Companies to Watch.

Companies to Watch is a special feature of Label & Narrow Web that pays tribute to a select group of converters who are making noteworthy contributions to the health of the industry.

This is not a ranking of any kind, nor is it meant to be all inclusive. In making our selections, we did not consider company size or annual sales.

If these companies share anything in common, it is that they are highly successful, that their work is of the highest quality, and that they are setting new industry standards every day.

Eberle Druck

At its plant on the Southern outskirts of Vienna, Austria, Eberle Druck makes packaging for the pharmaceutical industry. This is a field where fanatical attention to accuracy is considered scarcely enough, and Eberle makes a living largely thanks to its reputation for zero percent defects in its packaging and leaflets.

A family-owned printing business dating back to the end of the 19th Century, Eberle has long specialized in the security printing business, but today 90 percent of its business is making and printing folding boxes and leaflets for pharmaceuticals. Up to 2001, the company used sheetfed presses, but then gradually shifted to rotary webfed. With the installation last year of a rotary offset for double-sided printing of leaflets, the company is now 100 percent rotary.

"The move to rotary printing has improved both quality and productivity dramatically," says Eberle's CEO Martin Schmutterer. "Last year's enlargement of the European Union brought us into direct competition with low-cost countries like our neighbors Slovakia and Hungary. It is even more important now to examine every part of our production process, to adapt, to invest and to squeeze out costs."

Until a few years ago, Eberle's printing and converting were done on separate machines, but in 2002 the company installed a flexo printing and converting line from Gallus, with inline printing, diecutting and folding. "Our customers expect just-in-time delivery, and we can't afford to have semi-finished inventory waiting to be processed and dispatched," says Schmutterer.

Eberle has always tried to go one better than its competitors in terms of quality, and when the right quality control equipment isn't available, Eberle's engineers invent it. An example is its double-control "Eberle-Code", which is said to make a mix up between different types of packing impossible. At all events the company's control system has been accredited by ISO as a "zero-error quality control system". Eberle was also the first print company in Austria to be certified with ISO 9001, and also the first to introduce the innovative, computer based Kraus Pharma Print Control system. This validated testing system is used at the start of every production run to check the actual printed product against the customer's data.

Flexo and screen

Traditionally an offset printer, Eberle is now something of a flexo fanatic, at least when it comes to printing folding cartons. Martin Schmutterer again: "Pharmaceutical packaging uses mostly spot colors, and color consistency is of vital importance. We find flexo gives us better results than offset, and by using UV inks we can get color density on the box which could almost pass for screen printing. Using our eight color, 21" Gallus press, we can now print, diecut, crease, and emboss inline. This gives us a flexibility which we could only dream of in the days when we printed everything in sheet offset."

But if rotary flexo is the answer to many of Eberle's needs, there are some things for which screen printing is still the best answer. Makers of body care products have for many years been using the thick ink laydown of screen to give a "luxury" feel to their packaging. Major drug companies also are becoming aware that for their over-the-counter and generic drugs, the packaging must help to sell the product. For package printers like Eberle, who specialize in the pharmaceutical sector, screen also gives an opening into new markets in the luxury print sector.

An additional impulse towards screen is recent European Union legislation requiring all pharmaceutical packs to be marked in Braille. Eberle is no newcomer to Braille, and has been embossing its packs for more than 10 years using a system which it developed in-house, but the company is also aware of the restrictions imposed by the embossing process: The board used, for example, must be of virgin fibre, which increases the cost, and if the flat cartons are compressed during storage the Braille lettering can become illegible. To overcome these restrictions, Eberle looked at the possibilities of retrofitting a rotary screen unit onto its Gallus press. Martin Schmutterer outlines the dilemma, familiar to many carton converters:

"We use the same die for all cartons of a given size, but the Braille text is specific to each brand and product. This makes for long setup times now that you have to keep changing the embossing tool with every print run. With rotary screen printing the screen unit can be changed almost instantaneously. We opted for the Rotascreen because it is also made by Gallus and can be fitted at any point along the press. We as a company were not too familiar with screen printing but the preparation of Gallus' Screeny printing plates is not dissimilar from the familiar flexo plates, and we can go from the clients' repro film to the finished screen printing plate in less than 30 minutes. We can now print an ink layer of just under 0.3 mm, which gives a robust height for Braille characters." Eberle is also exploring the further uses of screen printing for security and brand protection purposes.

