[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:05.0] DC: It takes the right skills and the right innovation to design and manage meaningful print marketing solutions. Welcome to Podcasts From the Printerverse, where we explore all facets of print and marketing that create stellar communications and sales opportunities for business success. I’m your host Deborah Corn, the Intergalactic Ambassador to the Printerverse. Thanks for tuning in. Listen long and prosper.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:00:31.8] DC: Hey everybody, welcome to Podcasts From the Printerverse, this is Deborah Corn, your Intergalactic Ambassador, and today, we are beaming far across the pond, and we are speaking with Jeroen van Druenen. He is the director of Jubels. Jubels is a privately held marketing communication service provider, and printing company in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with more than a hundred and twenty years of experience in the graphic arts and communications industry.
They offer customers effective, on-demand, integrated, cross-media communications. Welcome Jeroen.
[0:01:11.0] JVD: How does that sound here, Deborah?
[0:01:14.7] DC: It sounds amazing, which is why I stalk you on LinkedIn, which is why I hunt you down at drupa, and which is why I try to find you anywhere I can to hug you and say, “Thank you for all the amazing print that you put into the world, sir.”
[0:01:30.2] JVC: That’s what we do, of course, and we have met some several occasions all over around the globe, which is very nice, and indeed, that’s most welcome, both place.
[0:01:40.2] DC: Can you tell everybody a little bit more about you and a little bit more about Jubels?
[0:01:46.2] JVD: Yes, of course. Well, we started the company in 1902, not myself but the great-grandfather of my colleague Fred. It’s still a family-owned business. We do work with 30 people in Amsterdam, your gateway to Europe as we say. Always nice to have customers coming from the US and we can collect them and skip over and so on, which is nice but 1902, we started with, well, working those days was announcement cards, birthday cards, wedding cards, and that kind of stuff.
In the late 50s, we went to offset and at a certain point, the father of Fred did go to the US and he found himself a Xerox machine, copy machine. So, we started the first copy shops in the Netherlands in 1977, and that grew into nine or 10 shops. Later on, we sold them and we only went third, it was one shop and one printing company with Justin Dosa, he is with offset. Then later on in the 80s, it became laser printing in black and white.
It went on to full-color printing with the first iGen in the Netherlands, the Xerox iGen, and that was in 2000 but before that, we started also using maybe you know that print shop mail, where you can personalize print in a more easy way but in some cases, you can’t use print shop mail anymore and when I was on a meeting for the Xerox premier partners, I’m one of the board members of the premium partners.
Some guy came to me from XMPie and he chased me for more than a year to persuade me to buy software, to do what I wanted to do. So, in 2004, 2005 we were one of the first customers who bought XMPie and the complete suite, not only to personalized print but also to do the campaigns, the marketing campaigns, and the web shops, et cetera, the print web shops, et cetera, and in those days, I really was surprised on what you can do with that kind of stuff.
So, you can add, which is print is offline media, you can combine it with online media, which is nice. It gives you the source on how to get the stuff on the web to ask customers or the people or with the audience to do something for you or to buy something, et cetera, and the information comes out of the system but it also goes back into the system, which is nice for the customer as well. So, that’s a little bit of what we have been doing over the years.
So, XMPie is a big part of it, and in 2007, we built our own new building in the north of Amsterdam and it’s about 3,000 square meters, which is completely out of concrete, so no wooden things or whatever, it’s concrete, 700 tons of concrete, which is very robust and it will be there for the next decade probably but in those days, 2007, 2008, the financial crisis started and we moved our company in the same weekend when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt.
So, on Monday, when we were sitting with all the pallets around us because we had moved that weekend, my company, Fred, and I were sitting on a pallet and said, “What have we been doing? Can we afford this?” Et cetera, et cetera. So, that was some hard times, of course, for everybody but especially when you bought a new building, which was built for us and it was more than 30% over budget and then, you know, that things were not going in the right direction.
