PrinterChat: Three Industry Events and a Big Promotion

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:02] DC: This is the true story of two printers who agreed to podcast with me and have their opinions recorded. Listen to what happens when printers stop being polite and start getting real.

[0:00:13] JM: Hi, this is Jamie McLennan.

[0:00:14] WC: And this is William Crabtree.

[0:00:16] DC: And I’m your host, Deborah Corn. Welcome to the PrinterChat Podcast.

[EPISODE]

[0:00:25] DC: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Podcasts From the Printerverse. This is Deborah Corn, your Intergalactic Ambassador. I’m here with the two printy-est printers I know, Jamie, the printer, and Will, the printer. Hello, gentlemen.

[0:00:38] WC: Hello, Deborah, and hello, Jamie.

[0:00:41] JM: Hey, Deborah. Hey, Will. How you doing?

[0:00:43] WC: I’m wonderful. How are you?

[0:00:45] DC: Great.

[0:00:44] JM: Doing good.

[0:00:45] DC: Hey, everybody. We know it has been a minute since our last podcast. We have all been extremely busy in fantastic ways. We are going to dedicate this episode to catching up on all of that. Then we’re going to talk about the events that took place in October, PRINTING United, Print Across America, and International Print Day. Jamie, the printer, something’s always going on at DMR Innvoke. What has been going on?

[0:01:14] JM: What has been going on? It’s just been a busy couple of months. Crazy here, both sides Innvoke and DMR. Just pumping out the work. A lot of things were in the plans for the Printing United and Print Across America, so we spent a lot of time doing that. That was everything, meetings and all that, just trying to get our stuff together for that. Nothing new to report on what’s happening here, other than just keeping the presses rolling and having fun while doing it.

[0:01:37] DC: I actually think you are mistaken in that. I recall receiving an email and Jamie had a brand-new title over at DMR Graphics. Why don’t you tell me, buddy, your good news, sir?

[0:01:54] JM: Funny. Thanks, Deborah. Yes, General Manager of DMR Graphics. Thank you. Yeah, it’s a long time coming. It’s been there. Just never was officially spoken. It was never in writing, but yeah, I’ve been the GM for a number of years. Now they finally just said, “You need to broadcast that and let everybody know.” Yes, thank you for noticing that in my email. I’ve got a lot of replies back to everybody going, “Hey, it’s about time.” But yeah. That’s funny. Thank you.

[0:02:20] WC: Congratulations, sir.

[0:02:21] JM: Thanks, Will.

[0:02:23] DC: Yeah. Right. Well, you need to say, we was –

[0:02:24] WC: Absolutely. Long, long time overdue.

[0:02:27] DC: Yeah. I saw the email and Jamie didn’t tell us and I copy and pasted it in our group text. I was like, “Hello. Somebody forgot to tell us something.” Jamie, now you were the creative print strategist last time I looked. Obviously, I mean, are you still doing that end?

[0:02:45] JM: Yes. Doing both. Yup.

[0:02:47] DC: What’s different?

[0:02:49] JM: Still creative print strategist. Nothing’s different. Just the title.

[0:02:51] DC: Do people report to you?

[0:02:53] JM: People have always reported to me. But now, it’s just more official. Our owner was like, “Let’s make this official. Instead of being the creative print strategist all the time, let people know that you’re the guy here and make sure they can report to you.” A little bit more responsibility, but I was already doing it anyway.

[0:03:12] DC: Do you have a dedicated parking spot?

[0:03:13] JM: No dedicated parking spot. No. But I’m usually in early enough before anybody gets here.

[0:03:18] DC: Do people have to ask you if they can go on vacation?

[0:03:21] JM: Yeah, that’s always been a thing. I’ve always signed off on their vacation. It’s on our –

[0:03:26] WC: You’ve been a general manager for years. What are you talking about?

[0:03:27] JM: I have been just finally getting –

[0:03:31] DC: Well, I didn’t know that I just send people to you all the time. Like, you’re Jamie, the printer. Now, you’re Jamie, the GM. But I’m not changing the hashtag. It’s not happening.

[0:03:39] JM: No, that’s fine. Jamie, the printer’s fine.

[0:03:41] DC: William, before we start with you, I found myself having to be on Facebook, because they sent me something, like if I didn’t put on two-factor authentication, they would basically throw me out of Facebook. When I did, I happened to see a post of yours that said, you had lost 60 freaking pounds. Your pants are falling off. If it weren’t for your big, hairy, ape-like knuckles, your wedding ring would be off, too. Congratu–freaking–lations on that.

[0:04:16] WC: Thank you. Yes. That is the case. I’ve lost 60 pounds. I was my heaviest at 260. It would have been about two years ago, a year. I was still about 260 when I bought Sign Parrot. Yeah, I’ve lost 60 pounds in the last a year and a half, two years, yeah.

[0:04:32] DC: Did you Ozempic it, or did you go the old-fashioned way and exercise and diet?

[0:04:38] WC: It was a huge lifestyle change. The stress of buying the company and going through all –

[0:04:42] JM: I was going to say, the stress of being in the sign business.

