Duplo spoke to a committee of customers about what they wanted from a northern show, and came up with a different slant to the successful London Calling events.

In the midst of the first ever Northern Lights event in Manchester, Duplo managing director Peter Jolly emphasised that, in reference to the company’s successful annual London gathering, the Manchester event is not simply ‘London Calling goes north’. True, it had an iconic setting – the Lowry, Salford Quays, close by to BBC and ITV studios in the re-developed ‘MediaCity UK’ – as Duplo has always endeavoured to achieve with London Calling. True also that many of the partners – Balreed, Renz, Vivid Laminating, for example – were the same.

But, said Mr Jolly, ‘we are creating a new show and wanted to listen to what our customers wanted, and create a show off the back of that’. This process began with putting a dozen customers in a room in January. All Duplo had at the time was two potential dates, a venue and the name Northern Lights.

‘We said: what will entice you to attend a northern show? Generally speaking, London Calling has been a lot about innovation. Very quickly in the north it was: we want to learn more about what we have already got, to make it more efficient. There were two different dynamics, so we’re really glad that we asked,’ said Mr Jolly. ‘The conversation was about making more money from what they had already got. They wanted workflow solutions because they’ve got bottlenecks, so we took that and have provided them with partners that can help them with that. The Duplo Owners Club came from that, and it’s probably the biggest success of the show. It will be a long term win.’

The Duplo Owners Club is the newly established user group for the company’s customers. There was an inaugural meeting at Northern Lights, chaired by Prime Group’s Adrian Tolley and with another 14 commercial printers and university in-plants in attendance; topic of discussion was cutters.

‘There was a real buzz around it. The general feedback was that it was about best practice,’ Mr Jolly continued. ‘If you have got a Duplo badge in your facility you have joined the Duplo Owners Club. They will be meeting again and there is a discussion about an online forum.

‘This is the start of little pockets around the country. There will be a London Calling version and there are benefits all around. Customers become more proficient and they get more out of their machine and their investment, and we have more time for our engineers to be doing maintenance on machines. The network will be the biggest winner but we don’t know where it will take people. The industry is more open now because people realise we are stronger together.’

Over the two days of the event, almost 200 visitors came through the door (there were 275 pre-show registrations), and Duplo’s marketing manager Sarah Crumpler said the show was ‘everything that we envisaged and more’. Duplo secured £260,000 worth of contracts and added a pipeline of prospects, it said. It was also the first time that the iSaddle and Mitamax systems had been shown outside of either London Calling or Duplo’s Addlestone premises in Surrey.

(XHEAD)                  Hand-picked partners

At the show, jobs were being passed between Infigo’s web to print software and Tharstern MIS, before printing on Balreed’s Konica Minolta press (on PaperlinX-supplied paper) and finished on the wide range of post-press kit on display.

Tharstern was showing a new version of its Estimate Pro module, as well as integration with Artios CAD. A busy Infigo was doing its fourth show in three weeks, said managing director Douglas Gibson. He was bullish, having just secured a deal to supply Catfish to Rapidity Communications, and he said the new Mega Edit tools in the software were ‘getting great traction’ in the market.

While providing paper for the event, PaperlinX had wide format (an HP Latex 360) and a small OKI A3 laser printer on show (the ES9541, with white and varnish capability), as well as a small 3D printer from its reseller relationship with ArtSystems’ Stratasys devices – a couple of which it has sold since it started the partnership in October 2014, according to Steve Peet from PaperlinX Digital Solutions. More traditionally, it was talking to visitors about Print Quality Management (PQM) – an umbrella term it uses for a number of products. At Northern Lights, the PQM focus was on ORIS Press Matcher software, which it was using to get within Fogra proofing standards on the HP Latex 360 and then matching on the OKI.

Over on the Balreed booth, the emphasis was also on getting more from existing equipment. Production print specialist Christian van Kooten explained that the company, as well as being an independent provider of digital print systems, brings a skillset of real digital artworking knowledge to the industry. He told Digital Printer: ‘Other companies give no in-depth training in file optimisation for digital print, making sure a file has the proper colours for the gamut of the machine. We put a lot of emphasis on training for colour management, colour profiles, engine gamut, regular calibration.

‘We visit the customer regularly – the more a company grows, the bigger the gap between sales and service, and we sit in the middle. We train from a digital file towards the digital engine and not the other way around. We approach it from the artwork perspective. People take the machines apart and try to tweak the engine to get the colour right, but you can do much more if you work on the file.’

The training is offered free of charge, he said, since Balreed’s view is that ‘the better the customer masters their machine and the more they use it, the better Balreed gets paid’.

Alongside Duplo’s range of finishing equipment such as the ISaddle and DC-745 multi-finisher were partners Renz and Vivid Laminating Technologies. Renz sales manager Dermot Callaghan said the wire binding company was soon to launch two new products that had come from significant R&D investment since Ipex. One of these in a complete inline system for presenting, punching and binding a book block, which it seems will be called the Inline 360 (the number relates to the maximum working width). ‘It’s a system for high volume book work with wire binding,’ said Mr Callaghan. ‘It’s a superb book machine – a new product that we can shout about.’ He added that the second new machine will be a puncher that adds more automation at the lower end of the Renz range.

New from Vivid Laminating Technologies meanwhile was a capability of doing holographic effects for security applications, using a gloss film in a spot UV kind of way. The capability arises from the take-up unit of Vivid’s recently announced Flatbook cutting accessory for the Matrix laminators, which it is about to start shipping.

Lumejet was also present at Northern Lights, though not showing its photonic technology – the S200 system, four of which are now in the field, with another having been ordered by Farringdon-based Clicks, making it the first company to have two, when installed. With high quality photobooks being a key market for the Lumejet technology, founder Trevor Elworthy said that Duplo and the Mitamax technology it sells was a natural partner. He added: ‘£200,000 for the printer, a book making system and some front end software – that’s the kind of package we are trying to put together.’

There will be a second Northern Lights event in 2016, said Duplo’s Sarah Crumpler inclosing, adding: ‘To say that the inaugural event was an unqualified success would be a huge understatement. The first person through the door on the opening day was from Scotland, which is another indicator that this sort of event is needed in the north.’