Looking to wider markets

Eberle Druck may be the leading Austrian converter in its specialist field, but by international standards, with 50 employees and sales of $6 million, it must rank as a lightweight (worldwide, the pharmaceutical packaging industry is worth something over $22 billion). Giants like Alcan and CCL are roaming the world looking for new customers in the pharmaceutical packaging field. Aware of the long term consequences of this market situation, Eberle looked around for a suitable ally. In October 2005 it found one, in the form of fellow Austrian Ratt GmbH, a slightly larger family-owned converter operating at the other end of the country, on the Swiss border. Under the terms of their strategic alliance, Ratt acquired 49 percent of Eberle, with each company retaining its own management.

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Two Men in a Boat

The product ranges of the two converters are largely complementary, with Ratt specializing in wide-format sheet offset printing for the food sector. One obvious objective of this alliance is to offer a full range of products, going from leaflets to in-store displays. The other arises out of the awareness that European politics have changed Austria's geography. After an interval of nearly a century, Austria and more especially Vienna is once again the focal point for the whole of Central Europe.

"By creating this alliance, Eberle/Ratt, we position ourselves as the most innovative and go-getting package printers in the whole region," says Schmutterer. "The fast-expanding markets of Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia are all in our back yard." Adds Stephan Ratt, CEO of Ratt GmbH, "This move is in line with our motto: 'Think global, act local.' We share the same business culture of the family-owned Austrian company, and we both have compatible, sharply defined market objectives."

Then, seven in a bigger boat

Martin Schmutterer and his partners Matthias and Stephan Ratt have been the driving force behind the recently-created "Packaging Network," a partnership of seven converters in Austria and Switzerland (plus Ratt GmbH's new subsidiary in Bulgaria), formed in order to shorten delivery times and improve customer service. The Packaging Network with its total of 260 employees and aggregate annual sales of [euro]32 million ($40 million) has set itself the ambitious goal of becoming the leading supplier of premium packaging to the fast-expanding markets of Central and Eastern Europe.--John Penhallow

Eberle Druck GmbH

Carlbergergasse 38

1230 Vienna, Austria

431-8653410

[e-mail]

www.eberle.co.at

Employees: 50

Annual sales: $6 million

Management: Martin Schmutterer, CEO

The Label Makers

A 'fiercely independent company' that aims to provide a first class personal service for every customer.

Countless label converters around the world have made that claim, but unlike The Label Makers Ltd. of Bradford in West Yorkshire, England, few can point to 43 years of solid achievement in doing just that. The company has relocated five times since its formation in October 1963 when John Webster started a label overprinting business in a two-room cottage outside Bradford. The firm now occupies recently expanded premises and warehousing of 45,000 square feet and currently has 54 employees. John remains active as chairman, while his son, David, runs the business as managing director.

Pressure sensitive labels for the cosmetics/toiletries, household, food, healthcare, and motor oils sectors make up most of the company's output.

It has also developed a range of peel/reseal leaflet labels to meet the growing need for extended text labels for marketing and legislative purposes.

More specialized are the large volumes of offset-printed labels produced for spirit distillers and importers of wines from California and South Africa, with some direct exports to French winemakers. This growing business typifies the overall high quality of the Label Makers' output to ISO 9001/2000 accreditation, which has been recognized in recent years with awards from the TLMI and FINAT. In 2004 it won the UK Label Printer of the Year in the annual PrintWeek Awards.

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Despite the accolades, the company is no different from other small-to-medium converters in the UK in trying to remain profitable at the crowded quality end of the market. Its marketing efforts include newsletters and attendance at specialist trade fairs, backed by a policy of sound investments. "Our focus has always been on our customers' needs, and by purchasing the latest equipment available to produce labels of the highest quality, we have been able to stay ahead of the competition. We are always keen to develop specialist products working in partnership with our customers," says David Webster.

