Wide-Format & Signage | September 2019

SEPTEMBER 2019

36 Beware

of Dog: Automation and Wide-Format Printing 48 W eb2Fabric: Lessons Learned 56 New

in Technical Textiles: Smart Diapers, Lava Suits, and More

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Convergence? Diversification? Whatever is it, WhatTheyThink has it covered.

E

very year in the industry there seems to arise a popular buzzword that gets used - and maybe even a bit overused. Some years ago it was “transpromo.” Another year it was “marketing services provider.”

“Digital transformation,” “synergy” and others come to mind.

This year, the buzzword appears to be “convergence.” The term is used to indicate the “convergence” of seemingly disparate services under the auspices of one service provider. While it may be more accurate to call this phenomenon the diversification of offerings provided by service providers, it is nevertheless being used to indicate the long-held trend of printers offering more services to their customers and even reaching new customers by producing new types of printing. Many have already commented on this, including our own Frank Romano in one of his famous Friday morning videos.

It seems to me that some may be confusing two things: Printers’ businesses and a new trade show. While putting everything under one roof is indeed “convergence,” what is happening to the businesses of printers is diversification.

Diversification isn’t really new. It’s been happening for decades across the industry; and indeed, it is just a normal business strategy. Anyone in business should always look to diversify and find ways to generate new revenue streams.

Convergence among trade shows has also been happening for years.

What is new is SGIA/NAPCO’s effort with PRINTING United to bring disparate but tangential industry segments together in one consolidated show. The argument that “convergence” among the offerings of industry service provider was driving this effort always did confuse me some.

I’d argue the better term is diversification - or divergence. What SGIA is doing is clearly convergence, but it appears to be in response to divergent behavior among 4

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printers. Say that three times quickly!

Maybe it’s just all semantics. You could argue bringing different services under one roof - or print business - is a convergence of services. The semantics aren’t the important thing. What’s important is responding to industry trends and moving the industry forward.

Since acquiring the magazine you are reading, our goal has been to mirror what we’ve done online in terms of industry segments. Those interested in print software can easily find that content on WhatTheyThink. The same with Wide Format, Labels & Packaging, Textiles and Finishing. Since re-branding the magazine to a WhatTheyThink masthead, we moved to a versioned edition strategy. Some subscribers get a Printing News edition, which highlights the commercial printing content. Others get a Wide Format edition, highlighting information of interest to the signs and display graphics market. We feel it’s important to educate everyone on all aspects of this ever-changing industry, so we include in each edition much of the content from the others. Eventually, we’ll be able to target a certain percentage of content to a single edition - thus enhancing the coverage we can give to a given segment. We also plan to launch several other editions under the same WhatTheyThink banner (Labels & Packaging, Textiles, Finishing, Industrial & 3D, etc).

So in this age of consolidation, convergence and diversification, look for WhatTheyThink to continue to lead the industry in providing targeted industry intelligence. Consider it “convergification,” or call it what you like!

We’re just happy to continue serving you no matter what you call it. Find article here PrintingNews.com/ 21081325 ■

Eric Vessels President eric@whattheythink.com

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For more information, visit Printingnews.com/10013323

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CONTENTS

SEPTEMBER 2019

PRINTING NEWS 8 RFPs Are Not a Good Way to Procure Print Software Jennifer Matt 12 Printing By Numbers Richard Romano

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14 MIS/ERP Systems: How are you managing your business?

David Zwang 18 Areas Where Only Print Can Reach (Still) Heidi Tolliver-Walker 20 Production Inkjet: Welcome to the Revolution—Time to Take Stock David Zwang 22 Inkjet Insight: Measuring Paper Against Expectations Mary Schilling WIDE-FORMAT & SIGNAGE

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22

24 Executive Q&A: Xerox Richard Romano 26 You’re Pushin’ Too Hard!

Dave Fellman 28 Best Practices in Enterprise Postal Governance: Do you have Mail and Postal strategy? Christine Erna COVER STORY

on’t Call It Wallpaper: 30 D “Wallcoverings” Are Just One Aspect of Décor Richard Romano

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36 Beware Of Dog: Automation and Wide-Format Printing Richard Romano 42 S Ai Launches Augmented Reality App for Signmakers Richard Romano 44 Digital Printing of Textiles: A Growth Opportunity Cary Sherburne

42 6

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Web2Fabric: Lessons 48 Learned Cary Sherburne

51 How Signs and Graphics Assist an Aging Generation Leah Edwards 54 SensorKnits: A New Approach to Wearable Tech Cary Sherburne 56 New in Technical Textiles: Smart Diapers, Lava Suits and More Cary Sherburne 58 Addressing Color Management Challenges in a Hybrid Analog/Digital Textiles & Apparel Industry Cary Sherburne 60 Idealliance PPC: Global Collaboration Ron Ellis and Tim Baechle 66 Labelexpo Europe 2019 David Zwang

Departments 4 Editorial 34 Watch List: Video 52 Wide-Format & Signage Products 64

Classifieds/Supplier Directory

In the Know- Events thINK LabelExpo Print19 PRINTING United 2019

September 16-18 September 24-27 October 3-5 October 23–25

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Printing News; wideformatsignage @whattheythink linkedin:

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SOFTWARE & WORKFLOW

RFPs Are Not a Good Way

to Procure Print Software

Focus on your needs and what works for other printers when it comes to software.

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Jennifer Matt

Article by Jennifer Matt

Jennifer Matt writes, speaks, and consults with printers worldwide who realize their ability to leverage software is critical to their success in the Information Age.

t some point, businesses of a certain size decided that putting out a formal request for proposal (RFP) was a good method for making software decisions. This was a long time ago;

A

a lot has changed about software and it’s time for the methods we deploy to make software decisions to change as well.

Here are my top three reasons why I hate RFPs for purchasing print software:

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SOFTWARE & WORKFLOW

RFPs are “prescriptive solutions” instead of “descriptive challenges to be solved.”

You are a printer, you are not a software company. You don’t know the best way to solve your challenges with software. You are an expert at your print business’ challenges. You are not an expert on how they should be solved with software. Do not sit down and write an exhaustive list of features (they are a list of solutions) as your RFP. What you need to do

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is communicate to potential print software vendors your well-thoughtout challenges. Implementation of most print software solutions is a terrible experience due to the sales process. Printers list hundreds of features in their RFP, winning vendor says “yes” to all of them. Printer assumes “yes” to any feature means that their challenges are going to be solved exactly how they assume with little or no work from them or customization of the vendor’s solution. Reality check. Bank account check. Implementation just slips by another year.

This outcome is common because the RFP actually prevents the vendor from understanding the printer. The RFP tries to “codify” the solution rather than provide each prospective vendor with a clear understanding of the business challenges so that a printer can get each vendor’s unique approach to solving these challenges. For example, if you have a long list of exact custom reports you want from a Print MIS, what you’ve done is prescribe a method for gaining business intelligence from your Print MIS. What if the vendor has a better way for solving your business intelligence challenge (e.g. configurable database query builder, integrated B.I. tool, etc.)?

You are prescribing a solution that isn’t even the best solution based on your limited knowledge. How could we continue to think this will help us make better procurement decisions?

RFPs rarely communicate priorities.

Everything about your business is prioritized. We have limited resources, so we need to deploy them to get the most important things done first. Yet, when we write an RFP we typically ask the prospective vendors to answer yes/no to feature-

related questions as if they are all equally important. I would prefer to see this kind of language in an RFP: The following are our top five business challenges. If you do not have a clear solution for each one of these, please take yourself out of consideration for this RFP as we will not consider any vendor that doesn’t have a solid solution for each of these issues.

“The RFP tries to “codify” the solution rather than provide each prospective vendor with a clear understanding of the business challenges so that a printer can get each vendor’s unique approach to solving these challenges. ” An example business challenge might be: We have a legacy Print MIS we need to replace, but we want to keep our fulfillment system (X) and integrate with our current web-toprint solution (Y). Please describe how your system would integrate into these two systems. What resources would we be required to have? How would the maintenance of these integrations be supported?

September 2019 WhatTheyThink - Printing News

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SOFTWARE & WORKFLOW That is a brief description of a challenge; let the vendors describe how they would solve it.

You have to make purchasing decisions based on what’s most important to you. This is the primary way you maintain control of the sales process. If you don’t do this, you will be driven by sales trained to highlight the features that put their solution in the best light against the competitors.

Be careful here, because I’ve seen lots of printers make decisions about software based on features that weren’t important to their business until they saw them in the sales process. In one case, I saw a very large printer choose a vendor who sold them on where they thought they should take their business (which happened to be exactly where their product was better than all the competition). It was a compelling sales job and a very expensive mistake, because the organization didn’t have any ability to sell that vision to their customers. So they wasted two plus years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on software that allowed them to do very complex things that their sales team couldn’t sell and their customers didn’t understand. Ouch.

Almost all of your time in the procurement process should be spent on your top three to five priorities.

This is you driving the RFP process.

It takes active driving because if vendors are weak at any one of your top five, they will try to avoid those topics and move you to talk about where they are strong. What you’re

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looking for is a “fit” between your top five challenges and the vendor’s strengths. You can never get to this via a long feature list that makes all vendors seem the same.

Is your software solution already working for other companies like mine?

There is nothing better than knowing that another printer who is similar to you has been using the software successfully before you buy it. This is an obvious statement, but it takes work to get to real answers and real confidence.

Reference customers are of course filtered by the vendor. The list of reference customers often has at least one thing in common: the amount of times they’ve been taken out to dinner, to baseball games (hockey if you’re Canadian), etc. Think “friends and family” of the vendor. This list is not useless but it’s also not enough.

The reference list is where the software is working for the company, and the people have agreed to be references. You will get some good information from these folks. You also need to get other references as well.

Software references (in particular) for a Print MIS solution is a landmine.

I have met only a handful of printers that are more than 50% positive about their Print MIS. It is not a happy topic for most printers. It is not all the vendor’s fault. It is a lot of work to make a Print MIS truly sing for your business. Most printers

haven’t done it, have no intention of doing it, don’t understand that it’s even their work to do. So your inquiries into references for Print MIS solutions will range from “I’m currently suing the vendor,” to “I’m OK with the solution but I’ve been taking high blood pressure medicine since the implementation.”

Take the glowing reviews from the list of “approved” references with a grain of salt. Take the complaining from unhappy customers with another grain of salt. If someone is really complaining, ask this question: “Can I talk to your Print MIS administrator?”

Chances are their answer will be “we don’t have one.” Exhibit A for why the implementation didn’t go well.

There is no perfect solution. There is no perfect vendor. You will have to do way more work than you think, but you have to go talk to printers about their positive and negative interactions with the vendor. While you’re talking to them, ask what they would have done differently during implementation. This is a great indicator if the printer understands that a successful implementation is just as much about their team’s effort as it is about the vendor’s efforts.

RFPs aren’t a good way to procure software. Spend more time getting to know other printers who are already using the software. Spend more time defining the business challenges you want the software to solve. Spend more time teaching the vendors about your business, then let them describe how they would solve your top priorities. This will not only allow you to make a better procurement decision,but it will also set the implementation team up for success.

The vendor actually learns a little about you in the sales process, and you learn about how their software would solve your most important business challenges. Find article here PrintingNews.com/21081983 ■

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8/19/19 4:50 PM

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PRINTING PULSE

Printing By Numbers June 2019 printing shipments were up, but down—but up....Industry employment is down all over, and even PR isn’t as robust as it was only a few months earlier....Attrition of print businesses appears to have slowed.

Printing Shipments: The Dog Days of Summer Begin The value of printing shipments for June 2019 was $6.61 billion, down from May’s $6.98 billion, in keeping with what has been established

as the new seasonality. It’s a little disappointing that June’s $6.61 billion came in a hair under June 2018’s $6.63 billion—and here we define a “hair” as about $20 million. July tends to be the nadir of the year—and we

can hope that it won’t be as nadirish as 2017.

Thanks to a really strong start to 2019, year-to-date shipments continue to outpace 2018—January to June shipments for 2019 are at $39.80 billion compared to 2018’s $39.58, although the gap is closing.

As we continue into the dog days of summer, maybe July will be a pleasant surprise and August will continue its seasonality.

Still, we do have to caution—as we always do—that NAICS 323 (which is what these shipments’ data are based on) isn’t necessarily the sole printing-related three-digit NAICS anymore. Some shops are classifying themselves in different kinds of services NAICS, and wide-format and sign manufacturers have their own NAICS classifications. Different parts of the industry are diverging from NAICS 323, which makes tracking industry statistics that much more of a challenge, and can make the industry seem much gloomier than it really is.

Jobs: Up in the Short Term, Down in the Long Term June employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that overall printing employment grew +0.5% from May to June 2019. However, on a year-over-year basis, it’s down -2.5%. Production employment grew +0.4% from May to June, but year-over-year was down -4.9%. Non-production employment was up +0.7% from May to June, and up +2.6% from June 2018.

In publishing, employment grew from 732,700 in May to 738,300 in 12

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PRINTING PULSE June, and grew +0.7% year-over-year.

Newspapers continued to take a hit employment-wise: down -8.2% from May 2018 to May 2019. Periodicals are not far behind, with a -4.2% decline in employment from May to May. The creative markets, once again, are doing better than printing and publishing, although the traditional hotspot, public relations, was only up +2.5% from May 2018 to May 2019.

(Back in May, PR employment was up +6.7% from March 2018 to March 2019.) Among agencies, employment was down -0.3%, but if we back out PR, agency employment was down -0.6%. Graphic design employment was up a little, and direct mail advertising was down a little more of a bit.

Overall, the employment situation in the economy has been very good; the June jobs report had been better than expected, with 224,000 jobs created in June and an unemployment rate of 3.7%. Still, if we look at the employment rate for prime age workers (25 to 54), in June it was 79.7%—down from the 2000 peak of 81.9%, the pre-recession peak of 80.3%, and even the 79.9% peak earlier this year. So while the headline unemployment number looks pretty good, there is still a bit of room for employment growth.

The industry has a tough enough time attracting workers even when the labor market isn’t tight, so finding workers is not going to get any easier.

Interestingly, over the summer, Chase announced (https://bit. ly/2YvNU8a) that it was replacing the copywriters for its marketing materials with artificial intelligence —not because it has a shortage of copywriters, but because customers were more responsive to machinewritten content. Automation may be a solution to the problem of finding elusive employees, but it is also being implemented (in our industry and elsewhere) primarily to reduce

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costs and improve quality. While the “robots are taking my job!” fear is a little overblown (for now...), it’s entirely possible at some point that there may be a surfeit of potential employees coming on the market.

It’s Alright, Ma He not busy being born is busy dying —Bob Dylan We can look at industry birth and death data to get a sense of how the industry is stabilizing and even improving—to some degree. From 2015 to 2016 (the most recent period for which we have data, which just came out over the summer), there has been an increase of nearly 1,600 establishments, but a decrease of just under 1,900 establishments, for a net loss of about 300 establishments. In that 2015 to 2016 period, we saw a much greater number of births and a smaller number of deaths compared to previous periods. So it goes.

