Welcome to Over the Skype from Germany!

My name is Andreas Weber.

I am managing the DACH region for INKISH here.

And today I am excited to welcome a very special disciple of

Gutenberg.

Günter Thomas.

In the wonderful Ruhr region and…

Günter, perhaps you could introduce yourself.

Yes.

Yes my name is Günter Thomas.

In fact, this year is my 50th jubilee in my company.

Corona came along with it.

Nevertheless we will celebrate it properly.

In August 1970 we had the idea to make printed materials more

beautiful,

to provide medicines for printed communications.

And today we have been able to accomplish this

to a large extent.

But there are always new ideas waiting for us,

and so we are located here,

in the middle of the Ruhr area, as you would say.

In the Ruhrpott, two kilometres from Schalke 04,

who is not doing so well either.

And we hope that everything will get better again.

We are also suffering from the Corona crisis, a bit like

almost all printing companies.

I’d like to say this very carefully,

but I think we’ll be able to overcome it.

Just like many other crises.

And I hope that we will be able to send beautiful prints

from the Ruhr area to destinations all over the world in the near

future.

But that means at the age of 50 –

then you must have been a child when you started.

Or am I wrong?

Indeed.

I started my apprenticeship at the age of 13

and at 16 I was the youngest apprentice printer in Germany.

You can say that.

And at 22 I thought to myself:

Now it’s time for you to set up your own business.

Yes – and since that time you can calculate

how old the person sitting in front of your lens is.

Yes, the lens hasn’t burst yet, that’s all right.

And when I think back now –

I think we both know each other about half of those 50 years.

And of course there are many special experiences

in my memory and emphatically burned into my internal hard drive,

so to speak, which is great.

The most surprising thing was when I visited you,

at your place in Gelsenkirchen,

and you said: Come with me, boy.

And you walked with me to your outsourced showroom.

And that was an Aldi store.

Do you remember that?

And in this Aldi store you explained premium print to me.

Can you recapitulate that a bit?

Yes –

printed communication surrounds us everywhere.

One must not only think that printed communication is in the form of

catalogues and advertising brochures and so on,

but printed communication exists on many levels,

sometimes more beautiful, sometimes more intense,

sometimes more appealing and less appealing.

And so we both went on a let me call it shopping tour together.

Afterwards we went through several other shops,

except for Aldi, but then we explored together.

What is Premium actually?

Where is Premium hiding?

Why Premium?

And there I remember, if I may interject briefly,

that you said, pointing to a bag of dog food for 99 cents with gold

foil.

And you said that, look at the consumer product.

This cheap product is made better than Deutsche Bank’s annual report.

Yes

It was like that.

And because you need to do a lot of advertising for the customer.

And you can’t lie to the customer with a deceptive packaging.

We have seen that many times –

this does not refer to Deutsche Bank.

I don’t want to deny that these balance sheets, which were wonderfully

spiced up, also from the outside.

But in the end, they’ve also changed over many years as deceptive

packaging.

And the viewer, the consumer, must have confidence in the brand,

in the packaging, that he does not get a deceptive packaging,

but that he basically has a sense of quality from the outside,

what touches him and what sticks with him.

This has always been the topic we have mostly focused on.

Now you said you’ve completed an apprenticeship –

as a printer.

All of a sudden we’re in the realm of high finance,

luxury goods and the very noble brand worlds.

That’s a huge step forward.

Who are you?

What got you into this situation?

Maybe you can also bring us a little bit closer to the business

philosophy

that you have developed.

Yes.

It was pushed from the very beginning.

4C plus grey will not be sufficient enough to make a living.

You have to touch the human being.

You have to go out and meet people in their world of taste.

You have to offer people trust,

and you have to go and create a product that pleases them.

Let me explain this to you with a very simple example.

When I do something for a fruit and vegetable vendor,

he has to feel when he holds a printed product in his hands.

Yes.

And he feels his peach on it.

And he walks up and says:

“That’s me. That’s my product.

