Industry Influencer
www.parkworld-online.com
BIG on FUN
Apple Industries’ CEO Allen Weisberg tells Park World editor Becci Knowles about his life in the entertainment industry and how Face Place and Print Budii have changed the way FEC’s, theme parks and other visitor attractions view the humble photo booth today.
W
hen I was growing up, you only went to a photo booth when you needed a serious looking head and
shoulders shot for a passport or driving licence. Now it’s a form of entertainment. How did this happen and more importantly, how did individuals like Allen Weisberg make it happen? To answer that question, we need to go back a generation…. “I got into the industry because my dad was in
it. I like to say that from the moment I was born I was in the industry,” says Allen. “After World War Two he went to school to study design, electronics and mechanical engineering, and later started a route business in New York. He was a very good technician. “Back in those days, business was done in bars
and restaurants – jukeboxes were the only music and games were the only entertainment. At five years old I was already going with him to fix the machines. Over time as the business grew I got to meet lots of interesting people.” When Allen was was eight or nine his father became a consultant to many of the factories in Chicago. “I would fly out there with him and that’s when I got my first feel of what the industry was really like,” he says. By the time he was 13, Allen was going into pizza places and selling them small games machines, “which my dad encouraged me to do” and by the time he was16, he’d already built his first game machine “with my own bare hands”. It’s perhaps no surprise then that by his early twenties, Allen had his own route business in New York and within a couple of years, 10 arcades to his name throughout the city. “At this time I also touched on the payphone business,” he says, with “over 4,000 pay phones out on the street.”
38 Despite all of this, the thing that always stuck
in Allen’s mind, was his first experience of the photo booth business. When he was around six years old his dad took him to meet a man called Albert Simon, a games distributor. “I always remember he said two things to me: ‘number one, whatever your dad has achieved be proud of it, and number two, this is no business, wanna see a real business?’ he said.” And with that, he took Allen in a freight elevator down below the showroom to see people selling photo booths. Photo booths, he told Allen, were a great investment as they paid for themselves in about a year.
Allen continued his route businesses until the
90’s, when game rooms and arcades started to drop off and he was struggling with a family to support, he remembered the conversation he’d had with Albert Simon all those years earlier. Deciding that photo booths were the way to go, he made contact with a company in Japan which manufactured sticker machines and before long he was the exclusive distributor for NEO Print in North and South America. And when they later went bust, Face Place, was born. Apple’s Face Place division now includes the
following popular brand names: Face Place Deluxe, Photo Studio Deluxe, Photo Studio Prism, Scene Machine, Movie booth, Outdoor Booth, Sapphire, Photo2Go, Photo Studio Station, Wedding Booth, Magazine Me and its latest addition, The MARVEL Adventure Lab - all of which are designed have fun in and are increasingly popular in FEC’s, theme parks and other leisure sites. Print Budii meanwhile, is the name of the new Apple Industries’ division dedicated to digital photo printing via self-service kiosks.
FEBRUARY 2019
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