In 2012 – no, I need to rephrase that a little bit. When we moved, we had our offset machine still for a five-color press and a two-color press on a B2 size, and in those days, things were shifting already, and to invest again in offset equipment, which was relatively expensive, I thought, “Well, maybe, it’s a good idea to stop offset printing.” And in 2010, 2011, I was trying to persuade Fred to go with me because we do this together, and at a certain point, yes, we’re going to sell the offset equipment and we only do digital.
So, that’s what we did and that was 2012. So, it’s now 12 years ago, and that stopping the offset printing was a very good idea. We miss it sometimes and I’m still buying offset, but I’m buying it and somebody else is printing it and my customers don’t care as long as they get the service they need from us. We are a very high-level service company, that makes our life a little bit easier. We’re still buying paper.
We’re still going offset press so binding, folding, cutting, and et cetera, et cetera and they’re still on our list but also, 30 years, I’ve met several people on the – in those days, the Xerox Premier Partner meetings all over the world, and I’m also – well, that’s the next step, it comes a little bit later. I met several people on those occasions and coming from abroad, coming from the US, coming from Europe, going different countries.
And in 2011, I met a guy from Saint Louis, Melouri, and after three weeks, he was in Amsterdam. After six weeks, I was in Missouri and we’ve been working together very closely to serve the customer, which is a very large global, pharmaceutical company. He does the work for the US market and we do ROW, rest of world, which ROW, I said to Mike in those days, “What does it mean? Because I don’t get it.”
[0:07:54.3] DC: Yeah.
[0:07:55.7] JVD: He said, “Rest of world.” “Okay, that’s good with me.”
[0:07:58.8] DC: Yeah, I’d like to have that on my end. We’ll do United States, you do the rest of the world. Okay, I’ll take that, no problem.
[0:08:05.7] JVD: Yeah, so, since 2011, we were working very closely together and at a certain moment, this global company went a little bit different. They wanted to organize events all over Europe and we’re now doing event stuff, meaning that we have a warehouse full of giveaways, like stress balls, pens, note pads, et cetera, et cetera, which we buy from different companies all over the world. We have, of course, the print-on-demand thing where we print a collateral, which is for the events.
We’re shipping out booths, we’re shipping out, road barriers, we’re shipping out all the things you need to have for an event, screens, TV screens, monitors, et cetera, et cetera, and all the events, all the 1,100 are coming back again. So, it’s a very demanding logistic operation where we use the carrier as like DHL or UPS or Fed-Ex, to bring it to the event, but also, to collect the stuff again from Birmingham or Amsterdam or Paris or whatever, whatever city or university or hospital, et cetera, et cetera.
That there is a little bit – we got three people, full-time working on this account just doing the things to work with the couriers that everybody is doing their part of the job. It’s amazing how it grew and in which direction the printing company can go. It’s more like a logistic fulfillment company plus printing. So, it’s different right now and I think that’s the way you need to move to don’t stick to just printing and getting stuff to your customer and say, “Hi, this is it.” But always ask the customer, “Hey, what can I do more for you?” That’s really one thing I like to do. So, that’s my job.
[0:10:04.4] DC: Yeah. I mean, that customer is not just loyal, they’re sticky. They’re not going to move their entire operation to another place. I mean, you would have to mess up something beyond them being able to accept the fact that somebody made a mistake for that to happen and it’s just so interesting because you know, in a way, you almost got yourself out of that world, once you switch to digital.
You didn’t have to store things anymore, you didn’t have to fulfill things as much as you were when people put massive amounts of quantity in offset and then ship things out, and yet, here you are, again, doing that but in such a massive scale but you are totally right. It’s about serving as many of the needs of the customers as possible because they also don’t want to have like, 20 vendors that they’re managing on their end.
I wanted to ask you the tagline of Jubels is “Smart printing since 1902.” Now, a lot of reasons why – how you might be defining smart, you did just cover in the history of Jubels but I guess, my question now is, how do you communicate how smart you are to your customers so they realize that there’s a real advantage of working with you?
