CJ King Expands into lenticular

CJ King & Company Printers, of Perth, Western Australia, is a progressive and innovative 12-year old printing company which, for the past 7 years, has focused exclusively on ‘Trade Only’ business. The company currently provides printing services to over 4,200 printers, designers and print brokers throughout Australia and New Zealand.

Says Chris King, director of the company, “Our aim has always been to build a large client base by offering a wide range of services and a cost-effective pricing structure. These capabilities, coupled with our aggressive approach to marketing, are designed to encourage retail printers, designers and print brokers to choose us in preference to any other trade printer in the country. “

King adds, “We’re not afraid to invest our resources in developing a growing range of new and innovative products that give our customers an ever increasing income stream. Investing in our own growth has always been paramount. Our introduction of new and exclusive products like plastic cards, UV stickers and most recently, 3D/moving image printing using software from HumanEyes Technologies – these are the types of activities that us apart from other trade printers.”

Moving into lenticular

CJ King has long been a Heidelberg shop. It installed the world’s first 8 color Heidelberg Perfector 52 press at the beginning of 2005, and in 2007 added a second 8 color Perfector. CJ King plans to introduce a 10 color Anicolour press in 2008. The company also installed the only Heidelberg 5 color 52 + coater and UV Flexo 74 presses in Western Australia in 2007. Overall, CJ King has 31 individual printing units installed and, according to King, its full range of Heidelberg printing presses and metal plate setters are ideally profiled and color managed to deliver consistent, high quality printed products at all times.

It was after it took delivery of a Heidelberg SM 72 UV press in 2006 that CJ King decided to explore lenticular printing. The company embarked on the journey with the support of Chris Graham, Managing Director of Premedia Technologies, master distributor of HumanEyes in Australia and New Zealand.

Says Chris Temov, Business Development Manager at CJ King, “We started conservatively, sourcing a number of sample prints and searching the internet for as much information about lenticular as we could find. Ultimately we came across an article in a digital printing magazine about HumanEyes Technologies and its 3D software. We contacted them directly at first and after a consultation with the experts at HumanEyes, we began our initial testing of their software.”

For a few months the company kept quiet about its new capabilities, testing and fine tuning the process until it was sure it could the quality results its customers would require.

Says Temov, “Our somewhat isolated location in Western Australia and the lack of outside lenticular printing technical expertise in our area lead us to believe we should invest adequate time and money into getting it right. With support from HumanEyes, Chris Graham of Premedia, and one of the local Heidelberg technicians, we tweaked and streamlined our lenticular production process, and developed the confidence to go to our customers with our offering.”

Marketing makes the difference

In preparation for launching its new lenticular printing services, the company developed a price structure and a series of instructional PDFs with which it could fulfill leads from everyone who inquired about lenticular. Knowing that the application is relatively new to its client base, the company wanted to make sure that it had adequate materials available to explain the process, how lenticular can be used in marketing, and the file production requirements.

Next came a mass email campaign addressed to over 3800 customers. The result was an amazing, with many hundreds of requests for samples.

Says Temov, “We’ve always had great success with promotional emailings. Fortunately, our advance preparation proved worthwhile. We continue to receive around 10 - 15 calls or emails a day requesting information about lenticular.”

With live customer orders just beginning to come in, the company has not stopped promotion. It published an article about Lenticular in a UK based print marketing publication called PrintingTalk, supplied 7000 lenticular covers attached to On Demand magazine at the beginning of 2008, supplied 7000 lenticular DL inserts to Print21 magazine in July, and another 8000 inserts to Print21 for its Trans Tasman edition later in 2008.

Today Temov’s team is integrating the newest version of HumanEyes software, HumanEyes Producer 3D – and Temov says that the product “is magnificent,” and that he and his colleagues are enthusiastic about using it.

“From the interest we’ve already seen,” Temov says, “it’s clear that we’re on to something with our new capabilities to provide 3D and moving images courtesy of HumanEyes. Undoubtedly our new lenticular printing capabilities will be one of the keys to our continued growth in the coming months. As a company, CJ King’s ongoing commitment to implementing new and innovative printing techniques like lenticular printing set us apart from other wholesale printers in Australia and in turn help our clients set themselves apart from their competitors.”

CJ King & Company Printers
5 Gibberd Road, Balcatta
Western Australia, 6021
Phone: +61 8 6241 2000
Fax: +61 8 6241 2099



Contact: Chris Temov – Manager Business Development - c.temov@cjking.com.au