Hi there. This is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com. Greetings from Antwerp, Belgium. Today I visited a company called Dioss. D-i-o-s-s. You can find them at dioss.com. Now what makes them unique is that they have found interesting ways to promote with digital and other forms of printing. For instance, take this picture of the tops of some Coke or other soda cans. They’ve created these small units that go right on top. This is what they look like. They’ve patented this by the way. And so what you find – and it’s been die cut as you can see. And it slips then over the tab on the can and what you wind up with is a promotion piece on the can before you use it. And it’s a very unique approach to marketing. One that I have not seen before.

Well, they’re doing a lot of interesting things. For instance, here’s – there are two pieces here. They have found a way with screen printing to give you texture. You can see on here the texture. It looks like a block of ice printed on translucent paper and it now goes over the picture of the car and it looks like the car is in a cold place. And, in fact, that image is repeated inside in the brochure itself.
?They print with, by the way, digital printing using Indigo as well as other machines and they also have some offset presses as well. What they’ve done is blended digital printing with screen printing with other techniques to get some very interesting effects. For instance, here they have done a piece that looks like it is the hide of an animal, a very weird animal by the way. But you can see the texture and they’ve done that with screen printing, not with any modern system for doing deposits of polymers.

Here’s one that shows cars that are in a sandy environment and so what they’ve done here is that you can feel this. It has a feeling of sand or sandpaper, if you will. So you get this wonderful three-dimensional effect, you open it up and it’s sort of repeated through the imagery inside the brochure.
?They have also done some rather interesting things. There’s a direct mail piece they’ve done where they show someone’s wallet. I don’t think I can show this too well. Let’s see if we can put it down here. But it’s a piece of film and looks like a film x-ray and it supposedly shows what’s inside a wallet and it’s a promotion for ING for some of their financial services.

They also have used this three-dimensional effect to do braille. You can just see the braille on this piece here and this is done again using screen printing, not using any polymer depositing effect.

Here’s another one they’ve done that’s interesting. If you take water on a brush and then wet it with – take the wet end and then put it on these colors you can actually paint them. And so a child can take the brush, put it on here and then paint the colors into the flag. It’s a very interesting promotion piece.

Another thing they’ve done is to take special material and you can almost feel the texture on here but it’s almost like a blackboard. You can put this on the wall and using chalk – sorry I hold it up and you see nothing, right. You can actually write on here with chalk and leave messages and even erase it when you’re done.

But the most interesting thing that they have done is this piece here. It’s printed on film and then mounted on a gold material and it has some heft to it. And it can be mailed as a separate unit, that is as a giant postcard. But when you get it I can’t imagine anyone who will throw this away. They will probably take some double-sided tape and put it on their door or put it somewhere because it is their title, their company and their name. But it almost looks like it’s been printed on a gold metallic metal and has a phenomenal heft to it. And extremely impressive in terms of receiving this and saying, “Oh my goodness gracious, where did this come from?”

So here’s an interesting company from Belgium, Dioss.com, doing some very interesting things with a number of different printing techniques. I believe that printing may not be the issue. What it is is creativity and they’ve come up with some really creative ideas and that’s what we need nowadays.

This is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.