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“By the time a jobreaches postpress, allthe costs are loaded in. So if it gets spoiled at the bindery stage,you’ve not only wasted the maximum amount of money, but you’ll also waste the most time replacing it,”

SEPTEMBER 2010 • PRINTACTION • 19

by Victoria Gaitskell

says Kris Bovay, General Manager of

Pacific Bindery Services Ltd., based

in Vancouver, British Columbia. As

incoming Chairperson of the Penn-

sylvania-based Binding Industries

Association (BIA), with 100 member

companies in Canada, the United

States and United Kingdom, Mexico,

and Australia, Bovay will spend her

2-year term leading BIA’s charge to

provide technical, management and

market intelligence to her sector of

the industry.

PrintAction contacted Bovay and two other recog-nized finishing experts in Canada, Yvon Sauvageau ofMulti Bookbinding and Norm Beange of SpecialtiesGraphic Finishers Ltd., to discover the latest trends andchallenges in bindery – a sector which is critical notonly to the success of almost every printed job but alsoto the industry as a whole. While today’s customers au-tomatically expect to receive jobs of high-quality print,they are far less aware of the impact that finishing hason the success of a project. At the same time, the in-dustry’s need for expert finishing escalates, in order todifferientiate print in the crowded communicationsmarketplace. Binderies across Canada face serious chal-lenges because of both overall shrinkage in the printmarket and the growing trend for printers to bringcompact, high-end bindery equipment in-house.

Bovay, Sauvageau and Beange rely on their years ofexperience to determine which markets for high-endfinishing work will thrive and which markets will pro-vide enough stability to enable them to invest in thenew applications and technologies that will enhancetheir value to printers. In this article, all three expertsshare their thoughts on these issues and the most-sig-nificant trends affecting their businesses.

The road to Pacific: Diversifying for growthand resizing in recessionBovay was born in Germany, where her grandfatherowned a case (hardcover book) bindery. As a smallchild, she immigrated with her family first to Winnipeg,Manitoba, where her grandparents ran a small bindery,then to Vancouver. While attending high school there

in the 1970s, she applied for a summer job at forestrygiant MacMillan Bloedel Ltd., then a $2-billion corpo-ration with 55,000 staff. After graduating from highschool, she moved into a full-time job with MacBlowhile studying linguistics at the University of BritishColumbia at night.

“In those days the work environment was quite sex-ist, with women doing secretarial work while the menwere managers,” Bovay recalls. But after one of herbosses, who recognized her leadership potential, urgedher to study more business-related subjects, she trans-ferred to British Columbia Institute of Technology andcompleted a marketing certificate instead.

Afterwards, MacBlo advanced Bovay quickly through13 different jobs in five years, exposing her to such di-verse departments as corporate training, personnelmanagement, sales, marketing and ultimately productmanagement for a division called Island Paper Mills. In2001, after Domtar purchased Island Paper, and Bovayhad spent 29 years with the company, they transferredher position to Chicago. She declined the move for fam-ily reasons, asked to be packaged out, and enrolled inthe MBA program at Victoria’s Royal Roads University.Six months later, in January 2002, she was headhuntedfor a position as Sales and Marketing Manager at Pa-cific Bindery Ltd., a shop offering a full range of generaltrade binding services.

Bovay accepted Pacific’s job on condition that she beallowed to complete her MBA degree concurrently, thusbecoming the third member of Pacific’s managementteam, alongside company co-owners Brad Clement,Controller, and Gerry Heinz, Operations Manager andson of Harvey and Erna Heinz, who founded Pacific in1971. Bovay credits her diverse prior activities atMacBlo with preparing her for the multifaceted de-mands of managing a much smaller company. Pacificis now one of Canada’s largest binderies, peaking at 80employees and a 50,000-square-foot facility.

“When I started, Pacific had about 50 employees, andsales were slow. It was right after 9/11, when the print-ing trade was suffering a year-long hiatus and market-ing budgets had bottomed out,” Bovay recalls. “Pacifichad also just moved into a new 50,000-square-foot fa-cility that generated additional overhead costs.

