ROCHESTER, New York (October 18, 2004) – NexPress Solutions, Inc., a Kodak company, is helping its customers deploy digital printing and workflow solutions that are driving powerful, effective custom marketing campaigns. NexPress’ unique digital platforms create high impact communications by combining vivid full-color imaging with personalization to improve direct mail response rates and sales. Yóffi Digital Press, based in Rochelle, Ill., has built its business around the new marketing services made possible by digital printing – where, as the company says, “design and data converge.” With the purchase of a KODAK NEXPRESS 2100 digital production color press and a KODAK DIGIMASTER digital production system, Yóffi is building its business around printing highly personalized direct mail and marketing programs. Yóffi has increased its revenues by 10 percent to 15 percent per month since installation of the digital presses this past April, and is quickly signing on new customers in retail marketing, financial services, education and other areas. “Personalized marketing in print is very accessible at reasonable costs – and more and more marketers are working with companies like Yóffi to embrace the power of variable data printing because they can see how personalization dramatically improves response rates,” said Venkat Purushotham, President and CEO, NexPress Solutions. “NexPress helps its customers succeed by both providing best-in-class technology, and business services that simplify program development and enable innovative, custom projects.” Yóffi Digital Press – Where Design and Data Converge “Our strategic partnerships allow us to provide a full range of variable data communications,” said Stefan Agustsson, a founder and production leader at Yóffi Digital Press. The company partners with Trekk Cross-Media, a full-service marketing, communication and promotional agency, to provide their clients an integrated solution for executing personalized marketing programs. “The Yoffi/Trekk partnership allows us to assist our customers from design to creation to mailing – and to incorporate personalized elements in the earliest stages of the concept and design process.” Yóffi has consulted with several clients that are just getting started in personalized marketing, using comparative test programs to demonstrate the substantial benefits of this approach. Working with Trekk Cross-Media, Yóffi recently printed a personalized direct mail campaign for Wolverine Shoes. The campaign included a custom offer and an individualized color map based on the address of each of 50,000 recipients, showing the nearest retail location at which the prospect could buy their shoes. The mailer also used a unique bar code to track responses. Yóffi and Trekk Cross-Media will be presenting the details of this campaign in NexPress booth #530 at the Direct Marketing Association’s (DMA) conference in New Orleans on October 16-19. More importantly, Yóffi puts its money where its mouth is – the company created a direct mail campaign for its own business to target marketing professionals. The Yóffi direct mail campaign sends a personalized, fictitious news article that touts the prospect’s success through variable data direct mail campaigns, encouraging recipients to contact Yóffi to turn this fictional story into reality. “We are getting a 10 to 15 percent response rate to our own campaign, which has really helped us grow our business,” Agustsson said. NexPress: the Platform for Success Yóffi Digital Press took a very rigorous approach to choosing its digital color-printing platform. “We went through an 18-month review process where we evaluated a number of digital printing systems,” Agustsson said. “We chose the NEXPRESS 2100 press for its combination of quality, performance, serviceability, uptime and the ability to print on a wide variety of substrates. Basically, this was a platform that would deliver the quality and flexibility to meet the printing needs of our customers, and robust performance that would support our business long term.” From a serviceability standpoint, Agustsson cited the Operator Replaceable Component (ORC) model as an important feature of the NEXPRESS 2100 press, which helps Yóffi control its costs better than click charge models. With the ORC model, most components of the press can be serviced or replaced onsite, reducing operating costs and increasing efficiency. With projections of continued growth of 10 percent to 15 percent per month for the next two years and several large contracts in negotiation, Yóffi is already making plans for an additional NEXPRESS 2100 press. They have their eye on the latest five-color device, which uses the KODAK NEXPRESS fifth imaging unit in combination with the NEXPRESS 2100 press. “We have two customers who require very specific PMS color matching, which the fifth imaging unit makes possible. Moreover, we will incorporate the intelligent coating capability, which will further protect direct mail pieces, maintaining the quality of the piece from production to the customers’ mailbox.” Agustsson said. The NEXPRESS 2100 press is designed for remarkably high quality color printing, taking advantage of the flexibility of digital printing for customized and on-demand output, and the reliability and high duty cycles of a press. Using the new capabilities of its unique fifth imaging unit, the NEXPRESS 2100 press enables users to simulate 86% of PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM colors, to add a protective coating to printed pieces for direct mail, and to add a glossy layer for higher visual impact for printed pieces. The NEXPRESS 2100 press also utilizes the highly flexible KODAK NEXTREME workflow manager software, powered by EFI, for managing a wide variety of variable data printing workflows.