[0:04:44] WC: Yeah. Well, yeah. The stress of being in the sign business did it. No, there was a lot of stress and I had some health issues, right? Well, the health issues just led to the motivation. I had fatty liver. I had back problems. I had kidney stones on my kidney stones, and my back and his spasms. I couldn’t walk. I felt like shit all the time and decided that it wasn’t how I wanted to live my life. I started riding a bicycle every day and I changed my diet. I don’t eat sugar.

Actually, one thing that I did that was a huge change was I took an allergy test and found out that I was allergic to a lot of things that I was eating all the time. I’m allergic to eggs and I ate eggs for breakfast every day. I’m allergic to most grains. I have minor celiac disease. I have an intolerance to gluten. I’m allergic to barley and hops and I drink beer every day.

[0:05:28] DC: Oh, my God. And he wants to have lunch with me on Friday.

[0:05:32] JM: I think I had that barley hops thing, because after a beer or two, it makes my nose start running. I don’t know if it’s –

[0:05:37] DC: Really?

[0:05:37] WC: Yeah. I cut all that stuff out and that coupled along with the exercise and now I make these cheese meat, charcuterie box things, or adult Lunchables. I make those for the whole week and that’s what I eat throughout the day and then I basically eat whatever I want for the most part for dinner. I’ve lost a bunch of weight and I feel better than I’ve ever felt in my life.

[0:05:55] DC: Excellent.

[0:05:56] JM: We need to talk after this and find out a little bit more about what you’re doing because I need to do that.

[0:06:00] WC: Yeah.

[0:06:00] DC: Oh, God. Please. All right, Jamie. All right. Let’s go for it.

[0:06:03] JM: I was down to 225 and blew up again. It took COVID to do it. It was a year after. I just got tired of exercising. Tired of doing everything.

[0:06:12] DC: I’m going to stay out of the numbers game here, but I’m in on being more healthy. Will, last question on this, because I’m fascinated. The things that you were allergic to, they obviously weren’t manifesting by your throat closing, or you getting rashes. How was the allergy manifesting?

[0:06:29] WC: Well, your body’s intolerant to certain things, right? In these blood tests, they can determine what you have a reaction to that’s a negative reaction. Your typical thought process behind an allergic reaction, well, you just said, you’re anaphylactic, your throat closes up, you get a rash, whatever. If you’re eating something that your body has an intolerance to, you can still digest it, you just don’t digest it the right way. So, your body doesn’t process it the right way. It gives you the runs. I had irritable bowel syndrome. I had a hernia in my stomach. I had ulcers.

[0:06:55] DC: Oh, my God.

[0:06:57] WC: Had all kinds of crazy shit. I was diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome when I was 20 and they’re like, “Yeah, we don’t know what the fuck is wrong with you. This is what you have.” They tried to give me some anti-psychotics to treat it and I was like, “Uh, no. Not going to take that medication. Thank you.” It took 20 more years for me to – and it was just a test that you can get a CVS at Target. It’s like, 200 bucks. Prick your finger, put it on the thing. They send you the results and tada-da, stop eating that and feel way better.

[0:07:23] DC: Wow. I want to do that now. Okay. Well, freaking congratulations on all of that, and for being healthy and being an inspiration to me and Jamie. Maybe just Jamie, we’ll say. I’m going to try to be motivated. Okay, what else is going on with the Tampa media empire?

[0:07:42] WC: Oh, you mean today, or just –

[0:07:44] DC: In general. Since the last podcast.

[0:07:46] WC: Every day. A lot has happened since the last podcast. Every day is an adventure, right? It’s going with the punches, right? We are in a position where we are far less firefighters and we are being proactive, in that we are solving problems before they happen, versus putting out the fire, which takes process, takes workflow. We’re ever-changing and ever-updating and finding new ways.

One of my recent victories that I’m really excited about is I figured out a way to be able to send somebody their estimate along with the contract, along with a payment link, all in one thing to where they sign online and it’s a legally binding thing. They input their credit card information and we’re done, right? This is for vehicle wraps and signing solutions. This was the big problem is we had looked this minor bullshit, five-bullet point thing agreement that we had them sign off on when they dropped off their car for the vehicle wraps and it didn’t cover anything. Every issue that we would run into, we had no fallback. I said, “Fuck this.”

I went and I searched every vehicle wrap contract online. I pulled out the things that I liked. I wrote a bunch of stuff that I wanted to add into it, rewrote a bunch of stuff that was from the existing contracts, and then ran the whole thing through AI and said, make this legal. Then they made it legal and they took a bunch of stuff out that I wanted to be in there and I took the stuff that they took out and I put it back in. I said, “No, put it back in. Make it legal.” AI just kept rewriting it to the point that I have this contract now. All I have to do is click once and they can see the contract, right? When it’s presented to them in the same way, terms and conditions, anything else is presented, they don’t have to click it, but they can, but they’re signing it, right?