“To develop business, we started adding services, suchas remoist gluing [for lick-to-stick envelopes and for-mvelopes, a process no other Vancouver bindery then of-fered] and fugitive gluing [for removeable attachments].And since we were only servicing the Lower Mainland[Vancouver area] and a few clients in the interior of BC,I immediately launched into diversifying our sales geo-graphically.” Within a year of adopting this strategy, Pa-cific was working with clients located on VancouverIsland (an hour away by ferry) and more extensively inthe interior of BC, as well as Alberta, Washington, andOregon. As a result of its combined diversification tac-tics, the company’s sales shot up initially by 26 percent,and from 2004 to 2007 its revenues continued to increaseby between five and 10 percent annually.

“Then in 2007 we were hit very hard by the closure ofthe Vancouver plant of one of our largest customers,

Pacific Bindery’smanagement team(left to right): BradClement, Controllerand Co-owner; Kris Bovay, GeneralManager; and GerryHeinz, OperationsManager and Co-owner.

20 • PRINTACTION • SEPTEMBER 2010

Quebecor, who relocated its work to Edmonton orToronto, and by the end of 2008 the economy was inrecession,” Bovay recounts. “The following year 2009brought more of the same, so we tried to recover by re-sizing. We went from 80 staff [including part-time peo-ple] at our peak in 2007 down to 51.” The company putone of its two primary stitchers up for sale, despiteyears of prior investment into the equipment, becausedemand for services had dropped so significantly injust a few short months. But at least Pacific was alsoable to capitalize on some good timing during thedownturn: the company’s 10-year lease was up for re-newal, so they negotiated down from 50,000 to 44,000square feet.

“Right now we have just finished redesigning ourlayout to gain space and efficiency and add warehous-ing capacity and racking that we didn’t have before –since warehousing and fulfillment are other areaswhere we’re diversifying.”

Bovay says, at present, Pacific serves 150 printersthroughout the province of British Columbia, includ-ing all the major Vancouver operations. “We also sell ourservices into the Alberta market, where we especially tryto acquire projects destined for B.C. Four to five yearsago, we had quite a few customers from Washington andOregon, but the recent move by the Canadian Dollar to-ward parity has eliminated any advantage for Americanprinters to deal with Canada, so we feel it is not a strongtarget market any more,” she laments.

Trade in Shawinigan: Books still alive and wellYvon Sauvageau is President of Multi Bookbinding(a.k.a. Multi-Reliure in French), a trade book binderyin Shawinigan, Quebec (a city of 51,734 located con-veniently midway between the metropolises of Mon-tréal and Québec City.) Three years ago, he bought thecompany with two partners, Louis Baribeau, VP Sales,and Patrick Pâquet, VP Production and son of SuzanneFerron, who founded Multi in 1988. Sauvageau has adiversified printing background, including various po-sitions in prepress and general management forTranscontinental, plus a 5-year stint, starting in 2000,when he launched and ran Caractéra, a commercialsheetfed company he ultimately sold to giant SoliscoPrinters Inc.

Multi’s 56,000-square-foot facility produces hard-cover, softcover, perfect and flex case binding, alongwith associated add-ons like hot stamping, embossing,laminating, rounded corners, dust jackets and bookmarks. Much of its equipment and staff training derivefrom Kolbus, a German manufacturer whose NorthAmerican and Mexican clients Sauvageau often hostsfor demos. In turn, Sauvageau explores other bookbinderies to gain market intelligence whenever he getsthe chance. Typically this approach means he travels toGermany through contacts at Kolbus or in the UnitedStates through the BIA, since he estimates no more thana handful of operations like Multi exist in Canada.