[0:11:31.3] JVD: Good question, thank you. Anyway, well, on a brand that needs to be a tagline and we thought this would cover it. Our first tagline was “Smart printing, smart solutions.” And smart solutions is then based on the things we do with XMPie. So, the marketing campaign we do for different kinds of companies. So, that’s – at a certain point, there was nothing which said, “Since 1902.” And 1902 says something about your history, about your legacy, and the reliability of a company.
So, that’s why we put it in and we only said, “Smart printing” and smart printing can be printing but it can also be sending out, shipping out an email, or shipping something to fulfill a job for a customer. It can mean so much. I’ve told you before, I’m also into book printing, bookbinding, specialty photo books for professional photographers, and that kind of people, which I like because that’s where we get our feeling with what we have been doing over the last 100 years.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:12:43.6] DC: Are you looking to elevate your game, take your bottom-line customer relationships, and events to the next level? Then, I want to work with you. I’m Deborah Corn, the Intergalactic Ambassador to the Printerverse. I engage with a vast, global audience of print and marketing professionals across all stages of their careers. They are seeking topical information and resources, new ways to serve their customers and connect with them, optimize processes for their communications and operations, and they need the products and services and partnership you offer to get to their next level.
Print Media Centr offers an array of unique opportunities that amplify your message and support your mission across the Printerverse. Let’s work together, bring the right people together, and move the industry forward together. Link in the show notes. Engage long and prosper.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:13:44.7] DC: That’s actually my next question now. So –
[0:13:46.8] JVD: Oh, okay.
[0:13:47.9] DC: We can get into it now, as long as you’re talking about book production. I wanted to know why that you pick that as one of your specialties, and how did you got started in it.
[0:14:00.0] JVD: Many years ago, we bought another company which was in that branch, in that sector, and we needed to learn something from this guy, and we did, and how did we learn that? That’s an interesting question and I have an interesting answer to that. We organize and we still do, we organize so-called lunch and learn sessions, and that’s what we do for the students of The Royal Academy in the Hague.
It’s an art school, it’s the photo academy in Amsterdam, the Design Academy in Eindhoven. So, that’s a world-known graphic school, art school, or whatever they are called, and we invite their students, the third and fourth year, nowadays a fourth-year course, ask them to come to Amsterdam and to tell them what a printshop in these days can do but we don’t talk only printing but we also invite a bindery to come in and we also invite a designer of, in this case, specialty photo books, to come in and to tell something, with a sandwich and a drink and a guided tour through the facility.
And after that, they always come for their first portfolio thing they’ve made on their school or acad or university and that’s printed also in very local entities like five or 10 copies or maybe 50 when somebody’s a little bit more successful but what it does, you give young people the opportunity to see the possibility of print. I had a class, Deborah, many years ago, from the Design Academy from Eindhoven.
There was none, Dutch guy or girl in it. It was people from Israel, from Japan, China, you name it, all over the world, and none of them have ever visited a print shop. They didn’t know how it worked, what it does, and how offset was done, et cetera, et cetera, and that’s something where we older people – I’m older, I’m surely, where we need to guide, to learn, and to give our professional thoughts over to the younger people.
So, how do you do that? To give them the opportunity to learn something, to come to your facility, to show them the possibilities, and to smell on paper. Well, we’ve been doing that for a very long time, what’s the smell of the paper, and you can smell offset, you can print or the wood-free papers, et cetera, et cetera, and I think that’s nice but you can also see that younger people who are working on their Mac or their Windows machine and they’re only using their mouse, and the rest is gone.
But if you have a nice piece of paper or a book and it looks good, then you can put it aside, and then after a week, you can take it back and see it again, et cetera, et cetera, and you only you should press the button on your computer, then it’s gone forever. So, the power of print, the power of paper is far more important than something else but for some things, it’s not doable anymore, your text bill or your invoice, which comes letterhead, et cetera, et cetera, no use.
But how nice is it to you, always do it yourself with nice business cards, not doing the same thing. Mine is three layers of paper and it’s got an RFID in it and that kind of stuff, also QR codes that if you hand it over to somebody, then you have something to speak about, and that’s more – I think it’s more fun. It’s got more human interaction than something else.
