Use case · Retail

Color e-paper for brand shelves and endcaps

Retailer-owned electronic shelf labels (ESL) do prices. Brand-owned Spectra 6 signs do everything else: endcap posters, category headers, promotional cards, seasonal wayfinding. Wireless, magnetic-mount, updated by your merchandising team from a browser.

Every major retailer has an ESL contract with Hanshow, VusionGroup (SES-imagotag), Pricer, or SoluM. Those systems own the price rail on every shelf. What they don’t own — and won’t easily let you touch — is the brand-controlled signage above and around the shelf. That’s where color e-paper wins.

Why Spectra 6 specifically: Six saturated pigments (black, white, red, yellow, blue, green) in one reflective panel. Brand marks look right. No glow, no glare, readable under supermarket fluorescents. Weekly promo cadence fits its 20-30 second full-panel refresh without anyone noticing.

What we build

Why not just ask the ESL vendor to do this?

Because they’re optimized for retailer procurement, not brand procurement. You’d be a small side deal in someone else’s contract. And the ESL flagship color panels (Hanshow Polaris Max, VusionGroup Vusion Iris) are gorgeous but sold in 20,000-unit lots per store rollout. If you’re a brand doing 200 endcap installs across 40 stores for a quarterly campaign, the ESL vendors won’t bid, and if they do the timeline is measured in quarters, not weeks.

How it hangs together

Hardware

Our reference PCB drives Good Display’s GDEP073E01 (7.3″), GDEP100E01 (10″), and GDEP133C02 (13.3″) Spectra 6 panels off an ESP32-S3 module. Battery topology depends on refresh rate: a rechargeable Li-ion cell in a magnetic-mount housing gets weeks between charges on a weekly refresh; a coin-cell version gets over a year if you can tolerate less frequent updates.

Firmware

Deep-sleep between refreshes, Wi-Fi wake on schedule or push, OTA updates, remote factory reset, and a provisioning UX that a merchandising manager can complete without an app. Waveform LUTs tuned per Spectra 6 panel lot so the reds and yellows don’t drift after 100k refreshes.

Cloud

Next.js CMS deployed to your Vercel account (or we host it as a managed service). Upload artwork, dither in the browser, schedule the swap, and every device in scope picks it up on its next wake. Roles for merch, brand, and store ops. API for your existing DAM.

What it costs, roughly