Joan Interview: From E-Paper Pioneer to Workplace Platform

Joan Interview: From E-Paper Pioneer to Workplace Platform

Joan Workplace, the company long known for its wireless e-paper meeting room displays, is now reaching for something much smaller than its first product: a 4-inch wearable e-paper badge. But co-founder Luka Birsa told invidis that the badge matters less as a gadget than as a marker of what Joan has become. The company, which traces its roots to Visionect's early e-paper experiments inspired by consumer readers like the Amazon Kindle, is increasingly becoming a workplace software company that happens to use e-paper exceptionally well. "We were the antithesis of the spaceship-like systems available at the time," Birsa said, recalling how Joan built its reputation on simplicity while rivals sold expensive, wired and hard-to-manage booking systems. A bakery or dental clinic considering any screen-based workflow — a greeting by the door, a status board in the back office — can start on ordinary televisions.

From booking screens to a full workplace stack

The company's scale, as it reports it, has grown with that ambition. It serves around 5,000 customers worldwide, has shipped roughly 100,000 e-paper devices, operates in more than 100 countries, employs about 80 people and generates more than €10 million in annual revenue.

Then the pandemic redrew office life, and Joan's product map followed. What began as meeting-room management expanded into desk booking, visitor management, employee communications and workplace content management, with the stated mission of improving the daily working life of over 10 million employees worldwide — a goal Birsa frames as removing friction from everyday workplace interactions.

The company's center of gravity moved from elegantly designed hardware to software. The result is Joan Workplace, an integrated platform connecting meeting rooms, desks, visitors, digital signage and employee communications. In that frame, the new e-paper badge is simply the latest endpoint in a larger ecosystem.

Unlike a traditional ID card, the badge pairs its e-paper display with Bluetooth and NFC, and sits fully inside Joan's software stack with wireless updates. Visitors receive reusable credentials that refresh automatically from the visitor management system; employees swap plastic access cards for dynamic badges; event organizers update attendee details and schedules live, with Joan pointing to events of 150 to 500 attendees as the sweet spot.

Low-cost e-paper badges already exist in parts of Asia. Joan's bet is that European and North American buyers want an enterprise-grade solution, pointing to design, security, support and ease of use rather than competing purely on hardware price.

Joan received more than a dozen design awards across its portfolio in 2026 alone, including Red Dot and German Design Awards.

"Our industry has spent a long time asking how big and how bright a screen can get," Birsa said. "The more interesting question now is how many surfaces a building needs to show what's true, and how few of them should need a cable."