So, in other words…we’ve always thought that way in all our business

areas.

I beg your pardon – but hit the heart and hit the wallet.

This has always been one of our lines of argument.

That didn’t mean that the whole thing is 08/15 and interchangeable,

but to bring it realistic and authentic on paper,

cardboard, with color and effects.

That was always our approach.

This means that the print must not be produced lovelessly.

We’re talking about commodity products.

And I think that’s exactly where most of your colleagues,

especially in the commercial printing sector, get into trouble.

They produce something that is more or less only produced under

efficiency aspects.

But you are clearly aiming at the effect for yourself,

your customers and their customers.

That’s right.

Because I have to think beyond that.

Are my clients successful with what I put in their hands?

Ultimately, I make a periodical out of it,

and we live by periodically repeating something in the consumer area.

In other words, the contact of customers to us

because we have inspired them and because it has made them successful.

And that is something more essential.

And we manufacture products here in our houses.

I simply want to express it.

We make steel catalogues promising success to steel merchants.

In such a presentation that every customer who holds this in his hands

will have a confidence in this dealer.

And when I then simply see what some jewelry and jeweler dealers

publish,

they actually have to take an example of how such guys do it,

how they push their business on the one hand and on the other hand a

lot of – what I see for example in the jeweler areas.

That’s not gold, that’s Düsseldorf lion-mustard.

And that is simply impossible with us.

And we are not prepared to have these things in the end.

We simply don’t want that, we want to tell the customer:

When you work with our products, there is a recognition value,

authenticity.

That is you, our customer.

And you can sell these products to your customers in your own

identity.

If I may say so, clients, so to speak, who are being called, work.

And I have seen those examples you mentioned, steel companies.

And of course there are metallic effects on the print.

That’s not just color as we know it,

but you also have, if I know it correctly, in addition to this

creative potential,

access to the brand – you speak one language with your customers,

who are also more likely to be friends and partners.

On the other hand, of course, a profound technical know-how.

That does have a history.

Because I think you’ve been able

to play a major role in the printing press industry.

Yes.

I think I’d like to say.

If it hadn’t been for us, who had butterflies in our stomachs,

there wouldn’t be any large, long printing presses

like the ones in the packaging sector today.

Where you throw a packet of nails in the front

and a prefabricated house comes out the back, as I always say.

That had always been our intention, and so –

with the support of the Federal Ministry for

the Environment and Nature Conservation –

we developed a printing press technology

with Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG.

Where afterwards a lot of chewing and coppering was done.

For example, from some of the relevant printing press manufacturers.

So – the idea of long machines was our idea, that’s just the way it

is.

The idea was born here,

and I was supported at the time by great people

from Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG,

who unfortunately are no longer there.

And that’s why I’m grateful that I was able to drive this development

forward

with these people and with these engineers and with these marketing

people.

This went so far that,

if I understand correctly,

you combined different printing processes in one machine.

It was.

That means if you see a machine in our shop today,

it’s 35 meters long,

and we work in flexo areas.

We work in offset areas,

but mostly we work in UV.

And you can see the finished product with us, so to say.

Our businesses have also changed a lot over the years.

And the customer gets everything here from one source,

and he can stay here.

And within a few minutes he gets a product

that he otherwise could not have realized.

Here he can have it done, and that is what we are well-known for.

And that’s why customers like coming to us.

In other words, this is a very different kind of contact you have,

which is special, if I may say so.

You have no distribution.

So one always asks oneself: How is that possible?

Yes, we actually have a well functioning marketing department

and we have extremely great products that we deliver all over the

world.

What we have, of course.

We have very good trade show booths

at the luxury trade shows of the world

and we have many contacts that include America, England, and Paris a

lot.

And this is where a lot of contacts are forged,

contacts we then develop over the years.

That’s how it works for us.

Because when you’re in Paris.

Paris is the Mecca of luxury par excellence,

be it in fashion, if you take Milan, if you take London.

You meet totally different people there

who are willing to do these things.

And if only you would think in money terms.

