Cary Sherburne:  Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink and I’m here with Vicki Blake who’s the director of business development and marketing at CGS.  Welcome.

Vicki Blake:  Thank you.

Cary Sherburne:  So we’ve been talking a lot in the industry about packaging and how a lot of the processes are moving into the digital realm and maybe you can talk a little bit about your thoughts about that, about – ‘cause the brand owners need faster time-to-market, the converters need reduced costs as well as reduced cycle time and the ability to handle the shorter runs, make samples easier.  So what do you think about all that?

Vicki Blake:  Absolutely.  We’re doing some exciting things about that, Cary.  First of all, we’re working together with Roland, with both the VersaCAMM VS and the LEC, which have metallic inks or you’ve got UV to work on the different substrates and we’ve done some – we’ve got a special version of color tuner for that.  We’ve got some media and some inks that will expand the gamut and as well as hardcopy prototyping.  We’re also working with 3-D visualization.  We’ve taken on a new product called 3-D Packager from FFEI that allows you to put together an animated folding scenario and send it off through a browser to your customer and have them annotate and approve on that, which is very exciting.  That also shows metallic, cutouts, and a lot of special effects on that also.

Cary Sherburne:  So, can you also – it’ll show sort of the different ambient lighting and things like that, or…?

Vicki Blake:  Yes, you can do some different lighting.  Actually, the next version will even have more lighting features in it, but the fact that you can flip it around and look at the iridescence or metallic inks or, you know, embossing.

Cary Sherburne:  Yeah, and that’s great.

Vicki Blake:  Foil stamp.

Cary Sherburne:  You know, and there is still a need for the – as you call them, the hardcopy samples, which are being created digitally of course.

Vicki Blake:  Absolutely.  But usually there are iterations that happen up front.  So you’ll have several times they’ll go back and forth.  You can show with the visualization you can show, for example, different variations.  You can send them three or four different designs and then they pick one, and then when you kind of come to the end of that, of course, they want to see a hardcopy proof.

Cary Sherburne:  Right, right.  And so that’s helping the process, throughout the supply chain then in terms of, you know, the needs of both of those stakeholders, the brand holder, brand owners wanting to…

Vicki Blake:  Absolutely.

Cary Sherburne:  And also the ability to do the shorter runs, which all of that has to – all that up front stuff has to happen faster in order to make the whole process work.

Vicki Blake:  And the same with monitor proofing and collaboration tools, which we have as well that will allow the brands once again to do those iterations much faster.  So that as, you said, they can get on the shelves.

Cary Sherburne:  Yeah. That’s great.