Cary Sherburne:  Hi, I'm Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com and I'm here with Vic Stalam, who is Senior Vice President and General Manager at X-Rite Pantone.  Good to see you again.

Vic Stalam:  Hi Cary.  How are you?

Cary Sherburne: Good.  You know we talked earlier about all the different vertical industries that Pantone is in, but we didn’t really talk about packaging and I understand you’ve got some pretty interesting initiatives going on in the packaging market.  Why don’t you tell us a little bit about that?

Vic Stalam:  Absolutely.  Packaging Cary, for us, is a very strategic market and primarily what we’re doing is we’re looking at our complete portfolio in terms of X-Rite and Pantone and bringing a comprehensive solution.  So the first thing we’re doing is working with brand owners and helping them in terms of making sure once they select the colors and to make sure it’s consistent across the whole supply chain around the world.

Cary Sherburne:  Depending on—regardless of where it’s created and what materials they’re using.

Vic Stalam:  Exactly, independent of substrates and printing technologies around the world.  So that’s the first thing.  The second thing we’re helping them is how do we help them compress the time from design to the time the product makes it on the shelf?  So in terms of taking all-

Cary Sherburne:  Right, time to market.

Vic Stalam:  Exactly, helping them with time to market.  So we’re working closely with the brand owners.  The next thing we’re doing is we’re helping the brand owners put together the ecosystem in terms of the trade shops, the designers and the converters that they work with and we’re putting together some processes in terms of how do you manage this color from an integrity perspective, so it’s consistent through every step in the supply chain.  So then what we’re doing is we’re deploying the sales people and application specialists around the world to work with these converters and design houses as well as trade shops who are assigned to a given brand, looking at the specification that the brand has come up with and making sure that the specifications are met at each one of the converters as well as at the trade shops.

Cary Sherburne:  This is a pretty big deal, right because packaging brand owners have a big problem with controlling that, especially on such a global market as we’re in.

Vic Stalam:  Absolutely, that’s one thing we’ve heard consistently from brand owners and since X-Rite and Pantone have the technology all the way from the standards through the measuring instruments, through the software to maintain this consistent, so we’re really excited about it.  This is a very big program and we’ve just kicked it off in London this week and we’re going to be deploying it around the world soon.

Cary Sherburne:  And packaging is growing.

Vic Stalam:  Absolutely, that’s one segment in print we can all agree that because at the end of the day.  We all need to eat food and if you look ahead the next 20 years I think we’ll still have a lot of packages being printed and we’ll be eating from packages.

Cary Sherburne:  That’s right.  Thank you.

Vic Stalam:  Thank you Cary.