Santa Ana, Calif. – Duplo USA Corporation is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2021 Shima Awards, its third annual print embellishment competition. The award recognizes innovative companies that are leveraging the power of spot coating, texture and tactile effects to produce high impact applications using the DDC-810 Raised Spot UV Coater.

Si Nguyen, Vice President of Sales at Duplo USA, visited with the recipients to learn more about their story and presented the award in person to the local companies. “It’s humbling to see our customers creatively use our technology to expand their services to another level of clientele and helping them succeed through the pandemic.” All three videos can be viewed on www.youtube.com/duplousa. 

SHIMA AWARD WINNERS

Gold Award – Tazpack
Tazpack in San Fernando, California takes pride in staying away from commodity printing, focusing instead on helping customers sell their products by providing creative embellishments on their packaging. Having built a solid reputation through word-of-mouth, the company applies raised spot UV to every single piece of packaging and commercial print job that comes through. “I don’t want a flat printed piece,” says Barbara Buschmann, President of Tazpack. “99% of what comes out of our Canon printer, goes to the DDC-810. Almost every single job we upsell with Duplo.”

Silver Award – Minuteman Press Carmel Mountain
Although this Minuteman Press located in San Diego, California is the first franchise to make the investment in Duplo’s solution, they are not your average Minuteman shop. The owner and his team work hard at turning their customer’s marketing pieces into a profitable experience that have proven to increase engagement and response rates from their target audience. “We don’t want to be just a printer,” says Kumar Agrawal, Owner of Minuteman Press Carmel Mountain. “90% of my customers tell me that their customers don’t look at them. They’re looking at the material that we printed and they are feeling it. This excites me.”

Bronze Award – Rengel Printing
Rengel Printing in St. Cloud, Minnesota, just celebrated their 100th year in the print business. Offering everything from offset and digital to wide format printing, the family-owned company decided to bring embellishment services in-house and has had incredible success increasing their revenue. “We started utilizing our source for some of this and all of sudden it’s like maybe we should bring one internal, just so we could control it. We now run the DDC-810 every day,” says Pete Rengel, Owner of Rengel Printing. “At the beginning when we thought how are we going to pay for it, we focused on getting four business card customers that would use this every single month. Now we’re selling postcards. We just did 30,000 postcards with the embellishment.”