Print has much in common with Coca-Cola, not only because the printed labels of the Share a Coke campaign lit up demand for mass personalisation, not only because the specification of Coca-Cola red is an endless source of discussion between colour management experts, and not only because the drinks company spends millions on promotional activity, which feeds through to printers.
The strongest link between printing and the soft drink is that they both succeed when they stress the emotions they invoke. Bruno Picquet should know. The chairman and CEO of Duplo International worked at Coca-Cola for 20 years. “When I started there I was told that ‘you are selling an emotion’,” says Picquet. “And when we are marketing print we are also in the business of selling emotion.”
That emotional pull is the strength of print compared to digital communications and the ability to stir emotions will ensure print’s survival, says Picquet, even if the shape of the industry changes and the demand for long run production shrinks.
The shift to shorter runs is about creating more customised, more relevant messages to consumers, demanding greater use of digital printing to achieve these sorts of products. And with greater relevance comes greater emotional impact – as seen in the supermarket battles to secure the last bottle of Coca-Cola with a popular name on it.
It is also why Duplo is moving into the larger B2 formats, typified by the larger Blade cutting table, the DC20K expansion of the DC746 multifinisher and most directly the DuSense DDC8000, an embellishment press that builds on the success of the smaller format DuSense 810.
This has sold well across the areas under Duplo International’s reach, particularly in countries like France and Italy where there is a culture of luxury goods and high value print, where foils and tactile finishes add a flourish to cosmetics, to couture and to champagne. The UK perhaps lacks this culture, but the flowering of artisan drinks and food brands is changing this. These require limited production runs and the need to make shelf impact and a connection to the consumer. Embellishment will help.
There will surely be further finishing machines that suit the larger format from Duplo to round out the portfolio. The focus is on adding value to printed communication, Picquet explains. That may be in something as mundane as cutting business cards automatically to something that has intrinsically higher value, perhaps personalisation through foil or tactile finishes.
“It’s adding value by means of innovation and automated precision,” Picquet adds. “We are opening a big door with this sort of innovation.”
Duplo will inevitably be talking to larger print companies, albeit there are fewer of them than in its traditional B3 and SRA3 market sector.
This is the mainstream format in the digital print sector where Duplo cut its teeth, evolving from a supplier of office equipment and lightweight production equipment into ever more sophisticated machinery and more robust products. The new DuSense, for example, has to be lifted into place, not wheeled into position. The green button approach to operation remains with set up very much taken care of by digital means, reading job files from a barcode and setting the system automatically.
There are still plenty of entry level products from Duplo, including duplicators intended for the schools market and simple multifinishers that sit on bench tops, rather than the floor. The DC648, for example, was launched this year.
In short Duplo is not walking away from this section of the market. Today the flagship machines, however, are in a different league, more robust and production oriented and bear the hallmarks of continuous upgrades to meet customer requirements.
As digital printing has improved over the years, so too has digital finishing. As more products become suited to digital printing, finishing has adapted to cope. Today digital printing is perhaps about more complex products that litho printers create rather than just for simple cut and fold products. Duplo is not alone in evolving, Plockmatic has a twin approach of inline and nearline production for the smaller end of the market; Horizon is developing automation and using robotics at the frontier between digital and litho production and even Hunkeler with DocuTrim has recognised the importance of automation in the cut sheet digital print market.
This evolution is now leading to larger press formats. Indigo seems to be selling more B2 Indigos than smaller format machines. The smaller presses have improving machines from Xerox, Canon, KM and Ricoh to contend with. There is far less competition in B2. This amounts to KM and Fujifilm to date with Ricoh and perhaps others preparing to launch this year.
The conversations began at Duplo some four or five years ago, says Picquet. “I was in Japan with then chairman Robin Greenhalgh and we were discussing the future, agreeing that we should go to a larger format. We need to be aware that SRA3 is our bread and butter and that we have still to sell B3 machines every day.
“But we saw that the press suppliers developing B2 did not have a solution for finishing a B2 sheet – and that is essential for the overall ROI for the press.”
