drupa Essentials of Print: Lorenzo Villa
With our series drupa Essentials of Print, we provide printing professionals with a platform to share their views on industry-related topics.
„In Germany, success factors include the presence of significant technology manufacturers, trade shows, logistics infrastructure, skilled labour and an automation culture. Advantages that German printers have been able to exploit masterfully, optimising their workflows and creating state-of-the art online sales models which go way beyond clumsy ‘multilingual websites’ used to place orders here and there.
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If online selling is synonymous with democratisation, it is reasonable to think that every printing business can benefit from this opportunity. Surprisingly, even those who don’t have real (actual) production capacity and sometimes not even machinery. The most far-sighted entrepreneurs have understood that to be successful, it is necessary to break away from a generalist offer and build an original and recognisable recipe of their own.
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If design plays a crucial role in the development of „conventional“ printing projects, its importance increases if we enter the field of unusual applications, with substrates and surfaces that have little or nothing to do with commercial printing and display graphics. It‘s new territory, made up of operators that we could define as solution makers, able to satisfy a new printing demand, often creating an offer completely separate from that of other PSPs. Most of them have gained specific experience outside the graphic arts, to the point that their portfolio ranges from fabrics to wallpapers, from photographic paper to pictorial canvas, up to gift-wrapping paper.
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Over time at drupa 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016 digital printing (inkjet in particular) has taken on increasing importance, to the point where it has become the main protagonist at the show and where at drupa 2020 it will be considered as an indisputable fact. It is therefore to be expected that the discussion will shift to digital transformation and the hybridisation of printproduction processes.“
In the drupa article series Essentials of Print, Lorenzo Villa reveals in his article “Between global trends and local patterns, online printing continues to grow“ what the future of online printing looks like.
About the Author:
Lorenzo Villa is a Print Engineer and Publisher. He holds a degree in Graphic Arts, as well as technical, strategic and commercial skills. From the late ‚90s Lorenzo has led print industry publications. He’s been co-founder and General Secretary of the EDP Association. From 2010 he started serving innovative manufacturers as management consultant, specializing in product & business development, being involved in a number of projects within graphics, textile and packaging. Together with his partner Gabriele Lo Surdo, in January 2015 he founded Density and acquired Italia Publishers, driving an ambitious revitalization plan based on a new generation of B2B media, delivering our industry higher levels of knowledge and inspiration.
Header picture © Messe Düsseldorf/ctillmann
