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Package printing begins to incorporate high-end solutions
By Rebecca Trela
Last summer, Columbus Paperbox sales rep Tom Kasle found himself in a hospital operating room, clad in a scrub suit and holding a scalpel.
It was, he says, the “aha” moment in curing the “pain” of one of his customers, a Toledo, Ohio surgeon who wanted a scalpel blade dispenser box. Kasle, who sells folding cartons, direct mail and postcards for the Columbus, Ohio-based family firm, doesn’t usually find himself so far from the office. But the variability of the work, from food packaging to exploding shoeboxes for the FBI, keeps him interested.
“Unless I went there, I would have had to rely on the information from the customer about what he wanted, and it was a very unusual job,” he says. By visiting the hospital areas his client frequented, Kasle determined how the box would be opened and used, its correct height, the right alignment and sizes. The customer wasn’t familiar with buying print—he originally wanted a run of 300 boxes from the offset shop. “I can’t physically print that and make it feasible, with all the waste I will have—we had to order at least 1,000,” Kasle says. He also couldn’t deliver 4-color samples for a try-out. “I get calls for that all the time: ‘Can you do 50 samples? 150?’”
Columbus Paperbox eventually printed and distributed the job, but Kasle isn’t sure if he’ll get a reorder soon because the original run was so much larger than the customer needed. Kasle isn’t alone in facing this tradeoff—many in the package
printing industry grapple with the growing popularity of 4-color printing, the role of digital vs. offset machines, and mass personalization that marketing executives are coming to expect.
Pulling Back
Packaging is at once a big world and a small world. Its products encompass everything from wide-format point-of-purchase displays to film-encased food to shrink-wrap sleeves on water bottles. It includes the ubiquitous folding cartons of cereal and similar products, corrugated cardboard and flexible drink pouches. But the number of manufacturers who print on packaging is not especially large, and is getting smaller as mergers and acquisitions contract the market in much the same way the forms workplace shrank in the ’90s.
But in forms and commercial print, mergers and acquisitions of major direct-sellers created opportunities for independents to snag significant national accounts. Will that happen in the packaging world? No one is sure yet, and some are discouraged. “To handle a big national packaging account, you have to have plants all over because it doesn’t pay to ship,” says Brian Deiger, a project manager at Pro-Pak in Maumee, Ohio. Pro-Pak produces corrugated packaging for consumer goods, the likes of which end up on shelves in big-box stores like Target or Kohl’s. The company doesn’t ship more than 400 miles, which Deiger says is “pretty standard.”
To remain afloat, though, package printers must stay abreast of the changing marketplace and its technology, much as traditional business forms manufacturers and distributors have learned to diversify their core business. “What used to be bells and whistles aren’t anymore,” Kasle says. “Foil stamping, book cover lids, UV coating…all that used to be optional. Not anymore.”
Tagging Along
Many firms are exploring the change-off point between offset and digital printing, says Deiger. Many manufacturers have questioned when and if package printing will follow the trends of on-demand and variable data that have already reshaped commercial and business printing. “At this point, digital’s not that prevalent,” he says, “but I think it could be. In time, there could be opportunity with variable, customer-oriented, highly changeable, on-the-fly stuff.”
Online, on-demand ordering has a nascent push in a handful of business projects, generally as a custom or special solution to big client projects. With most traditional package printing, excess inventory is stored in a warehouse and either retrieved later or thrown out once it is old. According to Paul Clark, president of SFC Graphics in Toledo, Ohio, that process is disappearing.
SFC Graphics set up an e-commerce platform for point-of-purchase signage and collateral for one of its largest clients, a building materials manufacturer that sells its products at big-box stores such as Lowe’s Home Improvement. The signs are part of multiple print pieces that display and sell the company’s product together.
“To us, to consumers, all these big box stores look the same,” Clark says. “But actually, each one is different. The client wanted a web-to-print program to get the various signs to stores nationwide.” The portal employs a completely touchless process; it orders and delivers the wide-format signs within 16 days. “The value here is that you can be very strategic, and change your offers rapidly,” Clark says.