If we run into issues where, okay, well, we think it’s going to be 10 hours for this removal and it takes 30, you’re billed by the hour for the amount of hours that it takes us. Now, we still verbally acknowledge these things that are major like that. If we have a removal that’s coming in, we have one in the shop right now that I bid out at 25 hours. I even told the guy, I’m like, “Look, this is baked into this car. You’ve had this wrap on this vehicle for seven years. It’s become part of the car. It’s going to take us a lot of time to get this off. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. But being transparent with you, we’re going to record it while we do it. We’re going to video it, so we time the amount of time that it takes. The amount of time that it takes is what we’re going to bill you for.

But having those things reinforced by the contract and having this system in place where it’s super easy, we get no pushback, we get no resistance. I was batting a hundred until this week. The contracts that I have, I have four pending, I’ve had 10 converts since I put the system in place. I’ve been doing it for three weeks. The four that are out there, I’m pretty sure are going to still convert too.

It’s having just those minor little changes in the way we were doing things. Before with our system, you had to log into pay. We send you an estimate with a link, the link, you log into pay, and then you pay your deposit, or you call us and you give your credit card to pay your deposit. Having it at all in one thing. Click, bang, bang, done, and no pushback from clients, whatsoever.

[0:10:45] DC: Excellent. Now, I’m fascinated that you’ve record your wrapping. Is that your –

[0:10:52] WC: Only the removals. We don’t charge by the hour for the wrap. That’s all calculated based on square footage, right? We can do that. We know how long it’s going to take us to wrap a vehicle based on the size of the vehicle. What we don’t know is when we get into removals, when we get into disassemblies, when we do disassemblies versus reassemblies. In the contract, we outline like, okay, well, we don’t take apart cars, unless you want us to. There’s going to be seams. We’re commercial. We’re not color change.

Color change, where you’re trying to take the place of a paint job, they want the whole vehicle disassembled and put back together. We’re not an auto body shop. I don’t do that, right? My guys are not auto-body people either. They can’t be taking apart vehicles and putting them back together. We outline that in the contract that we don’t do that anymore. If you want that done, then you’re going to pay us by the hour to do that service, or you’re going to pay someone to come in and do that service. If something breaks, you acknowledge that you realize the risk associated with that and you’re going to pay for the part. I’m not paying for the part. You’re paying for the part.

Because that was the expectation before is like, okay, take apart my vehicle. If something breaks, you’re responsible for it. We had these people that – and this was how the shop was run before, is every vehicle was disassembled. They disassembled, took off the handles, took off the mirrors, and took everything off. Then they’re doing, basically, what’s required for color change wraps, but for commercial wraps, so that it’s seamless, or reduced seams. Well, they were doing this, but then they were doing vertical seams, which is just not smart at all.

They were doing vertical seams, but they were doing disassembly and color change to reduce seams, which if they’d done it a different way, they could have had far less seams and not taken the vehicle apart. These are all things that I’m figuring out because I had nothing to do with wraps until a year ago. I’m going trial by fire, figuring out all of the workflow and issues and things that are left over from the previous company and resolving them. It’s a fun experience getting to learn all of these things as we go. What we do, we try, we fail, we try again and fail again, and figure out the best way to do it by doing it wrong.

[0:12:49] DC: Well, you’re just learning how to do it right, right? You’re not doing it wrong. You’re practicing getting it right.

[0:12:54] WC: Practicing getting it right. Yeah.

[0:12:55] DC: Yeah. You’re practicing getting it right.

[MESSAGE]

[0:12:59] DC: Print Media Centr provides Printspiration and resources to our vast network of print and marketing professionals. Whether you are an industry supplier, print service provider, print customer, or consultant, we have you covered, with topical sales and marketing content, event support and coverage, these podcasts, and an array of community lifting initiatives. We also work with printers, suppliers, and industry organizations, helping them to create meaningful relationships with customers and achieve success with their sales, social media, and content marketing endeavors. Visit printmediacentr.com and connect with the Printerverse. Print long and prosper.

[EPISODE CONTINUED]

[0:13:45] DC: All of my stuff since the last podcast is related to Print Across America and PRINTING United. Did I speak to you guys before I went to Labelexpo? Did we speak since then? Yeah. I went to Brussels. I went to Labelexpo, where we spent five days with no air conditioning in a hall from 19 freaking 22, or whatever. Europe, they just build these things, so they didn’t turn the air conditioning on, so that was great. It was a fantastic show and I was there with HP and then I did some local events. I hosted a fantastic woman in print event at the Printing Industries of New England. It was a great turnout. Thanks to Jenna and Christine for inviting me to come there.

Then I really spent most of my time prepping for Print Across America, which was an initiative I started to encourage as many print, sign, and implants across the United States and Canada to hold open house events and invite students over, or welcome them over if we found students for them and reach out to the community and really try to create more engagement with people around all the really cool, amazing possibilities and things you can do with printing because most people out there, especially civilians have no idea what print really is and all the amazingly cool things it can do.

