Scodix’s EVP of global marketing and sales, Mark Nixon, was kind enough to talk to me about the industry and the trends that he sees affecting it in the next months.
In particular, when it involves digital finishing enhancements, he states that it is typically about selling a valuable concept to clients who don’t have any existing clients. For most of the life of digital finishing, he explains that it was about targeting new customers — those who wanted to “take something not usually embellished, and make it sexy, add more value, and charge more for it.”
In recent years, digital finishing options have made great strides in quality. | Credit: Scodix
However, this is slowly changing over the last few years.
“The second market for digital finishing is Web-to-print,” he notes. “It clearly adds value to a piece and is extremely lucrative.” The traditional way of adding embellishments was costly and time-consuming, but as digital is gaining ground, Nixon notes, you can have the same effects for a small cost, while adding a lot of value.
“If we assume that there is something like 100 million sheets per year already being folded, or given spot UV coatings, or enhanced in some way, why am I not chasing that market?” he asks. “So in the past three years, we have embarked on selling digital embellishment to large volume players.”
That is possible today, and an attractive option for anyone offering any type of embellishments, is that although the cost has fallen significantly, the quality has increased. “On analog equipment, a makeready could take four or six hours. On ours, it’s three minutes,” says Nixon. Nixon also stated that the machines have been expanded to handle the 40-inch sheet sizes most shops run. The machine also offers a wider range embellishment options on-line. This makes it a compelling argument to commercial printers that they should seriously consider upgrading or adding digital finishing lines.
Nixon also notes that the trend towards more digital finishing options is shrinking run times and shorter turnaround times. He identifies two areas in the printing sector where digital finishing is making a rapid impact.
Digital finishing is a way to add embellishments to projects without spending too much. | Credit: Scodix
He first points out the packaging market, in which brands are looking to make versioned pieces for different regions and seasons or special events. While these runs are much shorter than traditional packaging, the brands still want to stand out from the crowd with eye-catching designs. For packaging printers, the costs and time for makereadies, dies, materials, and waste doesn’t decrease just because they are printing 10,000 instead of 100,000. Digital finishing can help to bridge this gap. It offers more robust options, while maintaining reasonable turnaround times and costs.
Nixon also mentions book publishing as the second segment. With companies like Amazon really pushing the “book of one” concept and just-in-time production of books, it is tempting to let those pieces go out the door with the bare minimum. Digital finishing can add special effects such as foils or coatings to these books, just like their longer-run counterparts. This opens the door to unique pieces that people will cherish and want to share. Consider coffee table books and highly embellished memory cards. A writer who wants to self-publish their manuscript can be charged an additional fee to get a professionally designed, embellished cover they will be proud of. Nixon points out that digital finishing gives printers a lot more options that can add incredible value that directly impacts the bottom line.
“We can make a big difference in the economics of these types of projects,” Nixon points out. “So that’s where we’ve been focusing our efforts. We see those trends in those spaces, and we’re trying to answer them. We want people to realize that digital finishing isn’t just sexier, it’s also more economical. Yes, it is very sexy, but it does have to go back to the economics — you can’t buy the equipment just because it’s sexy.”
Nixon believes that while the adoption of digital finishing is growing slowly and won’t happen overnight, we are reaching a tipping point, as the market is changing. “If we look at the evolution of digital prepress, at the beginning it was a hard sell,” he recalls. “Digital presses were a hard sell — everyone said you didn’t need one. But then the market changes, or the economics change, and that’s what we’re seeing with digital finishing — the market has changed.”
That said, Nixon doesn’t see digital finishing replacing all traditional equipment anytime soon. Rather, “I see us running alongside those analog processes. Both can coexist for long periods of time when something completely new replaces an old process. Digital printing is a great example of that — it’s only 15-20% of the market, and it co-exists with offset. Digital finishing will co-exist with the technology that’s already out there.”
Particularly in foiling and embossing are two areas where digital finishing is both lower cost and better quality.
So how does a printer make digital finishing work for them? Nixon notes that, for commercial printers, “it is all about being different, about giving their audience more things to appreciate. It improves brand image. From a commercial printer’s perspective, you must first sell the product and represent it. You have to be front-of-house with it, invent new applications, and keep producing nice-looking pieces.”
However, he recommends that printers consider a completely different route for digital finishing integration into sales processes. “Sustainability is a huge play these days with brands,” he notes. “Go to any of the top brands’ websites and look at their front page — they open with claims of sustainability and ‘green’ awareness. We’ve done deep dives on digital versus analog, and Scodix uses around 8,000 times less water, and 6,000 times less energy to create embellishments over analog. So, if you’re a packaging printer, and you’ve done analog for 50 years and you’re talking to brands that are very aware of their environmental impact, you can make big inroads into those accounts.”
Nixon points out that digital finishing is only at the beginning stages of its development. “As a technology, we are still super young in the development path,” he says. “There is still a long road ahead.” The quality and speeds have reached a point where they are good enough to be viable options in most applications, but there is still a lot of room for improvement that Nixon believes we’ll see pick up in the coming years.
“It is becoming more flexible with more enhancements on the same machine. You’ll see more people foiling and enhancing more of their print largely because the complicated will become easy. For example, micro embossing can be very elegant but is not possible for most brands due to the high cost of analog. Digital will make it affordable. These items will be more common and more commonly expected. Right now, only about 20% of foil sheets are embossed, but if you ask most brands, they would like to do more but don’t because it’s too expensive. But we will get over that hump.”
The ongoing labor challenges are another trend that will drive digital finishing adoption. “I know people who have been foiling for 50 years, and they are craftsmen,” Nixon says. “It takes them 8-12 hours to take the ordinary and make it gorgeous. However, the true craftsmen are few and far between. How do you replace Joe who’s been with the company for 30 years, but he wants to retire?” With digital finishing, however, he notes you can take anyone in the shop who wants to learn, and in a week, they can be up and running and producing highly embellished pieces that are just as beautiful. “Digital makes it easy,” he says.