The 1%: why Epic started as a safety-film company

Here is a number worth knowing before you buy security film: Epic is roughly one percent of this industry. The other ninety-nine percent are good people in a business that is easy to get into — a roll of film, a squeegee, a van — and hard to do well. Most of them came up tinting cars and homes, and most of them do that well. Nobody taught them security film as a separate trade, because the industry does not teach it. Manufacturers make the product; the trade is left to whoever buys the roll. Security film is a structural product, and the day it has to work is the worst day a building will have — but it arrives like every other film, a roll and a data sheet, and it gets installed like one. The difference does not show until the day it matters.

That is not a criticism of installers. It is the reason Epic exists. We were built the other way around: a safety-film company first, by a founder who has practiced construction his whole life, grew up around the trades, spent twelve years building custom motorcycles frame-up, is a licensed glazier and has installed film with his own hands — a jack of all trades by his own description, which turns out to be exactly what security film needed — and we became a window film company later, and good at that too.

Every job was designed

After the embassy bombings of the late 1990s and then 9/11, Chris Eder’s company put security film and attachment systems on federal buildings across the country — the EPA’s Federal Triangle headquarters, HUD, the Department of State, the Prettyman Courthouse, Sheppard Air Force Base, embassies in Rome and Malta and the ambassador’s residences in Luxembourg and Vatican City.

None of it was “hang film and leave.” Every opening was engineered with Applied Research Associates — ARA, the blast-engineering group in Vicksburg, Mississippi, whose engineers went on to write the industry’s blast-resistant design guides — and the attachment system Chris invented, the first of its kind for blast mitigation, became the standard the GSA still references.

Some of it was improvised on site. At the EPA building in Cincinnati, a two-story glass entry could not be protected by film alone, so Chris designed a stainless-steel cable system that ran from the third floor to the basement through the window frames; the film and attachment went on over it, so that if the glass ever let go, the cables would catch the frames themselves.

The blind that survived six explosions

The piece of that era Chris is proudest of is the one that sounds least dramatic: a mini-blind.

Older federal windows often had glass that could take only daylight film — not thick security film. Chris took a standard two-inch mini-blind, ran a stainless-steel cable beside the lift cords, and built a header and base rail on springs. In a blast, the blind caught the glass and the film and forced the debris back out of the building instead of into the room. It was the only blast-catching product that could be used again after being blown up.

The U.S. ran live blast tests on it. The British government brought Chris over to run their own: six live shots, the glass replaced six times, the same blinds every time. He patented the design and, when he retired from that company in 2005, assigned the patent to it.

Why this matters on your campus

Because the habit never left. Epic Precision — our proprietary cutting workflow — exists because Chris does not believe a safety film should be measured and trimmed by hand in a corridor. The Epic Method — a structural silicone attachment on all four sides — exists because film that is not anchored to the frame is a daylight film with a security label. Godley ISD’s officers met “a significant delay in forced entry” at our glass — their words — because the system was designed, not hung.

Anyone can buy the same 3M roll we do; we are glad they do, because the film is excellent. What does not come on the roll is three decades of designing for the day the glass gets hit — and a founder who has set the windows themselves. Most people do not realize how a window is held in a building: a few screws through the frame and a bead of caulk. That is fine for wind and rain. It is not an answer for forced entry or blast, and an installer who has never set a window has no way of knowing it. Epic knows, because we have done both.

Chris puts it more simply. He does not call himself a salesman; he calls himself a solutions provider. He solves problems and invents systems — the cable entry in Cincinnati, the blast blind, the attachment method, the cutting workflow — and says he probably should have been an engineer. Every Solutions Advisor at Epic carries that title for the same reason: the job is to solve the building’s problem, not to sell it a roll of film.

You can read the founders’ story on Our Story and see the federal project list on the Government page.

How Epic installs security film