They don’t realize they did it in their lives in certain ways. For sure, we always discuss this that the customers of print shops rarely know all of the capabilities of the print shop. They only know what they do with the print shop. I just had this conversation again today with actually, XMPie. Because they have this functionality in XMPie that a lot of printers don’t access, because they only use it for what they got it for to begin with and they just haven’t expanded their horizons to know that there’s actually more stuff that they could do with it. Really interesting.

Then to support Print Across America, we held an International Print Day Conference. It was a 10-hour conference online. I worked with a great company called Virtual Approval, who was the production company behind the Zoom meeting, so it was more like a TV, a 10-hour TV show than it was a Zoom meeting, or anything like that. We pulled up some of the Print Across America open houses. We got Jamie The Printer.

Will, you appreciate this, even though it won’t entice you. But Jamie and his company left the camera on in their conference the whole time and there was food on the table, so we could see everybody sneaking in and pulling out some food, like a sandwich. It was like, the people who were like, “Huh. I wonder if I’m allowed to have the sandwich people,” like, not the ones who knew that they could have the sandwich people. We had a lot of entertainment watching Jamie’s company eat lots of stuff during – including pizza. They had a second round of pizza come after breakfast. It was really just a fantastic day overall.

Yeah, I’m really excited. Jamie The Printer, you actually hosted two events or three events for International Print Day/Print Across America. You did an amazing job marketing them. Can you tell everybody about your experience, especially with the students who came over?

[0:17:16] JM: Yeah, we jumped on board early when you first started it. We all got on board here at DMR and really wanted to do this, because we had just rebranded our company, and expanded into the new space. We’re planning on having an open house in the summer, which it just helped push it back to October. It made sense. It gave us more time to get things ready here, since we were still hanging wall murals up the week before Print Across America. We did email blasts. We did some small direct mail to people. We sent it out to our customers, to some of the local schools that we do work for.

Your team was great, because they hooked us up with a university that we didn’t really want on our horizon that were local. Thirteen students came in, juniors and seniors from Cabrini University, which was local. One of the professors, they have not been anywhere since before COVID, so that was really cool. They were excited. They came with an agenda of things they wanted to learn. They wanted to learn about estimating, workflow, what we did. They wanted to see how things went through the shop and where they ended up and how they got shipped out, everything. They just had a full point of let’s go over this, this and this.

Ian in production went through some stuff on the computer, like, this is what our workflow is. I get the jobs, once they come in from sales and that. We actually had a customer that graduated from Cabrini here during one of the tours. He sat down with the students when we were in our conference room and said, “I graduated whatever year it was. This is some of the things.” He’s like, “You want to find a printer like DMR that works with you. Learns how you do files will help you get your files correct and doing that.” Then the professor jumped in, “Yeah, you don’t want to go with XX company online and just send your files off. You never know what you’re going to get back. They’ll just print whatever you want. Get with somebody that’s going to help you and work with you and make you better at what you’re doing.”

It was really cool. That was an added bonus, just having somebody here that graduated from their university and got the talk to them and had been through the whole ropes. He had owned a printing company one time. Had worked with this at one time, now works for another company. It was cool. Yeah, that was great. I mean, we did swag bags and we had four vendors in the morning. Linda Meyer set us up with Necusa, Mohawk, and Dry Tack. We had Piedmont plastics here. Then in the afternoon, we had five vendors in.

One of the guys stayed later, stayed for the second round because we did it in three different time slots. We did a 10 to 12 breakfast meeting and had the tours and then we did a 1 to 3 afternoon with lunch and then we did a –

[0:19:38] DC: That’s when the pizza came.

[0:19:39] JM: That’s when the pizza came. Then we had a 4 to 7, family and friends after work come through and tour. Yeah, that was fun. The vendors actually, I think they had a good time. I got a note today from somebody thanking us for having us here, having them in. They had a good time. They met a lot of people. They talked to a bunch of our clients and they got to hand out paper samples and other cool things and stuff that vendors haven’t seen their customers haven’t seen in a long time. They got to walk away with a bunch of cool swag from us and from the vendors. We did everything we could to make their day fun.

[0:20:12] DC: That’s so amazing. I want to give a shout-out to Mary Lee Clark. She’s the one who was helping me. She’s a concierge recruiter for the printing industry. She is the one who spearheaded the effort of matching students with printers, or printers with students depending upon who signed up first. If a printer signed up and all anyone needs to do is fill out a little form just to let us know that they were participating. Then Mary Lee would scour within a certain amount of driving distance from the printers and find any school, or technical program that had graphics, communications, design, printing students, whatever marketing students, whatever it might be. Then we sent them a questionnaire to participate to find out what they were studying, what the educator – we sent it to the teachers. What were the students studying? What were the things that they wanted them to see, or learn about at the print shop, and what types of jobs they would be looking for afterward to make it a really meaningful experience?

Then, Mary Lee called the printers before we let the students come over and say, “Okay, we have students for you, but here is the criteria of what we need you to deliver for them, so it’s meaningful.” Which sounds like, it completely worked out for you.

[0:21:32] JM: Oh, it definitely worked.

