Evoke Technologies and RedFez are two companies based at Craven Park Training and Enterprise Centre who celebrated their joint fourth birthday on Wednesday 11th May. Evoke Technologies a company focused on selling interactive technology and RedFez an IT support service.
They invited friends and local licensees along to celebrate at The Legends Lounge, Craven Park. The event included lots of cake as well as live entertainment.
One of the directors from RedFez Robin Thompson said, “the event was good we got some really good numbers, which was excellent. It was good to see a lot of the licensees chatting because we don’t talk to each other perhaps as much as we should so that was good to see.”
Whilst the event was getting started upstairs Nevenka Fenwick, Financial Director for Evoke Technologies arranged for a sensory vehicle to come from Osborne Technologies, a company they work with that distributes and manufacturers this technology, to give guests an idea of the immersive technology they work with.
I spoke to Matt Livesey from Osborne Technologies who gave me a demonstration of how it works. He said they “have a purposely built a sensory mobile vehicle, which allows us to show the possibilities of what a sensory or immersive room could be to customers across the UK. Its saves people from having to come to our showroom because we can take it to them. They can experience everything we have here including the vibration of the floor, dynamic lighting, wind, and smoke machines. All the elements that add to this space can show people what they could achieve within this space in schools and health care centres.”
During the pandemic, both businesses have worked hard to adapt to the situation Nevenka said “We soon realised that we were coming into a pandemic and quite a lot of our suppliers diversified into supplying hygiene products like protection screens, fogging machines and other different hygiene brands because a lot of our AV (audio-visual) distributers in the UK buy from Europe and were a couple of months ahead of the pandemic. They were already one step ahead and they were offered to the distributors of the UK which then as a reseller offered it to us, so we decided to diversify during Covid which helped us to keep going through the pandemic.”
Helen Thompson director for RedFez found that “The last four years has had its ups and downs we have had Covid to deal with when everyone else was told to work from home we actually moved out of our home office to here at Craven Park. That was a big step for us moving to a bigger office was fantastic.”
Both businesses have worked hard to get where they are now with some bright ideas to further improve their business. Helen expressed “We would like to take on more staff. We have a couple of volunteers now we would love to take them on full time.” While Nevenka talked about some events they have lined up “we are the main sponsor for East Yorkshire Business Expo and Silver Partners for Tech Week Humber.”
Report by Emily Bendelow