The press, which carries a basic $1.5m (£950,000) price tag, was one of 10 new products unveiled at the manufacturer’s pre-Drupa 2012 press conference in Israel ahead of their formal launch this May.

“This machine will take us into the heart of the offset market. It’s everything you would expect from Indigo, but in a larger format,” said Alon Bar-Shany, vice president and general manager of the HP Indigo Digital Press Division.

The 11-tonne, seven-colour press, is part of a trio of fourth generation Indigos that includes the 20000, a 34m/min web press capable of “gravure-quality” printing onto films as thin as 10mic targeted at the flexible packaging and label markets, and the 30000, which is the same speed as the 10000 but can handle boards up to 600mic and is aimed at the folded carton sector.

All three machines feature a maximum print width of 750mm and use the next generation of HP’s ElectroInk.

The Indigo 10000 offers the same full variable data capabilities as other Indigo machines and comes seven-colour as standard, while its 3,450sph simplex print speed is equivalent to 230 A4 ppm.

“There’s no doubt that by 2016 a lot of business will be based on these presses,” said Bar-Shany.

The 10000 will be the first machine to be commercially available in early 2013, with the 20000 and 30000 going live shortly afterwards. However, the first UK beta 10000 will go to Barking-based Precision Printing this August.

“There’s a lot of pent up demand for the different formats the 10000 offers, simple things like A4 landscape books and 6pp A4, all the DL formats work do much better B2 too,” said Precision managing director Gary Peeling.

“Our digital pages grow 50% each year, so this year I would either need to get two conventional Indigos or one 10000. I’m sure this is going to be interesting.”

François Martin, worldwide marketing director of HP’S Graphics Solutions Business, said the 10000 was aimed at existing digital businesses expanding their offering as well as large offset businesses moving into the sector.

“Digital print is no longer an option. Customers have growing requirements that include short-run, high-quality, versioned jobs. The 10000 will cater for these,” he said.

According to Martin, offset businesses investing in the press will be able to leverage their existing finishing equipment while digital finishing equipment – which is currently geared towards SRA3 – would be addressed from Drupa 2012 and beyond.

Three 10000s will be demonstrated at Drupa working within an end-to-end workflow alongside brand new and updated finishing equipment from Horizon and MBO.

All of the fourth generation presses feature HPs new Enhanced Productivity Mode (EPM), which enables full printing using just CMY, which reduces the presses’ colour gamut by 10% but boosts production speed by a third, giving the Indigo 10000 a maximum speed of 4,600sph (more than 300ppm).

HP estimates that approximately 30% of all commercial jobs would produce sellable results using EPM, which is also available on three of HP’s new third series Indigos, unveiled in Israel this week.

The Indigo 7600, HP’s first carbon neutral press, is capable of 160ppm in EPM and offers textured print and digital embossing, albeit at significantly slower speeds, while the upgraded Indigo 5600 offers EPM output up to 90ppm and has the option of ‘one-shot’ printing for plastic substrates.

The web-fed Indigo W7250 label press can print up to 320ppm using EPM and reach output of 960ppm in monochrome operation. The majority of the third series upgrades will be retrofittable.

The manufacturer has also updated its portfolio of web presses with productivity increases across the board. The HP T410 and T360 webs continue to offer colour output at 600ft/min but mono operation has been boosted 25% to 800ft/min.

In addition, HP has upgraded its T230 web with print speeds in both colour and mono increased to 400ft/min.

HP also used the pre-Drupa conference to unveil its 600dpi, 245m/min imprinting system, the C800 which HP will use to take on market leader Kodak. Up to five of the 108mm-wide heads can be ‘stitched’ together.

The launch of the Indigo 10000 concludes a long wait for a B2 Indigo press, following the unveiling of the XB2 concept press at Drupa 2000, which was intended to be commercialised as the Indigo b7000 by Drupa 2004 but was mothballed less than 12 months before the show.

Additional reporting by Darryl Danielli in Tel Aviv.

National Apprenticeship Week threw the spotlight on these policies with numerous MPs pledging ,support for modern apprenticeships alongside BPIF chief executive Kathy Woodward. The week culminated in her visiting Precision Printing in Dagenham and with managing director Gary Peeling, hosting visits from Stephen Metcalfe, MP for South Basildon and East Thurrock and from Dagenham MP Margaret Hodge.