[0:21:33] DC: Did you meet any potential employees, or are they too young?

[0:21:38] JM: A number of them asked about internships, which is great. Now we have a meeting, actually tomorrow about setting up an internship program. We’ll be working on that. It was great. We’re like, “Yeah, we’ve talked about it, but we’ve never done anything.” It was just like, “Why aren’t we doing it? Let’s start.” Tomorrow, we’re putting a couple of people together. What do we need to do to start an internship program and have students in, whether they’re over the holidays, or whether it’s summer, and go from there. Yeah. Hopefully, that’ll turn into a great thing.

[0:22:06] DC: Jamie The Printer, you are literally making me cry right now.

[0:22:08] WC: Deborah’s over here losing her shit right now.

[0:22:11] DC: I can’t believe – I mean, I don’t want to start crying, but I’m going to. This makes me so happy. I cannot even tell you. This is beyond even my wildest dreams of the success of this workforce development program, which is what it was. On top of it, I am hearing from – there were a ton of printers that never even told me that they were participating. Meaning, they just didn’t fill out a form. The form actually got you on my directory, which is the only reason we want to know what was going on with people.

For whatever reason, I’m getting these emails now from printers who were like, “Thank you so much. We have 150 people from the community.” I was like, “Who are you? What is going on?” Then even of the National Print and Sign Association, they had the most people sign up from their organization. I mean, the print owner said, “Hey, you know, it was easier for me to make a pitch to them.” Even in their organization, there were people I didn’t realize that participated and had crazy turnouts. Paul Strack was on Good Morning Kentucky. Oh, God. Was it Kentucky?

[0:23:19] JM: Yeah. I forget what it was. But yeah, I saw that. Yeah. I forget which morning show it was.

[0:23:24] DC: It was one of them. Sorry, it was a southern city. Sorry, Paul. I forget now. Yeah, I mean, people did amazing things. William, I know you were threatening to participate at Print Across America.

[0:23:39] WC: Yeah, we threatened to participate. We wrapped our lobby. We started to organize the warehouse at Sign Parrot. We did a ton of cleanup. We got almost prepared, but there’s so much chaos in my world that it was like, we weren’t at the position to bring people in and show people behind the curtain and –

[0:23:57] DC: That’s okay. You cleaned.

[0:23:59] WC: We did clean. We cleaned the lot. We organized. We decorated. We made some strides towards what we wanted to do for sure, for sure, for sure next year.

[0:24:07] DC: Okay, that’s fine.

[0:24:09] JM: That was a big help getting the cleaning, because –

[0:24:11] DC: Oh, my God.

[0:24:13] WC: Organization, yeah.

[0:24:14] JM: Those couple of days before, we’re like –

[0:24:15] DC: Yeah. It’s so funny, I keep hearing back from printers, especially, I want to give a shout-out to a gentleman named John Beery from Campbell Print Center in Virginia. He was in the middle of construction when he agreed. He was like, “Uh, uh-oh.” Then he pushed his whole construction team. Then he had two plants. The construction, they got really close, but not close enough, so they decided to move the event to the other facility and they had a massive clean-up there. It was something he’s been wanting to do for so long.

In a lot of ways, Print Across America became a catalyst for just getting rid of, everybody knows is a pile of, everyone has a junk drawer. Well, print shops, some of them have junk-like –

[0:25:03] JM: Racks of stuff.

[0:25:04] DC: Full of stuff. Exactly.

[0:25:05] WC: Well, rooms.

[0:25:08] DC: Yeah, exactly. Amazing. Well, the replays from International Print Day and our interactive program are at internationalprintday.org. Thank you. Will, thank you for cleaning your print shop and getting prepared for next year. Jamie The Printer, thank you for never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever letting me down when it comes to just exceeding all my dreams and expectations. Every single time, you were just the man, sir.

[0:25:37] JM: Thank you. I loved it. It was fun.

[0:25:38] DC: Yay. We were at PRINTING United, Jamie and I were, well, didn’t make it this year, but Will, you can ask us questions about what we saw and things like that. Jamie The Printer, I’m sure you were there with a shopping list. What were you guys looking at?

[0:25:55] JM: Yeah. We were there with a shopping list. We were looking at CNC cutters, just looking at we have three Kongsbergs. What else is out there? We saw a couple cool things. Kongsberg had a new one that does all the CNC routing but also does variable up and down, the X, Y axis. That was really cool. They were doing some cool things on the floor. There was another company I’ve never heard about before. They were there for the first time. Their machine was amazing.

[0:26:21] DC: Was it Caslo, or something like that?

[0:26:23] JM: It was a white and red machine. I don’t know, the guy sent me emails already, so I’m trying to set up a time. We’re going to talk to them just to see what it’s about. I forget the name of this company. I apologize. As was as soon as we walked in, we saw that and we’re like, “We’re not even really paying attention to this, but let’s look.” Yeah, we spent some time at our favorite booths, swissQ, and talked to those guys. They gave us some pointers on some things. We talked about what’s new for them, what’s coming down the pike. They get us some new files for some cool demo stuff. That was neat. Got to talk to our sales guy, which is always good. He’s a funny guy.

