Say What? A quick word with Derek Kenney

Before joining Kingsbury Press, Derek Kenney had spent seven years as sales director of Glasgow book printer Bell & Bain and has 18 years with Heidelberg before that. He had started in the industry at Litho Supplies in Livingston in October 1990 after four years at the Glasgow College of Printing.

Who do you sell to?

“We are working with creative agencies for luxury brands and publishers with books in aviation, cars, real estate, galleries and other art books. Bell & Bain, for example, is a fantastic book printer, but we are not a volume printer like Bell & Bain.”

What is it you are selling?

I like to sell six-colour print not four-colour process. This can be as simple as using a special colour instead of black for the text in a book, say a brown or a bronze. The difference that this makes is incredible. Designers can see the added value that this brings at not a huge cost for the extra impact. We work with creative designers that come up with fantastic designs and we bring that into print with the Wow factor that you do not get from digital. We call it the Art of Print.

Where is the next opportunity for Kingsbury?

Not everyone can buy art, nor can afford the limited edition prints for sale in the gallery, but they can afford the book that goes in the gallery or the exhibition and which will cost £35-70 each. This is the top end of the mainstream publishing market. British designers should be placing work here rather than overseas.

What does Kingsbury gain from being part of Bluetree?

We have access to digital printing which we did not have before. We are printing digitally now on designer papers and achieving the quality we are looking for from the Landa. I think that the Landa technology is super exciting for us and we will be using it more and more.