Making Lasting Memories

Company transfers photographs, video into digital format

By Ryan Carter, Staff Writer

Article Launched: 09/19/2008 09:58:24 PM PDT

It is no accident that Nick Daze and James Meyer are participating in the Alzheimer’s Association’s 16th annual Memory Walk in October. Their business is about keeping memories alive.

The 24-year-old La Ca ada Flintridge residents started Life Preserver Digital Archiving two years ago after finding a demand among family members and extended family to put their photographs and video on digital formats.

Since then, they’ve left the small apartment bedroom they used for the business and purchased their first retail office last year in Lincoln Heights. And the business has grown to 15 employees, who provide a series of digital transferring services - from taking old photos out of your attic and transferring them to a computer disc to putting old 8mm films on DVD.

“As the world is going digital, we wanted to make sure that the past wouldn’t get left behind,” said Meyer, who founded Life Preserver with Daze, a friend from Loyola High School.

So far, they are keeping up with that increasingly digital world’s demand.

They raked in about $225,000 in revenue this year and are on track to grow that next fiscal year, they said. And they are looking into expanding beyond a service area that already includes cities between Santa Barbara and San Diego.

The goal is to combine their interest in business and technology with a socially responsible form of entrepreneurship, which was a part of their Jesuit education at Loyola, they said.

Daze describes himself as a “tech-nerd” who worked at Apple for three years.

There, he gained critical experience with multimedia, which he said he coupled with his English studies at USC.

Meyer gained critical experience in running an organization through his business studies at Brown University and helping to start an orphanage in East Africa.

Ultimately, the ability to communicate their business’ message in a simple way was key, Daze said.

“We like to make the technology not scary,” Daze said.

The idea of taking people’s memories - their original photos - and digitizing them can be scary, he said, adding that they’ve worked out a digitizing process over two years in which high-tech scanners can churn out thousands of high-quality photos a week.

“If we don’t do it gracefully, that can be a very jarring transition for some people,” he said of the process of communicating what the business does.

That process has gained some fans as the fledgling business grows.

“They make you feel like they want to be part of your family and do this right for you,” said Cindy McLoughlin, a Pasadena resident who had the firm digitize family videos.

The firm is hoping to gain more fans through the Alzheimer’s Association event, which for them was a natural fit, they said. Both have been touched by the disease.

Daze’s great grandmother suffered from the disease, and they had a client who, while in the process of having photos digitized, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

“That was kind of a real eye-opening experience,” Daze said. “We sat down and looked at them and realized these were people literally losing their memories.”

So, working with the association became a goal.

On Oct. 5 at the association’s annual Memory Walk, Life Preserver will have a booth set up, offering free scans of up to 20 photos of a loved one. They urged participants to bring photos of a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease.

The event is an extension of the social entrepreneurship that the pair tried to establish from the beginning, they said.

“It’s about devising a way to bake into everything you do good will and integrating that into our company makeup from the beginning,” Meyer said.