Talking about sales guys that are just like, “Hey, I sell this press. You want it? This is the price. This is the best one out there. If you don’t, don’t buy it. Go somewhere else.” It’s just totally dry. Doesn’t care.

[0:27:06] DC: Who was this? This was swissQ guy?

[0:27:08] JM: Yeah. He’s so funny. He’s just like, “Yeah, this is it. You know what you’re getting. Take it or leave it.”

[0:27:13] DC: Wow.

[0:27:14] JM: It’s funny. Yeah, we’re –

[0:27:16] WC: They’re like an official sponsor of this podcast at this point, right? swissQ?

[0:27:20] JM: Yeah, they should be. Yes.

[0:27:19] DC: Seriously.

[0:27:20] JM: We got to talk to the VP. He wants to really come on here and talk. He wants to do something with Project Peacock, or something. He’s going to be reaching out. That’s flair as he is.

[0:27:31] DC: Okay.

[0:27:32] JM: We will hold him for it, Eric.

[MESSAGE]

[0:27:36] DC: News from the Printerverse delivers topical sales and marketing insight, along with plenty of Printspiration one time a month to inboxes everywhere. Our contributors cover the industry and the future of print media and marketing, with strategy for strengthening your customer relationships, better targeting of your prospects, and practical advice for helping your business grow. Printspiration is just a click away. Subscribe to News from The Printerverse at printmediacentr.com. Print long and prosper.

[EPISODE CONTINUED]

[0:28:11] DC: Was the cutter company, Hasler Cutter, by any chance? Don’t remember?

[0:28:17] JM: I don’t remember.

[0:28:18] DC: It’s just interesting because I had a conversation with a woman this morning named Melody Thompson from haslerusa.com and it was the first time they exhibited at PRINTING United and they have red and white cutting machines.

[0:28:31] JM: It’s got to be that man.

[0:28:32] DC: That would be really, really weird. But okay.

[0:28:37] JM: I know he sent me a link for it.

[0:28:38] DC: It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.

[0:28:40] JM: Yeah, we did that. We really talked to a lot of our material suppliers were there, which was really good. We got to talk to them.

[0:28:46] DC: Oh, you mean the board people.

[0:28:49] JM: Boards and substrates and stuff like that. We were looking for a substrate that’s like your touch screen, because we got a customer who wants us to print on that, but we need it in 48-inch by 90-inch sheets.

[0:29:01] DC: Wait a second.

[0:29:02] JM: Yeah.

[0:29:02] DC: Back up. What? You could print a touch screen? I’m very confused.

[0:29:08] JM: The material that makes your touch screen. We need something like that that I can print on, that still has the touch capabilities, but I need to be able to print –

[0:29:15] DC: Printed electronics? I’m so confused right now. What?

[0:29:18] JM: Not the electronic part. Just that thin, clear cover you put on your –

[0:29:23] DC: Why can’t you make the lens, like the lenticulars on the swissQ?

[0:29:27] JM: Yeah, we can print on really thin material. Yes. But you got to be able to touch through and activate stuff. Whatever that thin, clear thing is you put on your iPhone or Android to protect your screen.

[0:29:38] DC: Oh, I know exactly what you’re talking about. Yes, yes, yes, yes. It’s a film.

[0:29:41] JM: But I need the sheets, the film the I can print on.

[0:29:44] DC: Okay.

[0:29:45] JM: Yeah. We talked to a bunch of people about that –

[0:29:46] DC: Really interesting.

[0:29:48] JM: – because we have a couple of projects that we’re looking at that.

[0:29:50] DC: Really?

[0:29:51] JM: Yeah. For next year. If we can be on the forefront of that –

[0:29:54] DC: Is it for retail stuff?

[0:29:55] JM: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

[0:29:57] DC: Okay. What are they touching on the screen? Like, where is my –

[0:30:01] JM: Instead of pushing a button, they’ll touch the touch screen and activate, like listen to headphones, or speakers, or turning on the TV, or whatever. They just want to be able to do everything touch now, instead of actually pushing a button, like a click button.

[0:30:14] DC: In a retail store.

[0:30:15] WC: It’s basically an overlay on a screen, right? You have an iPad and it’s a screen protector, but the screen protector has printing on it that directs people to do things on the iPad.

[0:30:23] DC: Oh, my God. I can’t believe you can print on those things. That is so cool, Jamie The Printer.

[0:30:26] JM: It really was. I’m like, if I can buy 900 iPhone touch pads and put them together. I need so many cells that –

[0:30:36] WC: Jamie, did you find a material that you can do that on?

[0:30:38] JM: We have a bunch of people that are getting back to us.

[0:30:41] DC: How is it not coming from China? That’s what I –

[0:30:43] JM: It’s coming from somewhere, but yeah. What I really thought about the show was there was nothing that was really new and exciting. It was in 2019 when we were there. We were all there together like, “Oh, this is cool. That’s cool.”

