Finding the Right Match
Jan Franz Allerkamp, Managing Director
When you’re looking for the right partner or spouse, you need to open up and decide what are the characteristics of a good match. The same is true if you’re looking for the right place to launch your technology.
As we progress with the development of ACTEGA’s ECOLEAF solution, we need to ensure that our first strategic partners operate in a market segment where a large utilization of metallic embellishment can be seen to justify the investment in our technology.
For example, the narrow web label segment is very promising as it already uses a lot of metallic embellishment.
We have also decided to adopt the segmentation commonly used by print vendors and analysts like Pira when analyzing our opportunities: food & dairy, soft drinks, wine & spirits, pharmaceuticals, home & personal care (incl. cosmetics) and industrial products.
We found that the wine & spirits segment was the runaway leader in the use of metallization. A full 90% of all print jobs in this segment used metallization in 2015. Home & personal care were a distance second, with 50% of their jobs metalized.
Looking deeper, you can also learn to appreciate the diversity that exists even within a single segment. In the wine & spirits segment, nearly all high-end wine labels have metallization, but the metallic coverage is very low, around 5-10%. On the other hand, whiskey labels have much more metallic coverage and they are much less likely to be made from uncoated paper with its typical structured surface.
As we continue to examine the various segments, we are focused on the brand promise of the first-generation of ECOLEAF solutions: the efficient use of materials for the thin trigger image and the monolayer of metal flakes.
So, while the wine & spirit segment is a good fit for ECOLEAF, you can never underestimate the creativity of printers. I know from personal experience and many stories over the years, that printers can take your technology and produce the most amazing applications that you never even considered… in other words, I can’t wait to be surprised.
Join Our Online Survey
Jan Franz Allerkamp, Managing Director
We really enjoy talking to prospective customers and learning how ECOLEAF can help them grow their metallization businesses. We would like to extend the opportunity to a wider audience by letting you share information about your business needs in our upcoming online survey. In Q4/2018, we plan to publish highlights of our findings—without your business information of course.
The survey is now closed.
Our Summer Confession
The AMP Team
Everyone loves summer. After all, it’s the time that we Europeans take our famous 2- 3-week vacations that make North Americans jealous. But we have a confession to make: we’re not totally on vacation. You see, we’re addicted to print and packaging. Each place we visit, whether a museum, a castle or a store, is always an opportunity to check out the latest packaging and to see how metallization is being used in print.