Essentially, we’re still looking at a net attrition of printing businesses, a combination of consolidation and straight-out plant closures, but this attrition seems to have slowed, although we’ll have to wait for the

2016 to 2017 data before we can identify any specific trend. But given what we have been seeing with shipments in the years since 2016, we should expect this situation to have improved even more.

At the same time, births and deaths don’t always represent brand-new businesses or pushing-up-the-daisies dead ones. Rather, businesses often change their corporate structure. A corporation closes, a proprietorship opens. So it is often the same people just changing their tax structure.

Also, this is often a “poor man’s consolidation”: Two struggling print businesses find it cheaper to close and then open as a single new business, without dealing with the legalities and details of a merger or an acquisition.

And, as we explained above, it’s also possible that certain businesses have changed their business enough that they end up in a different NAICS (the data presented here only tracks NAICS 323).

So there can be a lot of stuff happening beneath the surface of these birth and death data.

Find article here PrintingNews. com/21082256 ■

September 2019 WhatTheyThink - Printing News

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SOFTWARE & WORKFLOW

MIS/ERP Systems: How are

you managing your business?

The best way to look at MIS/ERP systems is holistically, in the context of the bigger picture of managing your business as a whole.

Article by David Zwang

T

he best way to look at MIS/ ERP systems is holistically, in the context of the bigger picture of managing your business as a whole. Just as you should have a production workflow system, ultimately an MIS system is a workflow system for your business operations. It is not the entire workflow; it is a modular solution built with many individual components to support the business processes. As a part of your holistic system, this needs to integrate with other workflow systems both internally: production and perhaps accounting, and externally: customers, partners, etc.

The following provides a visual overview of the holistic transformative workflow reference model developed to describe the business model of the future.

It is important to remember that a workflow is just a series of connected processes. That means that perspective and roles offer differing views of what constitutes a workflow.

Each workflow has a specific purpose

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with specific benefits to the company.

The advantage of using this model as a reference is that it allows you to see the various workflows broken into a logical hierarchy as well as how they work together within a holistic system.

The key is that the workflows need to work together in order to provide the maximum flexibility for growth.

There are a wide range of tools and methods being used to manage business and production processes in U.S. printing operations, ranging from Excel spreadsheets to full-blown

ERP systems. Many of the available core modules are included in some form in all of the systems; however, the needs of a smaller commercial printer or a franchise center are not the same as those of a larger commercial printer or a packaging converter, etc. That being said, MIS is definitely not one size fits all and as a result is a very difficult decision for many printers. That is one of the reasons Print MIS ownerships are not as high as they should be.

The current trend of MIS

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For more information, visit Printingnews.com/10006791

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SOFTWARE & WORKFLOW systems and/or individual process components is moving toward cloudbased, multi-tenant systems versus single tenant on premise or cloud hosted with the cloud becoming the key influencing technology. It is an important part of the “Internet of Things” or Internet 4.0, since it creates a centralized platform for inter-process communications. There can also be cost advantages to using cloud-based solutions, or hybrid solutions that bridge cloud and on-premise functions. Some of the more obvious benefits of cloud computing are the reduction of IT costs, less reliance on IT personnel, facilitating connectivity across disparate systems and generally improving accessibility for clients and vendor partners.

In today’s environment there will always be a need to do various types of integration between disparate systems and processes but developing an MIS system requires a different mindset and skills. However, having the resources to integrate established functional pieces of software into a more complete and flexible solution is very doable, and increasingly becoming the norm. Connectors can capture information from these external systems and bring them into a printing firm, as well as report information back to customers, suppliers, etc.

Many of the “off the shelf” MIS systems for the print industry include support for JDF/JMF, although not all support is equal. Implementations may vary from vendor to vendor, and integration may not be as seamless as expected. In addition, or in place of JDF/JMF, most also include XML 16

mapping tools and/or Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for varying levels of external process integration. Looking beyond the print industry to the larger global enterprise, connectivity with API hubs such as Zapier (zapier.com) and DOMO (domo.com) can further streamline and simplify future integration efforts.

the standard and optional modules found in an MIS system, although depending upon the solution, the packaging of these modules can vary.

These systems usually offer varying levels of integration with outside systems and production components.

The Printing Industries of America does a survey each year of MIS systems and components. If you are in the market for an MIS system or in the market for new components, this is a great place to start. The latest survey includes 44 different systems and/or components, and details them by available functions, integration options, etc. The survey is available from their web store (printing. org) and it is free to members.

With a properly designed holistic system, your client’s production data and instructions flow through the external interface to the business management system (MIS) and then into your production management system for production processing. The results are then fed back into the MIS system for internal or external (client) reporting. It’s a beautiful thing.

One of the more important functions of an MIS system is order entry. Today there are many approaches to getting orders into production workflows. When it comes to order entry, whether it is EDI, Web2Print, file upload portals, email with attachments, etc., there is not a one-box solution that can satisfy all requirements for a general commercial printer. However, the emergence of some of today’s fully featured Web2Print solutions is adding some MIS functionality and taking that exclusivity from the MIS domain.

The following is a sampling of

More to Come …

I would like to address your interests and concerns in future articles as it relates to the manufacturing of Print, Packaging and Labels, and how, if at all, it drives future workflows including ‘Industry 4.0’. If you have any interesting examples of hybrid and bespoke manufacturing, I am very anxious to hear about them. Please feel free to contact me at david@ zwang.com with any questions, suggestions or examples of interesting applications. Find article here PrintingNews.com/21081966 ■

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For more information, visit Printingnews.com/10004777

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FINISHING & MAILING

Areas Where Only Print Can Reach (Still) Make sure your clients are reaching the digitally unconnected 8%.

Article by Heidi Tolliver-Walker

W

e have been hearing for a while that 24% of Americans in rural areas still have no access to broadband and 42% have no broadband at home (Pew Research), making print critical for marketers looking to reach those areas. Thirty-five percent of residents in these communities don’t own a smartphone, restricting their access to digital content even further, and 22% don’t use the internet at all.

When I’ve heard numbers like these, I always assumed “rural” meant small, isolated pockets out in the wide open spaces of the West or tucked into the hollows of Appalachia where the population density and topography made it difficult to support high-speed infrastructure. It never occurred to me that it meant entire cities and regions we would never imagine.

Recently, I watched a segment on CNN that surprised me.

Correspondent Miguel Marquez Heidi Tolliver-Walker Heidi Tolliver-Walker has been a commercial and digital printing industry analyst, feature writer, and author for more than 20 years. Her industry commentary can be found in national printing publications, blogs, and marketing publications.

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interviewed residents of Cleveland, Tenn., a community of 44,000 outside Chattanooga, where there is no broadband access. Chattanooga has some of the fastest internet in the country, yet Cleveland—just 34 miles away—has no broadband access at all. Marquez noted that, since 2011, the FCC has spent “billions” building out broadband to rural areas, but it still has a long way to go. This leaves millions of businesses and residents without access to any but the most basic internet services. Sure, there are mobile hotspots, but not everyone can afford them.

There are many ramifications of this isolation from the digital world, and marketing is one of them. Local marketers have learned who cannot be reached with digital channels, but national marketers may not be as tuned in to where their graphicsheavy emails and social media and digital advertising efforts may not be reaching. In cities like Cleveland, businesses and residents may be completely blind to the digital components of your campaigns.

This issue is being addressed at the micro-level by small companies like Wave Wireless, whose owner built his own broadband network that turned into a budding company to serve others near Parsons, Kan. There are more and more of these companies springing up. As of late

last year, the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (WISPA) estimated that there are about 2,000 companies providing such fixed wireless broadband access across all 50 states, serving an average of 1,200 customers each. But that’s not much consolation to brands looking to reach the 24 million Americans and the innumerable businesses not yet served by (or who cannot afford) such services.

The challenges to bringing broadband to nearly 8% of the U.S. population are great, and they aren’t likely to be solved any time soon.

Until then, print and other traditional channels remain critical to reaching these customers, whether business or consumer. So before your clients cut their print budgets in favor of digital marketing, make sure they don’t need those 8% of the U.S. population that they may not be able to reach.

Find article here PrintingNews. com/21082263 ■

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DIGITAL & INKJET

Production Inkjet:

Welcome to the Revolution— Time to Take Stock Production inkjet solutions are proliferating at an ever-increasing rate. The quality of many of the solutions has finally reached that of offset, and the productivity has surpassed that of toner.

Article by David Zwang

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e now have a fairly extensive range of web and sheetfed presses and technologies, and drupa 2020 is right around the corner with the promise of even more. Inkjet press placement growth is continuing at a steady rate according to IDC, with Continuous Feed (CF) at a CAGR of 17.2% and Cut Sheet (CS) at a CAGR of 25.1% projected through 2023 as seen in the chart below.

Things Are Changing While production inkjet is not a new technology, there have been a lot of developments in core technologies as well as market application development. I believe that as an industry we may have become a bit numb toward production inkjet news of late. It’s probably understandable, since equipment manufacturers and the media (myself included) have been flooding the airwaves with lots of information— some of it of regarding incremental

© IDC 2019

improvements, it may seem, so that after a while you just become numb to the continued stream of information. However, there have been many significant developments that you should be aware of as a

print or packaging service provider.

Those include the growth and segmentation of both inkjet products and market applications, which adds new opportunities but also some confusion to the process.

David Zwang David Zwang specializes in process analysis, and strategic development of firms involved publishing and packaging across the globe. Contact him at david@zwang.com

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© IDC 2019

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DIGITAL & INKJET © Keypoint Intelligence–InfoTrends

As with any new or disruptive technology, some people are waiting on the sidelines for that one unique solution to come to light. Although, if you step back and take a hard look, the production inkjet market is maturing, and it seems as if market opportunities in print and options in inkjet press equipment seem to be coming into alignment.

I have written before about hybrid and bespoke print solutions that may be better-suited to certain applications. However, even the more structured press solutions are now better matched to the market requirements. Continuous-feed (CF) inkjet web presses have been around the longest, and their adoption offered a fairly obvious platform for the natural transition of transactional toner-based production. Now, since the quality and media compatibilities with inkjet have started to sort themselves out, those CF presses are producing more direct mail and commercial applications, displacing both toner and offset production.

is a growing segmentation of product by cost and application in cut-sheet (CS) presses. As more lower-cost devices continue to enter the market, the barrier to entry is reduced, as is the average price of the machines.

This expanded choice of options will undoubtedly remove some of the entry and growth barriers for many who are interested in production inkjet.

Plenty of Room for Growth Inkjet print production is surpassing toner-based print production as well. A recent market forecast by Keypoint Intelligence– InfoTrends shows that while even the growth of toner print volume is healthy, the shift from toner to production inkjet is moving along at a much faster pace.

We have already seen that production inkjet—or any printing technology, for that matter—is not necessarily good for all applications

for many reasons. Those could be productivity, operating cost, market segment requirements, etc. Although, according to Smithers Pira, “In 2018 advertising—direct mail, promotional leaflets and fliers, display and signage—remains the most significant end-use market for inkjet printing. It will account for 55% of global inkjet revenue in 2018.”

When all of this is taken into account, it really paints a picture of healthy market opportunities and corresponding press equipment options. Of course, with all of these options and opportunities, it also does add some confusion at the more granular decision-making level. Keeping that in mind, we will continue to help guide you through the Production Inkjet Revolution as we ramp up to Labelexpo 2019 and drupa 2020.

More to Come…

I would like to address your interests and concerns in future articles as it relates to the manufacturing of Print, Packaging and Labels, and how, if at all, it drives future workflows including “Industry 4.0.” If you have any interesting examples of hybrid and bespoke manufacturing, I am very anxious to hear about them. Please feel free to contact me at david@zwang.com with any questions, suggestions or examples of interesting applications.

Find article here PrintingNews.com/ 21082259 ■

Lower Cost Options There is a growing segmentation of the continuous-feed web press space with the introduction of lower-cost “entry-level” machines, bringing lots of options to support the requirements.

As is the case with CF solutions, there

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© Smithers Pira for HP

September 2019 WhatTheyThink - Printing News

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DIGITAL & INKJET

Inkjet Insight: Measuring Paper Against Expectations

What is most important to you and your customers: gamut, show-through, small text clarity, mottle, coalescence, edge clarity, or are they all important?

Article by Mary Schilling

C

ompanies evaluating paper for suitability for their inkjet environment have different expectations. At a minimum, a paper has to be compatible with the device, but the relative importance of quality measures will vary. What is most important to you and your customers: gamut, show-through, small text clarity, mottle, coalescence, edge clarity, or are they all important? The answers to these questions on print quality priorities generally vary by market segment.

Mary Schilling Mary Schilling is co-owner of www.InkjetInsight.com and the owner of www.

SchillingInkjetConsulting. com. She consults with paper mills, fluid and inkjet machinery suppliers and end users. She writes technical inkjet industry and training articles.

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■■ T ransactional print mostly focuses on show through and small text clarity, but when corporate color matching is required, gamut comes into play.

■■ Gamut, mottle, coalescence and text clarity are always important measures for direct mail quality.

■■ Many commercial segments have a higher standard for all areas of print quality than transaction and most direct mail.

What does it mean to measure print quality?

For inkjet, quality does not have a defined standard, but experience has shown that there is a minimum achievable range of performance needed on the papers used in each market. Since paper highly impacts print quality, choosing or comparing paper for your inkjet device should not be subjective, but driven by the data.

Inkjet manufacturers provide lists

of “qualified” papers. To qualify for this list, a paper must successfully print a standardized test pattern with a defined ink volume at rated production speed. A test typically runs for at least 2000 lineal feet and must be dry at the end of the run with no visual wrinkles. This test process is about ink, machine and paper compatibility. The key here, is not to mess up the inside of the press with roller contamination and web breaks from wet output.

Once the printed output has passed this first step, the output is checked for color to color bleed, coalescence and mottle. If the output is visually unappealing, the paper is normally rejected unless color saturation, mottle and coalescence can be minimized by adjusting settings.

This may be all that is done for a paper to be “qualified.” This tells you that the paper will run, but not the quality you can expect. Often an Continue on page 63

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WIDE-FORMAT & SIGNAGE

Executive Q&A: Xerox WhatTheyThink spoke with Marybeth Gilbert, Vice President General Manager Production Inkjet and Packing Business, Chris Irick, Worldwide Product Marketing Manager, Entry Production Inkjet, and Bill Bay, Manager, Production Cut Sheet Business Team.

Story by Richard Romano

X

erox recently launched Baltoro, its nextgeneration production inkjet platform.

WhatTheyThink spoke with Marybeth Gilbert, vice president general manager production inkjet and packing business; Chris Irick, worldwide product marketing manager, entry production inkjet; and Bill Bay, manager, production cut sheet business team, about the company’s new flagship product, how the company sees the production inkjet market and how inkjet and xerography are not necessarily competing technologies.

WhatTheyThink: Xerox recently made some significant changes to its organizational structure. How are these changes positioning the production group within the company?