[0:30:54] WC: The last time, it was new and exciting.

[0:30:56] JM: Yeah. This year was just like, it was there.

[0:30:58] WC: Still same?

[0:31:00] JM: A lot of things to look at. I mean, a lot of Garmin stuff. We were like, yeah, here, this is like the things you should look at, the top 10 things in print, eight of them were Garmin. We’re like, “No, we’re not interested in that.” We want to go look at this other stuff, but it wasn’t anything new and exciting. Lando was there, which was cool. They had a really cool booth. We talked to them for a while, because there’s a local guy here that’s in one of our networking groups. I talked to him all the time. But that was really cool. They had a really good presentation.

I’d love to see a press working, but he’s like, “Well, slide down to Texas and we’ll show you one.” I’m like, “Okay, let us know. We’ll come visit for that.” Yeah, other than that, Fuji I thought had a really cool booth. They had a lot of cool stuff going on and stuff coming. They had a lot of models, like, this is what’s coming next year. I think everybody was getting ready for Germany for next year.

[0:31:47] DC: Yeah, for Drupa. Of course.

[0:31:49] JM: Drupa.  I think that’s where they were getting ready for that.

[0:31:53] DC: I had a really interesting experience at PRINTING United this year. I worked with three companies, and that’s what I did. I wasn’t “covering the show.” I was working with, like I said, three companies, XMPie. What I did with them is we recorded a podcast today, which was about what they learned about the market, the questions that people were asking, about the reasons why they would want to implement their software, or that they were asking about to take the temperature of where everybody is at personalization and all this other stuff, which is where this, I mentioned before, conversation came up about, how people didn’t realize how much XMPie could do.

Even though they were customers, just coming by to say hello, they ended up learning about, I guess, they call, it’s like, there’s this Markham stack that’s attached to it that you can do emails and other work along with the print. It was a really interesting conversation. I work with my friends from Rico. I did some social media and some videos with them, which was really cool. Then I worked with this company from Poland called Antigro Designer. They created a standalone platform that lets people do their own design on printers, websites, instead of going somewhere else, going to Canva and then shopping your files around.

The deal is that they’re print-ready files made for the specific equipment of the printers. They’re spec to for optimal output. They have a 3D rendering software and it works with AI and it was really cool. What we did was we walked around and I used my Intergalactic Ambassador connections and I introduced them to a bunch of the OEMs, who had a lot of interest in helping their customers do exactly this with this offering.

It was great and it was so much fun because they were all dressed in yellow shirts and I was walking around with these four Polish guys and it was like, they were like my minions. It was so cute. I just had so much fun with them walking around and learning about their software and really just hearing how other people embraced what they wanted to do and really understanding that there’s a gap. There’s actually a gap in this. Sometimes this functionality is attached to a larger thing that people don’t want, or can’t implement. Other times, like I said, you can go to an online design tool, but it’s not exactly attached to a printer, or the printer still has to fuss with the files. This made it almost like, you don’t have to touch anything.

It was really cool. I hope that it works out for them. I can’t wait to hear how that is all going. The only other thing I want to mention about the show and then we’ll see if William has any questions is, you guys will remember in 2019, we’re all in a group text and all of a sudden, I started getting these texts from Jamie just saying, “Oh, my God. You need to see this wallpaper. Oh, my God. You need to see this wallpaper.” I’m writing in the text, “Jamie, freaking wallpaper. What? What about the wallpaper do I need to see?” He couldn’t describe it. He just kept saying, “No, you need to go see this wallpaper.” So we went. It’s this company called Dimense. We’re like, “What in God’s name is that?”

I think, William, I found you when we went over, and we found this company, Dimense. Oh, my God. It was the coolest freaking thing we had ever seen in our entire life. It’s actually a process where paper, it foams up and creates texture.

[0:36:00] JM: Textured wallpaper. Yeah. Very cool.

[0:36:02] DC: It’s crazy.

[0:36:04] JM: We spent a lot of time there this year, too.

[0:36:06] DC: Yeah. They were actually bought by Roland. I’m so proud of them. Congratulations to Dimense. I’d given them the unicorn award at the last PRINTING United for a unique technology. Of course, I claim that that’s the reason that they got bought by Roland.

[0:36:21] JM: We talked to them for a while. They definitely up their game since 2019. They had two different machines, Roland-based. But yeah, it was cool. They had glitter everywhere. If you want to go to a booth that has a glitter, buckets of glitter. I was like, “This could be all in a shop?” They’re like, “Maybe.”

[0:36:38] DC: That’s what I was going to say. When I was at their press announcement and it was the actually the day before PRINTING United started. I was talking to team Roland and they’re like, well, and we’re going to announce the glitter machine tomorrow. I was like, “What? A glitter machine?” I couldn’t get my mind around it, knowing what the regular Dimense thing was. It was really interesting. Then when I saw it, I actually asked the same question. I was like, “How is this not a craziness with this glitter?” If you saw, they had that mat underneath it and it was under control, but still seems like –

[0:37:14] JM: It could be everywhere.