[0:17:52.7] DC: I couldn’t agree with you more. I mean, show and tells, open houses, I’ve been doing these for years with printers, by myself through Project Peacock, and I encountered the same thing you did, going to graphic communication schools, or design schools to find out that they’ve never been to a print shop, they’ve never output anything they’ve created through a printing press.
They might have a color copier output device in their place but there is a – like almost a hard stop between, “I’ve designed this and now it will live digitally” versus getting that further education on how to actually, what I say, bring it to life.
[0:18:35.1] JVD: Yeah. I got an interesting story, it happened last week and that’s a very famous Dutch design company and they only work for very big companies and they’re doing branding, et cetera, et cetera, and they design for a new company, a logo in a very, very bright blue, which is nice on a screen but the light comes from behind the screen, so it’s always very bright. “Right, this is what we want.”
And I said, “Maybe guys, the other way around. Maybe, first design for print and then, for a screen.” But on the other hand, I do have an Iridesse and that is a Xerox printing equipment. I can print a very nice blue for them. Not a very nice blue, it’s going to be very, very bright together with the, I would say gold, fluorescent pink to get it even more bright. So, it’s going in the right direction, but sometimes designers only work for screens which –
[0:19:36.9] DC: Or, for themselves. Let’s be honest here. Well, I love it. Well, I’m glad you love it. It’s not going to reproduce. I mean, I appreciate that you have the solution for that customer but that’s not the solution. The solution is to fix the logo, so we could be reproduced anywhere so they’re – I’m glad that they will be tied to you forever now because no one else will be able to hit that blue.
But that is, again, I wish that on that end, they would open their minds to seeing a bigger picture than it looks, “This is the way I want it.” And I’ve worked with a lot of creatives, I get it, there’s – there comes a point where you’re just like, “Okay, you can have it.” And then, unfortunately, it will be a problem for you but I’ve told you this a million times already.
[0:20:26.7] JVD: Yup.
[0:20:28.0] DC: Like, I hope you don’t have to embroider it, you know? Because there has to – you have to either create your own blue that that’s color. I hope you don’t need it on a T-shirt, I don’t know if screen ink comes in. I’m just saying, like, it’s a little shortsighted on their end but I’m glad that you were able to give them what they wanted. Speaking of what they wanted, you have a dedicated section on your website to binding methods, which I love because I think this is an underrated, creative area of the industry, quite frankly.
Most customers know three types, saddle stitch, wide row binding, and perfect bind, and they don’t know about some of the more creative and cool ones. Why did you choose to highlight the binding methods that you did and have your customers take advantage of them because they learned about them from you?
[0:21:22.3] JVD: Of course, this is why I’m doing it. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense. But, that’s again – it started with the specialty photo books and now, I have my – which I call my innovation room or my inspiration room, I got a cupboard of hundreds of books. Like I said, I’m 65 years old, I collected all my life’s specialty printing jobs, just small ones, just one-offs, and they’re all in the cupboards in my office. I got so many things, which I can show.
So, sometimes, when a customer comes in, and he wants something special like a photo book that is first, it’s going to be paper because paper is very important and in all on them. In Europe, we do uncoated papers, which we like more than all the glossy papers and that kind of stuff. So, first, it’s about paper, then it’s about binding, and how can you make a book look different than something else? We just did a book for a Dutch designer two weeks ago, and it has a – what I call, a US soft cover around it. Do you know what I mean then?
[0:22:36.1] DC: I know what a soft cover is but I don’t know what a US soft cover is.
[0:22:39.3] JVD: No, it’s like a poster, which is folded on the top and the bottom side, and then folded into the flaps of the cover. It’s officially called a US soft cover but when you open it, then you have your poster, you can take that off, then the cover comes in, it’s a red offset paper. It’s 300gsm or something like that but the red, it’s stitched with two staples but the staples itself is red as well.
[0:23:09.1] DC: Oh, cool.
[0:23:10.5] JVD: So, we’ve got a gold, silver, red, blue, white staples, that kind of stuff. That’s just – it’s the smallest piece of extras or embellishment if you like, on a book but sometimes, it does make the difference.