BOTH MET THE THREE CURRENT APPRENTICES AT PRECISION as well as former apprentices among the 130 staff. Chairman Clive Cooper explained that the business has always taken on youngsters, endorsed by Peeling saying “We have always been committed to training our own staff. It has always been one of the great things about the printing industry that you can start a career in a business that will develop and can learn new and exciting skills.”

New training frameworks have been developed to cover technological changes in association with NVQs from City & Guilds. The apprenticeships cover more than this, including numeracy and literacy skills and networked training for 16-19 year olds. The costs of this are met by government funds channelled through the Skills Funding Agency and the print federation so that BPIF members pay no extra for the apprenticeship training.

CURRENTLY THERE ARE 300 APPRENTICES UNDER THE BPIF scheme, learning from entry level machinery apprenticeships to higher apprenticeships in management which offer post degree level qualifications. Woodward adds: “Taking on apprentices is becoming an important part of a Corporate Social Responsibility within the working environment.”

She adds that companies should tap into the passion that youngsters can show. “If Matthew and Natalie who serve in MacDonalds at Stansted services can be passionate about their job, you can get your staff to understand the role that the piece of print they are working on will play for the customer. Then you can change the way that you look at your product and understand the whole supply chain.”

© Copyright 2012 Print Business. Somewhere in Kent.

This week 350 print apprentices will send their local MP a personalised postcard asking for support for apprenticeship training and their local print industry.

The postcards were launched at an event held as part of National Apprentice Week at Precision Printing on Friday.

Here, Precision’s three new apprentices met MP for South Basildon and East Thurrock Stephen Metcalfe and MP for Barking and Dagenham Margaret Hodge, who witnessed the mailers being printed on Precision’s HP Indigo 7500.

As well as requesting continued support for 16 to 19s on government-funded print apprenticeships, the mailers also featured a ‘power of print’ message.

“The cards are designed to say: hey Mr MP, when you’re at a committee meeting can you highlight how many people are employed in print and can we celebrate and support that by ensuring SMEs are considered for government contracts,” said BPIF chief executive Kathy Woodward, whose organisation instigated the campaign.

To MP Margaret Hodge’s concerns about the usefulness of apprenticeships to the participants and British industry more generally, MD of Precision Printing Gary Peeling responded that the BPIF apprenticeship scheme was “very valuable”.

“The result just isn’t as good if we don’t use the BPIF’s formal training structure,” he said. “Trainees don’t progress as fast and end up in positions for too long, whereas this formalises the process so they are moving through at the right pace.”

He added that, while skills learnt as part of the scheme were transferable to other industries, print apprenticeships were great opportunities for school-leavers and vital to the prosperity of the industry.

“Unlike some other schemes a print apprenticeship can allow someone without A-levels or a degree to develop a career that pays a very good wage and is highly skilled,” he said.

“And the way we ensure the future of the industry is to make sure we have new, well-trained staff within it.”

Once upon a time, the first thing a printer would show a prospective new client was the press. This, after all, was the company’s beating heart, its moneymaker – this was where the magic happened. These days, however, the average print business is just as likely to want to show off its web-to-print system, MIS or the workflow software that’s practically running the whole shop.

But some argue that this represents dangerous turn of events. Your average print boss, they say, does not typically have the expertise to properly specify and manage a range of complex IT systems and as a result, print businesses will wind up with systems that are unsuitable – being either overly complicated or underpowered – unnecessarily costly and poorly run.

Others, though, argue that a print boss doesn’t need to know how these systems work, they should instead concentrate on running the business and leave the techy stuff to a suitably qualified employee or third party.

Like software itself, then, it’s a complex topic. It’s made more complicated by the fact that there are two ways of bringing software systems into a company: buying pre-packaged systems in from third parties or building systems yourself in-house. Common wisdom would suggest that for the former, little knowledge of software is required, where as for the latter, you’d have to be some sort of Bill Gates/Steve Jobs hybrid. In reality, neither assumption holds true.

Take building your own system in-house first of all. Workflow, MIS and W2P systems are complicated enough to describe to a layperson, let alone build. Yet both Anthony Thirlby, managing director of ESP Colour, and Gary Peeling, managing director of Precision Printing, say they have built software systems in-house with only a very basic knowledge of programming and software processes.