Marybeth Gilbert: Production printing continues to be a core part of what Xerox is offering. The structure of the company has remained the same, where we have a production business group that I lead that includes both xerography and inkjet. We just announced the Baltoro platform, which is a huge step in innovation and which we’re very proud of. We actually feel that we’re more powerful today than we have been in the recent past.

Chris Irick: When we did our address to the marketplace, we said our reorganization was to streamline the business. So, if anything, we’ve expanded our offerings. Our customer-facing stuff is expanding.

WTT: Xerox continues to tweak its production inkjet portfolio. Can you tells us about the strategy behind this updated portfolio, such as discontinued production of Brenva and the launch of the Baltoro platform?

MG: We didn’t tweak our production inkjet strategy. We are continuing with our inkjet strategy. We looked at the space, we’ve looked—like all of you guys have—at the

Richard Romano Richard Romano has been writing about the graphic communications industry for 20 years. He is an industry analyst and author or co-author of more than half a dozen books.

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Marybeth Gilbert

Chris Irick

migration from offset, what Bill Bay did and did not come true, what will and will not come true. We’re aligning our strategy and innovation to point towards those spots that are going to continue to help our customers grow their businesses. Inkjet has its space, xerographic has its space and offset still has its space. So when we talk to our customers, we talk to them about the breadth of our portfolio. The new press that we just announced is a platform. It’s very similar to what we did with Nuvera and iGen; the platform has been the model. It’s an invest-withconfidence that our customers have enjoyed. When they invest with us, they know we stay with them. Baltoro is the first press off of our new inkjet platform, so it’s more than a tweak. It’s the next generation that needed to happen.

WTT: What is the status of the other inkjet offerings, like Trivor?

MG: Trivor is at the high end of the continuous-feed market, and then we have Rialto that sits below that. We continue to innovate on those and hopefully sometime this year you’ll see. We did pre-announce the Rialto 900 MP at Hunkeler Innovationdays and will be in the marketplace shortly.

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WIDE-FORMAT & SIGNAGE WTT: With all the emphasis on inkjet, where does Xerox see the future of toner?

Bill Bay: We tell a story that we call “better together” because we’re not expecting in the near term for the market to land on either inkjet or toner. It’s going to continue to be both because there are some strengths that toner-based products like iGen are going to continue to have—around media latitude in particular. There’s been such a strong emphasis on the beyond-CMYK story, not just from Xerox, and that continues to be a real strength in the toner-based products. There may be a time when inkjet becomes a dominant technology, but they’re going to exist together in the market for a long time. And the fact that Xerox has that breadth of portfolio with leadership products in both technologies is going to help our customers as much as it’s going to help our business.

“So toner and inkjet are going to coexist and they’re going to coexist nicely.”

MG: Inkjet and xerography are technologies that provide different types of output. Let’s dial it back to 20 years ago and we would have been talking with you and we’d be talking about the demise of mono[color]. Well, guess what? Mono is still a really healthy business. Maybe we think we’re Nostradamuses, that we can predict that mono will be dead and color will take over everything, or print’s dead because your iPads are going to take over everything, or no one is going to print another book because of the Kindle. What history has proven to us is that none of that is true. There’s not this on/off. We’re helping our customers to define what they really should have on their floor when they come to us with their printing questions and their value prop of where they need to go with the business. We do not talk to them strictly about inkjet. We talk to them about the value of printing, from workflow through our offerings and what’s the best mixture.

BB: We are uniquely positioned in the market because we have flagship technology in xerographic-land as well inkjet-land and what customers care about is “how quickly can I get this up and running and how can I get it to look similar to that device next to it? And how hard is it to train an operator into using it?” So toner and inkjet are going

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to coexist and they’re going to coexist nicely because of Xerox.

WTT: Do you find that as a printing equipment manufacturer today that it’s less about selling boxes and more about forming more of a consultative relationship with customers?

MG: I don’t think it’s consultational. I think it’s a partnership. When we talk to them, we remind them of that value prop that we bring in. We bring in the professional services, we bring in the consulting, we’re there with them. We don’t drop the box and run. Look where our customers have stress points right now. It’s not all about the engine. It’s the end-to-end value prop. It’s the workflow. It’s how to get color management, how to work with the finishing. What else can we do within the workflow component to get them to drive to their value prop? What is the right box they need in their production space? Then, how do we migrate that through all our other partners? We’re in a unique position where we’re known for that and we continue to bring that forward. Find article here PrintingNews.com/21082936 ■

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TRADE SERVICES

You’re Pushin’ Too Hard!

I believe in Sales Karma. What goes around, comes around.

Article by Dave Fellman

Pushing Is Good!

may have encountered the world’s biggest salesjerk today.

He called at 9:15 a.m. He asked to speak with the owner.

“That would be me,” I said.

“Well, today’s your lucky day,” he said. “I’m going to solve your financing problem. I can get you anywhere from $100,000 to $1,000,000 by the close of business tomorrow. But we have to start now.

What kind of business is this, and what’s your monthly sales volume?”

I should mention here that I believe in “Sales Karma.” What goes around, comes around. I am a sales person, so I am always polite to any other sales person, no matter how little interest I may have in their product or service. I am also a student of selling, so I always pay attention to whatever strategy and/ or tactics any other sales person tries to use on me. That’s all to explain why I didn’t hang up on this bozo immediately.

“I’m a consultant,” I said. “My sales volume is satisfactory. And I don’t think I need any financing.”

“Everybody needs financing,” he said. “How big a balance are you carrying on your credit cards? I can help you use your business to get out from under your personal debt.”

That’s when I hung up on him.

The point of today’s column may surprise you. You need to be willing to push in order to be successful in sales. There’s a point, of course, where pushing becomes obnoxious, but up until that point, it’s a good thing.

This all connects to my personal definition of selling, which goes like this: Selling encompasses all the things you can do to help people to make the decision to buy from you. Helping people is a proactive process. The classic “soft sell” may be to make your pitch and hope that they buy from you. The classic “hard sell” may be to push hard for the close. The most effective sell is somewhere in the middle.

Here’s another guiding principle.

Pushing is most effective in the middle of the sales cycle. It is least effective at the start, and then again at the finish line.

I

Dave Fellman Dave Fellman is the president of David Fellman & Associates, a sales and marketing consulting firm serving numerous segments of the graphic arts industry. Contact him at dmf@davefellman.com .

Faulty Assumption?

I think you’ll agree that my sales jerk pushed too hard at the start.

What he did was not prospecting, which to me always includes needs/ wants analysis. It was all based on his assumption that I needed or wanted to borrow money. Setting aside his obnoxious approach, you simply can’t expect to sell people things they don’t want or need.

But here’s something else to consider. Most businesses do want or need financing. In fact, I assume that you have some combination of leases and loans and lines of credit in place right now. You may not need more, but you might benefit from better, and in my experience,

the greatest challenge in printing sales is often to convince someone who already has a printer that you are better. In fact, it might be more accurate to say that the challenge is to get people to even consider that you might be better.

This is where you have to be willing to push. Think of it this way, you have plenty of suspects. You can take a very “soft sell” approach to those suspects, basically asking them if they’re interested in extending a dialog with you. If they are, that’s the first step toward qualifying them as real prospects.

But tell me if this sounds familiar.

You talk a few times, maybe even quote a few jobs, but they don’t seem to be taking you seriously. The tendency is to blame your pricing, but the real problem is usually that you haven’t pushed them past the point of sticking with their status quo. Remember, you have to help them to make the decision to buy from you. Once you get them to take you seriously, it tends to be much shorter step to placing that first order with you.

Remember, too, that you can alienate people by pushing too hard at the closing stage. It’s a far better strategy to push in the middle, establish your value and then guide them to the closing stage. That’s the point I’m hoping to make today.

By the way, you earn five “Baby Boomer Points” if you looked at the title of this column and said: “Hey, that was a song,” plus 20 more if you can name the band that recorded it, back in 1965, when many of us were young. Find article here PrintingNews.com/21075351 ■

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FINISHING & MAILING

Best Practices in Enterprise Postal Governance:

Do you have Mail and Postal strategy?

Postal Governance is an essential element of any Postal Strategy. Both the PSP/MSP, and the client have a great deal to lose if each of these things are not planned and executed effectively.

Article by Christine Erna

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ail has been around for hundreds of years and is not going away any time soon. For the printed communication that is addressed to an individual as a First-Class transactional or Marketing Mail piece, postage is the largest expense in its production. There are many steps in any workflow process to achieve a finished mailpiece, and having a solid foundation is essential to realizing your goal of getting the mailpiece delivered. Doing so at the right postage price and eliciting a response from the call to action, be it; paying an invoice, driving them to a website for services or a product is essential.

As a Print and/or Marketing Service Provider, supporting your clients with their mailing needs requires many different resources.

Getting the mailing address data from your client, cleansing, updating, appending, modeling that data to ensure it reaches the right client, at the right time, with the right information are some of the most Christine Erna Christine Erna is President of Strategic Postal Advisors. She consults to improve address quality while reducing return mail expenses. She can be reached at: cje@strategicpostaladvisors.com .

challenging. Ensuring the lowest postage costs by internally presorting or by partnering with a presort company is a decision that can change the profitability and response measurement of the job drastically. There could also be logistics involved if you are distributing large Marketing Mail volumes destined for USPS entry facilities across the country to drive savings.

The creative artwork for the mailpiece needs to be reviewed to ensure the dimensions, weight and address placement all meet the USPS requirements for mailing and qualification for the rates you are claiming.

Production scheduling coordination to meet not only the requested mail date but also the desired in-home date are critical components to be considered for the client coordinating a campaign across multiple channels with timing dependencies.

Postal Governance is an essential element of any Postal Strategy. Both the PSP/MSP, and the client have a great deal to lose if each of these things are not planned and executed effectively.

What Is Enterprise Postal Governance?

■■ M aintaining control over multimillion dollar postal spend

■■ M easuring and managing Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) of the mailing process across all operations ■■ Generating dashboards/ measurements of entire mailing process and auditing each regularly ■■ Centralized reporting and accountability to guarantee mailing process conformance to standards, regulations and policies ■■ Where else are people held to the true meaning of the word “guarantee?”

■■ Establishing central control over processing and operations ■■ Driving processes to “six sigma” levels of variation – continuous improvement through measurement ■■ Identifying and fully realizing attainable savings opportunities ■■ Establishing and maintaining postal expertise to analyze actionable data and implement best practices

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FINISHING & MAILING Common Challenges ■■ Managing multiple suppliers ■■ Integrating multiple systems involved in address management ■■ Monitoring multiple mailstreams ■■ Inconsistent or nonexistent business unit knowledge/ understanding of USPS regulations ■■ Frequently changing regulations ■■ Unique name and address data format and content

should be recorded, logged, captured, audited and “data mined” for the pure business acumen they provide.

Additionally, these metrics should be utilized for organizational budgeting, cost containment, improved efficiency

and general control over the cost of managing communications.

Expanding beyond capturing these data points and metrics, building or utilizing a dashboard environment Continue on page 62

Global Challenges: ■■ Privatized postal systems ■■ Postal SLAs are highly variable.

■■ Mail distribution strategies that change based upon country and may include the use of government run, private or courier vendors ■■ Distinct envelope layout, bar-coding and work-sharing discount regulations for each country ■■ Address elements, layout and correction tools vary greatly from country to country.

Enterprise Postal Governance Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) examples: ■■ Data Quality ❙❙ Coding Accuracy Support System (CASS) ❙❙ National Change of Address (NCOA) ■■ Production Quality and Service Level Agreement ❙❙ Mail Entry and Mail Delivery ❙❙ When is “Day One?” ❙❙ Start the Clock. ❙❙ Stop the Clock. ❙❙ Informed Visibility ■■ Postage Spend, Savings Includes cost avoidance and Optimization ❙❙ Permits ❙❙ Promotions ❙❙ Alternate carriers and partners All these data points and metrics For more information, visit PrintingNews.com/10005400

September 2019 WhatTheyThink - Wide-Format&Signage

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WIDE-FORMAT & SIGNAGE

Don’t Call It Wallpaper:

“Wallcoverings” Just One Aspect of Décor

Are

Snoop was particularly interested in a mural mashup of Star Wars and Star Trek which Gamut designed and printed.

(Image courtesy Gamut Media.)

From textures to murals, Richard Romano “snoops” on some trendy interiors.

Article by Richard Romano

W

hen we think of “wallpaper,” we think of slathering paste on a wall, unrolling and cutting the paper— hopefully straight and accurately— and trying to get it to stick in some vague approximation of the correct position. Well, that kind of wallpaper has gone the way of button shoes, and the number of materials that can be used to produce wallpaper décor today has expanded exponentially to include such substrates as vinyls, metallics (vrai and faux), textured materials and textiles. Whether they’re outputting rolls of repeating patterns or one-off custom images and murals, producers are taking wallcoverings to new heights.

“I don’t think ‘wallpaper’ is necessarily a passé word,” said Victoria Harris, textile application specialist at Mimaki USA. “I don’t think it’s out of fashion, but it’s Richard Romano Richard Romano has been writing about the graphic communications industry for 20 years. He is an industry analyst and author or co-author of more than half a dozen books.

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more than a wallpaper application.

Especially with technology advances like digital inkjet printing, it just has deeper meaning. You have so many more diverse possibilities from a design perspective as well as an application perspective. So it’s not just wallpaper anymore.”

“Nowadays, we also have fabric wallcoverings, so it’s not only the paper,” said Ryosuke Nakayama, textile and apparel product manager for Mimaki. “It’s getting diversified depending on the needs or depending on the location, if it’s retail space or a home space. Every wall has different properties.”

Repeat After Me Like the traditional wallpaper we have all probably wrestled with at some point, today’s wall décor, even though it is increasingly printed digitally, still largely comprises repeating patterns rather than discrete images.

Northeast Color, based in Dover, N.H., produces branded wall décor for some the country’s largest retail franchises—from fitness centers, to dry cleaners, to trampoline parks, to tutoring centers, to...you name it—and those repeating patterns are based on the franchise’s branding.

Wall graphics can be abstract or geometrical patterns or discrete images—sometimes both.

(Image courtesy Mimaki.)

“We use wall coverings to achieve a branding effect for our clients,” said Derrick Ableman, marketing manager for Northeast Color. “We look at the brand and the wall covering exclusively as elements of a branding. They’re tools to create that immersive environment.”

Northeast Color uses predominantly EFI equipment, and was a beta site for the recent VUTEk H5.

Because of the nature of Northeast Color’s clients—major retail franchises—the substrates chosen need to be industrial-grade and are designed to last up to 10 years.

“We’re really looking for versatility and durability,” Ableman said. “There are substrates that look and feel like metal, or pebbled surfaces, or all of

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WIDE-FORMAT & SIGNAGE inside a light aluminum frame. This type of décor has become popular in public spaces like airports.

Mimaki also sees heightened interest in new materials that demonstrate greater sustainability, especially for use in hospitals and schools.

“There are different new materials, especially like metallics and decals,” Harris said, “and also sustainable and antibacterial wall coverings.”

The latter are especially becoming popular in health care facilities. these different textures. It’s such a wide array of tools that we can use.”

This is another area where “paper” is taking a backseat to newer materials.