Pushing Forward
Buying digital printing equipment is expensive, many agree, but some firms have found a way to push into the market without investing in new machines. Mike Dohm, vice president of sales at The Triangle Printing Company, York, Pa., emphasizes packaging design. “Back when, you could design a business form that really worked and look like a hero. I equate the engineering side of structural design as a way to relate that same value-added concept.”
Selling the design element has been difficult to communicate to distributors, admits Dohm, who’s had an engineering staff in-house for about two and a half years. “Distributors are used to getting large margins, but there aren’t any in the package printing side, so you have to get creative.” One of Triangle’s big selling points, he says, is the ability to offer prototypes just like digital shops. The company images the sample onto coated board, which is run through Epson printers and then cut-out by plotters and folded. “It’s not exactly the same, but it simulates the die cut process and you can do real short runs—25 samples or so.”
Short runs are also popular with personalized products, a rising trend in almost all print niche markets. Witness the offerings of www.MyHeinz.com, where customers can order personalized bottles of Heinz ketchup, which sell for $6 apiece. Business is booming, the company says.
Consumers also can get vanity M&Ms, Hershey’s bars, Nikes, Jones Soda, and even Wheaties. According to an August 2006 edition of USA Today, Barbara Bush ordered a $29.95 box of the cereal for former president George H.W. Bush, with a picture of him skydiving in the background.
Marketing executives like this trend because it helps customers form a personal connection to the brand. The co-branded items tend to stick around customers’ homes and continue to leave a positive impression.
“We have done all types of personalization and versioning; VDP is definitely selling,” says Gary Burrow, CEO of Wayne Trademark Printing, High Point, N.C. “Special event bottled water, wines for alumni events or regional groups, pressure sensitive labels, shrink sleeves,” which speaks to the growing demand for digital print’s capabilities.
If a customer were interested in a highly-customized packaging product, Deiger says, Pro-Pak could certainly print the project. “If you wanted to do a promo in a certain area, for example, or print the price of the item on the box and ship it to different locations, like Canada, we could definitely change it on the fly,” he considers. That is, if a customer asked, which many haven’t. “I think the opportunity will evolve over time, but it’s unclear as to exactly where the opportunity will start.”
The package printing world isn’t waiting for the technology to be possible, because the technical knowledge can be borrowed from other forms of print. “The technology is there but not affordable,” says Vic Stalam, general manager of packaging at Kodak’s Graphic Communications Group. “It’s not a printing challenge; it’s a software and data mining challenge.” In his opinion, it’s a simple technological leap to put an inkjet head at the end of the printing line, where anything from a name to an image could be customized for a market or consumer. Here’s the difficult part: “Where do these images reside?” he asks. “Who catalogs, tracks and manages them?”
Kodak’s business partners have inquired about the possibility of versioning, Stalam says, because their customers ask: Can we select a different image for different markets? The trend is beginning, but no one is sure where it will or could end up. Developing countries compose a large part of the demand for packaging, Stalam says, with India and China expecting a 10 to 12 percent growth rate this year. Globally, packaging is growing at about five percent, except for corrugated cardboard, for which sales are slumping.
It’s easy to tap into the growth of packaging, Dohm says, as a natural add-on to another trend in the print industry: ad specialties. “Our distributors sell all kinds of gifts and trinkets nowadays and they don’t want something nice to show up in a brown corrugated shipper,” he says. Some of his more memorable projects have included a beer stein corporate gift in a damage-proof printed box and a safety gift package, put together in the shape of a van.
The package printing renaissance might seem slow in coming, but business has been on a steady upward trend, Kasle says. “Think back to ’02 or ’03; those were really the dark days. I was literally driving around town, stopping at places that just might use my product. Today, orders are up, referrals are up, and I see myself getting into marketing.”
Rebecca Trela is assistant editor at Print Solutions magazine. Email comments to rtrela@PSDA.org.