BRECKENRIDGE — They are invisible, operating in darkness. But their work is unavoidable.
“We are ghosts. We execute and disappear,” said Grant Leasia, whose family owns Denver-based EPS Doublet.
The company does more than design, build, install and tear down every piece of logoed signage for the Tour de France, most Olympics and all five years of the USA Pro Challenge.
The 23-year-old global company, with offices around the world and 86 employees in Denver, designs and builds infrastructure, railings and kiosks. It has crafted, constructed and installed every sign, banner, display and flag — for sponsors, spectators and athletes — at Olympics in Atlanta, Sydney, Salt Lake City, Vancouver and London.
Creating and installing flags for the Olympics, by the way, is a $3 million deal.
EPS Doublet is the brand partner for every Tour de France since 2002. The company has the patent on those ubiquitous slanted barriers that flank finish lines at bike races across the world.
The company does about $45 million in business every year, and the Denver office generates $20 million of that.
It started when Leasia’s father, Jon, the company’s chief and founder, began making racing signage for Colorado ski areas in the 1980s as part of a side gig for the ski luggage company Athalon.
A few years after he formed EPS — Event Promotion Supply — he bid to design, build and install all signage, banners and crowd control infrastructure for the Atlanta Summer Olympics in 1996.
He won half the bid. The other half went to the century-old French signage company Doublet. The two companies merged shortly after, creating an international firm with more than 300 employees across Europe and Colorado.
The company branched beyond signs about a decade ago. Today it’s a leader in experiential marketing. EPS Doublet designs and builds customized, pop-up interactive displays for the marketing agencies that represent global companies such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Jaguar and Nintendo.
In the company’s 150,000-square-foot warehouse in east Denver, wood and steel fabrication teams work with engineers and graphic designers to give form to the dreams of creative types tasked with buoying their brands.
When the tourism bureau in Miami wanted to build a temporary hotel pool deck — with palm trees, cabanas and bikini models — in New York City’s Union Square, EPS Doublet made it happen.
The company rented tankers in New Jersey, filled them with water and let them sit in the sun for three days so the water would be warm for the models. Workers built the 12,000-gallon pool in Denver and shipped it to New York. EPS Doublet crews installed it, filled it with water and then tore it down in a single day.
The company designed and built a life-sized replica of the Super Mario 3-D Land video game in New York’s Time Square — complete with sound-activated trampolines and paint-spitting piranhas — to celebrate the 2011 launch of the game for Nintendo.
The display took four months to design and build. Workers installed it in six hours, opened it for eight hours and tore it down in four hours.
“Our role is to make these off-the-wall ideas come to life,” said company vice president Sean Matthews, a lifelong friend of Grant Leasia’s who came to the company in 2008 after a career as a youth minister.
The challenge is more than making the napkin-sketched ideas of creative dreamers a reality, Matthews said.
“When someone says, ‘Hey, build a hotel swimming pool in downtown New York City,’ we can do that. But what do you charge them?” he said. “Where do you even begin pricing something like that?”
As the sun set Aug. 20 in Breckenridge, Leasia directed a team of 37 employees. They built the time trial starting house in preparation for Stage 5 of the Pro Challenge, lined the pavement with special logos and installed the slanted barriers that become thunder-makers when slapped by thousands of fans.
“This town, this is our toughest location,” Leasia said.
It’s the wind. Every structure he erects in Breckenridge is engineered to sustain 85 mph winds.
“You evacuate most towns when winds hit 60 mph,” he said.
When the finish team retired to bed after midnight, the start team was getting to work in Loveland, preparing for Saturday’s Stage 6. It was 24 hours of perpetual motion. When a team was tearing down in one town, a second team was installing in another place.
“If you see anything that gives you a message in this race, we made it,” Leasia said.
EPS Doublet helped Pro Challenge sponsors with their interactive efforts to engage race spectators. It helped design the mini-lounge Clif Bar atop Independence Pass. It designed, installed and moved Pearl Izumi’s vast retail tent every night, setting it up every day in each host city.
“Look at this. It’s an actual store. Those guys set up the flooring, the shelves, the changing room, and tomorrow it will be in Fort Collins and it will look exactly the same,” said Don Meyer, Pearl Izumi’s sports marketing manager, while a dozen festivalgoers shopped for Pro Challenge-branded merchandise in Breckenridge.
Meyer visited the EPS Doublet fabrication and production facility earlier this year as crews designed and created the Pearl Izumi tent.
“Just seeing what that company is capable of is nothing short of freaking amazing,” Meyer said.
Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374, jblevins@denverpost.com or