“We see paper product going up on the wall in commercial locations and paper product is thin,” said Bryan Winter, creative director for Northeast Color. “It’s not durable. It gets damaged very quickly and needs to be replaced. So with that same amount of installation effort, we can install a commercial-grade, mesh-back, vinylbased product that can be washed with no trouble and doesn’t scuff easily.

There’s a cost difference, but you’re getting a better product out of it.”

One of the major drivers of digital wall décor is the exponentially increasing array of textures and effects.

“From a design perspective, we see a lot of advances in 3D wall coverings and photorealistic panels for residential and commercial spaces,” Harris said. “We also see the ability to print and mimic natural textures, such as stone or marble as growing design trends. We also see more and more textile wall covering materials being put in frames so it can be easily switched out and changed.”

Silicone-edge graphics (SEG) are a growing display graphics application that involves mounting printed fabric

Going Home Digital wall décor, and the related “environmental graphics” application category, have gained traction in retail and office environments, but the residential digital wall market could be poised to take off, as people start to get a sense of the ways they can customize and personalize their homes.

And real estate staging companies are starting to get in on the action.

“There’s so much flipping of houses, and the real estate market has kind of surged,” said Donna Covannon, director of marketing NA for Xeikon. “The staging company

can go in and offer digital wall décor.

It doesn’t even have to be full-wall.

It could be wall borders or just a couple of panels. It’s something that they can easily put up and then easily take down without damaging the wall. If the owner doesn’t like that particular graphic, no problem. It’s easy to take down—actually easier than traditional wallpaper.”

At the most recent Xeikon Café in Itasca, Ill., outside Chicago, Xeikon demonstrated its easily removable wall coverings.

“We actually papered two of the breakout rooms at the Westin Hotel where we were having the event,” Covannon said, “and also the doors in that room where we applied a big label. It was then easily removed without any damage to the door or to the wall or the wallpaper.”

Xeikon would have been on the hook to the Westin for any damage— nothing like having some skin in the game.

Xeikon is also working with customers whose own customers can upload their own images and print personalized wallcoverings, or at

Right top: Gamut Media created more than a dozen wall murals for rapper Snoop Dogg’s California compound. Right bottom: Gamut Media won a 2015 SGIA Golden Image Award in the category of Building Graphics. (Images courtesy Gamut Media.)

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WIDE-FORMAT & SIGNAGE least customized wall borders.

“One of the opportunities is to produce wall borders, but add that personalized touch to them,” Covannon said. “Think about wall borders in a nursery, as an example.

So you can upload images of your own baby and add your own sayings instead of having the premade sayings.

We’re just taking that to the next level.”

And not just baby’s room.

“Wall borders really can fit in any room, like a family room,” Covannon added. “You can upload your images of your most memorable vacation.”

Above: An important aspect of the wall décor that was installed for the Xeikon Café was removability, so as not to damage the walls of the Westin. (Image courtesy Xeikon.)

Left: Getting a mural or other kind of wall graphic to fit in a precise location can be a challenge. “Field measurements are key.” (Image courtesy Northeast Color.)

The Mural of the Story A growing variety of wallcovering is the wall mural—nothing truly new (just ask Diego Rivera) except insofar as digital printing makes it easy and cost effective to produce one-offs and short-runs of wall murals.

Northeast Color also does mural work.

“Obviously our sweet spot, and what we prefer, is repeating patterns because we can do thousands and thousands of rolls and just crank them out,” Ableman said.

But he added that murals can be great for “those special sorts of accent walls or branded pieces or almost museum-grade installations.”

“Murals can be challenging,” Winter said. “Anytime we have a mural, field measurements are key. When we’re working off blueprints, they’re never exactly the same and sometimes

the floor is uneven or the molding is taller than they expected. So we always tend to build in extra design and extra bleed to give us a few extra inches here and there.”

Fullerton, Calif.’s Gamut Media specializes in custom-printed wall murals, and has even won an SGIA Golden Image Award for its printed graphics.

“A lot of people are doing custom wall graphics, especially for restaurants and retail,” said Philip Yu, creative director for Gamut Media. “They want a big impact when people walk in, and a digitally

printed wall mural is something that really could change the whole feel of the room.”

The specific material that Gamut Media uses is dictated by the look and feel the customer is going for.

“We do stuff for a higher-end dim sum restaurant, so their graphics are more like old black-and-white photos of how they started in Taiwan in the 50s,” Yu said. “So they want to go with like a canvas type of wallcovering.”

Gamut Media, which uses predominantly Roland VersaCamm printers, also does exterior graphics.

Last summer, they created a building wrap for ComicCon. One interesting project that Gamut Media recently worked on was a set of murals for rapper Snoop Dogg’s compound. (It also illustrates some of the oblique ways shops can get work.)

“We did a wall mural for my tattoo artist’s shop,” Yu said.

A contractor, who was working on the tattoo studio also worked on Snoop Dogg’s house.

“And then he asked my tattoo artist, ‘Hey, who did your wall mural, because I think I might be able to give him some work with Snoop.’ And that’s Far left: Dover, N.H.’s Northeast Color produces wallcoverings for major local and national franchises. Left: For Northeast Color, wall décor is an important part of its customers’ branding. Also note that 3D elements can be added to printed graphics. (Images courtesy Northeast Color.)

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Xeikon worked with Québec’s Melan, one of its customers, to produce wall graphics for the breakout rooms at the most recent Xeikon Café outside Chicago.

(Image courtesy Xeikon.)

how pretty much we got connected.”

Snoop had bought a massive recording studio which was essentially an empty shell.

“The first mural he wanted to do was a custom UCLA wall mural for his son, because he went to UCLA,” Yu said.

Snoop loved it, and then things took off—in more ways than one.

“After that, Snoop wanted a Star Wars/Star Trek type of mural,” Yu said. “He designed his whole interior to look pretty much like a spaceship.

We did that mural and then he loved it, and we just kept doing more and more.”

Gamut Media ended up doing upwards of 17 murals for Snoop Dogg’s private compound. As a creative, Yu found it a bit refreshing compared to a lot of the work he usually does.

“He gave me a lot of creative freedom, which is really cool because like a lot of time when we’re doing work for brands, you’re restricted to what their brand is. But he gave me free reign to do whatever I wanted and he liked our style.”

An additional point of pride is that Yu has seen his work turn up on TV. “When you watch his music videos, or see Netflix shows of him, or

interviews, you’ll see the wall murals in there.”

Climbing the Walls For printing companies looking to get into the wall covering/décor market, key advice centers on whom to approach to sell these kinds of products and services. As with environmental graphics, making first contact with architectural or interior design firms is a good start, since they are the ones that are involved in overall project management of the space that will need the décor.

Equipment-wise, wall décor is not a huge stretch if a company is already doing wide-format, sign or display graphics.

“It’s easily adaptable if they have the right digital printing solution,” Harris said. “If you have a digital printer with UV ink that also has a white ink, you have the ability to print on wall coverings. If you have the white ink, you can print on

metallic wall coverings, which we have a lot of end users doing.”

And from there, it’s a small step to expand to other elements of the décor.

“They’re able to add depth to the whole environment or the whole interior space,” she said.

Covannon stressed that print service providers should pay close attention to the substrates.

“They should definitely ask about the substrates, making sure that they can produce something that is easily removable,” she said.

And also make sure the substrates are compatible with the printing equipment you have, not just in terms of basic printability but also in terms of range of products offered.

“You really don’t want to limit yourself,” Covannon said.

The market for digitally printed wall décor is growing—and doesn’t appear to be exploited by the traditional wallpaper producers, as Xeikon discovered when they attended a Wallcovering Association event.

“We found that the current members, who are traditional flexo printers, actually weren’t interested in converting to digital,” Covannon said. “So that was a little bit of an eye-opener.”

It also provides an open niche for a print provider who knows digital and knows wall décor—and knows where to go to sell it. Find article here PrintingNews.com/21082780 ■

Right: Decals can often be considered an element of wall décor. Walls increasingly feature windows—and the line between window graphics and wall coverings can be a blurry one. Far right: Wall décor can consist of simple, repeating patterns. (Images courtesy Mimaki.)

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WATCH LIST

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Xante X-32 UV Inkjet Printer This is a heavy-duty, six color, 720 x 1200 dpi rapid printing uv-curable, flatbed inkjet printing solution for any large object or irregular surface.

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Eliminating Edge Distortion with a Channel Extension Arlon’s Technical Sales Specialist - West Coast, Louie Calma, shows thier way.

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Mercury Printing: On the Front Lines of the Production Inkjet Revolution Christian Schamberger, President of Mercury Printing, talks about the company and its focus.

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Conceptive Colors Produces Pure Dye Colorants Parashar Kacha, Business Head for Conceptive Colors, explains how the company has ensured highly purified dye colorants.

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ArtiosCAD Preflight: Quality control for your structural designs ArtiosCAD is the structural design applicaton for folding carton and corrugated packaging.

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CloudLab’s Steven Antoni Explains the Company’s Ecommerce Offering Steven Antoni, President of CloudLab Americas, explains how.

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SPGPrints’ Jos Notermans Explains the Benefits of the Company’s Archer Technology He explains the benefits of the company’s Archer technology and where the name came from.

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The State of Inkjet Mike Lincoln, from the State of Colorado inplant, talks about the growth his facility is seeing in transactional work.

Find video here: Printingnews.com/21082149

Twine Turns the Thread Market On Its Head at ITMA Yariv Bustan, Vice President of Product Marketing, explains their digital thread dyeing system.

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How to Drive Better Engagement From Sponsored Blogging Vanitha Swaminathan of University of Pittsburgh is featured in this marketing webinar.

Find video here: Printingnews.com/21082151

The Digital Future of the Textiles Industry Joan Perez Pericot, General Manager for HP’s textile business, shares his thoughts on the current state of the textiles industry.

Find video here: Printingnews.com/21082147

Quik Prints Extended Family Business At Ricoh Interact, David Zwang talks to Mark Little, VP of Operations for Quik Print of Oklahoma City.

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Pointcarre Helps Brands, Designers, and Producers Create a More Efficient Process President Steve Greenberg explains how.

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The Importance of Implementing a Smart Factory Strategy EFI’s Senior Product Director for Scheduling, PrintFlow & TGO Udi Arieli, explains how.

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Sir Speedy Tampa Sees Strong Growth in Signage Kelley Holmes talks with Steve Albritton, President & CEO of Sir Speedy Tampa.

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WIDE-FORMAT & SIGNAGE

Automation and Wide-Format Printing Automation for wide-format printing can encompass a lot of different processes, from automatic file processing, to robotics, even to database management.

Article by Richard Romano

T

here is a quote, usually attributed to American scholar, organizational consultant and author Warren Bennis (1925–2014) that goes, “The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.”

I am always reminded of this quote when we talk about automation in the printing industry, and the desire to minimize—or even completely eliminate—human touches. More people are bringing their dogs to work these days; at some point, will the dogs be leaving their humans at home?

For at least the past decade, in our industry surveys and conversations with vendors and 36

print business owners, we have often heard about a great desire to implement “automation.” But do we have a precise definition of what exactly “automation” is? In general commercial printing, the idea is “file in, print out,” ideally without having human hands touch the file or any other part of the job. This is coming pretty close to reality, but in wide format, the argument has always been that it was too “craft-like” and consisted of too many one-off jobs for an automated approach to be effective. To what extent is that still the case today? Are we getting closer to true wide-format automation?

Boarding Groups The most conspicuous aspect of wide-format automation is in the area of

loading and offloading—automatically feeding a wide-format machine.

Until recently, “I looked at automation as what I would generally call ‘pallet in, pallet out,’ the ability to load a pallet on one end and have it stacked on a pallet on the back end,” said Larry D’Amico, director of salesNorth America for Durst.

Durst machines have had this ability for some time, and more and more models are adding this kind of functionality. Others—like Fujifilm’s Inca Onset X3—have a robotic arm that automatically loads and unloads boards from the machine. (Cutting tables from the likes of Esko and Zünd have also been adding robotic arms for on- and off-boarding.)

On the roll side, automation can include being able to load more than

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WIDE-FORMAT & SIGNAGE one roll—or even different size rolls— and have the equipment automatically switch rolls when a new job comes in.

But Soft!

Still, how we define automation is largely a function of where we’re coming from, and that increasingly involves software or workflow automation.

“The term ‘automation’ can mean many things to different people depending on the specific aspect on which a print service provider concentrates their business,” said Bryan Manwaring, director of product marketing for Onyx Graphics, Inc. “The term ‘automation’ for our customers is all about saving time, reducing manual errors and increasing print capacity to do more with less.”

Specific examples of this, Manwaring said, can include: ■■ Automating submission of jobs from a front-end ordering system into production (basically web-to-print) ■■ Setting up print jobs with options such as page size, rotation, adding tiles or finishing marks like grommets, all automatically (in the case of Onyx’s software, using QuickSets) ■■ Applying automated color management controls to synchronize and proof color management settings across devices ■■ Adding cut-paths that are automatically recognized from the design software and then barcodes to print jobs for a seamless print-and-cut workflow The other emblematic example of wide-format automation is nesting optimization, where software determines the optimal arrangement of as many images as possible on a sheet or board. The imposition that is created at the outset of the job drives a cutting table or other device to automatically 38

cut out those nested images.

And automation for retail graphics can also involve database management. If a shop is creating graphics for tens or hundreds of locations of a retail chain, the wall, floor and other dimensions for each location might be different. And to top it off, they may be producing 10 to 20 different pieces for each of those stores. So “automation” would involve using databases to manage it all.

Every End Has a Beginning Interestingly, one aspect of wideformat printing that is driving the need for automation is finishing— which still remains a largely nonautomated process.

“The finishing work for wide format is very different from general commercial printing,” Manwaring said.

“There are manual steps involved in lamination and sewing, and using tools such as routers and other cutting devices adds complexity to setting up print work. Because of the variety in print applications that can be produced in wide format, each kind of product may have different needs for prepress, production and finishing. This has both slowed down the ability for print shops to automate, but also has exposed the need for greater automation.”

“In wide-format printing, there is a greater need for managing cutting parameters, as most RIPs are also connected to cutting tables,” said Darrian Young, global product strategy manager for GMG Software.

“Imposition tends to be weaker than cut-sheet solutions due to the type of work being produced. There also tends to be more tools for manually adjusting/modifying jobs in wideformat RIPs, which results from a history of non-automated processes, rather than from good practices.”

Are We There Yet? This is all well and good: vendors

are boosting their automation solutions for wide-format printers.

But is anyone in wide-format printing ready or eager to automate?

“We have more partners that integrate with Switch that are more focused on large format,” said Toon Van Rossum, Switch product manager at Enfocus Software. “Over the last two or three years, people have been embracing automation more and more—both in large-format and commercial printing.

For large format specifically, they are probably in an earlier exploration phase, while the commercial printers are already more heavily invested.”

Enfocus has also been adding more and more wide-format-specific features to its flagship product PitStop—color tools, gutter guides, adding grommets, etc.—and they can be automated from within Switch.