Thirlby has just taken the development of ESP’s workflow and MIS system – outsourced for the last seven months to a company in Reading – in-house, and he says he has no IT knowledge above a general interest in what software can do for him. Similarly, Barking-based Precision Printing developed its own workflow system, Oneflow, in 2009, despite Peeling’s only prior experience of this area being when he was a child and he programmed his Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer so that his name repeated across the screen.

What both men have found is that having the programming knowledge themselves has not been necessary, what has been crucial is having the trust in a third party or employee to do the programming for them.

“I really didn’t know a thing about programming,” says Peeling. “However, it doesn’t matter so much if the MD of the company doesn’t have a very in-depth understanding, in exactly the same way that an MD wouldn’t necessarily need to be able to run a printing press. The important thing is to have a couple of people on your workforce who do have a good understanding.”

Bespoke result

Thirlby agrees. He explains that his decision to bring development of his software in-house was because he feels he can get a more bespoke system as a result. Not having the expertise himself is no barrier, he says, to being able to do this. He has taken on a specialist developer to fill the holes in his own knowledge. He tells the developer what he wants from the system and then that developer puts it into practice. But that’s only half that developer’s job, says Thirlby.

“The other half is looking at what we do and coming up with smarter ways of doing it,” he explains. “That’s not something that I can second guess. He will spot things that I can’t.”

Those reading may have a couple of issues with this approach. Firstly, handing over control to an employee may be bringing some print bosses out into a cold sweat. Secondly, buying in expertise sounds pretty expensive. That sort of outlay would be fine for the larger firms, but for smaller ones it is likely to be out of reach. For some, then, building up a knowledge themselves would be the cheaper and more comfortable solution.

However, trying to find the time to build up the necessary knowledge of programming, not to mention developing the actual software itself, at the same time as running a successful print business is a little ambitious to say the least. And Peeling points out that, in fact, the financial outlay required to bring in outside help does not have to be as onerous as you may at first think.

“A lot of firms wouldn’t necessarily be able to employ the number of people that we have,” says Peeling, who started with one dedicated software employee in 2009 and now has a team of five. “But just having one person onsite who has a sound understanding of HTML, or having one of your existing employees trained in this area, is really worthwhile.”

Thirlby adds that you don’t even have to employ someone full time. “There are always IT people who are available on a short-term basis – consultants who might be able to help develop a package for a reasonable price,” he explains. “People say this sort of thing’s too expensive, but actually we might spend £300 for someone to come in for a day, and you could see a huge boost in profits from the automation that might bring.”

So building a system in house may not require the IT knowledge some would believe – a clear idea of what they wanted and the finance to bring in a developer to make that happen is all that Peeling and Thirlby really needed. But not many printers would want the hassle of building their own system, or have the finance to be able to do so. That’s why the majority opt for third-party solutions from the plethora of print software providers on the market. And here, common consensus says, you don’t need any software knowledge, you just buy something in and let it get on with the job. Like building you own software, however, common consensus appears to be wrong.

Paul Calland, managing director at commercial printer Cypher Digital is adamant that there is no room for Ludditism in print. He argues that, when it comes to third-party software products, a lack of IT knowledge could see printers buying expensive, comprehensive systems of which they only use a very small part.

“Smaller companies, such as ours, often pay for very complex systems and end up only using 10% of their functionality,” he says.

The reason they are paying for that level of service, says Calland, is because they do not have the IT knowledge to penetrate what are often the inaccessible sales pitches and specifications lists of pre-packaged software. They are, in effect, bamboozled out of their cash.

That said, Phillip Rodgers, technical manager at web-to-print software provider RedTie, says this is no longer the case and that the market has moved to a position where it understands some bespoke programming is needed to meet customer needs. He argues that it does not require a print company to have IT knowledge to achieve this.

“It’s never really a problem that people don’t have enough knowledge of software; they can still suggest ideas,” he says, explaining that RedTie has enough knowledge of both print and software to successfully translate and apply these ideas. “If you can imagine something for your business and think that maybe computers or software might be able to solve that for you, and it sounds like a good idea, then that’s as much as I think people need to know.”

Where he does think a working knowledge is useful is for promotion and problem solving. He says that a print company’s sales and customer service staff should know the basic processes involved in the software being run, if not the minutiae of how it works, so they can explain the benefits properly to clients. In addition, he says that when problems occur, it is easier for companies like RedTie to help if the printer has a working knowledge of what is happening.

