#356 - How UV rotary and Direct to Shape Changes the Game, With Vaughn Pollman, President, Innovative Digital Systems

Yeah, it's great.

It's a really interesting part of the industry.

So can you just tell us a bit about your rotary UV printing system and why it's a little bit different from the traditional flatbed or screen printing approach and why that matters for the end product when it comes out?

Yeah, so rotary printing is a specialty application, right? It's a machinery that's designed to print on an object that is spinning around rapidly.

For anybody that's not familiar with UV LED printing, you've got a liquid ink that is going through a printhead and the ink is being deposited onto the print service at really high speeds with a lot of control and the ink is being cured or dried by activating photo initiators that are in the ink.

It's the UV LED light that is curing or drying that ink.

Compared to flatbed printing, in flatbed printing, I have an array of printheads that are on a gantry.

It's moving left to right across a flat bed of product that's laid out.

The ink is being deposited at controlled locations across the print bed.

In rotary printing, I'm spinning a product like on a lathe underneath the print heads and the ink is going what's called direct to object onto the product.

And so our rotary printers, we were among the first developers of equipment in the US that specialized in this rotary printing.

And I suppose obviously direct to shape or direct to object is such a great way of being able to print on things that we don't necessarily usually print on.

Like you say, in terms of what you guys specialize in, I think I'm right in saying it's kind of drinkware, promotional products.

That for you guys is the sweet spot.

Am I right in saying that? Yeah, yeah.

So what drives that demand? What is driving that demand in the space? Yeah.

And are there other areas that you see direct to shape taking off in?

Absolutely, yeah.

So in the rotary printing, the machines are designed to print on objects that are cylindrical in shape, that are conical in shape.

So it really was product development.

It was, okay, customer demand said they wanted to put logos or some sort of image onto a growing market space, which was drinkware in the promotional product space.

Drinkware just has moved quickly up the charts in terms of what customers are interested in.

And it can move very well.

It can be made at high volume.

It can be personalized for events, for names, for people's photos, for funny sayings, for your favorite sports team.