[0:37:15] DC: A door opening and a window opening on the wrong side of the print shop could – sounds like the movie Frozen to me.

[0:37:22] JM: You’re going to come home with glitter all over you.

[0:37:23] DC: It’s like, “Can we build a snowman?” It seems like it could be a problem.

[MESSAGE]

[0:37:32] DC: Like what you hear? Leave us a comment. Click a few stars, share this episode and please subscribe to the show. Are you interested in being a guest and sharing your information with our active and growing global audience? Podcasts are trending as a potent direct marketing and educational channel for brands and businesses who want to provide portable content for customers and consumers. Visit printmediacentr.com, click on podcasts, and request a partner package today. Share long and prosper.

[EPISODE CONTINUED]

[0:38:06] DC: Okay, I really enjoyed the fact their success and feeling like we were part of it because we discovered that and talked about it at the 2019 PRINTING United. Okay, William. I know that you need to go. Do you have any questions about PRINTING United?

[0:38:25] WC: No, I’m jealous that I didn’t get to go. My wife and I had actually planned on going. My wife is working at the shop with me now.

[0:38:32] DC: What?

[0:38:33] WC: Yeah, that’s another big change.

[0:38:35] DC: There’s an update we missed.

[0:38:36] WC: Yeah. We missed that one earlier.

[0:38:39] DC: What is she doing?

[0:38:40] WC: She is, it’s a little too long to give all of her credentials, but she is quite the HR employee manager.

[0:38:46] DC: Amazing.

[0:38:47] WC: To give you this synopsis, she is an ER nurse. She was also doing payroll for 300 employees and HR for a 100 employees. When she worked her shifts, she not only took a patient load, but it was also managing 50 to 80 doctors and nurses on the floor and taking triage and ambulances and all kinds of stuff. She can handle a print shop, right? She’s now working and basically, bookkeeping, human resources, and running payroll and doing all that stuff. It’s awesome to have her there.

[0:39:15] DC: Amazing.

[0:39:17] WC: But we were trying to go. We tried to get the babysitter to watch the kids for the weekend, so we could fly up and she could see the whole what to do of a print trade show because she’d never been. We’ll definitely go next year. I missed you guys. I wish I could have been there with you. I’m excited to hear about all the stories and looking forward to coming next year.

[0:39:32] JM: We just happened to bump into each other. We’re texting each other, “Where you at? Where you at?”

[0:39:36] WC: That’s how it always goes.

[0:39:37] JM: There’s a lot of people there. You were always somewhere else because it was – the people that were there, I’m like, I didn’t see you. We’re there for a day and a half.

[0:39:43] DC: No, Jamie and I completely ran into each other by accident after texting each other for a day or so. Then, there were actually golf carts, driving people around and I made friends with one of the golf cart drivers. He was my Uber guy.

[0:39:57] WC: That’s really good.

[0:39:59] DC: We make plans because it was, I would say, ridiculously large.

[0:40:04] WC: It’s big. It’s always big.

[0:40:06] JM: It went around a corner and then to another hall.

[0:40:08] DC: There’s big, and then there’s –

[0:40:09] WC: My lower back and feet and calves and my whole body is just a shot after those things.

[0:40:15] DC: There’s big and then there’s just ridiculously big. Then you start wondering, what’s exactly in here.

[0:40:21] WC: You need a trolley or something in that thing, right?

[0:40:23] DC: Well, they did. They put up these golf carts in there and like I said, I would make plans. When I had to go from, of course, the XMPie was literally on the furthest wall of one hall. Antigro Designer was on the furthest hall of the other thing. It was taking me 20 minutes without, and 30 because I get stopped at trade shows. Luckily, people want to talk to me saying well –

[0:40:51] JM: Get all the learning things. We’re all the way back in a back corner somewhere. You had to go through the whole show to get through them.

[0:40:56] DC: Yeah. Get and going to the milk. Yeah, exactly. The supermarket. I made friends with a golf cart driver and then I would just be like, “Okay, what time you swing back around?” He’s like, “About 15 minutes.” I said, “Okay. I’ll be at stop six. I’ll see you there.” Then he would just take me where I want to go, so I had to hold my own system. I didn’t always find him though, of course. I think I only use the system twice, but it was the two long runs. That was after I had rescheduled my meeting because I was like, I’m never going to make it over there in time. There’s no way in hell.

Yeah. Overall, it’s been a good couple of months. Sorry, everybody out there that we left you hanging, but we will get back on our regular schedule. Thank you both so much for everything. Jamie The Printer, thank you for exceeding my expectations. Once again, William, thank you for getting healthy, so you stay around longer to teach me things. Everybody else out there, until next time, you stay healthy and safe, too, and print long and prosper.

[END OF EPISODE]

[0:42:03] DC: Thanks for listening to Podcasts From the Printerverse. Please subscribe, click some stars, and leave us a review. Connect with us through printmediacentr.com. We’d love to hear your feedback on our shows and topics that are of interest for future broadcasts. Until next time, thanks for joining us. Print long and prosper.

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