So solutions abound, but is anyone using them?

“Only some of the highervolume, forward-looking companies have really adopted this level of automation,” Young said. “The majority of companies are still thinking about it for someday, or it’s not even on their radars.”

Even though Durst has offered automation of various kinds for some time, D’Amico said, “the amount of implementation of those solutions is still relatively small. I see it more in the packaging environment, but not much beyond that, especially in the traditional wide-format segment.”

Again, where they’re coming from may be part of the issue, as a lot of today’s wide-format shops came from screen printing.

“So much of [screen printing] is manually fed, so they just have a different mentality than the offset guys.”

So what’s the sticking point? Is it that “wide-format printing is too artisanal” issue again? Is each job “too unique” for automation to be effective?

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WIDE-FORMAT & SIGNAGE “It’s fair to say that each print job can be unique when it contains specific tasks to meet print buyer needs,” Manwaring said. “This often takes the form of file changes as it moves from design file to finished product, which also differs from one print application to another.”

But, he added, “solutions that offer automation controls within the RIP and Print workflow software can take the pain out of those tasks that would otherwise be artisanal.”

“Companies tend to think they are ‘unique’ when, generally, they’re not,” Young said. “It is true, however, that connection to the W2P or MIS is absolutely essential, since it allows for automating custom parameters such as size. Without this, only cookie-cutter type products could be automated, which is where many of the ‘artisanal thinking’ companies get stuck.”

Let “automating custom parameters” be words to guide you.

“Automation has been slow to be adopted industry-wide because you have odd-size signs, pop-up displays and things like that that are one-offs in a printer’s head,” said John Dean, marketing content specialist for Enfocus, “but if you take just a little bit of extra time the first time you work that kind of a job manually, and you build as much automation into it as you can—whether it’s just the file processing or automatically sending your cut-lines to your table cutter—you do that once, then every time a job like that comes in, it’s already done.”

And it may also simply be that people just don’t know what they can automate.

“In a lot of cases, the problem is that they don’t know that the [automation] features exist,” Van Rossum said.

Even something as simple as hot folders for specific output devices can take a lot of the dog work out of wide-format workflows.

40

“Depending on which device it was going to, whether it needed white underprint or overprint, or whether it had cut-lines in it already, you could drop a file in a certain folder and then Switch would process it according to whatever Acrobat action lists that you created for that specific job,” Dean said. “For instance, you create one that makes a quarter-inch of bleed and adds the fold-line, then it would direct it to the RIP for the output device, whether it was an HP roll device or a flatbed printer. On the way, you could also have it convert everything to CMYK using profiles. It’s a simple workflow in concept, but as soon as people realize that they didn’t have to do all of these things manually for each job—all they had to do was make sure the trim size was right and throw it in a hot folder—then they immediately find out that they’re gaining time.”

There are still a lot of manual tasks in wide format.

“A person has to fold the edges of a sign and punch the grommets and whatnot,” Dean said, “but now that you have an automated way to put those guides and grommet marks in there and make a cut-line if they have a digital table, that then allows them to spend more time and care on the manual tasks.”

And there’s no saying that those manual tasks won’t be automated at some point in the future.

The Long Tail Wags the Dog Maybe print businesses don’t want to achieve what’s called “lights out” automation (or, to use the analogy I began this story with, “beware of dog” automation). Will they need to?

By hook or by crook, they may, not necessarily to differentiate themselves, but simply to remain competitive.

“I don’t think shops differentiate themselves with automation, because I don’t think their customers care,”

D’Amico said. “They just want the job at a certain quality level, a certain speed, a certain turnaround. But it definitely seems to me like the shops that have automated workflows are the ones that understand the whole process a little bit better, especially their costs associated with doing this work.”

Wide-format is not all that different from commercial printing in terms of the dynamics driving the need for automation.

“High turnover in production teams, tight customer deadlines and low margins are forcing shops to look for changes to their workflow and business to increase profits,” Manwaring said.

“Shrinking profits and tighter margins from the competition are driving automation,” agreed Young. “The long tail affects everyone. People want fewer quantities of more customized products with a shorter turnaround. The only way to address this and make money is through automation.”

At the end of the day, automation is all about controlling costs.

The influx of newbies into the wide-format printing arena is also, in a slightly more indirect way, driving the automation need.

“If you’re only doing large format, you might have noticed that in the last few years a lot more companies have been adding large format to their portfolios,” Van Rossum said.

“So suddenly you’re competing with commercial printers that now also do large format. So that’s probably also triggering a lot of large-format companies to look into automation.”

As much as we may like the idea of printing as a craft, we have to commoditize the process as much as possible, because printing has become all about doing more with less. Or, Van Rossum corrects, “doing more with the same—what you already have.” Find article here PrintingNews.com/21082894 ■

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WIDE-FORMAT & SIGNAGE

SAi Launches Augmented

Reality App for Signmakers

SAi’s new VirtualSign is an augmented reality app that lets signmakers show clients how a sign will look in situ before it is printed and installed.

Article by Richard Romano

O

ne of the killer apps for augmented reality is allowing customers to see what a product will look like in one’s home, office or other final location before it is actually bought. The IKEA catalog is perhaps the best example of this kind of AR application: point your phone at your empty living room and see how a particular piece of furniture will look in that spot.

Likewise, SAi, makers of Flexi, the standard design platform for the sign industry, recently launched VirtualSign, an app that allows signmakers to see how a sign will look in an actual interior or exterior location. SAi had been teasing the app for the past couple of years and it finally launched in June.

“The idea came from our CEO [Mark Blundell] and he thought it would be really cool if people could see their sign with their phone before they actually printed it,” said Gudrun Bonte, vice president of product management for SAi. “We looked into the technologies and thought, ‘That’s kind of an augmented reality approach.’”

The advantage of the app is that SAi customers’ design files already live in the cloud.

“Most of our customers make their own designs in our software and we already have the ability for them to upload their files to their cloud account, so they’re stored in the cloud for other tools that we have,” she said.

At present, the AR component works within the Flexi platform. Once

42

a designer has finished a sign and stores it on their cloud account, the VirtualSign app accesses all the stored files, displays them, the user selects the one they want to “comp,” and then they point their smartphone camera at the spot were the sign will be installed.

“The application will try to find vertical spaces,” Bonte said, “and the sign itself can be pinned down. Once that’s done, you can scale and rotate it, and once you’ve pinned it down, you can walk around with your phone, and it’s as if you’re walking around and physically being there.”

If the client isn’t physically with the signmaker, the user can take a

snapshot of the sign virtually in place and email it to them.

“The whole point of it is that it’s kind of a marketing tool,” Bonte said.

“Before you actually print or cut the sign, you can tell your print buyer, ‘Do you want to see what it’s going to look like on your wall or on your popup banner?’”

VirtualSign is part of a suite of tools that SAi has been developing to complement and supplement Flexi.

“About four years ago, we started thinking about what else we can do to help our customers besides printing,” Bonte said. “What can we do to alleviate some of the burdens that our customers have?”

As a result, SAi has been steadily releasing tools that are linked to customers’ cloud accounts. One in particular is called Artwork Approval.

“That tool came from a survey we sent to our customers in which we asked them, ‘What do you hate most about your job?’” Bonte said. “The

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number one reply was ‘dealing with customers.’ Having to communicate with the customer was the biggest, trickiest thing.”

With the Artwork Approval tool, while the signmaker is designing a project in Flexi, they can click a “Send For Approval” button and send a comp via email to their customer,

who can then annotate and make comments to it.

“They can go back and forth with different revisions until the customer hits the approval button, in which case they are ready to start producing the sign,” Bonte said. “So it’s taken away some of that over-the-phone communication and misunderstanding.”

Another tool called QuickQuote came out of the customer survey, as well.

“A lot of our customers didn’t really know how much they should charge for creating signs or prints,” Bonte said. “They would know how to charge for ink and media, but they wouldn’t think about the design time or the installation time.”

QuickQuotes is designed to make it easy to generate and send an accurate PDF quotation to customers. SAi is working on some additional new tools which will be announced in the fall.

At present, VirtualSign is available only for Flexi users, and is available for iPhone and Android via, respectively, iTunes and Google Play. Find article here PrintingNews. com/21082881 ■

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Visit us at Printing United Booth #7627 for hands-on demonstrations.

For more information, visit PrintingNews.com/10006499

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TEXTILE & APPAREL

Digital Printing of Textiles:

A Growth Opportunity

World Textile Information Network (WTIN) has released its latest data regarding worldwide digital printing of textiles and we recap some of that information here.

Article by Cary Sherburne

I

nformation provider World Textile Information Network (WTIN) has been tracking the growth of digital printing in the textiles industry for some time, and recently released new data.

While it demonstrates that their growth projections have been on track, we still have a long way to go in the industry’s analog-to-digital transformation, with just 6% of the world’s printed textiles produced digitally.

According to the company’s data, 2018 saw only a small percentage of fabric printed—although that small percentage amounted to 36 billion square meters excluding signage.

And only 6% of that was produced

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digitally. Still, that was 2.57 billion square meters of printed fabric. But that is up from only 3.3% as of ITMA 2015, nearly doubling its share.

There was an installed base of nearly 50,000 digital textile printers in 2018, up from about 27,000 in 2015. This is impressive growth when considering that the overall textiles market is growing at about 2%, according to Euler Hermes.

MS Printing Solutions and EFI Reggiani accounted for 36% of digitally printed fabric in 2018.

The majority of digital textile printers are installed in Europe and Asia (76%), with only 10% of total installs in North America.

We can expect to see the North American installed base continue

to grow, especially in today’s trade war environment, another encouragement for reshoring of the industry, although clearly the bulk of production will still continue to be produced offshore for the foreseeable future. Unit growth is primarily seen in the sub-20-square-meterper-hour printers, and the printers that can produce in excess of 650 square meters per hour—with the latter category accounting for 47% of production in 2018. At ITMA, we saw several new printers that produce in the 800-square-meter-per-hour range.

And of course, there is the workhorse EFI Reggiani BOLT that, at 90 linear meters per minute, can produce more than 8,000 square meters of highquality printed fabric per hour. At the

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For more information, visit PrintingNews.com/12303268

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TEXTILE & APPAREL show, the company reported that four units had already been ordered— three in Pakistan and one in Italy— with a robust order pipeline. It remains to be seen how printers like this will ultimately affect the analogto-digital transformation in textiles.

We’ve written a great deal about the benefits of digital printing, including economic and environmental. With the textiles industry being the world’s second largest polluter, the environmental benefits go without saying. And of course, there are many economic benefits to being able to produce any product, including textile-based products, on demand.

As has happened in many other industries, digital technologies have the ability to upend conventional supply chain practices, but most experts that we have spoken to believe we won’t see the industry getting close to any kind of digital critical mass for a decade or more.

Pigment inks hold a great deal of promise for moving production to digital because they typically

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can print on just about any fabric type, often with no need for postprocessing, significantly reducing environmental impact. And there are pigment transfer paper solutions

Pigment accounts for only 2% to 3% of digitally printed product today, a percentage that will grow to about 5% within a couple of years, with a CAGR of 15% to 20% over the next five years.

coming to market as well. WTIN reports that pigment accounts for only 2% to 3% of digitally printed product today, a percentage that will grow to about 5% within a couple of years, with a CAGR of 15% to 20% over the next five years.

China, which has been a major world polluter, is starting to try to put in place better controls, not just in textiles, but for manufacturing across the board. The good news is that more than 80,000 factories have been punished for violating the country’s stricter environmental regulations.

The bad news is that this is also restricting many of the chemical ingredients used by the textiles and other industries, with digital disperse dye inks being the most affected.

This includes rare earth minerals which are used in the development of colorants as well as raw materials that are crucial for other high-tech manufacturing.

While according to an article in The Verge, rare earth minerals are not really that rare. The process of

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TEXTILE & APPAREL extracting the necessary components from mined earth is a “messy, dangerous business,” involving acid baths and unhealthy doses of radiation, one reason why production has been relatively isolated to China.

However, if export of rare earth minerals from China is banned, which could happen in today’s volatile trade war environment, it may force other countries to pick up the slack, and would likely cause at least a temporary supply chain disruption that could affect production of dyes and inks for textiles—although surely dye and ink manufacturers are already looking for alternative sources.

“Even though a ban on rare earth exports is just speculation at this point, companies have begun

to preempt any new Chinese restrictions,” according to The Verge.

“American chemical firm Blue Line Corp and Australian rare earth miner Lynas have already proposed new production facilities in the U.S., and rare earth stocks around the world have surged in response to the threat.”

All of this can add up to increased ink prices, which WTIN expects to see beginning in 2020. Yet, there are so many cost benefits to a migration to on-demand or just-in-time manufacturing that are enabled by digital printing, that in the end, the ink price might not be the biggest deciding factor when brands look at how best to manufacture apparel, home goods and more. The key is to change the way brands think about their purchase process—with a

greater focus on lifecycle costs than on current unit costs, a shift that will take some time to take hold.

Like any of the other analog-todigital transformations we have seen across various industries, it is often the nonconventional competitors that swoop in and disrupt things.

Especially in North America, as brands look increasingly toward reshoring and streamlining supply chains, this presents significant opportunity for entrepreneurs who are approaching the business from a digital native perspective.

Stay tuned to WhatTheyThink’s textile section as we discover and cover these emerging companies that have the potential to accelerate the industry’s transformation. Find article here PrintingNews.com/21082893 ■

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WIDE-FORMAT & SIGNAGE

Web2Fabric:

Lessons Learned Customized web presence drives on-demand sales.

Article by Cary Sherburne

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emember back in the 1990s when we had the dot-com boom (and bust)? That’s the timeframe during which we saw the emergence of a myriad of web-toprint offerings. Most of those initial companies are gone, but web-toprint lives on. For companies who have implemented this approach to customer support and service, it has been critical to ensure an efficient back-end operation. You can’t have thousands of jobs coming in over the web and expect to make money on them if you have humans processing them.

This same on-demand production model is now making its way into the textiles and apparel industry,

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and DPInnovations is one of the companies that is helping to address this essential back-end productivity requirement. In fact, Steve Smith, the company’s founder, had the foresight to trademark the term Web2Fabric.

The company offers a set of tools that can be modularly configured to meet the needs of individual companies.

“The key to beginning an engagement of this nature is to have a thorough discussion about the vision the company has about its web presence,” Smith said. “You never just copy and paste these configurations.

There is always customization.

“Depending on who the target audience is, you may or may not want to make print quality information, including dpi, available

to customers on the web. If you are dealing largely with hobbyists, this audience likely doesn’t care as much about those technical details as compared to large brands or a skilled experienced textile industry designer, for example.”

He also pointed out that some businesses are looking to attract 20,000 customers with a targeted spend rate of $20 per order, while others might be looking for 1,000 customers who each spend $200 per order.

“There are very different technical requirements for these two scenarios,” he said. “Once we understand the target market, how the web site is going to behave, and who will use it, only then do we decide which tools from our library we will use.”

Among other tools, the company offers those that are designed for projects that need cut-and-sew, size changes, scaling, number of repeats and how a design will look on a cutand-sewn product.