Sauvageau says Multi’s normal staff of 55 swells to 80in peak periods May and September (May for year-books and September for school books and Christmas

stock that must reach stores by November). In threeyears, the company has grown from 43 clients to 97.“But that doesn’t mean we have double the income, be-cause some of our clients only give us two jobs a year,”Sauvageau explains. “In the recession we lost a big per-centage of business from former major clients, includ-ing DC Comics when it decided to move its printingback to the States. When Quebecor and Transconti-nental were busier, they gave us lots of jobs that they doin-house themselves now. We only do the more com-plicated jobs for them.

“And we don’t see annual reports any more,”Sauvageau continues. “Just five years ago we perfectbound a lot of them, but that market has shrunk byprobably 80 percent.” Laughing, he adds “Maybe theirfinancial statements are so bad these days that compa-nies are nervous about printing them now!”

Additionally, run sizes are down: “In case binding wemight do a large job of 100,000 copies for the U.S. mar-ket three or four times a year, but for hardcover 4,200 to4,700 copies is more typical. For perfect binding, runsare a bit bigger, around 6,500 copies.” Of course, mostprinters are seeing book runs shrink in size, eventhough more people are visiting bookstores and moretitles are being produced than ever before, but this sit-uation is especially obvious in a trade bindery.

Sauvageau spends at least one day a week meetingwith clients and prospects in Quebec or Ontario todemonstrate such innovations as flex-case binding(with a flexible 12-point cover) that is becoming thenew standard for cookbooks or the functional differ-ences between various sewing methods versus cold, hotmelt, or PUR glues. “Everybody knows that we’re prob-ably the biggest case bindery in the country, but we alsohave the biggest facilities for perfect binding, so we’remaking an effort to promote both services to a widergeographic area, from Ottawa to the Maritimes,” hecontinues. “We are making progress into new territory,but at the same time it’s tough for clients to changebook binders. They’re very loyal, because a lot can gowrong and correcting a mistake can cost up to ten timesthe original price of the job. It takes a lot of persever-ance to gain their confidence.”

Multi-Reliure now produces about 5-million booksper year. “To me, the book business is probably the moststable sector in printing right now,” Sauvageau affirms.

While self-publishing is a very specialized market andstill in its infancy, individual consumers are becomingmore aware of the technological possibilities of pro-ducing ultra short runs of homemade products. AsSauvageau explains, “People visit our Website every daybecause they are researching how to print their own

After its founding 22 years ago, Multi-Reliure was purchased in 2007

by Yvon Sauvageau (pictured left),Louis Baribeau, and Patrick Paquet.

SEPTEMBER 2010 • PRINTACTION • 21

books: family histories, photograph albums, memoirs,and travelogues; so in September we’re planning a newinvestment in machinery to run quantities of two to 75copies, aiming at that smaller market of under 100 im-pressions.

“Practically every small city and village publishes acommemorative book, personalized student yearbooksare increasingly popular, teachers are compiling moreof their own course books of required readings, andschool administrators want to economize with sturdiertextbooks that will last up to five years. We also print alot of religious works and scriptures for every religion;they are steady sellers, and clients stockpile large quan-tities for several years, because the texts never change,”Sauvageau continues.

Multi is also seeing a large spike in perfect-boundprojects with 6-page slat folded fold-out covers. Of late,this particular product has grown so much thatSauvageau and his partners have invested almost half amillion dollars on equipment that can produce suchcovers in just one pass.

“Lately, publishers seem more interested in addingeye-catching add-ons to book covers to increase shelfappeal, things like these fold-out flaps, embossing, andfoil stamping,” says Sauvageau. “Kindles and iPads mayreduce run lengths, but they will not replace the fun ofhaving a book in our hands. Maybe it will be differentin 20 years but not now. People still bring books andmagazines on vacation and read them in bed becausethey help people relax.”

Specialty in Toronto: High-end bindery mergerSpecialties Graphic Finishers Ltd. is a different type ofbindery operation entirely: “All we do is unusual, high-end stuff,” says company owner and President NormBeange, who for decades has been actively involved indeveloping new techniques and markets for finishingapplications. In the 1970s, Beange assumed control ofthe Toronto business from his father, who started itback in 1939.