Part of the key appeal of digital printing in B2 for commercial printers was supposed to be the existing access to finishing equipment in this format, which is the same as for litho printing. However, the reality seems to be that B2 digital is doing the same jobs as other digital presses, but far more effectively and productively.
That delivers the ROI of the more expensive press and explains why the DC20K is so important. In the main many printers moving from smaller format digital to B2 will have a Duplo multifinisher on the floor. It is able to crease, cut, slit and perforate in one pass, so frees up operators to perform different tasks. But at the SRA3 sheet size.
In the world of online portals for specifying and purchasing print, jobs will be ganged where they share a common substrate to maximise usage of each B2 sheet. And this means multiple cuts on the guillotine, adding a bottleneck and operator cost to what could be an automated process.
With the DC20K instead, the sheet is first cut to a suitable size and then fed via a bridge into the DC746. For many products the sheet can be cut in half, and two equal sheets will head through the multifinisher. For others an asymmetric cut will be needed, meaning different sized sheets will alternate with each other. The sheet layout will be programmed in prepress – Duplo can take the imposition file from EFI Fiery or from Ultimate Impostrip. The job identifier code brings up the settings while cameras register the sheet to the DC20K device, correcting for any misalignment in printing or feeding. The sheet then progresses to the feed table for the DC746 where it can be subject to the full array of options that this unit has, with the knives and wheels moving into position automatically. This can thus cope with different products printed on the same original sheet as well as a stack of business or greetings cards.
It may not be the fastest solution available and does not offer the inline capability that the Horizon SmartStacker, for example, features but it wins for versatility – at least for the moment. And it certainly beats using a guillotine for the task, which delivers the added value that Picquet talks about.
“Printers get the return on investment because the larger sheet gives them a better solution for impositions,” he says. In other words the larger sheet carries more than double the number of business cards than an SRA3 sheet. If that can accommodate 21 cards at a time, the B2 sheet can fit 64 cards on the sheet. A two-up greetings card design becomes six cards on the larger sheet. And so on.
The more obvious value add comes with the B2 Blade, the cutting table under the PFI label which indicates that this is not a product developed in-house by Duplo, but a machine supplied by an OEM. Duplo then applies its own software and livery for sale to its customer base. This has worked with the smaller format machine. Duplo International has sold 450, all coming during the lockdown periods. “All were sold through negotiations and demonstrations using Teams and software because we could not meet up,” Picquet says.
Likewise product introductions and sales for new versions of the multifinisher have been conducted digitally.
This is no longer necessary, though still an option for a first view of the technology. Duplo International’s dealer network will have demonstration machines as will the enlarged and revamped showroom for Duplo UK in Addlestone. This is the mothership for Duplo in Europe and played host to dealers from 25 countries at the end of May, the first time the Duplo family had been able to meet up in more than two years.
During that period Duplo introduced weekly Teams meetings for management to share decisions which have then to be transmitted across the different operations. “Every single decision taken is then communicated to all people in the company across Europe,” says Picquet.
The company has always been strong at looking after staff and has held Investors in People certification at the highest level for more than 25 years. It could not walk away during lockdowns, that was simply not possible. Instead it doubled down on doing what it could. All the dealers have come through the crisis, says Picquet, though the dealer for Russia is currently offline. At the start of the conflict, Duplo took a quick decision that it could no longer do business in Russia, a move endorsed by the board and welcomed by others in the company. “We have a set of values and we have to live by those values,” he says.
That is about the Triple Bottom Line, where People sits alongside Profit with Planet as the third leg. This is the race to be carbon neutral, and it is under thorough examination at Duplo. “There’s always a good reason not to do this – Covid or now the war in Ukraine,” says Picquet. “But it is a great opportunity to start thinking differently. It’s looking for what we can do as a company, what can we do in terms of print, what can we do in terms of staff.”
Recognition of the part that they play in the business is crucial to Duplo’s success, expressed in a “One Duplo” approach that covers its wider distributors as well as directly employed people. “Six years ago I saw Simon Sinek talk about the human need for a higher purpose,” says Picquet. The attitude to people in the business and on to customers is about this.
The awareness of the importance of sustainability is part of this thinking and is in the future for all businesses, print or otherwise. For Picquet this heralds a return from globalisation and extended supply chains to more networked economy where local suppliers work with other local businesses to provide a higher value service to them than one based merely on price.