Once an order is placed, all of the

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WIDE-FORMAT & SIGNAGE Your Design

necessary information is packaged and sent to the physical print room where it is processed by the customer’s RIP of choice – Caldera, Wasatch, Ergosoft, Inedit, etc. Data includes information that enables the RIP to put the job into the right queue on the right printer with the right fabric – all without human intervention.

“Some customers use many of our tools,” Smith said. “Others only use a few.”

He cites one of his clients as an example of the latter.

“This company is not targeting tens of thousands of potential customers.

Rather, they establish relationships with charities, schools and other organizations, gives each their own portal, allowing their constituents to order custom printed products. The organization markets this offering to its members. This means it needs to be a very simple process with all obstacles removed. The user chooses a design, is able to view that design on various products, picks the final product or products they want, and pays for it. These users are not into scaling, repeats, changing sizes, etc.”

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Our Manufacturing

Beyond Print Production Smith sees educating customers as part of his responsibility in these engagements. If the customer doesn’t have the right mindset – and budget – there is no value to either party in proceeding. But Smith feels very strongly that beyond his Web2Fabric production workflow, companies also need to be prepared to invest a significant amount in marketing efforts, if their target clients are unknown and exist somewhere on the web. This is based on his experience with the success – and failure – rates of engagements over time.

“When I look at all of our installations from the start,” he said, “I would say that 50% are no longer active as a web business. In most cases, they are still in business and able to take advantage of the production tools we offer. They just are not offering services online.

“The primary element that was missing from all of those that failed was marketing of their sites.

Early on in the development of Web2Fabric and the emergence of digital textile printing, you could

rely on organic growth, including word of mouth, blogs and online communities. Today, that approach will not get visitors to your store.

It just doesn’t happen unless you have a very unusual unique selling proposition. You are competing against hundreds or thousands of other businesses selling digitally printed products. The companies that are doing the big dollars in Web2Fabric are spending $20,000 to $30,000 per month on marketing, and they have the revenues to support that. As a rule of thumb, Cary Sherburne Cary Sherburne is a well-known author, journalist and marketing consultant whose practice is focused on marketing communications strategies for the printing and publishing industries.

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WIDE-FORMAT & SIGNAGE you have to plan on spending at least $5,000 per month on marketing to gain traction and appear on the first search page.”

Smith said this has developed over the last 12 months.

“Our projects are now very different,” he said. “There is no point in building an e-commerce website that targets tens of thousands of customers unless you commit to a significant marketing campaign and dedicate resources to that. The outcome for us is that we have fewer projects, but each project is far more intensive with a much more significant overall budget.”

Smith’s company does not offer marketing services, but he can refer customers to a network of digital marketing agencies.

“We ask them to not only budget for our services, but to set aside an adequate marketing budget right up front. If they are not willing to do that, or cannot do that, we more than likely will make the decision that the project is not for us.”

This is because DPInnovations has taken an approach that shares the risk, to an extent, with the customer.

“We consider ‘Year One’ as a break even year for us,” Smith said, “with ‘Year Two’ delivering a nominal profit. We make our money in years three, four and five. Beyond that, the project generally shifts into maintenance mode.”

Smith also recommends that companies work with a local digital marketing agency.

“Just like it is important to have a clear understanding of the company’s vision to determine the best technology configuration, it’s also critical for the digital marketing agency to understand the vision as well. And communicating that vision is best done face-to-face rather than in a remote online session. We help them find those local resources.”

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Words of Advice If you want to establish an e-commerce business in textiles and apparel, Smith offered this guidance: “Don’t think you are going to get away with spending a couple hundred dollars a week on Google ads to attract customers to your e-commerce site. If you don’t see the need to invest $150,000 to $200,000 in a web e-commerce business, then it’s probably not a discussion we should be having.”

While companies could hire technical staff to build a Web2Fabric infrastructure and marketing staff to promote it, Smith said that this is expensive and typically lacks scale.

“You are better off partnering with established companies in both areas that have already made these

investments and have the requisite skills.”

As digital printing of textiles continues to grow at double digits, there is significant opportunity for new and existing businesses to take advantage of its benefits in delivering on-demand or just-in-time production of digitally printed fabric, apparel, home goods and more. But in doing so, companies should heed Smith’s advice and ensure adequate resources to not only produce the products, but get the word out to target audiences.

Have a clear vision and communicate that vision to both technology and marketing partners. That will provide a framework from the get-go that has a much higher likelihood of success.

Find article here PrintingNews. com/21081542 ■

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WIDE-FORMAT & SIGNAGE

How Signs and Graphics Assist an

2 1 3

Aging Generation The correct signage can help older customers.

Article by Leah Edwards

C

3. Signs for Spending

1. Signs for Wayfinding

With time and money to spend, this demographic is active around town.

From errands to brunch, businesses need to be mindful of this segment of the population, increasing visibility outside with site and monument signs, window graphics and banners, and also enhancing findability with wayfinding signs. By making signs easy-to-read, restaurants with easy-toorder access and retail establishments will be easy to navigate. Because of this, business owners can ensure better overall experiences and future, repeat customers.

arefully crafted signs and visual graphics for the aging population are no longer restricted to retirement homes and medical facilities. With improvements in healthcare and technology, this generation is incredibly active as they continue to participate in all facets of daily life.

Since eyesight still diminishes with age, signs for this demographic will be more effective when utilizing larger fonts, having color contrasts and minimizing visual clutter. A little forethought regarding visibility and clarity in signage can help ensure that an active aging generation can have great experiences everywhere they visit.

Increasing visibility and providing easy wayfinding is important. Ideal signage includes large and readable fonts used in wayfinding signage including directories that are readily available to help with navigation.

2. Signs for Exercise

Seniors enjoy exploring various active outlets in this phase of life.

From group fitness classes to meeting

4. Signs for Home

Choosing where to live and enjoy a thriving senior lifestyle is important.

With signage, you can inform seniors about amenities and activities, while conveying a consistent and clear message to residents and visitors alike.

Visibility of brand and readability of signage provides seniors with an easyto-navigate living space.

5. Signs for Events

Leah Edwards Leah Edwards is a content marketing writer currently working for FASTSIGNS International, Inc. to share franchisees and their news with local markets as well as sharing great news about the brand as well.

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up with friends on the tennis courts, seniors need to be able to see, locate and navigate active spaces without asking a myriad of questions.

Incorporating a variety of sign types into a space can make a community event or experience more positive for this demographic. From digital signage to ground graphics, these innovative signs help, inform and inspire. Wayfinding signage is imperative for avoiding that feeling

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of being lost. Signage for education, upcoming events, or history of an organization can be informational and appreciated by an aging generation.

6. Signs for Donors

Many active seniors volunteer and are involved with charities, alumni associations or other community groups because they enjoy giving back. By incorporating donor signage and memorable sign pieces, you can thank them and honor their contributions. By making these installments easy to read with interesting, branded creative elements in them, people may be encouraged to take photos and share on social media to increase visibility online.

Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.� For active seniors, creating ideal signs are an integral piece of creating this beautiful life for them.

Without proper signage, business owners and organizations can miss opportunities to inform, sell and connect with them. An aging population deserves to have incredible experiences in all places, and signs and graphics help accomplish this. Find article here PrintingNews.com/21077536 â–

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PRODUCT NEWS

Crown Letsgo Inkjet Paper Now Available in Sheets As market leader in high speed inkjet paper Crown Van Gelder sells a wide range of reels under the name Crown Letsgo for all high speed inkjet presses in the market.

There is a choice of 3 portfolio’s: Publishing print, Promotional print and Transactional print. With more than 10 years of continuous innovation and knowledge support, we help our worldwide customers to improve inkjet performance on their presses. As of now, we supply part of the Letsgo range also in sheets in the sizes SRA3, A3 en A4 to customers in The Netherlands, United Kingdom and Germany. Via www.cvgwebshop. com sheets can be ordered online with a short delivery time. Because our Letsgo range is specifically developed for waterbased inkjet printing, priming or pre-coating on press is not necessary. The print result shows sharp and vivid colors with good drying and gives a lay flat print result for error free finishing.

www.printingnews.com/21081333

Konica Minolta Launches AccurioPress C83hc Konica Minolta is pleased to introduce its new High Chroma digital production press, the AccurioPress C83hc. The AccurioPress C83hc reproduces images that are difficult to achieve with standard CMYK toner, such as bright purples and vibrant greens. Its ability to reproduce RGB colors is invaluable in expanding printing applications such as photo books, fashion apparel, nature photography, commercial graphics, and more.

Beyond color, the AccurioPress C83hc is built for consistent, high-quality prints. Its state of the art technology increases productivity and accuracy. The AccurioPress C83hc runs 80 ppm/letter with high-capacity paper handling for large volume printing and high spec finishing options for greater efficiency.

Thick paper weight compatibility of up to 350 gsm expands versatility to handle a variety of media such as banners and textured stocks.

www.printingnews.com/21080157 Mac Papers Adds Rigid Media to Argent Wide Format Lineup Mac Papers, one of the largest merchant distributors in the southeastern United States, has added rigid materials to its exclusive Argent portfolio of wide format media. The Argent product line now includes PVC board, corrugated plastic and styrene rigid materials for a variety of media applications.

Argent rigid materials are carton packed to facilitate efficient delivery and storage. Printed sample sheets are available by request through Mac Papers’ online Sample Center at macpapers.com/samplecenter.

www.printingnews.com/21081323

Asia Pacific Debut for swissQprint Roll to Roll Printer Karibu After its successful world premiere in May 2019, Karibu, the new swissQprint roll to roll printer is scheduled to be unveiled in the Asia Pacific region: Sign & Display Show, Tokyo, 2931 August 2019.

After its successful world premiere in May 2019, Karibu, the new swissQprint roll to roll printer is scheduled to be unveiled in the Asia Pacific region: Sign & Display Show, Tokyo, 29–31 August 2019. swissQprint will be present at the Sign & Display Show, Tokyo from 29 to 31 August 2019: Aomi Big Sight, hall A, starring Karibu, the first swissQprint roll to roll printer at stand No. 46. Karibu has unique features which swissQprint already presented at the printer’s world premiere at Fespa Munich in May 2019. The high-end inkjet printer is now to have its debut in the Asia Pacific region.

Karibu is a roll to roll printer with swissQprint DNA; reliable, sophisticated and versatile – just as the flatbed printers of this Swiss manufacturers are. Unique features render the printer highly efficient, starting with the quick setup of the material, on to clever vacuum control, and to operation via the newly developed output software. Karibu is precise and delivers first-class print quality. Thanks to cool LED curing the printer processes a wide range of roll material using a specially developed ink set. Hence, it provides great versatility as well as high return on investment.

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PRODUCT NEWS CAPTIVA Innovations Launches Flexible Printed Electronic LED Retractable Banners for Leading Cosmetic Brand Across Canada

Toppan Develops Worlds First System for Generating Moir Pattern for Any Image Toppan Printing (Toppan), a global leader in communication, packaging, décor materials, and electronics solutions, has developed the world’s first system enabling a moiré interference pattern to be generated for any image.

The system was developed by applying Toppan’s technology for reducing the occurrence of moiré patterns in printed media.

An image is separated into two patterns to produce a moiré pattern design, enabling 3D and dynamic effects, a sense of depth, and variations in color density, which can be effective for in-store POP promotional tools, warning signs, and other displays.

Moiré patterns can occur unintentionally in printing due to the overlapping of aligned dots and lines. These interference patterns generally have a negative impact on the appearance and quality of printed media.

Toppan, however, has applied the expertise cultivated in research into technologies to prevent such patterns to now be able to control and use them effectively for eyecatching designs and visual impact.

The system developed separates an image into two patterns with different pitches and phases. The two images are then printed, and various methods, such as inserting a clear panel or leaving a space between them, are used to create the moiré pattern design.

www.printingnews.com/21081551

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CAPTIVA has announced the launch of its interactive LED eBanners for Lise Watier’s innovative lipstick marketing campaign.

The mandate for the Lise Watier campaign was not only to attract attention and draw-in audiences but most importantly to engage them through a fun interactive module that would increase brand awareness, leave a lasting impression, and ultimately drive sales.

The result is a highly sophisticated, yet easy to operate, LED beauty wheel in the form of a retractable banner – customers simply touch the PLAY button on the Lise Watier banner to stop the racing LED lights, and discover their prizes.

CAPTIVA’s flexible and versatile LED eBanner product can be programmed to create a wide range of lighting effects, and customized to be produced in various sizes and shapes lending itself to a variety of truly unique applications, including ceilings displays, curved surfaces, integrated into End Caps and POS displays and adapted to fit into retractable banner stands that are powered by a battery pack.

www.printingnews.com/21081723

Racami Introduces a Newly Redesigned BI Reporting Platform in its Alchem-e 6.4 Update

Neenah CLASSIC Papers are Perfect for Everything Under the Sun

Racami released an improved version of its Alchem-e software platform for high-volume production of customer communications. A key feature of the new version is the low-code dragand-drop interface that simplifies the creation of reports. Alchem-e’s unification of multiple databases and systems gives business users a single place to access information and evaluate the health of the operation.

The Alchem-e software helps direct marketers, transactional processors, book publishers, and corporations onboard jobs faster, manage multiple facilities, secure data, and simplify their environments by combining products from different vendors into a master system.

Neenah has just released Everything Under the Sun, the newest promotion showcasing its Neenah CLASSIC Papers portfolio — the most comprehensive, bestselling collection of fine printing papers on the market.

From the embossed cover produced on CLASSIC CREST, Solar White, high-fidelity printing, to images that incorporate the textures of CLASSIC Techweave or CLASSIC Woodgrain into the design, Everything Under the Sun houses a combination of creative design, print techniques, and a variety of paper shades, colors and textures to create inspiration, enhance visions, and help take ideas where they might lead.

www.printingnews.com/21081562

www.printingnews.com/21081727

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INDUSTRIAL PRINTING

A close-up of the sensors which are used as “keys” to operate the instrument.

(Image courtesy Daniel Oran.)

SensorKnits: A New

Approach to Wearable Tech As part of our coverage of textiles and apparel, we look for interesting developments, both in the more conventional textiles and apparel market as it transitions to a more digital approach, as well as developments in technical textiles.

Article by Cary Sherburne

A

s a lifelong knitter, I’ve been interested in how this technique for creating fabric can be used for more advanced purposes. We’ve published a few articles on this topic. For example, we wrote about how 3D knitting was used in the development of Nike’s FlyKnit shoe. We also wrote about the effort to bring knitting mills back to Brooklyn 54

by Tailored Industry by leveraging 3D knitting to eliminate most of the laborintensive finishing processes required with conventional knitting. And we have written about developments in wearables that use conductive materials to add functionality to fabrics, including the work being done at MIT on fiber computing.

I recently came across an interesting project underway at the

MIT Media Lab: SensorKnits. It uses a combination of digital knitting machines—a highly programmable manufacturing process—with conductive yarn to programmatically control the resistance of knitted fabric.

