STAR BUSINESS
In conversation with GENR8 Printing’s Yianni Moratidis GENR8 Printing director Yianni Moratidis is a popular industry player, recognised for helping businesses see how harnessing the power of social media can promote print. An advocate for self-learning on YouTube, he also produces videos to inform and entertain, so it is not surprising that he first started out his career in entertainment. Moving into the printing industry seemed a natural progression for this can-do entrepreneur, who owns four businesses in Newcastle and keeps expanding. Here he elaborates on this, and more, in this Q&A with ProPrint editor Colleen Bate. pretty confident that my printing business would take off.
Q. WHAT EQUIPMENT HAVE YOU PURCHASED SINCE STARTING OUT? A. I purchased an Accurio press C2060 from Konica Minolta, and then a Duplo DC-646 cutter creaser, and turned to YouTube to learn how to operate them. I think in today’s market, if you’re prepared to learn and educate yourself you can do anything. I wanted to try and automate as much as I could because I was a one-man operation and only had two staff members in entertainment, servicing both businesses.
GENR8 Printing director Yianni Moratidis is a mover and a shaker
Q.
HOW DID YOU BECOME AN OWNER OF A PRINTING COMPANY?
A. Peter Young and I started out playing covers every Friday and Saturday in pubs and clubs in Newcastle and formed in 2001 a band called Genr8. In 2007 I started GENR8Performing Arts because I’ve grown up singing and dancing from a young age, and purchased a building that was to become the performing arts facility. Then, in 2008 I started GENR8Entertainment which has since grown from strength to strength transforming into Newcastle’s premier music agency. We currently represent 35 venues in the Newcastle, Hunter Valley and Port Stephens areas, and we book 60 of the region’s top entertainers exclusively. Something I noticed at that time was that the posters advertising various gigs at each of the pubs were presented in
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different sizes and orientations, which I thought looked unprofessional. To solve the problem, I bought a copy of CorelDRAW and taught myself how to use it. I’d bought an HP DesignJet four-colour printer in 2008 and then went on to buy an HP multifunction printer which could print four colours. I started making templates so that I could produce posters that would feature functions and gigs that were coming up for the whole month and would have the same look. This picked up momentum, and I was producing posters for all my venues. 10 years later, newly married and having just completed the renovation of my wife’s hairdressing salon, I decided to become more involved in printing and founded GENR8 Printing. I discovered that the printing franchise in Newcastle at that time couldn’t cater to my needs. With all the pubs and clubs I serviced, I already had a large client base to target, so was
The next thing I set my sights on was mesh printing, after requesting a quote for an upcoming event from a local signwriting shop that only got back to me long after the event, held at one of my iconic Newcastle venues, had finished! When I visited Visual Impact that year, looking to produce mesh banners, I purchased an HP Latex 365 from Quadient (which has since been taken over by Smartech Business Systems) along with a cutter and a Graphtec machine. Things were ticking away nicely, and at the end of 2019 I could see the potential of working in the printing industry and purchased another building, an old engineering site. I could see so much potential in Newcastle – as well as the pubs and clubs I run, there are about 200 licensed pubs and around 187 vineyards in the Hunter Valley, so I figured that if I just got 10 per cent of these businesses on board, I would be doing well. The settlement of the building was due to be completed by the end of March 2020, and so I purchased an HP R1000 which could be housed in the new building and
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