Digital Finishing: Different Paths to Success
Express Printing Services, East Hanover, NJ, was launched in 2012 by Val DiGiacinto and Bob Moran, who met while working at The Ace Group. Starting a company from scratch gave the duo the opportunity to build a workflow in a way that ideally suited their business model and customer base. Express Printing serves the "quick turn digital on steroids" market from soup to nuts, including campaign development, data, mailing and finishing.
As a new company, DiGiacinto and Moran balanced new and used equipment, in-house finishing and outsourcing, to create the right mix. "There is a lot of 'not so used' equipment on the market right now," says DiGiacinto, president of Express Printing. "Some of it really holds its value."
Express Printing's equipment mix, from folding and creasing to drilling and saddlestitching, reads like a Who's Who of the finishing market: Morgana, Duplo, Champion and Challenge. Between 75 percent to 80 percent of its finishing is handled in-house.
One of Express Printing's keystone production machines is its Duplo bookletmaker with 10-bin autofeeder. "For a lot of what we are doing, the jobs are multi-part so some of the pieces are collated, some are not," explains DiGiacinto. "We also get a fair number of jobs in which the clients are supplying some of the materials. We needed the capability of working with mixed collated and uncollated jobs."
For longer runs, Express Printing has developed local partnerships that allow its team to outsource services while still treating them as if they were done in-house. Because all of Express Printing's suppliers are within a few miles of its location, DiGiacinto is able to be on-site when the work is being done.
The value of this flexibility was driven home recently, DiGiacinto reveals, when Express Printing produced a very special, multi-page brochure that contained five pockets. "When the pockets were filled with folded sell sheets, the sheets were bulging on the right and were 'pinched' on the left where they were bound," he recalls. "We added spacers to the bound left edge to compensate. We sent both samples to the client and they were very pleased!"