The most recent example of this has been the commissioning of an eight-unit, servo driven Nilpeter FA-4 UV flexo press, the first FA-Line press installed in the UK. At 16.5" wide, it gives a notable increase in capacity, especially for larger format jobs, such as margarine tub labels. The press includes two drop-in rotary screen units, cold foiling, chill drums for film printing, and a delaminator/relaminator unit for reverse-side label printing.

It complements a servo driven MPS 330 UV flexo/screen press, which last year marked the company's entry into the UV flexo market. Rotary UV letterpress still accounts for some 25 percent of production, based on Gallus, Nilpeter and Lintec presses. However, since 2001 the main bulk of production has gradually reverted to its eight-color offset/screen combination presses, using three Nilpeter M3300s and a Gallus T250.

All design/origination and plate preparation is handled in-house, based on an Esko network serving eight workstations and two Epsom Stylus Pro digital proofers. The company produces all its letterpress, flexo and offset plates in-house, along with Stork and Gallus Screeny screens. In June this year the firm installed a DuPont Cyrel Fast 1000 TD thermal processor and an Esko CDI Spark 4835 digital platesetter to serve the increased platemaking demand from its two UV flexo presses.

The company has assessed digital color printing, but considers it is currently unsuitable for a workload heavily dependent upon combination processes. Of course, the technology offers many advantages when processing fast turnarounds of short-run work, but the Label Makers has found a workaround. It uses two six-color Lintec semi-rotary letterpress machines equipped with inline foil blocking and laminating. These are said to give it the necessary flexibility and economy for this type of work. As to the future, no ongoing equipment purchases are in the pipeline. The recent prepress investments, plus the new FA-4 press, are considered enough to be going on with for now. Nevertheless, it is typical of the company's ambitions that some of the existing presses are being developed to enhance their multi-layer capabilities, including printing 16 colors for specialist applications.--Barry Hunt

The Label Makers Ltd.

LabMak House

Prince Street

Bradford, West Yorkshire BD4 6HQ, England

44-(0) 1274-681151

Founded: 1963

Employees: 54

Annual sales: [pounds sterling]6 million ($10.96 million)

Management: David Webster, managing director John Webster, chairman

Presses: 14: Nilpeter, Gallus, Lintec, MPS

Dana Labels

Since the mid to late 1990s, pressure sensitive label converters have been battling over the North American wine market. One of the companies that they have had to challenge--and which still remains at the top of the wine labeling market--is Dana Labels, of Beaverton, OR. The company was one of just a few pioneers who, back around 1990, began to move into a field that had been dominated by wet-glue cut-and-stack labels. Today Dana Labels stands apart from many label printers because its prime wine labels are produced on waterless web offset and digital web offset presses.

The company got its start in 1983 as a partnership that included the original founder, Harold Hanes, who also started Dana Labels in Hawaii. (Both are named after his daughter.) When he retired there was a partnership buyout; the two Dana Label firms, both quite alive today, have different owners and pursue different markets.

The Oregon Dana Labels was acquired in 1984 by Wilfredo and Ardie Rabanal, a husband and wife team that remains at the helm of the successful company today. Ardie operates the front office part of the business, and Wilfredo can usually be found out on the production floor. "He's the press shop genius that every printing company needs to have," says Dave Pancoast, sales manager.

In the early days Dana Labels was manufacturing general labels on letterpress machines, working with forms houses, producing computer fanfolded products. "In the late 1980s the software industry got big," recalls Pancoast, who has been with Dana since 1988, "and we did a lot of labels for those companies. But around that time we started focusing our marketing, and it was easy to cross over into wine."

Dana Labels acquired the first Sanjo UV waterless offset press in the USA in 1992, and that began the shift to the offset process and a serious devotion to wine labeling.

Tough customers

"Printing wine labels is brutal, extremely demanding," says Pancoast. "To make money at it is difficult. Most of the label shops are flexo, and most do a decent job, but a few do not. Wineries like textured papers, and some flexo can't print on them well. Fasson has tried to be innovative so that there is a textured stock that flexo printers can use. But it's difficult for flexo shops to consistently do a good print job with wine labels. They run a lot of paper to get good labels."

