Continued from page 19 Packaging’s Potential: There’s No Containing It brands and products, assuming that’s a book of business they want to pursue. It becomes an opportunity. Let’s say they’re doing work for clients in the fashion or gift business. They’re doing their clients’ data sheets, their sell sheets, or their direct mail. But now they can do some gift boxes, some test boxes, some prototype boxes. Consumer markets are all about promotions. You constantly need to refresh, coming up with new ideas . . . Digital fits in quite well.” There is another reason digital print technology serves the newly emerging packaging marketplace so well, Johnson added. That’s the ability to be just in time. “With that ability, you’re able to print at the right time, at the right location, for the right promotion, and with the right quantity,” he said. Label Makers Those commercial printers seeking an entry into printing labels might want to consider the products of Plymouth, MN-based Primera Technology, Inc. The company is a maker of many kinds of printing equipment, but its bread-and-butter products are label printers and applicators, said product manager Amber Jechort. Primera’s CX1200 Color Label Press is purchased by many commercial printers, and the FX1200 Digital Finishing System is the pair to that machine. The former is the printer printing on a continuous roll, while the latter laminates, digitally die cuts, and removes the matrix slit up to seven rolls and rewinds. “No dies are necessary,” Jechort said. “The advantage is that they don’t have to make or purchase dies for each individual client. They have the flexibility to make virtually any size or shape label. Another benefit of having a digital die cut is not being forced to turn away smaller jobs, where the ROI would otherwise not be there. The flexibility and low cost are the advantages to printers.” To be sure, not every printing industry expert is sold on the notion that packaging provides substantial opportunity to commercial printers. Among those not impressed is Mark Hanley, president of IT Strategies in Boston Of the potential to pursue folding carton printing, he observed, “The problem there is that it is contracted out, and it’s so low priced, that there’s nothing new about printing folding carton. It’s nice, but why weren’t you there 20 years ago? It’s sheet offset printing, and that’s a market where there is no bottom to the price. It’s a strictly commodity play, in my opinion, and short run is done very nicely by offset most of the time.” Nor is Hanley inclined to look upon what he calls “micro-runs,” of perhaps 50 or 100 copies intended for test or prototype packages, with any additional favor. “There are Xerox and Indigo machines that do those,” he reported. “It’s around the periphery. It’s not a mainstream play. The lower threshold of sheet offset is so low that many say, 600-unit runs, could be done offset.” He does acknowledge, however, that in every market there has been more demand for short run with every passing year. “That’s causing some shift away from high-volume analog printers for, say, folding carton,” he said. “Some markets are going more to short run, and in some cases that will give advantages to smaller printers without massive overhead. So I can see how some market might shift from large printers to small printers in the offset market,” Hanley said. To conclude, packaging is a very dynamic industry, with a great deal of change and dramatic innovation continually being introduced to the industry. “It’s not easy to get into,” Karstedt said. “But if they can do it effectively, it can be a significant new revenue stream.” MyPRINTResource.com Quick Printing | April 2015 35
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