Journalists from magazines and websites focused on the printing industry came from all corners of the globe descended on Dusseldorf last week to listen to companies explain their plans for Drupa this year. Presentation after presentation described the challenges the industry faces in the same terms, offered the same diagnosis and described some of the same unanswerable questions, the latter including how does the industry attract the new young talent it so desperately needs. That printers across the globe face the same set of challenges: sustainability, digitisation and lack of skilled staff. If anyone doubted that they belong to a global family of print, here is the genetic continuity to show that commercial printers in South Africa, South Carolina and Southampton are members of the same family.
There was also tacit acceptance that commercial print is the cousin that has fallen on hard times, at least in comparison to the go-ahead success of those in packaging or those immersed in all the potential of digital printing. The friendly message was that the the commercial print cousin should look at what their relatives are doing and think about joining them. At Drupa, that great family gathering of print, the likes of Heidelberg and Koenig & Bauer will be demonstrating highly sophisticated carton presses rather than commercial machines; even suppliers with a digital print back ground, Konica Minolta or even Duplo say, will have packaging focused products.
If this is one answer to the commercial printer’s dilemma, other questions do not yet have a straightforward solution or answer. How does print attract the gilded youth? Nobody is sure, though an article in the Wall Street Journal suggests that GenZ are at least as interested in joining a skilled trade as they are in university and a career in finance, so this crisis may resolve itself. Nor is there a silver bullet answer to the sustainability issue: there are many paths to ecological salvation. There will be solutions however, and these will be solutions that are communicated and shared across the printing world. Because this is what happens in families.
The world of print prepares for a family reunion
Journalists from magazines and websites focused on the printing industry came from all corners of the globe descended on Dusseldorf last week to listen to companies explain their plans for Drupa this year. Presentation after presentation described the challenges the industry faces in the same terms, offered the same diagnosis and described some of the same unanswerable questions, the latter including how does the industry attract the new young talent it so desperately needs. That printers across the globe face the same set of challenges: sustainability, digitisation and lack of skilled staff. If anyone doubted that they belong to a global family of print, here is the genetic continuity to show that commercial printers in South Africa, South Carolina and Southampton are members of the same family.
There was also tacit acceptance that commercial print is the cousin that has fallen on hard times, at least in comparison to the go-ahead success of those in packaging or those immersed in all the potential of digital printing. The friendly message was that the the commercial print cousin should look at what their relatives are doing and think about joining them. At Drupa, that great family gathering of print, the likes of Heidelberg and Koenig & Bauer will be demonstrating highly sophisticated carton presses rather than commercial machines; even suppliers with a digital print back ground, Konica Minolta or even Duplo say, will have packaging focused products.
If this is one answer to the commercial printer’s dilemma, other questions do not yet have a straightforward solution or answer. How does print attract the gilded youth? Nobody is sure, though an article in the Wall Street Journal suggests that GenZ are at least as interested in joining a skilled trade as they are in university and a career in finance, so this crisis may resolve itself. Nor is there a silver bullet answer to the sustainability issue: there are many paths to ecological salvation. There will be solutions however, and these will be solutions that are communicated and shared across the printing world. Because this is what happens in families.
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Prayers for the future of the print industry