Print Is Dead? Only If You Stop Reinventing Yourself · Primary Color · Dan Hirt – President

Friends still ask Primary Color CEO Dan Hirt whether he is really still in printing. After all, haven’t we been hearing for decades that print is dead?

For Hirt, the answer is much more interesting than simply yes or no.

Printing runs deep in his family. His father’s uncle worked in stone lithography in Nice, France, producing those wonderfully colorful tourist postcards made from black-and-white photographs and hand-coloring. His parents later moved from Switzerland to South Africa, where they established a successful printing company. Dan and his brother returned to Switzerland to complete apprenticeships in the graphic industry before the family eventually reunited in California.

Primary Color started in prepress, at a time when prepress could be an extremely profitable business. But Hirt could see what had happened to typesetters and realized that prepress alone wouldn’t last forever. So the company moved into printing.

Then print changed.

The dot-com boom shifted marketing budgets online. Run lengths became shorter. Traditional print volumes declined. And rather than waiting for everything to return to what it had once been, Primary Color continued changing with its customers.

Today, Hirt says they hardly describe themselves simply as a printing company. Primary Color works with design, structural engineering, wood and metal fabrication, temporary and permanent displays, retail, events, and much more — with print becoming one component of a much larger solution.

Technology follows the same philosophy.

A Heidelberg perfecting press addresses longer-run offset work, while the Landa covers the range from one to the thousands. In large format, Primary Color has worked extensively with Agfa technology and continues investing as quality, productivity, automation, and customer requirements evolve.

Operating in California also means that efficiency isn’t optional. Equipment has to deliver more output in less space and, increasingly, with fewer people — particularly as experienced offset operators retire and become harder to replace.

But perhaps the most important message in this INKISH film isn’t about any particular machine.

It’s about accepting that yesterday isn’t coming back.

Customers probably aren’t suddenly going to start ordering all those brochures again. Markets change. Marketing changes. Technology changes. And Hirt believes the job of a CEO is to keep a finger on the customer’s pulse, understand what’s happening inside the factory, know what technology is becoming available — and constantly connect those three things.

Because print isn’t dead.

But waiting for the past to return might be.