The truly demanding part, notes Pancoast, is working with the wineries. "The nature of the beast is the difficulty. They are so image driven in their marketplace. Just go into a store and look at the wine racks. The only thing that differentiates one wine from the other is the label.

"The graphics are demanding. We are printing multiple colors and foil stamping, and adding textured and multilevel embossing. We consider ourselves to be reproducing artwork more than anything else.

"Part of the difficulty is that the majority of wineries are not Gallo or Sutter Home, the bigger companies that have their own bottling rooms and labeling lines," Pancoast says. "Many wineries use mobile bottlers [These are trucks with bottling and labeling equipment installed within.]. There are not a lot of them around and they are booked solid, so the winery has to sign up six months in advance and it can't miss that date. If the labels are not done on time the winery owner has wine that has to be handled a second time to be labeled. So the deadlines are set in stone."

Wine labeling also has its seasonal intensities. Mid-January through May is a heavy time for label production. "It calms down a bit toward the end of May and part of June, then it cranks back up with the harvest, which runs from August through September, depending on the region," Pancoast explains.

As if that's not challenge enough, there are grape harvest variables to consider. "Last year there was a very hot April and a cold summer," Pancoast recalls. "As a result the growers had to drop fruit from their plants, so the yield per acre was down. This year we had a nice warm summer, so the vines are loaded up, production will be up, and cases of wine will be way up."

The turnaround time for wine labels during Dana's peak periods is four to eight weeks, Pancoast says. "That's just volume, and we run multiple shifts. Right now we are starting at about 6 a.m. and going to about 1 a.m. the next morning, and doing maintenance between."

Because wine labels are complex works of art, the converter has more to deal with in production. "When you are dealing with a label that is difficult to engineer, and get it done the way the designer wants it done, you have a lot of press checks and demanding delivery," Pancoast says. "And when you reproduce the label the following year you have to match the colors exactly. There is a constant challenge to keep everything as consistent as possible."

Designers play a big role in the wine label. "Once in a while we find a designer who is artistic and inventive, with a sense of what the printing process is, and who has a good business head. There aren't very many of those out there, but a few of them are very good."

A few years ago Dana Labels made the decision to try another printing method for wine labels, and acquired an HP Indigo press. Since then it has traded up from the 2000 model to the ws4000. "It's excellent at multiple images," says Pancoast. "We use it to print labels for small wineries, those with 100 cases of this and 200 cases of that. We can produce labels with very tight registration on the Indigo, like copy that's reversed to white out of a four color process. In some cases it's better than offset. We look at it as another good tool in the toolbox."

Wine labeling is well over half of Dana Labels' business today, and its customers are among the highly popular and successful (including Duck Pond Cellars. See Larry Arway's Field Report in L & NW July/August 2006, page 54.) "We intend to stay in the prime label business," Pancoast says. "It's the fun part of the industry."--Jack Kenny

Dana Labels Inc.

7778 SW Nimbus Ave., Bldg. 10

Beaverton OR 97008 USA

503-646-7933

www.danalabels.net

Founded: 1983

Employees: 38

Management: Wilfredo & Ardie Rabanal, owners

Presses: Waterless offset: Sanjo, Iwasaki; Digital: HP Indigo; Letterpress: Onda, Sanjo

Sud Etiquettes Industrie

Even the most enthusiastic whistlers-in-the-dark have to admit that French label market is not growing much, if at all. Go to the places where French label printers hang out and the talk is of "squeezing costs," "weakest to the wall" and like harbingers of gloom.

So when a French label converter says he is doing very nicely, thank you, and has recently bought two new presses, you can guess he must be either exceptional, or mad.

Denis Beauceville, founder and boss of Sud Etiquettes Industrie, does not look or sound mad. His company, in Gemenos close to France's Mediterranean coast, now employs 40 people. Its main activity is printing labels for the body care, pharmaceutical and household sectors, but Sud Etiquettes also sells labeling equipment, desktop label printers, both thermal and TT, and bar-code readers.

