shows, and then inquiring through the website. We’ve found that without the Web there would be no capacity for us to sell internationally at the scope we’re reaching. Because it’s an industrial product there’s often a bit of due diligence that needs to be done by the buyer, so we send them a demo and take them through the process and let them run the software on a trial basis on their particular equipment. That’s what we find is the most successful way for us to generate business.

What are challenges you deal with? Language?
The most difficult thing for us to do is be a small company trying to reach out into the international market, because it is so huge and there are so many variations. It’s interesting, the language doesn’t seem to be an issue. We are only in English, although the Polish police department has translated the interface and all of our documents into Polish. They have our screen in English and then they have a booklet that is the Polish version of that. We had talked about translating into Spanish, German, Mandarin. But it has not really been an issue. We have an order pending in Korea where it looks like we will have to recreate the interface in Korean, but English seems to be the lingua franca of the technology sector we’re operating in.

Where do you allocate scarce dollars?
A good, solid, clear website is a must, no question. And then trade shows and conferences. We were asked to present at a law enforcement conference last month, primarily because someone did some research on our website, and we’ve had two or three good leads come out of that. Anywhere you can get in front of people and show them the product, how it works, why it’s unique.

Do you do a lot of travel?
That comes back to having a distributor on the ground. We don’t go to the UK more than once a year because GASP is there and they’re doing the job for us.