Reinventing a 145-Year-Old Printing Company as an All-Digital Disruptor, Part One

Sustainability, e-commerce, strategic planning, and an all-digital production operation. What do we have when we wrap this up in one place? The Anstadt Company. I recently had the honor to share a conversation with Matt Doran, president and CEO of the Anstadt Company. Add to this his recent election as DSCOOP Board Chair for the Americas; and you have an idea of just how much value Doran brings to a great company.

Founded in 1878 and still family-owned, the Anstadt Company has done nothing if not change and grow, including making the leap into becoming an all-digital shop.

PI: Tell me a how you view the Anstadt Company now vs. the Anstadt Company three years ago (pre-pandemic).

Matt Doran: It is interesting. I look at the pandemic and it no doubt affected us. There is no denying that we all came out of it differently. But that alone did not put us where we are now. We all had to critically look at ourselves. But a lot of where we are today started occurring many years ago, and goes back to my own background in marketing.

Our transformation started 15 years ago. It was pre-pandemic when we really began looking ourselves and saying, “this is what we want to be.”

I am proud to be able to say that Anstadt has a remarkable story in that we have been in business more than 140 years with five generations of family ownership and leadership. To still be able to make the transformation we have made is wonderful.

PI: What did this process entail?

Doran: It is interesting, prior to joining Anstadt, I was in the pharmaceutical industry. I had about three years there and that impacted me. It was a great business foundation. When I entered the commercial printing industry, I saw it from a unique perspective. In my mind, the approach to solving customer problems and challenges was to solve it more as a marketing approach than a printing approach.

The traditional approach in our industry was all about how we are going to do it. This meant the specs etcetera, and my interest is more about how and what we are doing to affect the outcome for our customers. Add to that the why behind what we are doing. Fortunately, that really did kind of benefit me in terms of being able to do what I am doing today. I started to help evolve the company with the talented team that we have.

Honestly, it is my passion. I love walking through here and seeing what we do and seeing other people's operations. Strategy is what I think about when I get up, and it drives me every day to think about the what if? Where do we go and what type of things will we doing in the future? It is what drives me as a leader.

PI: So how would you describe your leadership vision and company mission?

Doran: Our vision is to be a company focused on demand generation; helping businesses generate demand for their brands, processes, and services. So back to your question regarding the pandemic — every investment we make we had to look at and ask, “What are we doing to help our customers generate more demand?”

It led to this operating vision of saying, “…we will be an all-digital operation” and we set that course before the pandemic, though the pandemic accelerated that. We enabled this strategy given the work dynamic that the pandemic changed in terms of the style of work and type of work we were going after. And the market was moving ever more quickly towards the on-demand model.

Credit: Anstadt

PI: What is your take on the talk about the “Death of Print?”

Doran: I say to our team all the time “we don't want to fight that battle.” In fact, it sounds like being in this business means we are partial to print. I am going to agree with a lot of people saying, “No, you are right. You do not need to print that anymore.” And yet I make a living from printing. That is what we do here. I would be the first to say, “Yes, you are right. You do not need to do that.”

The wonderful thing about it is there are all these emerging opportunities in print and taking digital content and people monetizing that. By that I mean taking digital content and monetizing it via print. It is a new way of thinking. And that is what I love about what is going on. But a lot depends on the kind of customers we want to be with — including the younger generation. Some of these are tech companies, and as you know, they are more marketing technology companies than they are traditional print customers. We still have many traditional print customers, but we are serving them in a different way.

That is a part of another reason we went all-digital. The applications we do today just simply do not fit offset.

One of the four core categories of products we focus on is e-commerce print-on-demand. And commercial printing is part of that. What I look at is “How do we do that? What application?” It plays with so much of what we are doing that includes things like Scodix, all the way to all these HP presses, to a smart stack, for example. There are so many things that speak to the market opportunities we are deeply involved in and continue to focus on, that I do not think it is any one application.

E-commerce print-on-demand is what I am most excited about.

Credit: Anstadt

PI: What other categories do you cover?

Doran: We produce everything from packaging to photo products and commercial work — all printed on-demand. We have on-demand mindset. How do the customers order and consume? We look at not just how we produce it, but how they utilize the products.

PI: What was behind your company’s decision to go all-digital?

Doran: The decision to go all-digital helped us to further our mission, our vision, to really become what we were already setting to do before the pandemic. And after that we all know that the supply chains were damaged, which enabled more on-demand capability; the “I need it now” mindset.

We officially became all-digital in 2023. And we are confident in our digital strategy when we look at things like automation. We are a big user of automated platforms like Site Flow, so we consider software and workflow as essential to our digital strategy.

We looked at other things, too. Take the challenge of recruitment of people. Whether it be younger people or just people in general. One of the things you talk about is getting younger people in our industry, which I love.

I think that now that we have an all-digital platform, it is changing the game in terms of how people see us. We’ve seen a shift in recruits thinking, “I want to be a part of that,” even including people that have been in our industry for a while. If you join Anstadt, you get to be a part of this fun tech stuff, plus the exciting print and marketing we are producing. Again, it’s the “how” we are making our products.

Credit: Anstadt