The group worked with three classes of textile sensors exploiting resistive, piezoresistive and capacitive properties of various textile structures enabled by machine knitting with

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The process of unzipping and flattening the handbag into an input of a musical instrument.

(Image courtesy SensorKnits Project.)

conductive yarn. The conductive yarn they chose to work with was a silvercoated conductive yarn obtained from China; there are likely many other choices that could be made as well, including the graphene-embedded yarn from Kyorene as we have also written about.

3D printing conductive materials on fabrics for making sensors and actuators is another method used in the past. This approach may lack longevity and durability, especially when used in a wearable that must sustain both motion and laundering.

Embedding conductive fibers into woven fabrics is another means. A good example of this is the Levi’s smart jacket developed through a collaboration between Levi’s and Google’s Jacquard project. In the case of the smart jacket, it connects to your phone via Bluetooth and was designed to make it easy to access

Customized belt rheostat sewn onto a backpack.

(Image courtesy Daniel Oran.)

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certain functions while riding a bike without needed to look at your phone. It gets around some of the issues with laundering by including a removable cuff dongle—just remove the dongle and throw the jacket in the wash.

The team notes that in addition to weaving, embroidery has also been used to add conductive materials to fabric. Recent advances in machine knitting allows the design of a multilayer or even 2.5D structure using multiple materials. The team states that machine knitting is more scalable than these other approaches, as well as more durable than conductive printing on fabrics.

Here are three examples that were presented as part of their research: 1. Customized belt rheostat sewn onto a backpack with a 3D-printed enclosure that covers the buckle, and a voltage divider circuit that changes the brightness of an LED. This can act as a safety mechanism, with

INDUSTRIAL PRINTING the backpack emitting light, for example, when a bicyclist is riding in the dark.

2. A knitted tablecloth for indoor use with 12 channels, each having a rheostat embedded.

Each rheostat can have a different function; for example, changing the color of the fabric or controlling lighting via connection to a microcomputer, which in turn broadcasts signals to a lab server, controlling both the light and ambiance of the space.

3. A musical instrument folded into a handbag which can be opened up, connected to a speaker and played. The bag can be a protective storage base for the speaker, which in their case was battery-powered.

What’s Next?

The SensorKnits team plans to continue its research to, among other things: ■■ Explore more sophisticated knitting machines to enable sensors to be embedded in, rather than placed atop, the knitted fabric.

■■ Improve the ability to interface these specialized knitted fabrics with other electronic components such as batteries and microcontrollers. For example, they identify the possibility of knitting “sockets” that make these connections between wire and yarn easier.

Other connectivity potential includes using buckles, buttons or conductive Velcro.

■■ Adapt their structural design methodology to other functional yarns. This might include heatresponsive, thermal chromic yarns to create interactive textiles at the stitch level.

Find article here PrintingNews. com/21081970 ■

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TEXTILE & APPAREL

New in Technical Textiles:

Smart Diapers, Lava Suits and More The topic of technical textiles can be a bit geeky. But there are always new and interesting developments in this area. Take P&G’s new smart diapers, or the protective lava suit for geologists from the University of Missouri working in volcanic areas.

Article by Cary Sherburne

The Ultimate in Wearables: Smart Diapers I don’t have a small child, but if I did, I’m not so sure I’d want my kid’s diapers talking to me. But that’s just what Procter & Gamble has introduced with its Lumi, an all-inone connected system that includes two activity sensors (presumably reusable) for diapers, a Logitech camera to be used as a Wi-Fi baby monitor and an app that integrates 56

it all. No, the camera is not in the diapers, which was my first thought…rather, it is meant to be a sophisticated baby monitor for the nursery.

Lumi is not expected to be on the market until fall, and pricing has not yet been announced, but likely the diapers themselves will be comparable in price to other Pampers offerings. What’s different is a wider blue wetness strip on the outside of the diaper that allows the sensor to notify parents—via

the Android or Apple app—that the diaper is wet. The sensor can also monitor sleep patterns. And the app also lets parents enter other data, such as feeding times and more, tracking data that can be helpful in establishing routines and for visits to the pediatrician. So from a technical textiles perspective, the difference here is the wider wetness strip, and other improvements that P&G has made to diapers over time. But the coolness of it has to do with the entire integrated system.

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TEXTILE & APPAREL Other companies are moving into this lucrative market as well. Huggies will be offering Monit that includes a Bluetooth sensor attaching to the outside of the diaper. It actually senses dirty, as well as wet, diapers (Lumi only deals with wetness). It can also track sleeping patterns, and is already available in Korea and Japan, with launch in North America soon. While this solution doesn’t appear to be linked to an app or a camera, it will offer a subscription service, making it easier for parents and more profitable for the company.

Staying Cool and Comfortable when Working with Lava This wouldn’t be my cup of tea, but geologists are doing important work at volcanic sites and need protective clothing. This is where Abby Romine, a graduate student in the Department of Textile and Apparel Management at the University of Missouri, comes in. If you are working around an active volcano, it can get pretty hot— 1,300 to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

So you obviously need protective clothing. You would like it to be not only protective, but comfortable.

Romine developed gear with

lightweight fabric that is breathable and doesn’t restrict movement. It’s also functional with all the pockets, clips and other gizmos geologists need when working in this volatile environment. Oh, and it’s flame and abrasion resistant, a must-have for lava workers. According to an article published by the University: “We tested [the gear] on a weeklong field trip in Colorado, and they were the most comfortable field pants I’ve ever worn,” Alan Whittington, chair of geological sciences, said. “I’ve been into outdoor gear since the 1980s. People want to buy gear that is expedition-level engineered, so I can see this as a good marketing opportunity beyond just volcanologists. If I had to choose between a commercial brand of work pants and these pants, I would pick these every time.”

Graphene: The Miracle Material We continue to be interested in developments with Graphene, touted as the strongest material on Earth and only discovered a few short years ago.00 Graphene is starting to make its way into high-performance sportswear now for both thermal and moisture control. It is also conductive, so you can expect to see incorporation of sensors into sportswear and other (Left) A graduate students in the MU Department of Geological Sciences field tested the lava suits created by Abby Romine, a graduate student in Textile and Apparel Management, during a recent research trip to Colorado. © MU News Bureau (Below) Vor-flex graphene enhanced rubber. touted as the strongest material on Earth and only discovered a few short years ago.

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garments as well. Advanced materials group Versarien, a UK-based company, recently announced a collaborative effort to incorporate its graphene ink technology into performance sportswear.

Getting back to the topic of protective gear, tests show that two nano-sized layers of graphene are strong enough to stop a bullet.

Imagine what that means for those clunky and—I am sure— uncomfortable bullet-proof vests our first responders wear.

Knitting: It’s for More than Grandmas I have to admit, I’m both a knitter and a proud grandma. So it’s fun to see how knitting is finding a resurgence in innovation. We wrote about 3D knitting as a way to revitalize knitting mills in North America. Tailored Industry is leading the way with an aggressive approach that can help brands bring products to market faster—and with less cost.

We also wrote about SensorKnits, a project out of the MIT Media Lab, using conductive yarn to programmatically control the resistance of knitted fabric. Still in its infancy, this technology offers interesting opportunities for the future. While they are not yet using graphene in their experiments, we suspect that will soon come as well.

Scratching the Surface This just scratches the surface of what’s happening in technical textiles these days. We are looking forward to attending TechTextil North America next year (co-located with TexProcess), scheduled for May 12 to 14 in Atlanta, Ga., to get the latest scoop on what’s new with technical textiles and how these innovative products will ultimate affect all of our lives. Stay tuned! Find article here PrintingNews.com/21082131 ■

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TEXTILE & APPAREL

Color Management Challenges in a Hybrid Analog/

Addressing

Digital Textiles & Apparel Industry In the textiles and apparel industry, color management has historically been a given. Now with the introduction of digital textile printing into the mix, new color management challenges have arisen.

Article by Cary Sherburne

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or many using conventional manufacturing processes in the textiles and apparel industry, consistent color management is a given. It is routine to have garment components manufactured in different locations, and using different fabrics. However, in the end, these components must match when they come together to create the final product. With conventional manufacturing techniques, manufacturers rely on lab dips to match color, and in many cases are required to match with a Delta-E of 0.5...a much more stringent tolerance than the graphic arts is held to.

While digital textile printing only represents some 6% of overall printed textiles today, it is growing at double digits. And digital textile printers are not only getting more reliable and accurate, but they are getting faster.

Consider, for example, the EFI Reggiani BOLT printing at up to 90 linear meters per minute with a width of 1.8 meters. The company reports that four have already been installed (one in Italy and three in Pakistan) with a decent pipeline of sales opportunities underway. And both Mimaki and Mouvent showed digital textile printers operating at 400 square meters per hour at ITMA recently. These are some examples of faster printers that can

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begin to replace some of the analog processes currently in use.

Add to that the need for brands to bring more collections per year to market, and the resulting lower quantities per item being produced, and you have another spur to the growth of digital textile printing.

So why does that matter from a color management perspective? In conventional textiles, not only are there longer runs that allow set-up and startup costs to be amortized over a larger quantity, but these manufacturers also use custom colors, making it easier to ensure matches from lot to lot and location to location. But with digital printing, process printing is used; that is to say, custom colors are made up through a combination of CMYK inks.

It’s one thing to control the color of a dye bath or spot color inks for screen printing that use the same colorants for large batches of dyeing or printing. It’s entirely another to achieve consistent color with 4+ color process printing— not only consistent from run to run, but consistent with any production that is being done using conventional technologies. In hybrid environments that combine conventionally and digitally produced components, the colors must match no matter how the components are created.

As Omer Kulka, vice president of marketing and product strategy at Kornit Digital recently pointed

out, while it is unlikely that two shirts ordered on demand through e-commerce will ever meet up, digital printing is also being used to refill retail inventories. Consider the shirts that remain on the shelf: when new inventory is added, it definitely needs to match that remaining stock, or the retailer will likely have a fit.

Getting Color Right from the Get-Go Color consistency starts with getting the color specification right.

Color Solutions International, for example, has a stock offer of 3,700 colors on its ColorWall, but also works with brands to develop new and custom colors. In fact, only about 30% of color requests are satisfied via the ColorWall library, with 70% being addressed through the development of custom colors. The company has 140 brands and retailers that use its color standards services to select either an existing ColorWall color or to develop a custom standard to more closely meet their needs.

“Whatever the inspiration is— fingernail polish or a Dorito chip— we help them create a custom color or select one from our ColorWall,” said Tim Williams, CSI’s marketing manager. “Once the color is agreed upon, we provide a highly qualitycontrolled mounted fabric swatch that contains printed information

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TEXTILE & APPAREL including reflectance data, the color measurement tool that was used, color formulation recipes, light sources, etc. This, together with our software that integrates with PLM systems, allows brands to better manage color and control the approval process across the supply chain. And with the data that is provided, their digital textile printing suppliers can assure their printers are outputting the right color as well.”

Not all buyers are as concerned with consistent color as major brands, however. Consider Spoonflower as an example, that serves a range of buyers from one-time visitors and hobbyists to small business customers, some of whom are knowledgeable about color and others who are not.

“We do offer design tools that allow people to sample a design if color is an important feature,” said Kerry King, senior vice president of research and development at Spoonflower. “They can purchase an 8-inch-by-8-inch swatch for a minimal cost, plus we have color maps and guides for customers who are designing their own artwork, allowing them to enter hex codes or other color designators into their design software. Our goal is to produce the selected color consistently if the customers don’t change anything on their end.”

Streamlining the Supply Chain Another challenge facing the industry is how to streamline the design and development process and to improve color communication across the supply chain in order to meet these shorter cycle times and faster speed to market. King, who also serves as president of industry association AATCC, points out that many AATCC members are still working within a more traditional workflow in terms of their color development process,

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and communication between product development and production may not always be optimum.

“Most of our work in AATCC has been to bridge the gap between product development and production,” she said. “There is a long history in design where numerical values for color have not always been the way people communicate color. This is one of the things we are trying to move the needle on, bringing all stakeholders in the supply chain together to talk about what works and what doesn’t, and bridge the knowledge gap between technicians who are dyeing fabric and those that just want a beautiful product. This becomes increasingly important as the role of e-commerce grows in the textiles and apparel industry, where brands need to ensure brand integrity, customer satisfaction and reduction of returns due to unexpected color.”

Collaboration for Better Outcomes Increasingly, industry players are collaborating with each other and with industry associations such as AATCC, to help resolve some of these issues. An example of this, announced at ITMA, is the collaboration Adobe has with Datacolor and CSI, which we exclusively reported on just prior to the show. Mike Scrutton, director of print technology and strategy for Adobe’s Print and Publishing Business Unit, explained that Datacolor’s ColorReaderPRO is now integrated with Adobe Textile Designer, allowing designers to measure color inspiration in the real world and transfer the data to Photoshop automatically via a Bluetooth connection. It works like an eyedropper tool: the user simply places the device on the sample, presses the button, and the color is identified for them within Textile Designer. The ColorReaderPRO works

seamlessly with third-party color standard libraries, including CSI’s ColorWall and brands’ color libraries.

This integration offers time and cost savings in the textile design process by eliminating the need to manually search and match textile color samples with swatches or color codes. We expect to see a growing numbers of collaborations like this as the industry moves to tackle color and other challenges associated with the analogto-digital migration it is undergoing.

Key Takeaways Suppliers to the market are educating users on how to use hardware and software, to better understand the impact of lighting on color and appearance, and even on the basics of color theory as we enter a hybrid world where digital and conventional technologies must work side by side.

“The best way to deliver a better color-managed process across the supply chain is through specific, objective communication,” said Chris Hipps, global director for Archroma Color Management, “from defining the light sources and a digital QTX color standard to objectively agreeing upon colorimetric acceptance tolerances and limits. A common goal is to allow suppliers to be able to make the same acceptability decisions as their customers faster, remotely and with fewer physical samples. Aligning on the process and controlling as many variables as possible supports better, faster and lower cost color development processes.”

It is clear that digital technologies, whether for design, specification, measurement, color communication or manufacturing– both digital and conventional–have a growing role to play in the future of textiles and apparel. Find article here PrintingNews.com/21082786 ■

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THINK TANK

Idealliance PPC:

Global Collaboration—Where Standards are Born The Idealliance Print Properties and Colorimetric Council (PPC), whose work is done entirely through global collaboration with contributions from the top color scientists, consultants, OEMs, brands, service providers recently held a meeting at Kodak.

Article by Ron Ellis and Tim Baechle

T

he Idealliance Print Properties and Colorimetric Council (PPC), whose work is done entirely through global collaboration with contributions from the top color scientists, consultants, OEMs, brands, service providers, creatives, educators and global innovators, recently held a meeting at Kodak in Vancouver, Canada.

The PPC is a global think tank, within the think tank of Idealliance, and works on projects under one of the core values of Idealliance, which is “Our Work Matters.” The work produced within PPC has literally transformed the global print and packaging industry.

The PPC produces standards, specifications, datasets, profiles, targets, research and globally leading practices to propel the industry forward. It is a group of more than 200 individuals from all parts of the

supply chain from all over the world.

