Frank Pisano of Bluefin on Trending Display Shapes and the Power of Partnerships

February 16, 2026 by guest author, Antonia Hamberger

Frank Pisano is one of the digital signage industry’s best-connected figures — the kind of CEO who seems to have endless energy for events, meetings, and networking. For the past three years, he’s been at the helm of Bluefin, a display manufacturer specializing in custom solutions and counting Walmart among its biggest customers.

When I recently interviewed him during the invidis Executive Club in Miami, Pisano emphasized the value of building a strong partner ecosystem and leveraging best-in-class solutions rather than trying to do everything alone. Most of Bluefin’s leads, he said, come through its partners. He also highlighted the company’s own manufacturing facility, which allows the Atlanta-based vendor to produce custom form factors in batch sizes that many larger manufacturers would consider too small.

Pisano sees strong potential in unique formats — stretch, circular, or square displays — as people grow a bit tired of always seeing 16:9 (except, of course, on this website). He also pointed to Bluefin’s system-on-chip strategy as a key driver, with a focus on higher-end compute options, including BrightSign as well as premium Android and Intel-based solutions.

Watch the full interview here or read the transcript below:

Transcript:

 Hi, Frank. How are you doing? Awesome. It’s great to see you. Good to see you too. Introduce yourself really quickly. I’m Frank Pisano, CEO of Bluefin International, and it’s it’s a pleasure to be here. Pleasure to have you. So Bluefin is a manufacturer of custom made displays. Yes. Your main vertical is retail.

I heard you saying that you’re expanding, you’re growing the team, but also retail effort has been struggling. Yeah, so retail is our largest vertical by far, but we are also expanding into a lot of the other verticals. Healthcare is one of our fastest growing verticals this year. Hospitality stadiums and arenas and airports.

Corporate communication, higher ed. There’s a lot of different growth areas for Bluefin. We do custom and we are known for custom. We do custom very well. And not a lot of companies would tackle custom because it’s, we could do things in smaller quantities since we own our own manufacturing facility.

However, we also do some core products too, which are, we can keep an inventory and we can get to POC really quick and we can fulfill a lot of smaller deals for our customer base as well. So when I see Bluefin, a trade shows is a lot of times these funky display formats, like round displays, I don’t know, funky colors.

I like ing. How important are those form factors or what’s, what are some trending form factors? I think unique or funky. I like how you say it as well. Yeah. I think unique is how people know us for sure. And that could be unique that we do small screens because not a lot of the bigger manufacturers are doing smaller screens.

Yeah. It could be stretch displays, which we do a ton of stretch displays. Okay. Circles and squares are fun. And they’re I like to say they’re sexy too. ’cause they go on a wall and they’re really eye catching. A lot of people are used to seeing their 16, nine formats. Yeah. But do actually, do customers actually want them?

Yes. We were doing a really good job, especially with somebody’s brand is either a circle or square. They were really embracing those. But even the uniqueness of what we offer that high-end system on a chip. So a lot of folks are moving to the system on a chip. We do system on a chip, but ours is just higher end.

It’s either a high end bright sign, okay. Or it’s a higher end Android platform or higher end intel platform. So it is still system on a chip, but it’s just putting in a lot more compute that can handle even some of the biggest challenges for HTML perform. I also saw you reintroduce the looping playback this year.

That kind of seems backward from a professional standpoint, but do customers still want this, that, or need that? So sometimes it could just be a fail safe if if they want to actually just, or they want to just limp into the digital signage and they just need some simple messaging before they really step up to the more commercialized professional. It’s just a change to our board. So it’s not much, it’s not much from our capacity Okay. To be able to do that. There’s no cost difference or any of those types of things. It’s just a nice fail safe for customers. And if somebody maybe doesn’t want to go into their content management software platform to do something and they just want a simple happy birthday Antonio type message with folks that don’t know enough about sign, it’s just a very easy thing for them to do.

Okay. You also put large formats right? Do you see many customers already switching to LED. Yeah. Oh, the LED’s definitely growing and we’re aware of that and we’re watching it closely. The large format screens is relatively new for Bluefin. We’re known for smaller screens. But our customer base was asking us to do the same thing we’re doing really well and that they love and adore about Bluefin, but just in larger and larger screens.

Okay. So there’s still demand for screens up to. Let’s see. So we’ll do five inches, no. Yeah. Sure. If we if the opportunity calls for it, we, since we manufacture all of our own stuff, we can get access to those panels. 55, 65, 75, 86. Those are very popular for us. Now, our premium format again, we could put in that high end compute.

We do a lot of touch. We can do things like unique again with higher brightness, more nits so we can really fulfill most of the needs of the, our customer base. So Frank, you’ve been in the industry for a long time. It’s an old joke that An old joke. No, but a lot of people in the industry know you.

I’m curious to know what do you think the industry is doing wrong or what’s something the industry as a whole could benefit from? I think part of that, I have been in the industry for over 25 years and I think I have more energy now than I ever have. It’s, and a lot of that visibly and a lot of that is the partner ecosystem that we’re dealing with.

If they’re operating in silos and they’re not working with the partner ecosystem, they’re making mistakes because most of the Bluefin’s leads are coming from those folks in the ecosystem. If it’s a CMS partner, infrastructure companies, content creation companies, they know what our value proposition is because we’re out there networking and, people deal with who they like in this industry.

Yeah. So make yourself available to learn and network with the great minds we have in the industry. You think that’s not going to change for the digital signage industry, even if it’s growing going forward because we have these large IT integrators coming into this space. But you think the digital signage industry is so unique, it requires the human connection?

It does, yes. Okay. There’s, obviously with the growth of AI is tremendous, but the human touch is so impactful in what we do, and you gotta partner with people that know what they’re doing. You can’t be a, a jack of all trades is hard in this industry because you have really best of class software providers, best of class content creators, best of class hardware manufacturers.

You have to go and use the best of the best to deploy the best solutions. Okay. Thank you, Frank. Thank you. Thank you. It was good seeing you. Always the pleasure.