Specialties’ services include mechanical binding, in-tricate folding, and multiple variations on inserts. Otherexamples of the company’s recent custom orders in-clude 300 leatherbound albums of restored family pho-tographs that a business magnate distributed to hisfriends. They just completed 300 wedding invitationswith $5,000 worth of intricacies in engraving, die cut-ting, and gold leaf. Many jobs are menus, including redkidskin-bound restaurant menus costing $60 a pop,and bills of fare, table cards, and invitations for On-tario’s recent G-8 and G-20 Summits.

“Often our fanciest jobs are for designers who areselling what they are,” says Beange. “When you considerthe cost of a sales call, why not up the ante for anotherten bucks by dressing up your sample with a velvet-lined box? You only get one chance at first impressions.”

To build on Specialties’ unique finishing position inthe marketplace, in July 2010 Beange bought Toronto-based Anstey Book Binding. At the time of writing hewas in the process of merging Anstey’s 15 employeesand equipment into his own Warden-Avenue facilitywith a staff of 100 (downsized from 150 before the re-cession.) “I bought Anstey because of the good chem-istry between us, because some of what they do overlapswith us, and because they also do all kinds of things no-body else in Canada can do,” Beange explains.

Anstey was founded in 1882 as a trade bindery thatproduced a lot of law books until the mid-1990s, whenPresident Neil Stewart bought it. But the bottom soonfell out of that market. Stewart’s background in fineprintmaking and graphic design helped him to recog-nize the opportunity to serve the design field instead.“Right away I started offering letterpress as a product,along with foil stamping, embossing, and engraving. It was an insane thing to do,” he says. “The engravingespecially was incredibly expensive and wouldn’t be sustainable alone; but offering it to our customers as

Multi also often serves host as Kolbus’ demos for prospectiveNorth American clients

22 • PRINTACTION • SEPTEMBER 2010

one solution of many, combined with the education weprovide to our clientele, seems to work well for us.

“Our products are things that make us drool, likelimited-edition corporate pieces for small events atbanks and law firms that never get seen by the public,”continues Stewart. For example, as a fundraiser forworld literacy, Anstey recently printed a limited firstedition of a story by Rohinton Mistry combined with alimited-edition print by Tony Urquhart, one ofCanada’s leading contemporary artists.

“I always believed there would be a renaissance of let-terpress, and in fact it has become a hot property againbecause of a resurgence of interest in craft, the tactilequalities of materials, and exploring process,” he en-thuses. “When we first show design firms our stuff, veryoften they don’t have a job for us, but we give themsamples, and eventually a job will come out of it be-cause they want it to happen. Everybody wants to workon a showpiece for their portfolio. They might give usjust one project like that every two years, but everyoneloves it.

“In the last five years we have tried to work on moreefficient models in response to the challenges of down-sizing and having more smaller jobs rather than a fewbig ones. Just prior to selling the company, we realizedwe needed an infusion of new energy and technology tobuild the company, so the purchase by Specialties willallow us to focus on the next phase of Anstey,” explainsStewart, who will stay on with the company to grow thisside of the hidden printing market.

“It’s expensive to do things by hand, and while we willcontinue to be craft-oriented, we also need to build ef-ficiency into some of the things we do to survive thisvery aggressive marketplace. Books in particular arevery labour-intensive, so we want to introduce more au-tomation into our semi-automated production meth-ods, so that we can turn jobs around more quickly andget into other markets and expand. The purchase willalso enable me to focus more on design and sales, in-stead of having to worry about the day-to-day finances,”says Stewart.

Finishing with expertise: The importance ofbindery skill and client interactionBovay believes that in today’s diversified market stafftraining is paramount: “In order to manage we need totake in all the business we can get. Traditionally formost binderies labour represents 50 to 60 percent ofcosts, so to remain viable our question becomes: Inorder to cut payroll, do we need to cut services as well?Automation isn’t always the answer, since mostbinderies do a lot of handwork. We have certainly re-viewed efficiencies and purchased some equipment toautomate certain processes, for example a spiral coilformer to expedite coil binding. But to maintain our di-verse offerings, staff training is also important to us.”

