Cary Sherburne: Hi, I’m Cary Sherburn, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com. I’m here with Doug Watson, who’s President and CEO of Masterpiece Graphics or sometimes known as MGX. Welcome

Doug Watson: Nice to be here.

Cary Sherburne: So you guys – maybe you could tell me a little bit about MGX to start with. Let’s get a little background.

Doug Watson: Masterpiece Graphics creates digital media and products for dry tone, wet toner and Inkjet type of presses. And so it’s our goal to try to make materials that would go through any kind of machine and offer you any kind of variety of different products that would allow you to create niches, and create more margin and be able to increase your business.

Cary Sherburne: So you’ve got the substrates themselves and you also have coatings.

Doug Watson: Yes, we do – that makes a little bit different. Not only do we offer the mainline materials and customized materials, but we also can take certain materials that people want to go through these machines and actually put coatings on that we get them to survive through the process.

Cary Sherburne: And you just recently announced a distribution partnership with Ariva. You want to talk about that a little bit?

Doug Watson: Yes, we’re really excited about the partnership with Ariva. Because it gives us a presence, especially in the Northeast and Canada where we can use more influence and penetration into the market. And they have a lot of sales people that are covering digital applications as well as regular offset applications. So it’s gonna give us a great group of people that can take digital into the marketplace and they have an emphasis where they’re trying to be an offering to allow somebody to come to Ariva with sort of a one shop, one stop attitude. Where they can get anything they wanted with respect to digital and the digital machines that are out there.

Cary Sherburne: You know, we talked to Ariva a little bit earlier and we’re talking about the fact that – especially these digital printers. I mean, they’re so creative and they’re innovative with their customers and they’re always looking for new substrates and new products they can develop and so on. So between the two of you you’re gonna be able to help them achieve that goal.

Doug Watson: Nowadays, the offset printer is faced with a declining market. And they’re faced with the opportunity to buy digital presses and get into digital. And they’re also faced with new opportunities or they’re trying to create new market niches that will allow them to have some sort of margin or regain the margin that they were losing and get into digital. So we’re out there with Ariva being able to offer the solutions. Steer their business in a way that they can create more profit and help them out.

Cary Sherburne: Yeah, then you know, help them with business development ideas and education. Help them educate their customers. All of that. That’s great. Well, congratulations. It sounds like a great partnership. We’ll look forward to seeing lots of new announcements come out from you guys.

Doug Watson: Thank you. It’s an encouraging time to be having them represent our products and we just hooked up with a great team.

Cary Sherburne: Terrific. Thank you.