PEOPLE IN PRINT
Building nimble flexibility at Carbon8 Carbon8 co-founder and director Peter Musarra explains how the business has (and always will) adopt flexibility to stay head and shoulders ahead of the game, especially in a COVID-hit world
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arbon8 is going from strength to strength, having recently added a repertoire of four gold awards and a bronze award to its belt at the National Print Awards (NPAs) which took place late last year. As one of Sydney’s leading commercial printers, the company has taken a creative approach to keep its business going and its staff employed during COVID. AP spoke to its co-founder and director Peter Musarra about what makes the business tick.
Q: What is fuelling Carbon8’s recent upward momentum?
Peter Musarra (PM): Ultimately, it’s a deep passion for our craft and enjoying the fruits of our labours, having built a business that is robust and capable. There is a continued and growing appetite for beautiful things. Whether you’re a small start-up or a multinational brand, if you need to have a provider that can scope and execute reliably, there are less and less players in our space that can truly offer that. Carbon8 sees a fantastic opportunity to grow our client base rapidly serving them with a consistently better than industry-best standards.
Q: Can you tell us more about Carbon8’s recent wins in late 2021?
PM: 2021 was another hard year, navigating COVID and supply chain shocks, but we were lucky enough to win big at the NPAs and once again being recognised in the Power50. Winning our four gold awards at the NPAs was the most successful we had ever been and it’s always a point of pride
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to be recognised for our work. We serve some of the most ambitious and creative businesses one could hope to serve, that are constantly looking for that point of difference in their marketing materials. To have a physical printed piece, something tangible, that truly captures and represents a brand is a very powerful tool to engage customers with. We work with our clients, collaboratively, backed by our vast array of in-house machinery in many cases to keep producing innovative, engaging and above all else, effective print collateral that allows us to remain one of the most wellrespected print companies. We’re thankful each day that our clients entrust so much of their work with us but conscious that we can never take it for granted.
Q: What are some of the biggest growth areas for Carbon8 to date?
PM: We supply the property and development sectors, which was one of the key areas that re-emerged as COVID lockdowns eased. They have been strong buyers of our type of work that often requires tight timelines, as well as high quality with diverse and creative multi-piece solutions. During the last couple of years of COVID, we brought both case-making and section sewing in-house, largely as a response to this sector pushing for additional options and complexity. We continue to grow well in our wideformat division and are finding strong demand for the more unique capabilities we have such as printing onto woods, acrylics, fabrics, and book-binding cloths and SwissQ’s haptic printing ability. Having such formidable capability under
the one roof, we are supplying more to the trade as others search for a dependable provider that they can partner with to complement their operation. We continue to actively try to grow areas of our business that many others try to avoid as our strategy is to develop new unique offerings in the hope of avoiding the mass market where so many other larger players can dominate a smaller company such as ours.
Q: Looking back at Carbon8’s humble beginnings to what it has become today, is this the direction you envisioned for the business?
PM: On the surface, yes, maybe not necessarily manifesting in the scale and diversity of machinery. However, Carbon8 was forged some 14 years ago with creativity at its core. We saw a gaping hole in the market at the time. Most creatives worth their salt were struggling to find a print house that spoke their language and truly wanted and could bring their ideas to life. Ken [Kenneth Beck] and I set out then to serve that exact market and we are still doing that on a larger scale today.
Q: What have you had to do to steer change within the business, especially during COVID?
PM: Let’s face it, the last couple of years has been an absolute rollercoaster with just about every industry being belted one way then the other. Carbon8 wasn’t immune to this – our revenues were brutalised during lockdowns, which reflects how much our products support physical connections between people.
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