Pacific is fortunate in that one of its staff members isa very skilled trainer who conducts intensive 20-hoursessions over several weeks to improve skills across theplant. The company is also careful to invest enoughtime to cross-train employees on a variety of equip-ment. “Historically, perfect binding operators were lacrème de la crème of bindery operators and would scoffat working in other departments,” says Bovay. “But thedirection of the future is to have all bindery employeescross-trained, and the employees like it because theycan log more work hours.”

Stewart says his interactions with clients have alsochanged: “Often our projects evolve through a very or-ganic process of discovery and a lot of collaboration be-tween the end user, the designer, and us. Lately we’rebecoming more of a resource centre for the graphiccommunity because we show and teach them thingsthey’re not getting in school, including providing train-ing workshops.

“I’m very aware that mentoring is a really importantthing,” Stewart emphasizes. “Through downsizing, cor-

porations eliminated their experienced people in mid-dle management who knew how things were done anddownloaded their tasks onto their suppliers. Nowsometimes my client contact will be somebody’s secre-tary with no training in printing or graphic design. Soyou have to be very patient and do a lot of handholding,because you need clientele who understand your serv-ices and value, and you need to make yourself relevantto a younger audience by helping them out and solvingtheir problems for them. If you want to stay in thegame, you just have to suck it up and move forward.”

Of course, it is becoming harder and harder for com-panies operating within the printing industry to conductlong-range forecasts when faced with so much budgetcompetition from on-screen communications, whethermobile or sitting on top of a desk. Their long-range plans

are further frustrated because finishing and printingequipment remain long-term capital investments. “Right now the big issue for binderies is determiningwhat’s happening in the marketplace in terms of mar-keting spend,” says Bovay. “I don’t think printing is deadby any means, but now we have to share the space withthe Web and other media, including radio and TV. For-merly printed collateral used to attract an 80-percentshare. I don’t think it’s going to return to the way it usedto be, but it will come back.”

“I’m not worried about the book disappearing,” fore-casts Stewart. “As we go into different devices for read-ing and delivering the printed word, we’re actuallymaking the traditional form of the book even stronger.

We’re doing shorter runs of books and making nicerbooks and combining them with pieces of limited-edi-tion art, pairing artists with writers.”

“Our company is positioned for growth now,” pre-dicts Beange. “[For example], I think restaurants willbe a continually growing industry in the future becausepeople are spending more time out. Restaurants willalso face an increasing problem of differentiation, sothey will need more high-end menus and promotionalitems. On the other hand, demand for one of our otherproducts may shrink. Fortunately, we have lots of eggs,but not too many in any one basket.”

“We’re still seeing lots of catalogues,” reportsSauvageau, “although instead of 8,000 catalogues,clients now print 2,000 copies, but they’re of betterquality and targeted to their best customers.”

Bovay agrees that catalogues seem to be rebounding:“In 2008 and 2009, one of Pacific’s U.S. clients, a big-name catalogue retailer, eliminated the printed versionof their catalogue and sold entirely online. But they re-turned to print with a bang in 2010 because their saleshad plummeted. Print is tactile and it goes out to thecustomer. With only a Website, you’re expecting thecustomer to land there, but maybe they’re not lookingfor you.”

Victoria Gaitskell is a veteran print and electronic journalistboth outside and inside the printing industry. Her interests in-clude business, personnel, and communication trends andstrategies. She is keen to share thoughts and discuss storyideas with readers at victoria.gaitskell@sympatico.ca

It’s expensive to do things by hand, and while we will

continue to be craft-oriented, we also need to build

efficiency into some of the things we do to survive this

very aggressive marketplace

Neil Stewart (left) and Norm Beange of Specialties

Graphic Finishers.

SEPTEMBER 2010 • PRINTACTION • 23

– Neil Stewart