[0:23:26.6] DC: I had no idea until this very moment that they were color staples and now, I’m like, “Why did I never use them?” I love this now, it’s amazing.
[0:23:35.3] JVD: Well, that’s the first one. Then to cover is a three on a GSM, then the full-color pages, it was a brochure of 70 pixels, 80 pages, something like that, and the first section, this was not – because it’s stapled, the first I think 16 pages, sheets if you might say, are on 60 GSM. It was very light and a very translucent paper but it printed completely full color then the text pages in the middle of the book are 100 GSM, just white and then you have a nice book, then you get something extra, and now it’s been taken to the Stedelijk Museum, the Museum of Amsterdam, where very professional names are there.
So, it’s in their collection, so that’s nice and we got some books over there as well. So, that’s one of the things but I’ve also made a book for the professional photographer and he’s a photographer of war. So, he goes to Israel or to Lebanon or the Ukraine to cover the scenes that are happening over there, which we will not talk about because it’s too awful but he wanted a book and his wife came along with so many.
He was in my inspiration room and he was, “I want this book to be printed. I want this book, I want to be printed in offset because this is what I want” and my complete loom and it’s very large is completely folders digital, brochures, books, et cetera, et cetera, and the pieces, and he was pulling something up. I said, “I want this offset.” “No,” I said, “This is digital, all right? This is digital.” And three or four different books he grabbed out in my cobelt.
He said, “I want this.” Yeah, I said, “This is digital.” At the end, he said, “I want digital.” So that when you have a customer who is very reluctant so to speak about digital, it has to guide them to that process because the quantity itself, 250 books, and it’s a hardcover with a very nice dye stamping and with 120 pages on an uncoated paper with very special photos, and at a certain point, he said, “This is what I want and I want it to be done in this way.”
And the good thing of it, he produced the same book in Greece a year ago and I have many more examples of that. I have the same book printed in offset and I have to same book digital printed. I mean, I can show people, “Hey, this is what you get. It was printed by a printer in Greece.” It was a little bit too much water, so it’s not crispy or whatever and you get my crispy prints on a Xerox machine.
But by the way, I got an Iridesse, I got an iGen, and the iGen has matte toner, and matte toner on an uncoated paper gives a very matte image, which most of my customers like very much. So, that’s one of the good things and when he walked away, I said, “I need to ship it to Romania, this book, can you do that for me?” “Yes, yes I can.” So, we shipped it to Romania. “Oh, and I want a book cover.”
So, I pulled something out of my cupboards, which is a square box. It’s boxed in an open, an underlayer, and I said, “Oh, I want the box as well.” So, we printed the box, we did the same dye stamp on the front and this guy was very happy.
[0:27:12.2] DC: Yeah. Now, it’s a collector’s item as well.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:27:16.9] DC: Printspiration is streaming across the Printerverse on the Project Peacock Network, and our mission to provide education and resources for print customers, students, and printers around the world has never been more accessible. Watch what you want, when you want, where you want. It’s free. Visit ProjectPeacock.TV to access original programming, and replays from our online events. Learn about the Peacock partners and companies featured in our shows. Join our mailing list to learn about new episode premieres, and series launches, and create a free account to make watchlists. Ready for your close-up? Get your Peacock show on air by visiting ProjectPeacock.TV and request your partnership proposal today. Peacock long and prosper.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:28:09.1] DC: A lot of times I, you know, coming from the advertising agencies as a print customer, right? I can empathize with the photographer that you just mentioned because somewhere along the line, he probably had a bad experience with digital printing or I remember when it first came out, it was fuzzy, and I was like, “There is no way in hell I am using this for my big brand customers. It’s never going to happen.”
And I had to keep being shown samples by the printers who were smart enough not to compare it to offset. You know, in the beginning, that was a useless conversation because everyone was going to say, “That looks better.” And it was always the colors were deeper. There was just something more solid about it. The digital seemed airy, you know, in the solid colors but we’re very far from those days.