This approach reduces the carbon footprint and risk from stretched supply chains and improves responsiveness. It explains the growth in artisan and bespoke production and the growth in ecommerce that Picquet and Greenhalgh explored in Kyoto. He says: “I think there will be a good strong commercial printer in every small town. “They will be able to produce the promotional print and packaging that small business trading over the internet will need. And B2 digital printing and finishing is a big part of that.”
If the combination of press and the DC20K delivers efficiency and cost benefits, the larger PFI Blade can be effective at short runs of packaging – SRA3 having limited appeal for carton production. And then there is the new DDC8000, the larger DuSense. This is the machine to add tactile effects, varnishes and foils to a printed sheet with devastating impact. “We have sold a lot of the B3 DuSense since the launch in 2017. One of the biggest challenges with it is finding the right people to run it and to sell its capability.”
It is not a machine for every Duplo distributor, nor for every market. Sales will be carefully managed to minimise risk. The machine, however, fits with the times and directions mature markets are taking.
“There is growth in people making purchases of artisan products and who are prepared to pay a little more because of this,” he explains. “So if you as a printer can embellish with a solution like DuSense for foiling and varnishing and can offer cutting and creasing as well as folding and gluing it amounts to a good package and opportunity for a digital print company to deliver a packaging solution.”
The DDC 8000 is a significant step forwards for Duplo. It looks like a heavier piece of production equipment, from a standard sheet feeder head through to delivery stack. Four versions are offered; all machines are capable of a later upgrade to the full specification. The Essential is for spot UV effects only, Essential+ adds a foiling unit; Pro includes a surface treatment step for different print technologies and Ultimate includes the feeder and stacker.
There are no feed bins despite the larger format because this is for short runs. Instead a stack might in theory contain a number of jobs with the DuSense able to switch automatically between them.
The sheet passes an automated thickness detector which will adjust the height of the Kyocera print heads to their ideal position. As this will cope with paper from 80gsm to 600 micron boards, there can be a significant spread of thicknesses. A surface treatment step will ensure a consistent surface, regardless of printing technology used, whether digital or offset. The sheet is lined up for decoration by a side lay and by register marks running down the sheet. Cameras will pick these up and correct for any skew or unwanted movement in the substrate. A barcode will pick up any special instructions for the sheet, personalisation for example.
The DuSense can cope with a sheet with a maximum format of 585×1,068mm, enough to cover the format of the most common digital press formats and the next generation of digital presses. The Kyocera print heads can deliver the UV curable oil as Duplo describes the UV responsive material that can be applied in layers from 10-80 microns thick. This is first pinned by an LED UV system before being subject to a deep penetration cure for which mercury vapour lamp remains a better option than LED UV.
Before the varnish oil is fully cured, a hot foil can be applied to the tacky varnish using up to five different foils across the sheet. The cores are positioned on a fast load mandrel with a take up spool opposite to collect unused material after application. The range of foils covers all manner of colours and effects, including patterned and hologram materials.
Duplo has worked with Foilco to develop the ideal settings and check how the foils are applied.
When foiling is not needed and spot varnish effects are enough, the sheet is diverted below the foiling station by a tray into the delivery.
Duplo is introducing this technology to compete with Scodix and MGI, each with different models in the market and a few years additional experience. Both have B1 format machines and MGI has a version of its JetVarnish for narrow web label embellishment.
Victor Albergel, developer of the the MGI technology and executive vice president of the business, says that print has become a commodity, that finishing and embellishment provide threaded value to print that customers need.
“Brands have two challenges: how can my product be identified on the shelf and how can it stand out from the products. It takes two seconds for a consumer to identify a brand and 1.93 seconds to come to a decision about buying it according to researchers from the University of Chicago. Using spot varnish and foils can halve the time it takes to identify a product and can increase the intention to buy by 21%. When brands understand this they will invest in embellishment on packaging and labels.”
This understanding is what Duplo is also counting on. Says Picquet: “We want to enable customers to add value to their printed communications. We are in the business of selling emotions.”
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