Many of France's label printers are family businesses run by the son or grandson of the founder. Denis Beauceville is the exception. Evacuated from Algeria after that country's independence in 1962, he took to teaching math at the local high school. He soon decided that his business should be business, whereupon he joined Avery Dennison. The next 10 years were spent learning the ropes of the self-adhesive label sector. Then, in 1985, he was ready to set up his own firm, first as a broker and reseller of labeling equipment, then, in 1989, as a fully fledged label converter.

Starting with two letterpress machines, the new company soon needed to expand its capacity and move into other printing technologies. By the early years of the 21st Century Sud Etiquettes was running half a dozen rotary label presses including both offset and flexo machines.

Investing in growth

In 2005 came the decision to expand and upgrade with the purchase of two new presses. First came a servo driven flexo/screen combination press from Dutch manufacturer MPS. "Our latest investments are in line with our policy to make whatever type of label our customers need, whatever the run length," says Denis Beauceville. "Our MPS press has six UV flexo units and four UV screen ones, all fully interchangeable. On the same machine we can also do hot or cold foiling, varnishing and diecutting. We are currently using the MPS press mainly for food and cosmetics labels, but we can also print in Braille, which opens up the market for pharmaceutical labels."

The second item on Sud Etiquettes' shopping list for 2005 was a digital HP Indigo press. This was the next logical step, according to Beauceville: "I really believe that the future is digital, and not just in the label business. We waited until digital printing technology had got over its teething troubles. Our ws4050 from HP Indigo gives us offset quality, sometimes even better than offset." Asked to summarize the progress achieved thanks to the digital technology, he replies, "With digital, the label printer makes money, his customer makes money, and small order sizes that would be totally uneconomic in flexo or offset suddenly become feasible. It's a whole new world."

Run lengths are getting shorter in France for much the same reasons as elsewhere in the world, as label end users adopt just-in-time and increase their special offers and promotions. But according to Denis Beauceville there are special factors that make France's label converters particularly vulnerable. "Our wage costs are among the highest in the world, and every year we see a few more of our customers shifting their production to lower cost countries, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. Even the ones who don't shift their production out of France, are globalizing their purchasing. One of Sud Etiquettes' French customers for example now buys most of his labels in Spain. We get to produce the labels our Spanish competitor can't yet make, but how long can we hold on to that?

"On the positive side, in our region we are seeing a lot of new family run businesses being set up. People lose their jobs or retire young, and they look around for some new activity--making jam, honey or whatever. When these people want to sell their produce through local supermarkets, they need proper labels, with high quality color printing, and bar codes to boot. That's where we come in with our offer of short-run labels."

The new digital press is a key weapon in Sud Etiquette's armory. Beauceville, as a former math teacher, likes to give a schoolbook example: "We had an order for 35,000 labels, four-color, six inches square, with 23 different variants. To have this printed in flexo, our customer would have needed to pay for 23x4=92 flexo plates at $85 each; that's a total of $7,820 before we even start the print run. Using the digital press, we were able to print the whole lot for only $5,440. Q.E.D."

The ability to print very short runs at reasonable prices is opening up a business sector for Sud Etiquettes: the wine label business. Much of France's wine is bottled by the growers themselves, or by local cooperatives, and a label order with 23 (or more) different variants is nothing unusual.

As with wines, so also with spirits. Absinthe conjures up images of 19th Century artists drinking themselves into oblivion. Banned for decades, it recently became available again (legally) in Europe, and Sud Etiquettes won the order for a test marketing campaign, using the HP Indigo press. Result: a new and satisfied customer.

The range of printing technologies used by Sud Etiquette has given rise to a changed marketing concept. "Printers have traditionally offered their customers prices per thousand," says Beauceville. "We are now looking at offering them a global all-inclusive service for all their label needs. It will then be up to us to decide how often to print and which process or press to use, in order to make sure that inventories of finished labels are kept to a minimum without the customer ever running out of stock."

