16 minute read
75 YEAR ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL: KEITH FARREL
Don’t stop me now: Keith Ferrel
At 75, Cactus Imaging co-founder and general manager of operations Keith Ferrel reflects on his time in the industry including the importance of vision, risk-taking, continuous innovation and investments in automation
There’s no one in this industry quite like Keith Ferrel. At 75 years of age this year, he is one of the few remaining seniors that works fulltime – and he has no plans of stopping anytime soon. His peers describe him as a visionary; a calculated risk-taker; an extremely hardworking but humble person; a gentleman that wants to make a difference in the printing world.
Ferrel has also experienced it all in business – from helping start up a company in printing with no prior print knowledge, to being held at gunpoint when he demanded payment from a procrastinating client, visiting an international client during a coup, and seeing one of his sites impacted by tragedy.
The business, Cactus Imaging, is a huge part of his life, and having helped run it from its inception, he says it is one of his prides and joys. Ferrel, who is originally from New Zealand, has not only taken Cactus Imaging from strength to strength, but he has also come a long way since his foray into the world of print.
Widely recognised in Asia Pacific as one of the most influential people in the print industry, Ferrel has several accolades under his belt. A FESPA Hall of Fame inductee, Ferrel was also the 2014 FESPA World Printer of the Year and the 2021 Media Super Lifetime Achievement Award winner.
In addition, Ferrel has constantly topped the ProPrint Awards list since 2022 –he won the Printer 50 category in 2022, came runner-up in 2023, and topped the list again in 2024.
“People think I’m a visionary but to me, it’s just business sense. You’ve got to have foresight and take advantage of opportunities; otherwise, you’re just wasting time. But you’ve got to know when to jump off the bus and jump back on another one,” Ferrel said.
Early beginnings
Ferrel co-founded Cactus Imaging in Auckland in 1992, together with Warwick Spicer. The duo met when Spicer was CEO of the now-defunct Auckland Star, while Ferrel was group sales director. The idea of starting a business emerged when Spicer was intrigued by electrostatic printing technology at a tradeshow when looking to buy a newspaper press. He found the technology to have commercial potential and approached Ferrel with the proposition.
Ferrel bought into the idea and they both set the business up in Auckland. At that time, Ferrel was only 42 years old, and Spicer was 54 – with no prior printing experience whatsoever.
“We ended up buying an electrostatic printer, which was the first of its kind in the southern hemisphere, and potentially the first outside of the US,” Ferrel said.
However, after 12 months of running the company, the pair realised the New Zealand market alone was not big enough for what they were anticipating for the business. So, they made the big move to Sydney in 1993 and set up the sales arm of Cactus Imaging Australia. Their New Zealand operations was printing what they were selling in Australia.
“We got to the stage where we were selling more in Australia and printing in New Zealand, than printing and selling in New Zealand,” Ferrel said.
They also saw the potential for paper billboards, which was very common back then, to be replaced by vinyl. After researching Vutek vinyl printing technology in 1995 and meeting Dan Griesemer, whose company, Impact Imaging, was doing grand-format vinyl printing, the pair decided to play in that space – which was largely dominated by MMT in Australia.
However, as Cactus Imaging didn’t have sufficient funds for a vinyl printer, Spicer and Ferrel outsourced production to Impact Imaging. Very quickly, the vinyl billboards business skyrocketed, and the duo were soon looking to own their own 3.5m Vutek Sprayjet in Australia.
Griesemer took a 50 per cent stake in Cactus Imaging and helped Spicer and Ferrel establish a full-scale production plant at Lane Cove, Sydney, in 1996.
With the new Vutek Sprayjet installed in Australia, Cactus was able to introduce seven-day turnarounds.
“When we were printing on vinyl billboards in America, turnarounds were between six to eight weeks. But, when we got a machine here, we could turn them around in a week. It was a game-changer,” Ferrel recalled.
