Why Has the Attitude Changed: New Market Opportunities

Where last year, none of the press manufacturers seemed interested in finishing products like MGE’s i-cut® Digital Die Cutting Solution, this year key personnel from all of the larger format digital press companies, as well as numerous potential printer customers were focused on finishing throughout the show. With the silver bullet that was to be associated with “personalization” still in the wings, creative marketing opportunities for “niche” marketing that require professional finishing are now coming to the forefront.

This kind of new use of technology is not just of interest in the more traditional digital offset market, as discussed in Part 1 of this article, but also in the digital wide format market. Companies such as Vutek, Durst, 3M and others displayed MGE i-cut® systems in their booths at the SGIA Show in late October. In some of these cases the process was really simplified because they were feeding contour information directly to the i-cut® system, through its interface, making the process fast, and transparent to the operator. Other wide format printer companies, such as Roland make their own cutting products for one or more of their printer models, and software vendors, such as Wasatch Computer Technology have added contour cutting information to their wide format RIP products.

Some of the finished materials that were being cut and demonstrated at both shows are pictured in this article. According to The EAGLE’s discussions with Vutek, Durst, and 3M, solutions for irregular shaped finishing like that supplied by MGE are absolutely necessary to help their customers deliver the wider range of targeted shorter run goods that their customers are looking to purchase from a single vendor. Without this kind of equipment in place, many wide format print suppliers are finding that the companies who they go to provide custom finishing are making more money on the orders than they are for the printed product. So, moderately priced finishing systems, are becoming very necessary as a way to keep more margin dollars in house.

We also spoke with a unique specialty digital finishing only company in Burlington, Wisconsin, Di-Con Corp., whose major product is to provide digital cutting services for clients across the United States who require short and midsize run digital cutting for their customers. The Di-Con clients are mostly digital printers, label printers and screen printers doing short and midrange runs of any size from business cards and pressure sensitive labels all the way up to ten-foot tall decals and POP using materials up to one inch thick.

Their clients are easily introduced to the digital cutting method. A turn around within one or two days, according to Di-Con, combined with low set up costs, easy design of digital cut files, high quality cutting, almost no loss percentage, low waste percentage and no die form costs makes the services very competitive and attractive for clients with shorter print runs. They say that the need is growing because the response from guests seeing Di-Con work at their booth at the recent SGIA show has already brought a lot of jobs from new clients.