What is Beauceville's conclusion on his counter-cyclical investments? "It all comes down to productivity. We have just 10 people working in production; our two new presses today produce nearly half of our $5 million annual sales, and I could be in the market for another digital press some time soon."--John Penhallow

Sud Etiquettes Industrie

Parc d'activites, 270 avenue du Pic de Bertagne

13420 Gemenos, France

39-(0)4-42-32-26-26

www.sudetiquettes.fr

Founded: 1985

Annual sales: $5 million

Management: Denis Beauceville, founder

Presses: 6

Harlands

You would be hard pressed to find another label converter with such a checkered history as Harlands of Hull Ltd. With trading roots going back to 1832, the East Yorkshire firm operated for decades as a stable, family-owned business to become one of the UK's leading label printers and supplier of labeling systems. However, declining family interest from around the mid-1990s was followed by a period of uncertainty as Harlands was passed from one new owner to another. Dublin-based Grenadier Holdings helped stabilize the firm from early 2000 and in August 2001 moved it into a more modern factory, while retaining the whimsical name of the original premises, "Land of Green Ginger House".

Events took a new twist when Grenadier sold the company as part of a management buyout led by Ian Wright, a former Harlands sales manager who returned as managing director in October 2000. The firm's status changed once again in May 2005 when the specialist packaging division of the Clondalkin Group successfully bid for the company. Harlands Labels therefore joined Boxes Prestige, Boxes GH and Ditone Labels in the UK. Other group companies include the recently acquired global Pharmagraphics, Pharmagraphics Guy (formerly Guy & Co.) and Guysal in Ireland, Boxes LPF and Linde in the Netherlands, Boxes Prestige in Poland, and BBF Labels and Plastic Cards & Inserts in the USA.

Harlands serves the cosmetics/toiletries, personal care, alcoholic beverages, premium foods, homecare products, and pharmaceuticals sectors. Filmic labels make up the bulk of production, which also includes niche products like extended text and peel-and-seal multi-ply labels. However, while the total European self-adhesive label market may be maintaining annual growth levels of 5.2 percent by volume, the UK market is in relative decline. "The opportunities in our domestic market have become much more difficult to identify and secure," says Wright. Like others he points to Eastern Europe as offering the best opportunity for growth.

This factor helps explain the establishment of Harlands Poland as a satellite production center in Lublin, 150 miles south east of the capital of Warsaw. Both plants reflect the fact that many leading brand owners have made strategic moves into Eastern Europe. "We now work alongside many of our customers to support these strategies," says Wright, who in addition to looking after Harlands UK, looks after Harlands Poland as well as Ditone Labels.

"Our experience in making the exact same move allows us to help them to overcome issues and challenges and strengthen our relationship with them. It is important for us to embrace this as an opportunity or we will be left behind. It's a simple fact of making sure we evolve with our customers and understand their needs rather than resist them. Our Polish operation is experiencing fantastic growth and providing customers with a brand that is well known for quality and service for them to rely on when they begin operating from Eastern Europe."

Located alongside Boxes Prestige Poland, the factory occupies 107,639 square feet of space (10,000 square meters) and currently employs 18 people. It already replicates most of the Hull operation, working to the same standards and using similar types of inks and substrates. All origination and prepress work, including CTP for flexo platemaking and digital proofing, is handled by the Hull plant, which also arranges the supply of diecutters.

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Both plants include a nine-unit MPS 300 combination UV flexo press with a 13" web width and interchangeable rotary screen units. Each also includes retrofitted chill drums for producing film products, such as sachets, sleeve labels and wraparounds. While the newer Polish operation is centered around UV flexo, the Hull plant retains its large rotary letterpress/rotary screen capacity based on Gallus R160, R200 and R218 presses.

"Letterpress is still the ideal process for handling large volumes of smaller runs of jobs that have frequent design changes, whereas in Poland the demand is for much longer label runs that are better suited to UV flexo production," says Wright. He agrees that recent advances have made digital color printing far more attractive, but as far as Harlands is concerned an extensive use of all the key inline combination processes makes it an uneconomic process to adopt at present.--Barry Hunt

Harlands of Hull

Land of Green Ginger House

Burma Drive

Hull HU9 5SD, England

44-(0)1482-785300

www.harlands.co.uk

Founded: 1832

Employees: 70

Annual sales: [pounds sterling]8.5 million ($15.84 million)

Management: Ian Wright, managing director

Presses: MPS, Gallus

Harlands Poland

Sp. Zoo--UI. Melgiewska 7-9

20-952 Lublin, Poland--[phone]

www.harlandslabels.pl

Founded: 2005

Employees: 18

Management: Ian Wright, managing director

Presses: MPS, Mark Andy, Aquaflex

Paragon Identification

Manufacturing in the UK, France and Rumania, and selling throughout the world, Grenadier is a rather discreet, low profile forms-and-labels printing group. Its specialties include all kinds of business forms, smart tickets, labels and other narrow web security applications. Paragon Identification in France is an important part of Grenadier, and specializes above all in label, ticketing and security applications.