“I still remember the very first billboard that we printed – for Balmain Rugby Leagues Club. It was about an 8m by 3m billboard, and it took nearly six and a half hours to print.”
Have bag, will travel
Cactus Imaging’s expansion into Asia followed shortly when it purchased machinery through the now-defunct Israeli-based NUR. Cactus owned the second NUR Blueboard HiQ Plus machine in the world, which was also an Asia Pacific first.
The NUR rep at that time, suggested Cactus Imaging go offshore to which Ferrel replied, “We’re only just starting to make headway here, let alone go anywhere else”. The rep then suggested a joint venture.
Austrade helped Ferrel and Spicer organise appointments with potential joint venture partners right through Asia, including India, Pakistan, and the Middle East. In 2000, they eventually signed a deal with Chennai’s Bee Vee Graphics to set up what Ferrel said was India’s first digital grand-format operation.
“It just went off from there. Then came about this opportunity in Pakistan with a company called Lakson Tobacco, through Philip Morris. We thought we could service Pakistan using our Indian factory, not knowing the feud between India and Pakistan,” Ferrel said, candidly.
“I’m not going to tell you exactly what we did to get around it; they’d probably hunt me down.”
Another memorable incident for Ferrel was when a Pakistani client owed the company money and was procrastinating to pay. When Ferrel visited his operations in India, he decided to make the trip over to Karachi to retrieve what this client owed him.
“They lied that they’d got the money, not realising I was in India and was only an hour and a half flight away. I landed there that afternoon, got a cab from the airport to the hotel, and he gave me a cheque. The deal was for cash,” Ferrel said.
“I was furious and got closer to him. The next thing I knew, I had a shotgun to my head. I ended up getting the money anyway, but the challenge then was getting US$50,000 through the Karachi airport. Those days, we had to be at the airport five hours before a flight, so I checked in and hid in the toilet.
“They kept calling my name and I exited the toilet at the last minute possible and told the airport staff I had been violently ill. They put me on a buggy and raced me through customs and onto the plane.
“On the plane, I thought to myself, ‘I have all this money on me, how am I going to manage when I disembark in India?’ Thankfully I had been going in and out of the country so often that the guy at customs knew me and let me through quickly.”
After six years in India, just as Ferrel was returning to Sydney from visiting its Chennai operations, tragedy struck. Ferrel knew something was off when Spicer was at the Sydney Airport to receive him.
“Warwick was at the airport and as soon as he saw me, he said ‘mate, go home and get changed because you’re getting back on a plane this afternoon to Chennai – the place is six metres under water,” Ferrel said.
“The Chennai site was backed onto a river and there had been huge storms. The banks had broken, affecting the entire industrial area including our factory. It was an absolute disaster.”
As nothing was salvageable, the company lodged an insurance claim, which he calls the biggest insurance payout in Chennai of that time, because Cactus Imaging was insured for loss of business as well.
Cactus Imaging saw no reason to rebuild the business, so it sold its stake in the joint venture and exited India. The Pakistani business also drifted off.
Through its time, Cactus Imaging serviced clients in other Asian countries as well, including Malaysia, Singapore, and Cambodia.
“When I was doing some work for a company called Sena Jaya in Singapore, its boss Simon Loong was talking to someone named Calvin Pereira in Cambodia – I had not even heard of the country at that time!” Ferrel said.
“Calvin was using MMT in Malaysia to print his billboards, so Simon suggested he use Cactus Imaging. Calvin was happy to meet me for a chat, so I jumped on a plane not knowing anything about Cambodia, apart from it being about two hours away from Singapore by flight.
“When I got on the plane, you wouldn’t believe it. I was the only person in civilian clothes. The rest were in army uniform. When we landed in Phnom Penh, it was right in the middle of a bloody coup!
