The railway is going to run right outside Theo Pettaras’ door when the NSW Dept of Transport goes ahead with a new light rail system. There’ll be jack hammering and ripping up of concrete, dust and lots of vibrations in downtown Surry Hills. But Digitalpress won’t be there. The award-winning printer has a one-way ticket to new premises in Young St, Waterloo.
“We’re bursting at the seams here and after ten years it’s time for another move and another press,” said Pettaras. “With a new press and new premises, I’m looking forward to the opportunity to reposition ourselves.”
Widely recognised as one of the most innovative printers in the industry, Pettaras is upgrading to a Kodak NexPress 3900 when he makes the move in two weeks to the larger premises near trendy Dank Street. Undeterred by the logistics he reckons he’ll be up and running by the New Year with practically no downtime.
“It’s the next phase in how we position ourselves in the marketplace. It’s not about being bigger, but being better. We’re taking the opportunity to look at what we’ve done well over the years and focus on developing that,” he said. “We’ll learn from our mistakes and improve. We’re not going to be a commodity printer.”
Pettaras is excited about his new Nexpress 3900, bigger, faster and incorporating the latest software system. It will kick start a new phase where Digitalpress will be able to handle a lot more of its formerly offset work in-house. An economy mode with lower resolution allows the NexPress to compete with offset over longer print runs more cost effectively.
“It can also print in RGB mode, which is amazing quality,” he said. “I reckon it’s 25 per cent better quality.”
Always a pioneer in printing techniques and marketing Pettaras reveals that he closed down the Digitalpress automated web2print portal six weeks ago. Despite being a pioneer in the channel, the experience was that customers would use the site to obtain a quote but would not complete, preferring to get on the phone and quote the web price.
“You can do $7 business cards if there is no involvement but you can’t operate at that price in a one-off order over the phone. We found that our customers still wanted B2C touch points when ordering print,” he said.
As always Pettaras is deeply engaged with the design community, currently promoting an A3 poster design competition that makes a feature of white ink capability and BJ Ball’s Colorplan paper. He hopes all the upheaval of the move will be well behind him by the time the winner is awarded at a function in Oxford street in February.