We think a lot of butterflies in our stomachs,

and we just try to live our lives by it.

Because life is a similar story and unique.

You can’t take anything with you, everything is borrowed,

everything stays on the earth.

And if you just come here,

live only according to economic components,

then that would be, for me personally,

that would be no way at all to be allowed and able to live my life in

this way.

Now you said something very important.

You don’t just wait for customers to come to you.

You go where the customers are.

And if I understand it correctly,

this must of course also be a demanding clientele

that values getting the best, not just anything.

Hence Paris.

On the other hand, from where you’re sitting right now…

You can’t see everything.

You’d have to walk around with a camera.

We’re a bit limited at the moment.

But I got great footage on your website.

Now you’ve created an environment too.

It actually looks like a top agency somewhere,

Madison Avenue, New York City.

Yes, yes, indeed.

It all has to add up a bit.

You have to present a credibility.

That’s very important.

So when you walk into our hall, our printing press hall,

you think you’re in a laboratory.

And it has to be all about ethics and cleanliness,

it has to be all slick, just like our trend house.

And that’s why some good customers come to us and say:

I feel safe there. I feel protected there.

And we enjoy developing with GT.

Nothing is simply scrubbed through here.

Time is not a factor at GT.

You don’t have to pay him according to time either,

you have to pay him afterwards.

By emotion.

That’s the most important thing after the product,

what comes out afterwards.

I’m not talking about some gamblers or some tea merchant or anything.

This is what we do. We have to enjoy all these products ourselves.

Meaning, if I may add that?

Premium doesn’t actually mean anything elitist,

but to achieve the maximum that can be achieved with printed matter.

And I personally know, I know many of your colleagues.

And you have great admiration.

Peter Sommer from Elanders, who says:

“Gee, Günter Thomas, that’s a cool guy.”

Even if he does completely different things in his kind of business,

what you create is still very popular.

For me it has a lot to do with magic.

Maybe you can explain a bit more about how you compose it,

because actually you always bring an orchestra together

and you are the director of a house

that really drives the various talents to top performances.

Of course not only in your house,

but also in the agencies you work with.

If they are involved, the photographers and above all,

the brand owners, is that right?

Yes, indeed.

Well, I want to say presumptuously.

We also study Buten a lot.

In other occupations as well.

So, that means on the one hand:

I like to sit down on the Spanish Steps in Rome.

Yes – for example.

Then you look down there and see many,

big display windows and many fashion brands and so on.

And I look closely at why a certain group of clients

always stops in front of this or that shop window?

This is staged.

I go downstairs and look at it and a really great designer,

who staged these shop windows like this.

And I say, that’s scene-setting,

and look more deeply at what he was thinking while doing it and so on.

After all, all we want to do is to have a stage.

That means just what people like.

We just do what people like.

When you buy a jacket or buy a shirt.

You are like: Does the collar itch?

How does the fabric feel?

And so on.

These are all things which, after all, make us say:

This is the return to the senses.

The design that we humans are made of.

And this is actually a very simple situation.

The return to the senses, the design that we humans are made of.

Human DNA. Sight, hearing, smell, touch, et cetera.

The things we just love.

There are things we like.

That’s quite a few.

And we try to combine them on paper,

cardboard and other media materials.

And there was a very special situation two years ago.

I was allowed to help out a little.

You and Mondi tested something together.

Normally you work on coated paper.

And suddenly people from Mondi came into this beautiful trend house,

and I may say they were very inspired,

because they had never seen such a ‘printing company” before.

And then they came with their natural papers, uncoated papers.

And you worked something out together.

How did it go from there?

Mondi brought some new papers onto the market.

We simply approached these papers and cardboard boxes with brute

force.

We said we’d test this carton too.

Dyed cardboard, two-ply and so on.

Now let’s test it out.

Until the stuff, as we say in the Ruhr area, twitches and we have

tested everything

from RGBs. And of embossed foil printing. Of cold foil.

And everything there is. From opaque white, to UV.

And so on.

