Christoph Gamper · CEO · DURST · LabelExpo Barcelona 2025
Morten from Inkish interviews Christoph Gamper, CEO of Durst Group, at LabelExpo in Barcelona. Despite the extreme heat in Hall 3, Christoph shares that business at Durst is just as “hot,” with the company continuing to grow and now having over 4,200 systems installed worldwide, including more than 550 digital engines across 33 countries. He explains that Durst’s success is driven by a collective mindset within the company—while they don’t aim to be the biggest, they strive to be the best in technology. Everyone at Durst has bought into this goal, creating what he describes as a big, happy family pushing forward together.
Christoph says he spends little time in his office and is often traveling to meet customers, attend trade shows, and visit markets like China and the United States, ensuring he stays close to the market and to customers’ needs. He sees his role as leading the innovation roadmap while also “sniffing the markets” to deeply understand customer pain points, with Durst’s mission being to remove those pains. He credits Durst’s success to its strong mid-management, close collaboration between teams, and a culture where leadership actively engages with both staff and customers.
He also outlines Durst’s expansion beyond labels into other areas, especially packaging, including corrugated and folding carton, through Durst Group’s partnership with Koenig & Bauer under Koenig & Bauer Durst. In addition, Durst remains committed to large-format printing, ceramics, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, and new ventures in software. Christoph highlights All4Labels as a customer and mentions being particularly proud of All4Site, a company he founded in New York, brought back to Europe, and which is now rapidly growing under Redstone Capital with major clients like Nike.
He concludes that while not every segment develops at the same speed, Durst is growing strongly, expanding strategically, and maintaining its focus on innovation, quality, and customer satisfaction.
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Thu September 18th
Julie Watson · CEO · Ultimate Tech · Lab...
Julie explains that Ultimate has been investing heavily in R&D over the past few years, expanding its solutions beyond commercial print into new segments such as labels, digital packaging, and wide format. The company’s goal is to eliminate manual prepress work by enabling full hands-free automation from web storefronts or MIS systems through to printing and finishing. At the booth, they are demonstrating automated label production with an HP Indigo press and a GM LC350 laser die-cutter, showing how their software dynamically handles mixed jobs, different shapes, sizes, barcodes, and changeovers all on a single roll. Julie notes that digital printing is changing the market by enabling shorter runs, personalization, and mass customization, while also creating complexity from managing many SKUs and batches—something Ultimate’s solutions can fully automate. The system can even manage extended content labels such as pharmaceutical booklets and handle batching and separation for multi-customer rolls directly from CSV or MIS data, with no manual touch points. She highlights Ultimate’s unique strength in centralizing workflows: instead of separate imposition software tied to each device, Ultimate offers a unified platform that can drive diverse applications—commercial, mailing, books, labels, and wide format—through a single pipeline. This reduces training and maintenance complexity while improving scalability. Julie adds that while many customers still run Ultimate on-premise, the software can also run in the cloud, on Windows, Mac, or Linux servers, and can dynamically scale for peak seasons. This flexibility allows customers to start small, expand capacity when needed, and process maximum volumes during high-demand periods. She concludes that this approach helps converters accept more orders, shorten turnaround times, and boost revenue during peak seasons.