IPEX 2010 Blogs - Simon Enticknap Number 1

Ipex hasn’t even begun yet, but you can’t keep a good blogger down. Or even a bad one for that matter. Before the ceremonial opening ribbon has been cut, while the banners are still being unfurled, the barrels of fine English ale rolled into position, Simon Enticknap sends this report from the very heart of England.

Spring has sprung here in Birmingham, the buds are budding, the birds and the bees are doing what comes naturally. The sun is shining – I kid you not – the sky dotted with puffy white clouds like candy floss drifting on a cyan pond. The place is positively verdant – an apt word indeed to describe an English spring day. Verdancy is everywhere. We’re up to our necks in verdantness.

It’s not really the sort of weather one hopes for when faced with the prospect of spending a week standing in a large halogen-lit, air-conditioned barn looking at printing equipment, but then it doesn’t pay to complain too much about the weather here. It could be worse, it could be a lot worse, very quickly. It could be raining, and probably will be.

More significantly, the dreaded Icelandic volcanic ash cloud has reared its ugly head again like some malignant Norse god, threatening to close airports and disrupt the travel plans of the many thousands of people currently making their way to Ipex. More than ever, if you are planning to visit the show, I wish you were here. This could be a very slow no-show indeed.

For those of you who have made it over, we are gathered here for the next few days in order to seek out the secret of how to make money from the business of sticking coloured stuff onto flat surfaces.

Where do the children play?

For that is what it is in essence. It sounds so easy, doesn’t it, when you put it like that, like child’s play. And indeed, for a long time, it was child’s play, very skilful child’s play no doubt but nevertheless reassuringly simple in its belief that people – customers – were prepared to pay very handsomely indeed for the ability to put coloured stuff onto flat surfaces.

Not any more. Like some immutable natural law, what was once relatively straightforward has now become devilishly tricky – technically, financially, commercially. Why would anybody do it? Especially when there’s no longer the certainty of days gone when by simply keeping up-to-date with the latest technology and continuing to invest in new equipment at regular intervals, a printer could be assured of a ready market for his/her ability to stick ink (one of the coloured substances) onto paper.

That no longer applies. We can reassure ourselves that print will never die, that it possesses certain unique qualities that cannot be replicated by any other means – and that much is still true - but such bravado no longer seems as convincing as it once did.

Too many good businesses have gone by the wayside in recent times, icons of the industry that have had their veneer of impregnability stripped bare. Doubt, uncertainty, anxiety about the future are spreading like a volcanic plume, undermining the best-laid plans and robbing the industry of its swagger, the belief in its very raison d’être.

True, there are still many printers out there making a living, happy with their healthy order books, confident in their ability to make a print product that people will continue to pay good money to buy. Are you one of those printers?

If you’re not then you may well be interested in what an event like Ipex has to offer, if only in the hope that it will unlock the secret of what the future holds, for good or ill.

And if you are one of those printers, then the same still applies because recent events have taught us – as if we didn’t already know – that nothing can be taken for granted.

Home is where Middle Earth used to be

Birmingham is something of a homecoming for me. This is where I was born, in the upstairs front room of 95 Egginton Road, Hall Green. The house is still there, pretty much unchanged, although the neighbourhood itself seems to have gone downhill somewhat since I left many years ago.

Hall Green is typical of many Birmingham suburbs with its rows of inter- and post-war housing and surprisingly leafy streets. It’s a changed a lot since the days when author JRR Tolkein lived in the area and apparently based the bucolic Hobbit homeland of the Shire in The Lord of the Rings on the green fields of Hall Green. There’s not much evidence of idyllic rural communities these days. Many of the front gardens where we used to play as kids have been paved or concreted over to provide extra parking spaces for modern two or three car families.

Birmingham knows all about change, and not just the annual rising-of-the-sap kind. My grandfather worked for many years in a factory making parts to supply the mammoth car factory at Longbridge, in its day the largest manufacturing plant in the world, producing iconic vehicles such as the MG and Mini. Today, hardly any of the cars parked on the concrete front lawns of Hall Green actually come from Birmingham. An industry that once employed hundreds of thousands of people and helped define a city has been cut down to size.

Such is the nature of business. For printers too, while an Ipex Spring offers the chance for some renewal, it’s a certainty that not everything will grow back the way it was.

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