Learn as you go

But a working knowledge, whether you are buying a system in or building your own, does not necessarily have to be present from the start. What is key, argues Peeling, is the willingness to ask questions. That that will teach you as much as you ever need to know.

“We really knew nothing at the start, but when you are working with developers to set up a system, you acquire an understanding of what is going on – you ask questions like ‘why is this not happening?’ or ‘why did that not work first time?’ and you gradually learn through the answers to those questions,” he explains.

So, while software may well have eased itself into a dominant position within print companies, it does not necessarily follow that print bosses around the country have to quickly sign themselves up to a programming degree. Yes, working knowledge of IT systems is an advantage, but as Peeling and Thirlby have shown, software skills are not essential to success in this area. What is important, as Peeling says, is to ask questions and not simply opt out of IT matters – this way you end up with a system you want and that works whether you make your own or buy one in, no matter what your knowledge of IT

AGI Shorewood European chief executive Tony Garnish has been appointed president of the BPIF.

The organisation, which has just moved into its new premises in Hooper Street, East London, has also appointed Precision Printing Company managing director Gary Peeling and Northend Creative Print Solutions managing director Nigel Stubley as board directors.

BPIF chief executive Kathy Woodward said: “When I took over as chief executive in June two key priorities for me personally were to move out of Farringdon Point, our office in London, which were a real drain on our finances and to recruit to the board some high profile directors who can challenge our thinking and help us to shape our strategy going forward.

“It is great that we have been able to attract such high calibre individuals and we look forward to their input.”
AGI World and Shorewood Packaging merged earlier this year.

Company requires extra production capacity to meet increasing demand for digital print services, with digital impressions increasing by 80 percent per annum and sales to peak at Christmas

BARCELONA, Spain, 25 November 2011 – HP today announced that Precision Printing has installed two new HP Indigo 7500 Digital Presses, at its site in Barking, UK, to fulfill increased demand for its digital print services during the festive season and meet the strong sales growth predicted for 2012.

Precision Printing has more than 40 years experience in the commercial printing sector, but established its digital print arm just six years ago, when it’s first HP Indigo 5000 press was installed. The new digital print services not only increased the jobs received from existing clients but brought many new opportunities for new business and additional products to add to the company’s portfolio. With these new revenue streams increasing demand for its services, Precision Printing soon expanded its HP Indigo portfolio, installing a second HP Indigo 5000 in July 2005, just three months after the first, followed by an HP Indigo 7000 press in 2008 – the first press of this model installed in the UK.

Since then, Precision Printing has continued to identify and enter new market sectors with innovative, high-value digital print, such as web-to-print services, personalised direct marketing and photo applications. This constant expansion lead to the installation of their first HP Indigo 7500 in 2010 and has driven an 80 percent increase in digital impressions over the previous financial year (2009-2010). With the expectation that 2011 will see similarly high growth in demand, Precision Printing decided to install its latest HP Indigo 7500 presses. These two new presses bring the company’s total digital production capacity to six HP Indigo Presses and make it one of the largest HP Indigo Press install-bases in the country.

“We are experiencing remarkable growth driven by the scope of high-value innovative solutions achievable with digital print technology,” said Gary Peeling, managing director, Precision Printing Co Ltd. “We constantly expand our product portfolio to attract new business, most recently with the introduction of photo and publishing products for the consumer market. The versatility and high-quality results achievable with the HP Indigo presses enable us to do this successfully. The decision to install our new HP Indigo 7500s to manage the peak in orders we’ll see over Christmas and the year ahead was an easy one. Our customers require the high-level print quality that only an HP Indigo press can provide and the HP Indigo 7500 is currently the most productive HP model on the market.”

With Christmas around the corner, the new HP presses will soon be put through their paces. All six of Precision Printing’s HP Indigo presses will be in operation 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the 12 week period in and around the festive season when demand for Precision Printing’s consumer products such as personalised photobooks, vanity publishing applications and greetings cards, will peak. The company predicts around 35,000 individual orders to be printed each day during the month of December. The HP Indigo 7500 Digital Press is designed for high-volume production such as this and can print up to 120 A4 pages per minute (ppm) in full colour(1) or 240 ppm in either monochrome or two colours. In addition, Precision Printing will manage the transactions with its own unique workflow system, Oneflow.

Now in its second generation, Oneflow was developed two years ago to enable efficient and cost-effective production of short-run applications. Oneflow is able to link to legacy client platforms quickly and easily and collates, tracks and prioritises orders within Precision Printing’s production workflow.

