Lifetime achievement

After my studies in chemistry and business administration I started my business career in 1973 with Burroughs Business Forms, where I had various positions in sales and marketing.

On a business trip in 1987 to Brussels I noticed by chance that there was a Labelexpo show taking place. Knowing little about label printing, I decided to visit the show and ended up talking with a visitor from the label industry, who offered me a job at tesa Bandfix in Switzerland.

tesa Bandfix, a daughter company of Beiersdorf, owner of the Nivea brand, was a leading supplier for self-adhesive labels for the cosmetics industry. In those days all the global cosmetics brand owners had production facilities in Switzerland.

At the beginning of the 1990s this changed dramatically, as all of them moved their production to less expensive countries. Within a few years, we lost more than half our business – and being part of a cosmetics competitor didn’t help either.

We needed a new strategy to survive and keep the employees in Switzerland. Our strategy was based on:

l Innovations and developments of new, unique products with high added value

l Export had to replace the losses in Switzerland and help to keep the existing customer base

l Building alliances and working with partners was essential to compete with other global suppliers

The first project and new product in 1990 was the integration of a digital printing unit with ion-deposition technology onto a Gallus letterpress machine – perhaps the first hybrid machine! These technical labels with consecutive barcode numbering where part of a new pharmaceutical product, which was sold globally by the Swiss company Roche.

Scratch-off labels for the prepaid phone market and RFID tickets for the Moscow metro were other specialties we sold via tesa sales or other partners.

A milestone in tesa Bandfix’s success in the late 1990s was the installation of the first Nilpeter offset press in Europe. Our own development of a gravure unit and in-line adhesive coating gave us the opportunity to create unique design labels for the cosmetics and health care industry as well as functional labels for security and technical applications.

Important for our innovation strategy was a team for product and process development, who supported sales and production. Getting in contact with the development people from our potential customers at a very early stage was the key for success. Together with our customers we developed customized solutions and products, which enabled us to stay out of the ‘me too’ price pressure zone.

As important as the development of new products was fast international distribution. Not having production and sales facilities in other parts of the world was forcing us to build alliances and partnerships.

It started with Concordia, a group of leading label printers in Europe, where we combined purchasing, exchanged production know-how and installed production back-up. Later we expanded the group with partners from Mexico, Brazil and China.

International associations

International contacts and associations were an important source for our success, and therefore it was logical for me to get more active and involved in both Finat and the German label association VskE.

Here are some of the highlights:

l During my time in Finat from 1999 to 2015, we established the national association board (NBA) in Europe, where Finat plays a coordinating umbrella function to share local achievements, work on European standardization and legislation issues and drive sustainable solutions.

l In 2004 the Young Managers Club (YMC) for young professionals was founded, and has today more than 70 members.

l Worldwide, the L9 represents the global associations and became the platform for a cross-continent network and forum to harmonize global issues.

l The Labelexpo Advisory Board (LAB) is working closely with our partner Tarsus to improve the most important show in Brussels.

Other highlights were the new positioning of the Finat congress as the ‘European Label Forum’ (ELF) and the Finat Radar trend survey, which informs our members every six months about European material and machine sales as well as trends from converters and end users.

These achievements are the result of the total board, the various committees and the cooperation of all partners in our industry, suppliers and sponsors, converters and associations and facilitators like Tarsus.

We have the unique situation in our industry that everybody in the supply chain is talking openly to each other and participating in the different events.

Receiving the Stanton Avery Lifetime Achievement Award at the end of my career is a great honor for me and I take it on behalf of all the colleagues from the Finat board, the committees and the international associations who contributed so much to the success of our industry. My company and I personally benefited a lot from these contacts. I got all kind of valuable in-put, met a lot of different companies and people and many of them became very good friends.

Thank you to all of you for the time we spent together, the experiences we shared and the net-working parties we had. You made my business life so interesting and happy.