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A marketing manager for a big brand owner described to me recently that he wanted his products to be shiny and sticky. As he was describing tea bags at the time, I was, to say the least, puzzled until he explained what he meant. He wanted his product to stand out on the supermarket shelf. He wanted it to be the one that caught the customer’s eye when they were browsing the selection on offer. It had to be the most attractively packaged product out of all the choices. Shiny – in other words.

I have always believed that suppliers are people of the utmost importance in a business, at least as important as customers and employees but with an added essential difference.

I recently attended the annual meeting of the Paperboard Packaging Council (PPC) in Dallas, Texas with Sharon Rothschild, Landa’s Product Manager for the folding carton segment.

I cannot claim to be a good cook. Far from it. What little skill I possess is owed entirely to time spent in my youth as a Boy Scout. Today, the ability to produce a meal in a mud oven in a field has become a lot less useful in this microwave age than it was fifty years ago.

We Brits delight in being out of step with our European partners. There is an apocryphal story about a headline in the Times of London some years ago. Apparently during some bad autumnal weather the headline read, “Fog in the English Channel – Europe cut off”. It sort of sums up our approach to our position of being a small island off the coast of Europe, with our adherence to pounds sterling and miles instead of euros and kilometres.

As Benny Landa explained in his recent webcast, our representatives have been on a global trek – covering North America, Asia, Europe and many points in between. We’ve met with many of printers, converters, industry analysts, and print purchasers.

We have got greedy English bakers to thank for the introduction of food labelling. King John, he of Magna Carta fame, was apparently driven to introduce a law in 1203 which compelled bakers to put their identifying mark on loaves, so the bread could be traced. It seems that bakers in London had taken advantage of the growing population by adulterating their bread and adding all sorts of other cheaper ingredients to the wheat, in an attempt to increase their profits.

Landa Digital Printing customers are like no other manufacturers customers. Let’s face it, they were amazed by a brand new concept at a trade show, probably spent no more than an hour or so looking at a multi-million € / $ presentation and then put their name and a not unsizeable pot of their own money against one of the first ones to be built. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they knew that their machine would not be delivered for at least a couple of years. I have been selling equipment to printers for many years and I can tell you that I was as surprised as anyone at the numbers of people who had faith in the vision that Benny Landa described to them at Drupa 2012.