Connor Donnelly and Patrick Crean acquired the UK and French assets of the foundering Moore Paragon group in 1998. Today, with 10 production sites and annual sales of $200 million, Grenadier is one of Europe's top 10 security printers, and can claim to be number one in Europe when it comes to ticketing. Much of the research, and most of the production of security documents and tickets, takes place at Paragon Identification's plant at Argent-sur-Sauldre, France, under the watchful eye of CEO Dominique Durant des Aulnois.

Just the ticket

Event ticketing, which involves producing difficult-to-forge entry tickets for anything from sporting events to theme parks to exhibitions, is a fast expanding part of Paragon's activity. Here the main challenge is to produce attractive tickets, generally with four-color printing, combined with such security features as magnetic stripes, holograms and consecutive numbering.

Transport ticketing gives less scope to creative design, but the requirements for reliability and anti-counterfeiting are if anything even higher. Paragon is one of the main suppliers of subway tickets to the Paris metro, the second-largest in Europe, with its millions of passengers transported every day. Public transport systems in no less than 15 other countries also look to Paragon for their ticketing. Most of the volume business is with magnetic stripe tickets, but Paragon is also in the forefront of the growing market for RFID tickets. Too expensive still for the humble one-ride subway ticket, the RFID ticket comes into its own with the growing popularity of weekly or monthly transport passes. The same RFID technology is also giving Paragon its entry into all forms of "smart" access control passes, including ski-passes for Europe's many mountain resorts.

Both the event ticketing and the transport ticketing print shops at Paragon's works are designated high security areas with 24-hour CCTV surveillance, such that even highly respectable journalists writing for world-leading trade journals may not take photographs.

However, it is betraying no secrets to say that Paragon's presses and assembled equipment come in all shapes, sizes and ages. The "heavyweight" presses are gravure, but flexo and offset are also used, often in combination. Mag-stripe tickets for example are gravure printed on a line to which several flexo print units have been added. For its industrial labels, Paragon relies on its Arsoma presses.

Understanding the label end user

"The label converter's job is not just to make labels," says Dominique Durant. "He needs to understand the whole supply chain. Most of all, he must understand how the label will be applied and what aesthetic, commercial and informational purposes that label must fulfill. Too many people in our business have the methods and mentality of an artisan. We need to smarten up and get professional. Industrial labels in particular are a vital ingredient for our customers' production and packing, logistics and marketing."

Durant himself has put into place at Paragon a raft of quality control systems. His shop floor managers and foremen are trained to be constantly on the lookout for non-value-added processes which can be eliminated. On the sales side he revolts against the idea of the label converter as an order-taker. "We must work with the customer and share our expertise with him, especially in the phase before the order is signed," he says.

"Product life cycles are getting shorter and shorter," he reminds us. "It is now not unusual for major brands to change their labels twice a year. Even industrial labels, for automobiles for instance, are changing every two years as a result of new models and new legislation." He should know, because Paragon supplies specialty labels to several major European car manufacturers. "Paragon is of course an accredited supplier to the automobile industry under the relevant ISO certification, but that is only a start. We know that our competitors in Eastern Europe and in Asia are using the same materials and broadly the same machinery as us, but with wage costs less than one third of French levels. So we need to be the ones who can work the most closely with our customers, produce the best quality, and deliver it faster."

France, unlike Britain, still has an industrial base in automobile manufacture as in many other industries. But for how long? Dominique Durant is above all a realist. "Like many other label converters here, we are still too parochial in our approach to business. There are virtually no more frontiers in Europe. We need at the very least to think European, or else we will find ourselves pushed to the wall."