Peeling explained, “This award-winning software has helped to fuel our development in the consumer market alongside our HP Indigo technology, enabling the production of exciting new products, which simply were not economically viable before. A personalised greetings card, for example, is an affordable, yet highly valuable product for the consumer, being a more personal, emotive product than a generic card. However, being low-cost, our production workflow must be as efficient as possible to make printing products such as these a profitable solution, and this is exactly what we have achieved with Oneflow and the cost-effective short-runs delivered by our HP Indigos.”.

The digital print arm of Precision Printing’s business may have only been active for a relatively short time in the company’s history, but the success it has seen during this period has had a significant impact on the organisation that operates today. Peeling attributes this in part to being affiliated with HP from the beginning.

“Our relationship with HP is unique. Being able to identify target markets and successfully move into these new areas has been made easier with the direction and technical training HP provides, such as the HP Capture programme, and the support of the HP Indigo user-group, Dscoop. This fantastic partnership has definitely been a key factor in the development of our business.”

Designed for use by HP Indigo and HP Large format digital technology users, the HP Capture programme offers HP’s Print Service Providers (PSPs) a comprehensive range of educational aids, tools and communities designed to help them manage and grow their businesses. HP recently enhanced this resource with a new easy-to-use online interface and an expanded range of content and training. For more information, visit www.hp.com/go/capture.

Dscoop (the Digital Solutions Cooperative) is an independent global community of graphic arts business owners and technical professionals who use HP equipment and related solutions. It is focused on educating but also on connecting its members with each other and with HP to improve members’ business growth, efficiency and profitability. Peeling is a strong advocate for the organisation and joined the Dscoop board of directors when the organisation launched in Europe (announcement of Dscoop launched in Europe, Middle East and Africa made on 28th September 2011). For more information about Dscoop EMEA, visit www.dscoop.org/emea.   More information is available at www.youtube.com/hpgraphicarts or follow HP on www.twitter.com/hpgraphicarts.

(1) Color Calibration Standard of the HP Indigo 7500 digital print press: PANTONE -licensed HP IndiChrome on-press 6-colour printing using CMYK as well as orange and violet; PANTONE -licensed HP IndiChrome Plus on-press 7-colour printing using CMYK as well as orange, violet, and green; PANTONE -licensed HP IndiChrome off-press Ink Mixing System, for spot colour creation, using CMYK as well as orange, violet, red, green, blue, bright yellow, and transparent; HP Professional PANTONE Emulation Technology (PANTONE -licensed CMYK values for 4-colour PANTONE simulation, utilising ICC profiles to provide optimised simulation values for the specific press and media combination)

On-demand trailblazer Precision Printing has doubled its digital print capacity with a £1m investment in two additional HP Indigo 7500s as the company ramps up for its busiest period, when it will be processing up to 35,000 orders a day.

The spend comes off the back of the Barking-based company doubling its clicks for each of the past two years. Prior to this latest spend the company had capacity for 10m clicks per month; following September’s installation of the two flagship 7500s, this has increased to 24m.

“And we’ll be using every single one of them in December, that’s for sure,” said managing director Gary Peeling.

The latest 120ppm colour digital presses have joined four other Indigos at the company, a 7500, a 7000 and two 5000s, making it one of the largest Indigo installations in the UK.

The digital spend was complemented by the installation of a Renz Inline 500 fully automatic wire-binding line, a substantial upgrade to the company’s in-house developed, award-winning workflow, Oneflow, and a wholesale revamp of the company’s fulfilment operation.

“We’ve been very much focussed on increasing productivity, so, for example, we’ve increases productivity in terms of our output on the fulfilment side six-fold year-on-year.”

According to Peeling, the next phase of investment plan is likely to focus on replacing the company’s 5000s next year and the introduction of “dynamic finishing platforms”.

“We’re experiencing significant demand on the digital side of the business, our digital growth is around 80% per annum, so clearly we will require further expansion in 2012, but the exact platforms will probably emerge from Drupa.”

The company took its first steps into digital only six years ago, at which time it was a £5.5m turnover litho business employing 85 staff and handling 45 orders a day. Today it employs 130 full time staff and sales are projected to hit £14m in 2011.All of the growth has been driven by digital, which now generates £8m of sales and between 10,000 and 20,000 orders per day, each with a typical value of £2.30.