“I disembarked the plane and didn’t have to clear customs or anything. There was a car at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for me. I got into the car and surprisingly ended up at the royal palace in Cambodia. Phnom Penh Media was owned by representatives of the royal family at that time, so I stayed at the palace and met with someone named Dien Douk, whose father was the King of Cambodia.”
Cactus Imaging still retains Phnom Penh Media as a client to today, with Ferrel and Douk becoming good friends –he was even invited to Douk’s wedding.
Australia the cash cow
All eyes were on Cactus Imaging’s growth, and in 2007, Ferrel and Spicer received an acquisition proposal from New Zealand private equity company, Knox Investment Partners, also a major shareholder in Opus Group. Knox Investment Partners had previously purchased Cactus Imaging’s New Zealand operations.
“Warwick and I didn’t want to sell the Australian business as it was our cash cow. The business was doing very, very well so we refused their first offer,” Ferrel said.
However, when the investment firm came back with a counteroffer, it was a deal they could not refuse. By this time, Spicer was close to retirement age – he left the business within a week of its purchase by Knox Investment while Ferrel and Nigel Spicer (Warwick’s son) continued with the business.
“Warwick’s leadership, his business acumen, his inspiration, and more importantly, his continued friendship has had such an enormous impact on both my life and career,” Ferrel said.
Opus Group went on to purchase several other top printers of its time including McPherson’s Printing in Melbourne, CanPrint in Canberra, and Ligare in Sydney. However, Opus started facing revenue declines.
“When this happened, several of Opus’ acquisitions including Cactus Imaging were ‘bailed out’ by CK Lau in Hong Kong. Following that, he put Cactus Imaging up for sale as large format wasn’t his thing and he wanted to focus on book printing, which was more in tune with the offerings of Ligare and McPherson’s Printing,” Ferrel said.
“I discussed it with Brendon Cook, the founder and then CEO of oOh!media before he retired, and the company bought Cactus Imaging for a very good price. This provided, and still provides today, surety supply and reinvestment in equipment for Cactus Imaging.”
At the forefront of technology
With such a strong history backing it, Cactus Imaging has become a market leader today. It owned – and owns – the latest and greatest printing and finishing equipment and has spent millions on automation to support its clients and staff.
Previously, along with the NUR Blueboard HiQ Plus machine, Cactus Imaging had a few other firsts when it came to technology. The innovation-forward business owned the world’s first HP Scitex TurboJet 8500, fourth HP Scitex XP5100, and second HP Scitex XP5500 in its heyday.
It was also the first in the southern hemisphere to go from solvent to UV.
In more recent years, Cactus Imaging purchased the southern hemisphere’s first Durst Rho 512R roll-to-roll UV-curable printer in 2017 and a high-speed Durst P5 350 HS D4 hybrid press in 2023, which was also the second one in the world. Cactus Imaging also recently invested more than €300,000 in a new MIS system with Durst last year.
In 2019, Cactus Imaging installed Australia’s first Fujifilm Acuity Ultra 5044, one of the first five of its generation in the world. It also installed its predecessor, the Fujifilm Acuity Ultra, in 2018, also as an Australian first. The Fujifilm Acuity R2 was installed at Cactus Imaging in 2023 – the first of several installations for this technology following its showcase at FESPA Munich that year.
In 2020, Cactus Imaging also installed an Australian-first Fotoba trimmer.
“We’re always at the forefront of technology. One of our big benefits – which has been built up over years of trust and working with manufacturers – is our ability to help them help us. We’ve been to beta sites, we’ve tested various equipment, and we’ve always put our toes in the water where new technology is involved,” Ferrel said.
“Because of this trust, we can sometimes gain knowledge of what technologies are in the works from manufacturers, which allows us to forward plan.
“I’m not interested in going to tradeshows and buying what anybody else can buy today because we bought that two years ago. What I’m looking at is the manufacturers’ future inventory because we don’t just want to be competitive; we want to be market leaders.”