So, I’m glad that by just showing him only samples of the pristine digital printing that either you did or you collected as a sample enabled him to get his mind off of whatever he was thinking about offset and you also didn’t give him a chance necessarily to compare things because that’s not what it’s about. It was about how he wanted it to look, how he wanted it to feel, and then adding the convenience of using digital printing.
Which means, you have so many more options for if you wanted to make all the covers differently, or you wanted to have a special page inside that was a note to somebody. I mean, there was just so many options, you just mentioned and you’ve mentioned a few times that you have an Iridesse, you’re a Xerox premier partner, you have a specialty print section on your website that highlights specialty inks, and embellishments and foils.
And I am sure everybody’s using them but all of those can also conflict with sustainability goals especially if people don’t understand, you know, what usage is appropriate. It’s a complicated topic, how do you discuss it with customers if it comes up?
[0:30:23.3] JVD: To be honest, open, and fair, that’s how you need to talk about it. Printing itself and the way it’s being produced never can be CO2-free or zero, whatever but the way we do it, the way we print, we print with wind power. We have our own solar panels on my rooftop, more than 400 of those things. These days when it’s raining in Amsterdam right now, so I would – it’s not used, so we got wind power, which is also nice.
Toner itself and this is all toner-based as you know, toner, when you recycle paper, the way you can recycle paper is much easier with toner than with offset ink or with HP ink, et cetera, et cetera, that’s what they tell me so that’s what I’m telling my customers as well and I am open to, you know, there’s one sample, which I want to tell you. I’m also doing a very large job for a large retailer in the Netherlands.
We’re producing labels for them and it’s labels that are on a trolley and they are all bar codes and it’s all personalized. It’s more than 50 to 75 million labels per year and they’re all being laminated front and backside because I need to hang and if they hang outside with the Dutch weather, they curl it and so, you need to laminate those things. It’s lamination. In the early days when we dye cut the laminated paper, then the things, which we can’t use go in the trash bin and we collect them and then laminate, and that stuff went to China, back to China.
Lamination goes from China and the rubbish goes back to China but at a certain point many years ago, they don’t want our rubbish anymore, which is completely understandable. So, it went to Turkey where they burned it or whatever they did and now in the last three years, it’s not doable anymore. We need to trash it ourselves, to burn it ourselves in a very nice thing in Amsterdam, which is why, and then we pay a little bit more.
That’s okay but what I was doing with my customer and he’s in retail, they have so much packages from plastic, from poly whatever poly it is, and I was sitting for the new year contract and I said to him, “Well, we can do biofoil if you like.” Biofoil, it doesn’t do anything because it is going to the same burner but it’s bio-based. It’s a little bit different, it’s more expensive, and it gives a better feeling for the audience.
But that’s what I think is my need to give you a good feeling. So, I was talking to this guy and he said, “Well, you do.” And I can’t show it on a video but he was holding his hands, his finger to his thumb and it was like one millimeter, you’re part of one millimeter and I’m doing one meter of things to get the things we need to do for the environment. So, you will come to a point where you will need to do the bio-based lamination but not for now.
So, it’s working, progress work to do something about the environment to be more sustainable but that’s mainly it and I’m always open into foils and into specialty inks and that kind of things and I think most customers do understand that.
[0:34:03.1] DC: Yeah, I mean, there are pretty strict regulations in Europe around sustainability, recycling. We do not have them as strict as you do in the United States at all. Labels, packaging, anything, any sort of materials. Are there any coming, any regulations coming in Europe or being discussed in Europe? I know that there’s that pulp thing coming about knowing the origin of the pulp of paper if you’re in the EU and having proof that it came from a sustainable forest and not from Indonesia or somewhere where they’re chopping down the rainforest and stuff like that.
Are there any that are concerning you or you suggest that the rest of us, you know, was it ROW and the rest of the world should be investigating before we you know, are pushing these embellishments or not, pushing is not a great word but maybe overusing them at the moment? We like things blingy here in the United States.
