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Conceptual Packaging - A Creative Type Company

Turning The Corner
With Sparkle, Glitter, and High Technology, Great Western Industries Reinvents Itself As A Key Player in the Packaging Market
by M. Grace Maselli

If the task were to describe how Great Western Industries, a commercial printing company in Dallas, Tex., has forged ahead into new markets—specifically, into what CEO Brian Mason calls “enhanced graphics packaging”—central to the depiction of the company’s success would be its penchant for strategic vision and its skill in crafting the creative appeal emblematic of high-quality packaging.
Today, Great Western’s strong suit is printing fragrance and cosmetics packaging for clients like Victoria’s Secret and entertainment specialties such as DVD packages for Warner Home Video. But its expertise in package production springs from a different set of roots.

Now primarily a manufacturer of paperboard and plastic folding cartons, the company was founded in 1992 as a printer of trading cards. Over the years, however, competition in the trading card market grew stiff as publishers vied to meet card collectors’ endless appetite for original graphic design and innovative sheet decorations. As a result, notes Mason, “we gained a lot of experience in experimenting on the fly.”

Out of this experimentation came, literally, the company’s shining star—the glittering line of reflective products known as GEMKote, the embellishing hallmark of much of the packaging produced by Great Western. According to Mason, GEMKote is a series of metallic coatings for paper and plastic that provide foil-like treatments or color-changing effects for the specialty packaging.

Light show to go

The GEMKote effect takes hold, Mason explains, “when color shifts across the surface of the substrate as the angle of light approaching the surface changes.” The result is an eye-catching radiance for packages or counter displays. “With the proper lighting, GEMKote takes on a kind of incandescence,” Mason points out, adding that the coating can be used equally effectively with paper and plastic. Recently, for example, the glittering effect was applied to a transparent plastic sheet over a four-color process background to create a cigarette advertisement for a consumer magazine.

Great Western developed GEMKote for trading cards in the late 1990s. In 2002, the company began to market its coating technology to packaging clients. According to Mason, Great Western found that the manufacturing and design flexibility it had achieved in trading cards translated well into the packaging niche. Its tried-and-true processes for manufacturing trading cards showed themselves to be well suited to package design, enabling Great Western to apply them higher-end cosmetic and fragrance packaging.

In fact, says Mason, so thriving has the transition to packaging been for Great Western that the company recently undertook a major shift in its production focus, selling off the trading card converting end of the business to its principal competitor in that market. “Our primary focus is now high-end printing, enhanced decoration and, carton converting,” he says.

Great Western’s recent revenue history attests to the strategy’s success. In the 2000, according to Mason, 100% of revenue came from trading cards. The following year, however, the company began to focus its expansion on paperboard and plastic carton converting, and by 2004, the revenue mix had shifted to two-thirds generated from packaging and the remainder from trading cards. “Once we made the commitment to enter the enhanced graphics packaging market, we wanted to narrow our focus and intellectual capital,” Mason says.

Great Western operates a 160,000-square-foot plant with 150 full-time employees. It relies primarily on 40ý conventional and UV sheetfed presses for package production, but it also employ silk screen printing. “A great deal of enhanced packaging uses conventional printing with specialized silkscreen applications,” Mason says.

Impressed by the press

Pivotal to the company’s achievements in packaging, according to Mason, was the purchase of the first of two Komori Lithrone LS40 sheetfed presses in March of last year. Each is a six-color model with tower coater and extended delivery. “In 2003, our packaging sales increased by over 100 percent compared to 2002,” says Mason, who attributes the increase in part to the efficiencies made possible by the LS technology.

He claims that the LS version of the Lithrone has “stunningly greater automated features” compared to previous versions. Moreover, he says, the LS40’s “preset ink keys, done automatically through prepress data on the CIP3 interface, dramatically reduce mechanical makeready time. The automated press controls from the user console allow press operators to spend more time looking at the job than worrying about the mechanics of the press.” (CIP3 is a workflow technology that uses digital data to control the functions of a printing press.)

Mason also praises the LS40 for excelling at the most basic task of a printing machine: laying down ink on paper. He notes that the oscillating rollers of the LS40’s ink train eliminate ghosting, the unwanted transfer of inked images from sheet to sheet—a particular concern in package printing, which often requires heavy ink coverage in many solid blocks of color. “Before the LS,” Mason says, “we had to cock the images to the sheet. Because we no longer need to do this, run times on press are much faster.” (“Cocking” means rotating the position on the sheets so that the edges of the printed area are angled away from the edge of the sheet.) The LS40’s improved inking characteristics also yield much more consistency in ink density and color values: “We’ve reduced color variation in excess of 50 percent,” he remarks.

Great Western further assures print quality with its Creo computer-to-plate (CTP) system, which can image printing plates directly from digital data without using film. Removing film from the plate imaging process helps to control dot gain, the tendency of halftone dots to increase in size with a corresponding negative effect on the appearance of the image.

Before CTP, Mason says, there was much trial and error in discerning the extent to which dot gain accounted for color imprecision. “Nobody really knew what to do except to redo the prepress films. Now, if we don’t have a very accurate match to the proof, we can usually make a tonal adjustment to one color, output a new plate, and achieve a match to proof that everyone desires at very minimal expense.”

See and sign off
Mason says that thanks to CTP, Great Western has “very hyper-accurate dot reproduction schemas. We can predict dot gain in every tonal range from one to 99 percent. We can compensate for dot gain with the output curves on our plates, the result of which is a hyper-precise match to ink on paper.” In fact, he says, dot gain is so firmly under control that more than 50 percent of Great Western’s customers are signing off on work after seeing the first sheet pulled from the printing press.

Of course, the benefits of even the best advances in technology can be limited if communication between a printer and its customers isn’t thorough. To keep package designers appraised of everything it has to offer them, Great Western conducts an ongoing series of design seminars both at its Dallas facility and on the road. The linchpin of the outreach effort is Steve Young, Great Western’s president, director of research and development, and the inventor of GEMKote.

According to Mason, Young has set aside his managerial responsibilities to devote full attention to R&D and customer education. Among his other duties, Young meets with designers to show them how to apply enhanced packaging features to their work, helping to ensure that their designs can be produced.
“I think designers are looking for business partners who can bring both structural enhancements and innovation to the table in a fashion that’s predicable and affordable,” Mason says. “They need a vendor with the depth of experience to know what works and what doesn’t. That’s why we’ve invested so heavily in R&D. We deliver predictable results upon execution.”

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DESIGN DIRECTIONS for SUSTAINABILITY

SETTING THE BEST COURSE REQUIRES AN ACCURATE COMPASS

DECEMBER 4, 2008
1:00 PM EASTERN

This special 90-minute webinar will feature up-to-date insights into the market forces affecting package design and sustainability. Registration for this program is $89.99. Attendees will receive a copy of Packaging Sustainability: Tools, Systems and Strategies for Innovative Package Design (a $49.95 value) by Wendy Jedlicka.

Keynote Address by:
MINAL MISTRY
Project Manager, Sustainable Packaging Coalition/GreenBlue

COMPASS is an online software tool for packaging designers and engineers to compare the environmental impacts of their package designs.

DESIGN DIRECTIONS for SUSTAINABILITY

SETTING THE BEST COURSE REQUIRES AN ACCURATE COMPASS