How does a 70-year-old printing company stay ahead of modern trends?
How a 70-Year-Old Swedish Company Uses Xerox to Create the Future of Print and Digital Marketing
For Arkitektkopia, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, the answer is to embrace the latest printing and automation software technologies provided by Xerox. It uses 12 printers and automation to produce between 680,000 and one million pages per week for some of its more than 6,000 different customers across architecture, education, finance, retail and more.
“In particular, Arkitektkopia uses its Xerox® Baltoro® HF Inkjet Press to produce crisp, vivid color prints, quickly, in any conceivable number of copies for larger or smaller jobs, and far more economically than it would cost to print on a higher-end offset printer, with similar quality,” says Arkitektkopia’s CEO Gunnar Duintjer.
In fact, Anders Åhlmans, Arkitektkopia’s manager of digital printing, says that 50 percent of its educational and commercial jobs are printed on its Baltoro machines. And it can do so while customizing each job to each client with Xerox’s Baltoro automation software. “Every job is a one-off,” says Åhlmans.
“Our competitive advantage is that we can provide a wide range of products and services to our customers. We can, as a partner, solve all our customers' needs, and they receive just one invoice—easy, just in time and with a minimum of administration.”
Arkitektkopia was founded in 1951 by married couple Östen and Inga Grankvist to provide copies of architectural blueprints for construction projects. As readers may have guessed, the firm’s name translates to “Architect’s Copy.” Among them are some of Sweden’s most famous buildings such as Vällingby Centrum, Malmo's “Turning Torso” and Stockholm’s Globe.
In the intervening decades, the firm has remained under the control of the Grankvist family, but it has acquired over 200 smaller firms and expanded into 15 franchise shops across the country with nearly $47 million in annual revenue by embracing future technologies at the forefront of print and digital media.
These days, Arkitektkopia produces far more than just blueprints—it prints everything for the building industry, including property maintenance to the retail and events market, regardless of media (print or digital), size or material chosen.
“Today, we print a lot of manuals, a lot of educational materials, a lot of direct mail,” says Åhlmans, a nearly 30-year veteran. “It is easier to remember what we read than what we just hear.”
When time comes to print premium designs with special effects, such as gold, silver or metallic, Arkitektkopia relies on shimmering embellishments with real metal particles in the toner provided by the Xerox® Iridesse® Production Press platform. Arkitektkopia doesn’t just send its prints in bulk—it handles packaging and mailing to individual recipients as well.
“You can do a lot of different things with printing and direct mailing,” says Duintjer.
For customers with lots of paper forms, Arkitektkopia can handle pickup, transportation, scanning, digitization, organization and long-term cloud storage of their documents, as well as export it on-demand to other media.
To help with the need to design graphics that work as well in print as they do on the screens of mobile devices or computers, Arkitektkopia retains a department of seven full-time employees who work directly with clients on the visual design of their campaigns and materials.
When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out around the world in late 2019 and early 2020, Arkitektkopia filled its e-commerce shop with relevant printed signs, decals and materials for customers to use in their own businesses to promote social distancing and other health and safety measures. Though the year proved challenging for the print industry, Duintjer and Åhlmans predict it will see a major rebound in 2021 as COVID-19 vaccines are distributed.
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