[0:35:05.7] JVD: That’s what we do like too, of course with – well, we have a package text. So, when you send something to a customer and then they pay the text and that’s just a very small percentage for the packaging and if you are Ikea or if you are some large retailer, then you must take back what you send something to a house, let’s say a new refrigerator or something like that, then there’s this big carton box around it.
Then they have to take it with them again to their shop, so it’s not for the consumer but you need to give them back, which is nice, that will go further and large companies in the EU with more than 200 million turnover, next year they need to make an annual report of their sustainability and now usage of CO2 and that kind of stuff but if it starts with the larger companies, it always goes down to the smaller companies.
So, I just invested, we just invested, I mean to say, in the new MIS. It’s from MultiPress, which is Dutch MIS and it works very fine, where it can up to order level can say how much CO2 you’ve been using. So, that’s what I’m going to implement hopefully this year or maybe beginning of the next year because that’s something which is interesting for larger companies like the ones I just said, then they can say, “Okay, you give me the numbers of the last month because I need them for this sustainability report” et cetera, et cetera, and this is the way we are going.
[0:36:58.9] DC: Yeah, for sure, and it’s just another way to differentiate yourself. First of all, the solar panels, the wind panels, I mean, I don’t know if that’s very common in the Netherlands. It’s not common in the United States to see –
[0:37:11.1] JVD: Oh, we have a lot of them.
[0:37:13.0] DC: Well, you have a lot of windmills. I mean, we all know that but –
[0:37:16.3] JVD: Yeah, but there was a report last week, more than 60% or 70% now comes from sustainable energy.
[0:37:24.0] DC: That’s amazing.
[0:37:25.4] JVD: Yeah.
[0:37:26.1] DC: Yeah, but here in the United States you know, at a certain point, everyone’s using recyclable paper, everybody is trying to offset their carbon, everybody. So, where do you have to go to, to how do you stand out in a talk track when you’re competing for business and people care about this. I have solar panels, I use wind energy, I have electric vehicles that deliver your print.
I mean, this all matters but being able to say I can account for all of the carbon that we have used in creating your work and you can start a program, or together, we can start a program to offset that, again, another reason why a customer would stay loyal and sticky to you. So, I just love that you’re not only ahead of it but you’re in front of it, which is different than trying to catch up.
[0:38:23.1] JVD: That’s where we started this podcast. We’ve been always on the forefront, we started this electric press, we were one of the first in offset, we were the first one in black and white copying, then it went to black and white laser printing, personalization, and first iGen, first Iridesse, et cetera, et cetera. We’ve been always in the forefront. We had our type setting in 1977 where we had the OCR reading machine, where the ladies who are typing on an IBM typesetter, they were typing with a special OCR font.
And we could put it into a phototypesetting machine and then there was typesetting done, which in those days, in ’78 it was really fun. Yeah, so we’ve always been in the forefront.
[0:39:14.8] DC: Yeah, totally, which you know, means that a lot of people should want to work with you and you do have a section on your website for vacancies, which I love and there are currently two open positions everybody. One of the positions is for a digital press operator.
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[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:40:08.6] DC: So, I’d like to know what is the state of workforce development for printing companies in the Netherlands in general.
[0:40:16.2] JVD: Oh, dear Deborah, this is a painful moment and it always gives you a headache because the CSR, which is also the customer sales representative, whatever, was managing the orders. That’s what we always call them account manager, that was almost a year on our website, nobody came into, and then well, we have some thoughts about expanding our printing facility so we need an extra print operator.
And on that one, which got out a month ago, we have one guy who’s soliciting for this job right now. So, any graphic arts school or graphic communication school, when I was young there was a print shop for the people who want to be a printer. There was a level for managing or there was another level a little bit higher, which I did but I could still print because I like to work with my hands and I need to feel.
And I always tell my guys, “Hey, if you can’t do something, I can do it for you and maybe even better.” That’s what I think, which is not true but I’m always trying but in Holland, there is no school anymore for printers. It’s gone, it’s gone, nobody.
[0:41:41.2] DC: None of the universities teach anything about graphic arts or, wow.
[0:41:46.0] JVD: No, graphic not about printing.
