When you first meet Phil Taylor you soon realise he’s no ordinary thinker. From Franklin Web’s extensive ‘print precinct’ in the west of Melbourne, this second-generation printer drives the business that sets the benchmarks for innovation and success in the hyper-competitive world of catalogue print production. Deeply schooled in all the practicalities of operating probably the largest single printing plant in the country, Taylor is continuing to invest at the frontiers of technology to maintain his company’s pre-eminence. Last month he took time to show Patrick Howard around.
The sheer size of Franklin Web makes a first and lasting impression. Since Len Taylor, Phil’s father, built his original plant here in the 1950s, the company has expanded to encompass seven separate buildings covering some 100,000 square metres of factory space across 40 acres. The scale and ambition of the project testify to a unique vision that has come to define catalogue production in Australia.
Six plants house different iterations of web presses while the seventh, directly across the road from the company’s multi-million dollar headquarters in Fourth Avenue, houses a massive bindery. Franklin’s powerful and eclectic press fleet details the company’s technological evolution. They range from 16, 32, 64 and 72 page presses to the latest investments, two 80-page manroland Lithoman, the most productive presses of their kind in the world. In fact, when I looked up at the digital display on the newest press it was running at 368,000 copies an hour.
The spread of press brands – Toshiba, Komori and manroland – and the variety of sizes, cut-offs and options they represent, bespeak one of Phil Taylor’s defining characteristics: his willingness to be different, to be a game changer rather than follow the crowd.
Taylor’s enthusiasm for technological innovation and risk taking started during his apprenticeship as a lithographic printer and platemaker, and grew as he moved towards his role as CEO of Franklin. Over the years, he has charted his own course, expanded the potential of his business and, in doing so, helped shape the catalogue printing market in Australia.
Nearly 200 people work at the Franklin Web plant in Sunshine which produces an enormous amount of print every year including more than 250 million catalogues a month.
This print comes in ‘peaks and troughs’ as a result of the seasonality of the catalogue business. “Celebrations drive marketing and marketing drives catalogues,” says Taylor. Christmas, Easter, Fathers and Mothers Days are big periods for Franklin Web.
We get into Taylor’s electric buggy – forget walking, the distances are just too massive on a tour of the web offset facilities– and he takes me to the huge bindery. Housing a fleet of Müller Martini stitchers, Stahl folders and Polar guillotines, it is geared to process more than 20 million pieces during peak months. We cross the road again to the sheetfed operation to see Franklin’s only sheetfed press, a Komori Lithrone S40 five-colour. Taylor is full of praise for the productive Lithrone which, he says, was purchased when buying one of the Komori webs. Its usefulness is clear as we survey the range of covers, inserts and other marketing collateral produced over the previous week.
Building better catalogues
Franklin Web’s position in the catalogue printing market owes as much to the company’s innovative development of the medium as it does to masterly technological operation.
Phil Taylor is a passionate supporter of the efficacy of catalogues as a marketing and prospecting tool. He tells of clients claiming a lift in sales of up to 40 per cent following
the release of a catalogue, and another large retailer who attributes as much as a third of its entire sales to its catalogue campaigns.
For a catalogue to be successful, however, Taylor knows it has to cut through the clutter in the mailbox. It has to be different. Apart from the high-volume critical mass retailers, most catalogue advertisers are focused very much on local area marketing. Early on, Franklin Web began to overprint store names to give the catalogues a local perspective and to take local area marketing a step further for large buying groups.
With Franklin’s cat builder system, retailers can create highly-customised catalogue versions for each of their local area markets, from small outlets in country towns, to larger stores in regional centres and mega stores in the metropolitan area. Not only do they have the ability to overprint local information, they can customise the content, product range and even pricing to ‘build’ versions which are relevant to each local market.
For Franklin, this might mean creating anywhere between a handful to almost a hundred different catalogue versions for any one campaign. At the end of the day, Taylor says, it’s about using technology to help catalogues engage with consumers and ultimately drive sales. And that, after all, is the point.
The Franklin DNA
There is a widely held belief that customers have little or no interest in the technology behind the printed product and do not care about the brand of a machine, or whether it is offset or digital. This goes against the philosophy held by Phil Taylor, passed on to him by his father Len.
A committed technologist, Taylor believes in emphasising the technology behind the brand; he thinks it matters not only to the staff of Franklin Web, which it certainly does, but to the customers too. “The more our clients understand about our technology and what it can do, the better it is, because they can use that knowledge to enhance the effectiveness of their campaigns.
“Whether it’s building in local area marketing information, adding a perforated form, infusing their catalogue with micro-encapsulated fragrances – maybe flowers for gardeners or whitebait for anglers – adding impact with any one of a remarkable array of shape cuts we can deliver straight off the end of the press, or adding a completely new dimension with our interactive Blippar app (see box story), our technology can help give them the edge in the market. That’s our role; to help them maximise that advantage.”
All these innovations in print communications are part of Franklin Web’s unique technological approach and, perhaps more importantly, part of Taylor’s – and the company’s – DNA.
Technology fan
Clearly, Taylor is a fan of technology and is quick and unafraid to invest. He believes in keeping ahead of the game, ensuring Franklin Web is the pacesetter not only in technology, whether press power or automation, but in meeting the market’s expectations for interactive printing.
The power of his press arsenal gives him the ability to produce more catalogue formats, with fail safe delivery guarantees, than any other single production location anywhere in Australia. He has strong opinions on different brands and technologies – when we meet he is particularly enthusiastic about his latest acquisition, the company’s second manroland Lithoman, with the latest in high-end productive automation (see over page).
Everywhere within the vast, ultramodern facility are telltale signs of a creative technologist at work, from the fluid bag system for ink delivery from Flint, which he specified, to the complex Gammerler automated bundling and palletising systems at the end of the presses.
As innovative and pioneering as he is, Taylor admits to being deeply conservative when it comes to business. A commitment to remaining debt free – born when he accompanied his father to a bruising meeting with the bank as a teenager – may have meant holding back on investment at times, but he points out it has also given him the freedom to take advantage of the company’s independence.
At the end of our time together, as he is showing me down the stairs of Franklin’s gleaming hi-tech offices, I ask him what continues to drive him. “My Dad was very fond of quoting a couple of Benjamin Franklin’s sayings,” he reflects. “The first is ‘well done is better than well said’, and the second is ‘energy and persistence conquer all things’. We still try and follow those today.”
I respond with a sincere compliment on how the whole company is just so impressive. As we pause near the bottom of the staircase he says, “I reckon Dad would be really proud of Franklin today”.