Jeroen van Druenen of Jubels on XMPie powering their company transformation

Cary Sherburne interviews Jeroen van Druenen, Director at Jubels and Vice President of the XMPie Users Group. He talks about how XMPie has helped his company to transform themselves and remain competitive in a challenging economy.

Cary Sherburne: Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink and I’m here with Jeroen van Druenen who is a Director at Jubels in Amsterdam.

Jeroen van Druenen: Welcome.

Cary Sherburne: Thank you. That was good. And so you and I have known each other for a while because we were both involved with the XMPie Users Group and you’re actually the president?

Jeroen van Druenen: Vice President.

Cary Sherburne: Vice President of that now. And your company has been one of the early, sort of, leaders in terms of making this business transformation that has to happen. Maybe you could talk a little bit about, you know, how you’ve done that and what it’s meant to your company.

Jeroen van Druenen: I always say when we did invest in XMPie – I think it was in 2007 or so – that really enabled us to change our business. And if it wasn’t for XMPie I think we were not here anymore.

Cary Sherburne: Wow, that’s a pretty strong statement.

Jeroen van Druenen: Yeah, because of the economics and where we are based in Amsterdam. Amsterdam is an expensive city to run a print shop. Labors are higher than the rest of the country. Rents are higher. So it’s difficult and now it enables us to – we have an advantage for our competitors at this moment.

Cary Sherburne: So you’re able to charge more because you’ve got a higher value output.

Jeroen van Druenen: Yeah.

Cary Sherburne: And so maybe you could describe a little bit about how your business is configured. I mean, do you have offset? You have digital obviously.

Jeroen van Druenen: We do have – we have digital and we do have offset, four color up to 50 x 70 centimeters. So that’s the medium size format. We do run a two shifts operations a day. And besides printing offset and digital we do have a large warehouse where we fulfill our customers’ needs. We do have some print on demand shops based on XMPie uStore and we’re doing, I think, 40 to 50 jobs a day.

Cary Sherburne: Wow, that’s good.

Jeroen van Druenen: Yeah.

Cary Sherburne: And then you’re also doing integrated campaigns with the customers using XMPie, some of that?

Jeroen van Druenen: Yeah, we still do although that’s still hard to sell because customers don’t understand and don’t have the databases up where we want them.

Cary Sherburne: Right, the quality.

Jeroen van Druenen: So that’s still a problem but we’re getting there. We’re getting there.

Cary Sherburne: So it’s something to look forward to. Some more fun to look forward too, right?

Jeroen van Druenen: Yeah, yeah.

Cary Sherburne: That’s great. Well congratulations because it’s been a difficult time, right? And a lot of companies didn’t make the moves that you made so congratulations on that and we’ll look forward to hearing from you in a year or so and see what new things you’re doing.

Jeroen van Druenen: Okay.

Cary Sherburne: Thank you.

Jeroen van Druenen: Thank you, Cary.