To say there finally, what does the product actually give:

cardboard from Mondi.

I must honestly say, we came out with results that we didn’t know

before.

You know – I’ll tell you now the Queen of England, so to speak,

out and on the left side of the effect Andy Warhol.

And it was an extremely great story for me to work with this medium.

And I guess we were all surprised about it,

and it still impresses me to this day.

I just want to express that.

A true experiment.

It’s great that Mondi’s getting involved in something like this too,

because it could’ve been a total failure.

Yes, sure. Indeed.

You’re standing at the beginning of something.

Of course, we have some experience, but they were special fabrics.

And I must honestly admit that I was baffled

that this cardboard had all that potential.

The pliability, the stiffness, the rigidity, the strength, extreme

blinker embossing.

That it almost fell out the back.

And the cardboard went with it.

Well, I have to say, I honestly enjoyed it very, very much.

I never expected this.

That is why we were all very proud of the result.

This means that practically a test form has been created,

and all sorts of things have been combined on this test form.

And now – I can imagine.

You’re not the kind of person who would do something like that

and keep everything to yourself.

I’m sure you’ve introduced it to your friends and customers.

How did you do that?

And how did they react?

Yes –

They were impressed by the mix of coloured cardboard boxes

and what was brought up on top of them.

If you have glitter on black,

a black natural cardboard with glitter.

Yes

it has a crazy effect.

Of course you have to hit the glitter tone that matches the black.

Or you can take a picture with only opaque white on black cardboard.

That means a monochrome on black cardboard.

You end up using the cardboard like – yes – like a grid, so to say.

And build up your opaque white forms there.

Completely different printed products have come out.

Completely different prints and so on.

Yes.

And which, let’s say, is also very, very important.

If you can distribute this to the world.

And if you can develop the final product.

Sender and receiver.

And I think we also have to

but I can’t do that alone in the concerted action

so that we can bring print back into the foreground.

We have to do all of this many times in a concerted action.

I think the Mondi clientele has given a big round of applause, too.

That’s definitely what I heard.

I was also told that when we had a meeting just a few weeks ago –

and it was very well accepted.

We would like to continue along this path.

I can return that echo.

Pardon?

I can return the positive feedback.

Because Mondi works a lot on social media

and posted it into these creative communities that they can address.

And in fact there was exactly this feedback.

But for me it also means –

our topic is still – print and the digital age.

That means that you actually need to be a printer who dominates with

this impetus

like you do, like your whole team does.

These are not only mature people,

there are also many young people,

very committed individuals.

And that means what you can achieve there,

that fits into the world as it is.

And especially when it becomes

a sensual experience to deal with printed materials.

The message: Especially in the print sector, it can be the first or

last thing to hold in your hands from a product or company.

And therefore, you only have one shot.

And this shot must be accurate.

Now I see some products which then work with a so-called forced

refinement.

Usually, they’ll show you everything they can do.

No.

You have to understand the product, the people, the business.

And since we are very, very much in the cosmetics business,

also with developments and designs.

And we also have very, very loyal customers there as well.

We see all our products,

we can also see if they are in the duty free shops,

so many developments that we have only done

where we did not produce because the quantities

have simply become so huge and so large.

Instead, we have only dedicated ourselves to development, so to say.

But unfortunately, what you see again and again,

and we observe this when you make a good product,

on the one hand,

you cannot believe how much is being covered,

how much is stolen and how much is imitated.

And partly among world known brands.

This means that one world brand steals the idea

from the other – to put it in German – yes, the idea.

And that is for me – I’ve never seen that before –

and I’ve never noticed it before.

But that has become noticeably more.

If I may express it like this.

That is, it is simply copied,

but then again mostly under the premise

that the original idea that was there is not understood.

And then it appears as if.

Exactly that. It’s happening to us so often these days.

In other words, a design to make a quick buck,

to produce the instantaneous water heater.

And I saw it recently with a very simple example.

We are able to make a lot of products,

especially for my friends from 4711, forty-seven eleven.

