Primary Color: Pushing The Envelope

Seeking to push the envelope on color and entice new business, Cypress, California-based Primary Color recently took an “extremely impulsive” leap into the future. Although current president Dan Hirt does distinguish between cutting edge and bleeding, he doesn’t necessarily want to be the very first. “We like to be innovative but let someone else work out the kinks first!” he laughs.

For more than 40 years, Primary Color has been willing to embrace change. What began as a prepress company started by Hirt’s parents has become one of the most diverse printing companies in the country, in large part because of its willingness to stay on the cutting edge of technology.

Which brings Hirt to his latest purchase — the Landa S10 Nanographic printing press from Landa Digital Printing.

“That was an extremely impulsive move on our part,” Hirt says. “We found ourselves having a record year in sales last year, and knew this year wasn’t going to be as big. We landed a lot of new business, but budgets were getting cut, so we needed to focus on efficiency and giving our customers something new to get excited about.”

As for why the Landa S10 specifically, he says, “we went to PRINTING United Expo last year, and we had no intention of adding the press. But we walked through their booth and saw the samples they had, and we were extremely impressed. We sent them our color targets — that we use as our starting point when evaluating new equipment — and the results were amazing. This machine essentially sold itself.”

Part of what makes the new press stand out, Hirt notes, is its versatility. In fact, he is pulling jobs off all his current presses. “It has the unique ability to take work from the litho, from the Indigos, as well as wide-format work for retail POP because it’s 41". We’re taking work from three different departments, and able to run it on this press with a much lower cost per sq. ft., on a whole new variety of substrates, with an amazing color gamut.”

The press was just installed in June 2023, so Hirt says his team is still getting used to what it can do, and finding new applications it can handle. The ability to produce a wider color gamut, in particular, has allowed the company to secure several new customers in the entertainment industry, where colors not only have to be accurate, they have to match across a wide range of applications and formats.

“The world has changed,” says Hirt. “Eighty percent of content today is for the web, for social media, etc. And 20% is print. So, the RGB color space is what clients are designing in, they are getting approvals on their monitors, and when those digital campaigns are deployed, they are RGB. And it has always been a massive sacrifice in color when it is then translated into GRACoL or G3 on a traditional offset or digital press. Now what we’re saying is ‘we want your RGB files, and we can produce them with far less degradation.’”

Beyond entertainment, as the Primary Color team continues testing different substrates and applications, Hirt anticipates being able to entice customers in a much wider range of verticals. Cosmetics is one area he sees as being a strong market for the type of work the press can produce, given that color accuracy is so critical to the packaging and marketing materials of those types of products.

And because the Landa is still a digital press, it brings all the benefits of that platform as well, including the ability to “print to kit,” Hirt points out. “And when I say that an example would be a cosmetics rollout, where you have hundreds of strips of little colors, in different sizes for different locations, and it all has to be packed in a manual process currently,” he adds. “That introduces human error, and there are extra costs to assemble goods and pack them up accurately to ship.”

Primary Color already does a form of print to kit on its Indigo presses, printing everything for a specific box or kit at once, and then it can be easily packaged without needing to go hunting for each component. Hirt hopes to do the same with the Landa S10, and with its wider color gamut and ability to print wider prints, he can do entire campaigns in a single pass, including posters, signage, color strips, marketing materials, and more. “It will give us greater flexibility,” he says. “We can have all the work done in the data up front, so it is presorted and collated on press. It is going to enhance what we were already doing, and for sure is going to attract some new business.”

Beyond the Landa S10, Primary Color has made a few other investments in recent years, including adding the Agfa Tauro press, which Hirt notes has increased the bandwidth in the wide-format department considerably. “It is much faster, has better resolution, and has a higher color gamut than our old press,” he says. “It was an improvement to the overall quality of our product, and our clients have noticed the difference as well. Now they’re asking us to print on specific machines, because the prints on the older machines look grainier in comparison, and that was the industry standard just five years ago.”

Looking further ahead, Hirt admits it is tough to predict what will be next, given the lingering uncertainties in the economy. That said, he will continue to focus on improving the throughput for jobs as they move through the shop and look to find ways to reduce labor costs where he can. “We are trying to produce jobs faster, and lower the costs through more efficient workflows,” he says. “Our immediate task the rest of this year will be to improve all departments, making them more efficient, and driving jobs to the best possible device based on cost, not just on which machine is available at the time.”

Supply chain issues have mostly evened out, which Hirt says has helped quite a bit on that front. However, shipping continues to be a significant cost. To reduce those costs, Primary Color is constantly looking for new and better ways to package the jobs, so they are smaller and lightweight. Which, Hirt points out, also leads to “reduced waste in packaging materials, and makes them more recyclable. Those considerations are driving a lot of today’s marketing decisions.”

At the end of the day, there is no real “secret sauce” to Primary Color’s success, with Hirt noting that what they do as a company is “allow our clients to drive innovation.” He says that listening to what they need, and then finding ways to be a conduit to bring their true vision to life without any compromises is ultimately what has made them successful.

“It’s listening and trying to apply what they want without it costing them extra money,” Hirt says. “They [have] given up asking for a lot of things because they accepted that the color standards [are what they are]. They accepted it, but they don’t like it. So, it’s listening. Everyone can print beautifully in 10 colors on a litho press. With the Landa we can do seven colors with a high color gamut and no extra costs.”

That, he shares, is why Primary Color was so eager to get on the cutting edge of this new technology.