A prime example of Cactus Imaging’s market leadership is the development of its environmentally friendly printing option for outdoor advertising billboard skins, where the substrate is not only recycled, but turned back into boards for use again. Led by Nigel Spicer, Cactus Imaging partners with Gale Pacific on these projects.
This idea started taking root in 2019, when Cactus Imaging developed Smart Skins –a world first outdoor advertising banner –in conjunction with oOh!media. Smart Skins allowed the substrate to be turned into high grade polymer products like park benches and bollards when no longer needed.
“We’ve been working on our environmentally friendly printing option for more than 10 years and we’re 98 per cent of the way there. Unless you’re doing things like these, you’re going to be yesterday’s man,” Ferrel said.
Ferrel has no intentions of stopping or retiring, saying he is more focused than ever and wants to pass on his immense knowledge and experience to the industry.
“I love what I do, the people I work with, and this industry. I’d hate to put it in all this work for nothing and hopefully, others can benefit from it. I’m still going at this age because it’s mind over matter for me. Maybe one day I’ll wake up and think I’ve had enough, but until then, I’ve got more than enough enthusiasm to want to be a part of print,” he said.
Having been in the industry for 33 years, Ferrel said the growth of innovation and technological shifts in print has been “mind boggling”.
“In the past, your machines would allow you to print for one segment of the industry. They were also slower and lacked in detail and quality for prints,” Ferrel said.
“Machines today are super-fast, allow us to print on a variety of substrates, are so detailed in their print quality, have short changeover times, and allow us to play in markets we haven’t done before.
“For example, our Durst P5 allows for hapt printing – you can use it to print braille and raised effects and its many other features. We’ve just completed a big job for an artist using the hapt feature, and the prints will go into the New York Art Gallery.”
What’s also happening is the growth of digital billboards – but Ferrel finds it’s not as bad as some make it out to be.
“Digital billboards haven’t impacted anywhere near as much as people think.
I don’t deny there is growth in digital outdoor, but that has given recognition to outdoor media. So, while there are fewer static billboards now, the volume of changeouts of static ads have increased, allowing printers to produce more,” Ferrel said.
“One of the advantages of static billboards is it’s availability 24/7. Digital billboards rotate advertising, so each ad is only shown for about 10 seconds at a time,” he said.
“You can drive past your billboard on a freeway five times a day for five days and never see your ad. Also, with static billboards, research shows retention rates are much higher than with digital billboards.”
Social endeavours
Ferrel’s efforts extend beyond the doors of Cactus Imaging. He gives back to industry and society, plays as hard as he works, and makes sure he sets aside time for family.
“I’ve reached a stage in life where I have the experience to give back. If I keep everything to myself, there’s no legacy left. My knowledge is there to spread so hopefully others can be better, or better equipped,” he said.
Within the industry, Ferrel advocates for Women in Print, the FESPA Future Leaders Program, and the ASGA apprenticeships and traineeships programs, to name a few.
He was also a past HP Customer Advisory board member, past board chairman of the Asia Pacific Japan Dscoop board, is currently a board member of the Asia Pacific Japan Dscoop board, and a current board member of FESPA Australia.
Cactus Imaging supports Camp Quality, Cure Our Kids, the Endeavour Foundation, and the Humpty Dumpty Foundation, along with many other charities. Ferrel, who loves his rugby, has also made sure the company backs charities founded by former Wallabies including the George Gregan Foundation and Matt Rogers’ charity, 4 ASD Kids.
A true sports lover, Ferrel also has a soft spot for horse racing – he currently owns far too many racehorses but has been lucky enough to have a Melbourne Cup runner.
“Three of them recently raced at Rosehill, and all three came second. I guess that’s better than nothing,” he said with a chuckle.
The family-focused man also finds himself spending valuable time with his family.
“My family is everything to me. I’ve been married for 43 years now, have an amazingly supportive wife, three wonderful daughters and four beautiful grandchildren,” he added.