Meetings are held several times a year in person, as well as monthly, via online conference calls. All member views and voices are welcome.

Many significant initiatives have come out of the PPC, including: the recent TC1617 target (proposed IT8/7.5), IT8/7.4, SCTV (ISO 20654), GRACoL, SWOP®2013, ISO/PAS 15339 (the Seven Characterized Reference Print Conditions), PRX and PQX (XML metadata exchange for the packaging supply chain working its way through ISO as 20616-1 and 20616-2), ISO 19303-1 (Packaging Printing Color Reproduction), and an incredible number of other standards, initiatives and implementable actions increasing efficiency. PPC works closely and in parallel with CGATS/USTAG on print standards and specifications that are then chosen to propose to ISO TC 130, where Idealliance has eight ISO Experts on the ISO TC130

Ron Ellis Ron Ellis is a Boston-based consultant specializing in color management, worflow integration, and press calibration.

Ron is the PPC Chair of Idealliance.

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Tim Baechle Timothy Baechle is the Chief Executive Officer of Idealliance formally the Vice President of Global Print Technologies & Workflow.

Committee and is a Liaison “A,” as well as countless others who serve on the PPC who are also ISO Experts on the ISO TC130 Committee.

Idealliance Print Properties & Colorimetric Council Objectives The objectives of the PPC are: ■■ Perform development projects on new and current industry topics.

■■ Provide the industry with leading practices, guidelines, specifications, standards, tools, information and methods to create extraordinary efficiencies within the industry.

■■ Provide application support for end users including calibration, specification and design creation all the way to production excellence.

■■ Create global standards and work in collaboration with global standards bodies for the betterment of the industry as whole.

Idealliance Print Properties & Colorimetric Council Goals The specific goals of the PPC are: ■■ Provide value to the entire global industry, not just member organizations.

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THINK TANK ■■ Thrust the industry forward.

■■ Increase efficiency of all aspects of the supply chain where possible.

■■ Enrich the life of organizations and individuals through knowledge sharing and education.

■■ Maintain PPC as a place where everyone is welcome and ideas and open discussion can flow.

The PPC is a place where you can be involved in projects that propel the printing and packaging industry, as well as learn from some of the sharpest minds in the industry and collaborate with world class companies. We have personally found that involvement in projects that change how we work as an industry is the most fulfilling part. When we are at client sites, we frequently see them using ideas and standards that came from the PPC. If you are an Idealliance member, consider joining the PPC and becoming part of the future of print.

Current Projects of Idealliance Print Properties Council Some of the PPC projects currently underway include: Expanded Gamut Printing: The ECG project standardizes expanded gamut printing for offset, flexo and digital print. The project includes a universal seven-color characterization target, a seven-color proofing control strip, seven-color datasets and a guide to seven-color calibration.

New CRPCs including a Universal Digital Dataset: The Council is also looking at future datasets to better meet the needs of the print community.

Although the XCMYK and ECG datasets (including a CMYK version for digital print) provide some larger spaces for wide gamut digital use, many users still want a wider gamut CMYK profile and translation space.

Idealliance is working on a larger gamut print and translation space

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based on the widest known print devices. This larger G7 color space will allow for print without clipping the gamut of digital devices, as well as retaining a visual connection to the existing CRPCs and G7 color spaces.

G7®and ICC Profiling: The PPC and Ryerson University are conducting a research project to document whether or not G7 improves ICC profiling results. This project aims to determine if doing G7 results in better ICC profiles. The research is taking place at Ryerson using a variety of print devices, as well as analyzing live data provided by a number of large printers who use multiple calibration and profiling techniques.

One of the greatest pleasures we have is working with the other individuals who make up PPC. Working with Spot Colors: The PPC is also looking at better ways to work with spot colors. These projects involve looking at further improvement in ways to specify and communicate spot colors as well as tints of spot colors.

TC1617 (proposed IT8.7/5) and datasets: The PPC will soon release new IT8.7/5 (TC1617) versions of the datasets to accompany CGATS 21.

These provide complementary data for those creating and editing profiles.

Updated Paper Calculation Spreadsheet: In addition to updating the datasets, the Print Properties & Colorimetric Council is also updating the M1 Substrate Relative Correction

spreadsheet to contain the full IT8.7/5 (TC1617) datasets. This will allow users to work with the full IT8.7/5 (TC1617) datasets, as well as produce profiles and data that will provide necessary data for quality applications, as well as improved profiling.

PPC also has many smaller projects focused on helping end users apply these methods, specifications and standards. These “how to” documents, videos and tools assist users in understanding and using leading practices. These include an updated “Guide to Print Production” on how to configure Adobe CC and additional projects.

We are also working to make the meetings easier and more accessible.

Sometimes travel time and costs to attend these meetings can limit the number of attendees. Coming up during the next year, these meetings will be streamed live with both video and audio, as well as topics timed so members can call in for pertinent topics. In addition, the Print Properties & Colorimetric Council holds scheduled teleconferences every month and will record event video, as well as post documents, research and standards as they have done for decades.

One of the greatest pleasures we have is working with the other individuals who make up PPC. They range from the deep thinkers, such as physicists and scientists who are committed to standards and leading practices, to ordinary practitioners who are deeply experienced in print production workflows, all of whom give their time, thoughts and respect to the others in the room as well as the industry. These individuals are the engine that drives PPC. If you are interested in joining PPC, please email tbaechle@idealliance. org and visit www.idealliance.org.

Find article here PrintingNews. com/21081326 ■

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FINISHING & MAILING Continued from page 29

for quick access by team members that need to see, utilize, evaluate and react to them is critical.

I cannot count how many times I have visited organizations and asked for their mail volume reports, postage spend, return mail volume, incoming mail volume, etc. and the information was not actively captured or maintained. A phrase that comes to mind is,“You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

Enterprise Postal Governance is about having the knowledge.

Forming a Postal Governance team as part of your organizational Postal and Mail Strategy enables organizations to have the right people with the proper levels of authority, accountability and commitment to successfully achieve strategic goals. Their success allows everyone to prosper and grow.

A successful Postal Governance team should have an Executive Champion to endorse and support the participation and commitment of the team. It should also include members of the organization from any line of business (LOB) that touches postage or mail. Here is an example of a Postal Governance organizational chart.

Enterprise Postal Governance Objectives ■■ E stablish an Executive Leadership Team.

■■ Align goals and objectives.

■■ Review postage spend and findings.

■■ Provide access to process owners.

■■ Establish a Mailing Council Support Team.

■■ Determine enterprise mailing standards.

■■ Review implementation strategies.

Each team member contributing to the objectives plays a critical role in

defining, capturing or providing the data and metrics that will support the initiatives and outcomes.

The ability to quickly view, analyze and act from a common dashboard containing their defined metrics, enables profitable decisions. Multilevel dashboards convey the right level of knowledge at the right level of operation for optimal impact.

By having all the process metrics come into a central management view, this allows postal and company experts to achieve overall postal compliance with USPS and internal regulations and guidelines. In addition to monitoring individual mail streams, this enables expanded evaluation across mail streams further promoting organizational relationships and alignment.

It is critical to have a companywide view of mailing operations related to USPS postal compliance and regulations. Just one non-compliant mail stream can (and has) caused the USPS to initiate an audit of an entire company and all their mailing operation records. The metrics, reports and information gathered and stored as part of Postal Governance includes what is needed in the event of an audit.

Failure to plan is a plan for failure.

Operational level reporting supports the executive level dashboard. This reporting includes daily, weekly and monthly reporting on address hygiene processes with trend reports that identify if address quality is improving, staying consistent or getting worse. The operational level reports also identify any outliers and the impact of any changes in USPS

62 WhatTheyThink - Wide-Format&Signage September 2019

regulations or software introduced by internal process or a vendor.

This is a result of the “control” phase for any organization and is the reason why Postal Governance must be implemented. Implementation of metrics, gathering and analyzing represent key milestones of this journey. Continuous monitoring leads to the identification of root causes of issues and trends that are supported by data that initiates a “drill down” process toward resolution.

For example, a mailer implemented a change related to their NCOALink License requirements. In doing so, they failed to evaluate the metrics from the operation that were also being sent to the USPS. As a result, they failed to notice when the process stopped working and they were no longer in compliance, resulting in failed mailing and rework expenses that were unrecoverable.

Potential Benefits and Results of Postal Governance ■■ V isibility and central control over $XX MM budget; automated dashboards ■■ YY MM savings from projects in initial scope of work ■■ Ongoing, prioritized list of innovative evaluation and savings projects ■■ Predict and budget for future rate increases; cost avoidance ■■ Protect YY MM in annual postage discounts A mail and postal strategy can and should be succinct, nimble and constantly reviewed to accommodate the evolution within the mailing and postal industry.

Given the scope and complexity of the issues, it’s advisable to work with a consultant with postal expertise to design and implement the correct solution for your company. The benefits can be huge. Find article here PrintingNews.com/21082656 ■

DIGITAL & INKJET

Continued from page 22 Use measurable images for print quality testing. (Image courtesy Inkjet Insight.)

OEM is also performing a measured print quality analysis on listed papers, but this information is not normally shared with the OEM’s customers.

Does qualified mean quality?

Without measurement data, it’s hard to know if your print expectations align with the person qualifying the paper. The OEM is supporting customers in many market segments, what is acceptable to one may not be acceptable to another.

This subjective approach can lead to surprises and disappointment if a “qualified paper” does not meet the customer’s print quality expectations.

Without an agreed upon standard for inkjet quality, it’s hard for OEMs to qualify papers in an objectively meaningful way. Many categorize paper as 1-4 or with a star ranking.

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These categories or rankings bundle all of the aspects of print quality into a single, averaged measure. This means that two papers with the same ranking might produce very different results. One might have scored high on text clarity and low on gamut – or vice versa. A paper that was not suitable for full color inkjet might be great for mono applications like books or forms. Even with the top “score” how do you know if this paper is right for your environment?

You are the decider on what quality means Without an industry standard for print quality, you need to determine which quality measures are most important to you and your customers.

Keep in mind that these priorities may vary by customer or type of

work. Here are the key items to test and measure: 1. Optical density 2. Chroma – CMYKRGB 3. Show through 4. Color gamut 5. Mottle 6. Coalescence 7. Color to color bleed 8. Small text clarity 9. Edge clarity At Inkjet Insight, we call these Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for print quality. We have evaluated and profiled 100’s of papers and have drilled down within various paper categories the data ranges which they fall. This creates a valuable reference point during your evaluation period to evaluate within a target based on ISO measurements. Find article here PrintingNews.com/21082509 ■

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Epson America, Inc................................ 41 PrintingNews.com/10005229 proimaging.epson.com; 800.GO.EPSON

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Canon USA............................................. 67

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Zund America, Inc................................. 37 PrintingNews.com/10008759 zund.com; 414.433.0700

September 2019 WhatTheyThink - Wide-Format&Signage

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EVENTS

Labelexpo Europe 2019 -

Getting Ready for the Big Event!

It is truly a global event. And don’t let the name fool you, it isn’t just about labels.

Article by David Zwang

H

ead over to Brussels Sept. 24-27 for Labelexpo Europe. This is the 40th anniversary of Labelexpo Europe and it should be a bigger and better event than usual. The last Labelexpo Europe in 2017 had almost 700 exhibitors and was visited by companies from over 139 countries.

Very much like drupa, it is truly a global event. And don’t let the name fool you, it isn’t just about labels, there is also flexible packaging and of course lots of innovative finishing and media showcased.

Global label production growth is tracking at about 3% above the global GDP, primarily driven by the rise in the middle class and the increase in mass customization of products.

According to Smithers Pira, we can expect significant and extended growth through 2023 across the entire packaging market. This is corroborated with forecasts by TechNavio’s Global Packaging Market 2019-2023 which estimates a CAGR of approximately 6% by 2023. Moving beyond packaging, the sixth drupa Global Trends Report anticipates a continued rise in both revenues and profits across much of the print supply chain.

In order to keep up with those opportunities and increases, the software and hardware equipment manufacturers have been innovating at an ever-increasing pace, so we can expect to see some very exciting solutions on display. Many of these solutions will also be harbingers 66

of the kinds of innovation you will see at drupa 2020. Even if you are not in label or flexible packaging production, this event offers you a preview of things to come, albeit you may need to connect the dots.

While toner-based digital solutions, both liquid and dry, have dominated the move to digital label production, we are now seeing an increase in production inkjet solutions offering higher productivity at a lower cost.

However, we are also seeing many new initiatives by flexographic equipment manufacturers who have always had the most cost-effective and productive label and flexible packaging production solutions.

These new solutions provide higher productivity than any of the toner solutions at quality levels that meet or exceed that of offset print. While most label, flexible packaging and packaging in general is beginning to see demands for mass customization, there are still some segments that require mass personalization. In order to meet those demands, there is a whole new wave of hybrid presses being introduced. These presses combine the production speed and higher quality of the ‘newly reborn’ flexo along with inline digital production inkjet imaging.

There will also be a lot of innovation in embellishment and finishing technologies, including die cutting, since labels have a history of using any available technique to create a product that can be differentiated on a crowed retail store

shelf. New or significantly upgraded press solutions will be coming from many global companies including: Bobst, Canon, Domino, Durst, Edale, Gallus, HP, Konica Minolta, Mark Andy, MGI, Mouvent, Xeikon and many others. We can also expect to see a host of new entry level machines driven by Memjet and Xaar imaging technologies as well.

The latest flexo plate and platemaking technology will be shown by Asahi, Dupont, Esko, Flint, Fujifilm, Macdermid, Mark Andy, Kodak Miraclon and many others.

Some of the latest UV ink and curing technology will also be on display as companies are trying to balance food safety, sustainability and cost. Of course, there will be a lot of solution providers of production workflow software as well. Everything from business management, workflow automation, fulfillment, RFID and security solutions, etc.

This event also hosts an array of educational sessions including Master Classes in Digital Labels, Self-Adhesive Labels, Inks Coatings & Varnishes and Flexible Packaging. There are also three application-focused areas for Flexible Packaging, Brand Innovation and a Sustainability Insight Café.

There is a lot more to cover, so stay tuned for more of this Labelexpo Europe 2019 coverage from the event.

We will look at some more innovative products, trends and interesting futures that were announced at the show.

Find article here PrintingNews. com/21082264 ■

WhatTheyThink - Wide-Format&Signage September 2019

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COLOR DIGITAL PRESSES

imagePRESS C910 SERIES. MAKE NO SACRIFICES. When you strive to deliver the best, you can’t make sacrifices. And with the imagePRESS C910 Series color digital presses from Canon, you don’t have to.

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The ideal media, selected from an impressive array of options …

Expanded applications to help grow your business.

With the imagePRESS C910 Series and your dedication, you can deliver superb quality— without any sacrifices.

That’s Techmanity From Canon.

For more information, visit PrintingNews.com/10004298

Learn more print.usa.canon.com

Canon and imagePRESS are registered trademarks of Canon Inc. in the United States and may also be registered trademarks or trademarks in other countries. ©2019 Canon U.S.A., Inc. All rights reserved.

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