With eco-friendly alternatives, a colourful range and glow in the dark coated book binding wires-  Bekaert participated for the first time ever in Europe's largest English-speaking printing event - IPEX 2010, Birmingham, UK. The positive and responsive feedback from visiting customers has generated a lot of sales leads and idea pitches for the future.
 
With the market slowly recovering from the recent crisis, many people in the printing industry were eagerly looking for new, practical and resourceful solutions to give their business the boost it requires. With over 1,000 exhibitors and 50,000 visitors from all over the world, the IPEX 2010 edition has proven to be the right place to find new ways to make a business more efficient, profitable and competitive.  IPEX 2010 was an exemplary showcase of the best the graphic arts industry has to offer and had a downright positive vibe to it.  Exhibitors and visitors alike agreed this clearly reflected the industry's refreshed, optimistic and dynamic outlook on the future.
 
Marcelo Xavier, Bekaert's Global Segment Manager for book binding wire, wholeheartedly agrees: "We are very pleased that our first participation turned out to be so successful. Bekaert has over 30 years experience in producing coated wires for the book binding industry. Over these years we have not only developed the skills and technical know-how to create an attractive and high quality wire that is easy to process, we also have pretty good idea of what the end consumer is looking for. That's why IPEX 2010 was the perfect platform for our Ecobind and Glow-in-the-dark wire. It's an innovative industry platform for graphic arts specialists looking for new and green ways to make their customers' art - and printwork look better."
 
The Bekaert Ecobind is a book binding wire coated with an eco-friendly or 'green' polymer derived from natural resources. It is as durable as any other regular polymer coated wire, but also compostable and CO2 neutral, allowing printers to produce all-green exercise notebooks, reports, manuals, diaries, calendars and other stationery for the environmentally-minded consumer.
                                                                                              
Another novelty at IPEX 2010 was the Bekaert Glow-in-the-dark book binding wire. This wire is coated with a special polymer that absorbs energy from any source of light. Once the wire is put back in the dark, the coating remits that energy in a soft greenish glow providing stationery with a luminous touch. This new wire allows marketing service providers to offer an added value to the print work of their customers.
 
Furthermore visitors also showed keen interest in the Bekaert stitching wire and the company's very extensive colour palette within its traditional offer of Metalobind, Nylobind and Tinobind.