[0:41:48.5] DC: Okay, I hear you.
[0:41:50.0] JVD: So, they don’t teach how to print in offset. Well, they do – they’re designing, they’re doing multimedia, and how to program games and videos, et cetera, et cetera, and they forget the graphic arts industry. It’s not sexy so to speak. That’s one of my biggest problems. I want younger people to come in, I want females to come in, I want guys who are hungry to learn something because it’s – I think it’s still a very nice profession to have in a way.
You can still make money, it will get different in the coming years since it does over the last decade it changed so much. They teach me how to make the letterpress letters inlet in those days and now, but you have everybody can do printing in a different way. So, it’s hard to get good people right now and everybody is suffering in the Netherlands about we don’t have unemployment in the Netherlands. It’s very, very low and every branch is asking for more people. They’re not coming, yeah.
[0:42:58.1] DC: Yeah. Well, a little tough love. The job description on your website is horrible. It just literally says, “Run a digital press” and it listed digital presses, so it makes it seem like you have to know how to do that where maybe you’re better off, you know saying, “Do you want to work for a dynamic communications company that’s changing the face of marketing in the Netherlands and we will train you.” You know?
[0:43:23.0] JVD: That’s a good one.
[0:43:24.1] DC: A lot of millennials, I just want to say they – digital presses are open to people learning how to use them where offset, I would definitely describe as more of a craft, you know, until you get it down. So, I would say change that a little. I also thought Europe was the, like hub of apprenticeships. You don’t have any apprentices running around there?
[0:43:48.7] JVD: Well, we have one right now but again, printing is not sexy.
[0:43:54.8] DC: I hear you. I basically have a career trying to change that perception of print.
[0:44:00.1] JVD: Yeah.
[0:44:00.6] DC: I always say print has the worst PR. There was somebody I used to work with, Donnie Deutsch owned Deutsch Advertising, it was pretty famous and he was on TV but he said that the Eiffel Tower is just a lamppost with really great PR and I was like, “That’s the printing industry.” People don’t realize, I mean, what is it at the end of the day? It’s a manufacturing business with really bad PR, which is why everybody thinks about it as, “Stop the presses” you know?
[0:44:31.5] JVD: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[0:44:32.2] DC: Instead of thinking of it as a modern technology, which is what it is and you know, really provides customer convenience, can provide pragmatic marketing so an offer can be there when I’m ready to buy, it can help remind people that they left things in shopping carts. I mean, there’s a million things but nobody ever speaks about that. They just want to speak about, “Hey, do you have any work coming up?”
You know, and it’s just doesn’t work. Okay, you have been at Jubels for almost 40 years, not that I’m hoping that you retire any time soon but what is the legacy that you hope to leave behind?
[0:45:13.4] JVD: That’s one of the most difficult questions now, but the way Jubels is organized right now, there’s things that we are doing that makes me very proud because that’s what I think a modern company would look like and I am very proud to be on that journey for almost 40 years. It has been a journey and like I said, we started with LET, it went to typesetting, it went from analog to digital printing, et cetera, et cetera, and we’re still changing.
And hopefully, that’s something we can do for the next decades and Fred and I, we’ve been very proud of our company and the way it’s being this structured right now and we’re not in the position to do something else, right? And of course, I’m 65 years old right now, when you retire in the Netherlands, I can’t retire right now if I like but I don’t want to. It’s still fun to talk with customers, to talk with you, to talk around the world.
I’m also president of the XMPie User Group, where we do have our sometimes nice symposium work, webinar, or whatever, and I can talk, that makes my life so much – it gives me pleasure. So, still a pleasure and I hope to do it for the next two or three years or so.
[0:46:40.1] DC: Me as well and I just want to thank you so much for your time and again for making the world a more beautiful place through the craft —
[0:46:47.8] JVD: Thank you.
[0:46:48.8] DC: Of printing and communications and you know, being smart about it, which is why I have no doubt that your company will be around for another 120 years. Everything you need to connect with Jeroen is in the show notes. Until next time everybody, print long and prosper.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
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