Clients include a leading photo brand, for which the company produces a range of personalised photo products, charities, leading agencies and blue-chip clients. The company is also solely responsible for the production of Clinton’s on-demand greetings cards.

When Precision Printing announced a new pressroom assistant would be joining the team, a certain kind of person was expected to walk through the door, roll up their sleeves and get stuck into the messy business of mixing and measuring inks and scrubbing plates clean. That person did not, in the team’s mind’s eye, sport long, bright blonde hair, painted nails, immaculate make-up and six-inch wedge heels. But that, in the words of their new colleague Emma Thompson, “is what they got.”

“For the hours I was there my hair was tied back, my hands were covered in ink and I was loving every minute of it,” says Thompson, who has been at the firm for 15 years and is now senior production manager. “I was desperate to get on the presses, especially because my then-partner, who was a machine minder, bet me that a woman would never be hired as a press operator.”

Such a bet is not surprising when you consider that Thompson and her partner only knew of five other women working on the presses in the mid-1990s. But is the situation any different today?

Certainly companies like Precision, which now has 39 women working within its 143-strong team in a multitude of roles, from print production assistants to client services directors, show that women have made gradual inroads into a range of roles within the industry. But, as anyone who has recently walked through a pressroom or attended an industry event will agree, the balance is still far from even.

Ina Cooke is sales director at Kall Kwik Plymouth and started out as a litho press operator 15 years ago. She says she has always enjoyed the hands-on nature of the work, having been known to surprise customers by being underneath a press with a spanner when they walk in. But Cooke is still a rare breed, she feels.
“I have met other female litho printers before but they are very few and far between,” she says. “I’d say they probably still make up less than 10% of operators in the UK.”

This kind of ratio can be found not just in the printroom, but upstairs in the boardroom too. When UK country manager at HP Nancy Janes decided to organise a Ladies Day at Ascot for women in managerial positions within print, she struggled to put a list together. In the end, the list consisted of 22 names, 12 of whom attended. The lack of women in both areas is, of course, linked says Dani Novick, managing director at print and packaging recruitment specialist Mercury Search & Selection. A direct correlation can be drawn, she explains, between how many women work on the presses and how many in the industry’s boardrooms.

“In most cases, directors have worked their way up from the shopfloor,” she says, “so if this isn’t attracting female representation it’s going to have longer-term consequences. The government’s proposals for women to make up 40% of PLC boards might be somewhat of a shock in the printing industry and nigh on impossible anytime soon.”

Which begs the question of why still so few women are coming into print at entry level. Is there something about print that is inherently unappealing to the majority of women, or is the industry doing something to deter otherwise enthusiastic prospective female employees?

Gender divisions Of course, not all areas of print are male dominated, with women traditionally featuring strongly on the administration and finishing side of things, and even more so in sales, customer service and graphic design roles, so that in some companies, there are as many if not more women than men in customer-facing and design positions. So why not production?

What Precision Printing and doubtless many other printing businesses can attest to is that stereotypes of gender – the mechanical world being a male domain and the creative world a female one – are very far from reality. However, that does not mean they don’t have an influence.

At Precision, Emma Thompson admits that women often start out in more typically ‘female’ roles, as receptionists for example, but then they do graduate to positions that demand a high level of understanding of and passion for production processes.

“Once women get into the printing world they become engrossed and really enjoy the hands-on work,” she reports. Others have sometimes found the environment less welcoming and the stereotypes more difficult to overcome. Tracy Dineen is regional business manager at Duplo and she says that the sexism that still pervades some printing environments can be a decisive factor in whether women feel comfortable pursuing a career in the industry. She says she has had first-hand experience of women leaving the industry because they were tired of hearing women talked about only in terms of their attractiveness and of hearing disparaging remarks about women’s inability to do production jobs.

“It’s certainly not the case that all or even most printers are sexist,” she says “but it’s quite unbelievable the things that you still hear – even from senior people in the industry – in terms of talking about women in an objectifying way.”

Although she isn’t offended by them, Ina Cooke agrees that comments about the inherent differences between men and women, with the emphasis often on women’s inferior aptitude for engineering and technical skills, do occur.

“I’m sure out of 10 women I’d probably be the only one not offended by some of the remarks,” she says. “It’ll be things like men use this side of the brain, women use the other, so men are good at this specific skill and women shouldn’t be here.”

