Durst Expands its Virtual Demo Capabilities

Christoph Gamper

Printing News:  Christoph, though I am sure our readers are all familiar with Durst, let’s start with a brief overview of the company.

Christoph Gamper:  We are a nearly 80-year-old family-owned company located in the heart of Europe in Brixen, in the middle of the mountains. Today we have a little more than 700 employees in three production locations and about 20 distributors and subsidiaries worldwide. We are all about digital printing, in signage, fabric, labels & packaging, corrugated board printing, and 2D and 3D ceramic tile. We are specialists in digital production; wherever inkjet goes and we see a market for ourselves, that’s where we go; and we try to be number one or number two in each space where we compete.

Christian Harder, VP of Sales

PN:  How is the business divided up between the primary areas where you compete?

CG:  The large format business is a little less than half of our sales revenue, and our sales revenue worldwide last year was about $300 million. Within the large format business, we have signage, soft signage and industrial textiles. The latter doesn’t play a large role for us.

PN:  And what about packaging and corrugated?

CG:  Those are areas where we have been growing very fast, and we have been investing a lot, especially in labels. We also did a lot of research into corrugated printing with water-based inks, and installations as well. So these markets are very good for us.

PN:  In your new headquarters, you have a Customer Experience Center. I wonder what customers would see if they visit, and in the current time, do you have virtual demos available?

CG:  We’re in here now. I’m speaking to you from our bar, where we have a barista and real Italian coffee. We have our UVC-R Air Disinfection System running, an innovative solution for reducing the viral load in indoor environments. We put our expertise in the laboratories, in production, in UV technology, in flow simulations and in the safety guidelines together, to bring a piece of quality of life back to the new normality, with this Air Disinfection System. It combines both air exchange and UV irradiation in one system, effectively reducing infectious aerosols, viruses and germs in indoor environments. It’s made our work environment safer, and we also market this product as well. But yes, we are still here, and we are also doing virtual demos.

Christian Harder:  Before the pandemic, we welcomed many customers from around the world into our Customer Experience Center. We have a wide range of our products here for customers to experience, including digital printers for all of the different market segments we support, including the new P5 350 HS platform and our label printers. Now with the pandemic, things have completely changed. We have implemented a virtual platform for demos during this time; and much to our surprise, they were very much welcomed and well-received by our customers. Before all of this, we really didn’t believe that a virtual demonstration of a printer of the investment scale we are talking about would work out, but indeed they have. We also have a virtual showroom on our website where customers can configure printers to meet their needs.

PN:  And when you announced your new P5 350 high speed printer, you did that with a virtual event, right?

CG:  During the pandemic, we’ve had a couple of virtual product launches, including that one, because it was the only way we could get it done. So far, we are very happy with how it has gone. People are making buying decisions based on these virtual demos. We are looking forward to being able to get back to in-person demos in our center, but even then, we believe perhaps 50% will still want to do them virtually.

PN:  You’ve also introduced new elements to your smart factory approach, including Automat, carrying the Pixels to Output theme forward?

CG:  Yes, this is important because efficiency is not a question of fast printing. Efficiency is a question of the best workflow you can get. We’ve always had it in mind to do a nice suite of software and hardware that binds it all together and gives you an efficient workflow so at the end of the day, the customer can save time and produce more efficiently. It has paid off in many ways, especially during the pandemic when you cannot have the print shop full of people. Automat is just a different automation piece we have added.

PN:  During this time, looking at your customer base, which segments have managed to carry on despite the pandemic, and how have some of them shifted their businesses during the pandemic?

CG:  Labels & Packaging has done very well, even during the pandemic. What definitely has been basically killed is soft signage for trade shows, outdoor signage and so on. I would say compared to 2019, before the pandemic, we have seen perhaps 22% less in the customer base. But some customers have gone different ways to add to the business.

CH:  We have some great examples where some of our customers were able to diversify, perhaps into labels or the packaging industry, so they did not suffer as much. We have both single-pass solutions and multi-pass solutions that they were able to leverage during this time.

CG:  A lot of it comes down to the applications. If you have a very solid application with a complete value chain, you are able to stay in the business. If you are just doing printing for the sake of printing, it was way more difficult. Especially online printers with a good front end, labels was a good opportunity, because labels business might have been a side business, but it gained in importance. Just think about craft breweries as an example. Some of these online printers really understood that you could connect the printer to a web site and to a cutter, and go with it. Our job is to show how they can innovate, and that helped them keep up production and keep people employed.

PN:  Anything else you would like to share with our audience?

CG:  I have just one message to the printing community. We will come back and come back strong, the whole community. It may be Q3 or Q4, but I see light at the end of the tunnel. We are ramping up a full portfolio to meet those needs.

CH:  One thing good companies do is continue to invest, even in time of crisis, and we are in a crisis now. And we have been investing heavily, even before the pandemic. As Christoph said, we are optimistic, though we still have to go through the rest of this. But we’ll be here with the right portfolio, not only hardware solutions but software solutions, to have the right solutions for and with our customers.

EDITOR’S NOTE: To view to the full video interview, visit https://www.printingnews.com/21148992.