Educated in France and Switzerland, Dominique Durant des Aulnois spent 15 years with Oce France, the printing equipment and document management group, before joining Paragon in 1997. He became CEO of Paragon Identification in 1999.

In 2005 he was elected for a two-year term as president of the French label association UNFEA. He recently summarized his policy for the Association as follows: "To encourage excellence by publishing benchmark statistics for the profession, to organize industrial training sessions, and to set up a library/database of technical information."--John Penhallow

Paragon Identification

Les Aubepins

18410 Argent Sur Sauldre, France

33-2-48-81-61-00

[e-mail]

www.identification.fr

Annual sales: $200 million

Plants: 10 production sites

Management: Dominique Durant des Aulnois, CEO

General Tape & Label

General Tape Company got its start in 1949 at no specific address. George Little and Red Houding sold tape and sundry drug items in the Detroit, MI, USA region from the trunks of their cars. After serving in Korea in the US military, Little returned to run the company alone. He purchased some slitters and acquired a narrow web printing system to print on the tapes. By the mid-1960s Dan Dillinger and Louis Raden joined as partners, and in 1969 Raden acquired the interest of the others. The company moved a couple of times, and today is located in a 22,000 square foot plant on Eight Mile Road in Southfield, just across the street from Detroit proper.

Lou Raden died six years ago, and today the company is headed by Mary Raden, his wife. Jack Hooker is VP and chief operating officer. He joined the company as Raden's second in command at the Detroit operation as well as Tempe Label Company in Arizona, which was sold six years ago.

At some point over the past 56 years the name of the company changed to General Tape & Supply, and the company became deeply involved in labels for the auto business.

The recent dramatic changes in the automotive industry are but the latest in a series that General Tape & Label has witnessed over the years, says Hooker. "We have worked with all of the major automotive manufacturers and several tier-two suppliers," he says. "We have produced a wide variety of labels for them, which were used for identification during production, and for building the engines."

The company put its innovative minds to work to come up with some ingenius automotive support products, Hooker adds. "In the past they used dust cups to cover holes in some parts, so we developed labels that can be used for that purpose, and removed for production at certain spots in the assembly line. We also put a label together to hold the fuel line in place while the gas lines were installed."

The name change to General Tape & Label came in the recent past, when the company began to venture into other markets. "We had been looking over the years at the produce market, at point-of-purchase labels, and we are continuing to work in those arenas. They drove us to digital printing, so that we could respond quickly to market changes," Hooker observes.

With its 28 employees and five Webtron and Mark Andy flexo presses, General Tape & Label runs a mix of product. "On the automotive side there's not a lot of process printing," Hooker says, "but in our other markets we use four color." A good amount of that is UV flexo printing. "We had a learning curve to go through with that for a while, but now we have a handle on it. Though I don't see the need that we thought would develop with our customer base," he adds.

Last summer the company made the decision to go digital, and took swift action. A new HP Indigo ws4050 press was installed by October.

"We were catching quite a bit of short run and variable information work," recalls Hooker. "So this has really helped us. Right now we are offering digital printing to smaller companies, and coming up with some good ideas."

One of the company's customers is in the meat packing business, and previously had sold all of its products to restaurants. Now they are distributing into consumer channels, and worked with General Tape & Label to develop eye-catching labels aimed at different markets. "We can create cost-effective labels targeted to appeal to Polish or Hispanic communities, then create seasonal labels for Oktoberfest or sports events. The customer is testing which flavors of sausage sell the best in what environments, and then ramping up production accordingly."

Even the automotive market is looking into using digitally produced labels. "We always worked with engineering people in the past, but now we are working with their marketing people, test marketing a new item," Hooker says.

"We like steady growth," he adds. "I see us adding more presses, but I'm not sure whether they will be digital or flexo." And despite the challenges in the auto market today, "We don't want to leave it. We want to innovate how they use our labels."--Jack Kenny

General Tape & Label

21500 W. Eight Mile Road

Southfield MI 48075-5668 USA

248-357-2744

www.gentape.com

Founded: 1949

Employees: 28

Management:

Mary Raden, president

Jack Hooker, VP, COO

Presses: 6: Webtron, Mark Andy, HP Indigo