She says she is regularly confronted by those who don’t expect her to be as knowledgeable about printing as a man. “I do feel sometimes that you’ve got to be not just as good as the men but a little bit better,” she reports. “You start proving yourself before someone even asks you to.”

Weight of history It’s not just the attitudes of the individuals that women have to overcome, but the weight of the historical definitions of gender that are behind those attitudes, and these definitions influence both men and women. Kathy Woodward, head of the BPIF, explains that this history means print is not even on the radar of many young women selecting a profession.

“Not only have women traditionally not gone into print production,” she says,” they haven’t traditionally gone into production in any industry. Men historically did pressroom work because heavy lifting, working with machines and getting messy was seen as unsuitable for women.”

Convention, Woodward explains, can continue to dictate people’s subconscious decisions even when the rationale behind the tradition – that certain environments are unsuitable for women, for example – has long since been debunked.

This constitutes a vicious cycle, adds Thompson. Men frequently come into the industry following their father’s success in the field, whereas women have very few role models to make a career in print seem like a viable option.

Thankfully, there are signs that this is starting to change, with Woodward’s role at the BPIF a massive boost in this area, but there is still some distance to go.
What is needed to take things further is greater promotion of the industry to young women. Here, though, there is a real barrier of outmoded perceptions of the industry to overcome. Mercury’s Dani Novick explains that the image most people have of the printing industry is not a particularly attractive one.
“The general perception of print is a long way off reality,” she says. “People think that this is an old-fashioned, dirty, noisy environment, which it’s not anymore.”

It’s not just women that this deters, of course, print has long had a problem attracting new entrants. Perhaps, then, rather than specifically a gender issue, the lack of women in the industry is actually part of a wider recruitment issue the industry is facing.

Closed shop Novick certainly takes this view. She explains that all individuals making a conscious decision about what industry to enter will be put off by the misconception that print is reliant upon dirty, outmoded technology and baffling terminology.

“Print has always been a very closed shop kind of industry with people accustomed to talking in technical jargon as a form of one-upmanship,” says Novick. “What we need to do is start talking about how inspirational the results are, how cutting-edge the technology is and how, because many companies have diversified into cross-media to become marketing fulfilment organisations, the industry is very dynamic, very innovative and incredibly exciting. That should capture the imagination of the next generation with their connected and media mindsets.”

More effectively selling how exciting the industry can be will ensure, says Novick, that print does not just attract those who have fallen into the trade due to it being a well trodden-route for people like them.

Attracting a diverse workforce to print, including different sorts of male individuals as well as female, is of course crucial in light of the kind of market that printers are now selling to. Managing director of Precision Printing Gary Peeling says that the comparatively high percentage of women in his company has had a very positive impact.

“If you’re going to sell to a diverse market place you need diversity in your company,” he says. “There’s no point just hiring all of the same sort of people, especially as 80% of our buyers working within publishing and marketing are women.”

Peeling is, of course, keen to point out that no company should operate a policy of positive discrimination when it comes to hiring women. While industry-wide incentives to promote a career in print are needed, recruitment should always operate on the basis of the best person for the job in question.

Merit rules Nicola Bisset, managing director at Optimus, agrees. Despite being warned when she first started out in print that she would never get anywhere as a woman, she says that over-zealous encouragement of women to enter the world of print could be counterproductive.

“If you make a huge thing out of there not being enough women then this highlights that there appears to be a problem and actually introduces the idea to women that there might be a valid reason for not pursuing that career,” she says. “It’s good to give encouragement to women that, yes, there are opportunities in the industry for them, but only in the same way that there are opportunities in any industry for anyone of any gender.”

Getting more women into print and reaping the benefits of a more diverse workforce should, then, be a matter of better promoting the exciting opportunities that print offers to people from all walks of life. While sexist comments and attitudes are still regrettably a feature of some printing environments, most people would agree that the days of Page 3 calendars in pressrooms and women not being taken seriously by clients are a thing of the past, and will be even rarer the more diverse print’s workforce becomes.

Of course, the factors that inspire individuals to pursue a certain career will always be complicated and difficult to predict, particularly as they often respond to underlying, unexamined preconceptions about what people ‘like me’ do. What the industry might do to redress the gender balance is send out positive messages about what print can achieve, and so, in the words of Precision’s Emma Thompson, what “a great industry it is to be in, no matter who you are.”