Gerry Mulvaney, a UK graphic arts executive, is largely unknown in the US. So a broad profile of his career and his views and insights may seem a strange choice for an instructive article addressed mainly to the US community. But sometimes a little distance in geography or time enables events to clarify and the reality of trends to appear.

Perhaps more than anyone else, he grasped the imminent obsolescence of the existing channel model. He realized that "thinking globally" was imperative for dealers and that, indeed, the regional dealer would be under severe pressure as borders and boundaries changed or were superceded.

We first came to know Mulvaney way back in 1993 when The Eagle sponsored and organized an international conference on graphic arts distribution in Braschaat, Belgium, near Antwerp. The conference attracted business leaders from 11 countries and was the first and perhaps only conference of its kind - a symposium on broad trends that were reshaping the graphic arts distribution business. The two main trends that the conference addressed were globalization and the digital revolution. Only a few US dealers attended. Most insisted that distribution is inherently local and therefore trends and conditions in other countries were irrelevant. Remember that this was 1993.