And since we’re in the corona period right now.

It was in the magazines and media and TV how 4711 is helping against

corona –

because it is very much interspersed with alcohol.

You wouldn’t believe how we were contacted at trade shows and such.

Could we reproduce the packaging?

And because it comes from us too.

And that’s already on the verge of legality,

which is happening there to some extent.

So it’s also about packaging, about trust.

We create trust.

To make a quick buck on the one hand.

That is – that was not experienced in the past.

You know, people used to counterfeit money in the past.

But not such things in order to make a quick buck.

You’ve got that a lot, too. Yes.

There’s a greed behind it somewhere

that has really become a very mutated form of sensuality.

Apparently.

Indeed.

Indeed, indeed.

So I could show you examples of world brands,

where the origin is, and how that is afterwards at every airport in

the world.

And you would grab yourself by the head and say:

How is such a thing possible?

How ripped off can you be to copy this?

From a cover to a champagne brand –

and you see the same, it’s only slightly changed.

And it is. Yes, that is so close to counterfeiting.

Let me just put it this way.

Then we’ll leave it at that point,

because we don’t want to talk bad about the world.

We are both really full of life and joy and love.

Of course, there’s still a talent in you,

or an enthusiasm that we still have not discussed…

…but which I was able to experience.

You are – in the background, you can see the lettering:

Brands, Print and Rock’n’Roll.

You are an enthusiastic Rock’n’Roll musician

and can turn a print room into a concert hall.

That means there is a great affinity to art and artists.

And maybe it can give us a little bit of insight,

especially because you also work with visual artists, not only with

music.

And that would be so at the end of the first interview.

We will certainly have many more conversations.

It would be great for us to participate in that form of sensuality.

Yeah.

We have always come up to the mark –

we have done so for many decades.

Music connects, business divides –

that was actually always our motto,

And you know yourself if you want to reach the person,

with a musicality, with an attention. You yourself, you offer him

the most of the best, try to do it anyway.

Then a spark jumps over

and is basically because then we have also always manufactured

products at the same time,

where we then also said, there is music in it.

So that means you’ve built the bridge. The bridge of the scenery.

If you go to great rock events today,

they consist almost only 80 percent of explosions, of light, of

effects and so on.

And we simply always said that with music

we put these effects on paper and so on.

And since I was on the road as a professional for many years.

My people have always given me the freedom to wander the world.

And I was trying to inspire people with music.

That was of course a great marketing tool for us.

And many of my employees have a musical background

and are also well educated.

At some point they only had to learn how to calculate.

Great, great professionals, great musicians.

And that’s why we were allowed to be on the road

and present it in many concert halls all over the world.

No deception, but simply music that touches our hearts

and that ultimately leads to what we have done,

to create simply awesome marketing through music.

That had been the meaning, so to say.

So to speak, sensual survival is still transferred through music.

And we also know from dementia research done on all these things.

There is nothing as special as music to stimulate the entire brain

and also to avoid long-term bad consequences.

It’s very nice that you’re giving us insight into this.

Do you have any clips on YouTube?

Where one can have a look?

Or on your website?

I’m sure there is.

On the one hand I like to be a stage person,

on the other hand I am reserved in these areas.

And as you know, I have done a lot for Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG.

And there are certainly still some things on there, from YouTube or on

YouTube, or better said,

and yes, if someone wants to look at it, he’s welcome to do so.

But it has always been with us – just like in earlier years.

The Print Brand and Rock and Roll – Show.

That is simply what drives us forward.

And also our guitars are very beautiful.

Very nice.

Now there’s just one more point.

You told me in our short preliminary talk that

you had done something great with a visual artist,

so to speak, who lives in the neighbourhood with you,

which again has a very obvious reference to the present.

And you also said that it was already printed and packaged.

Are you allowed to talk about it already?

Yeah,

it’s not printed and packaged yet.

It’s being printed and packaged.

We are currently taking it into account and

the artist, Christian Nienhaus, and my team had the idea

that we should perhaps show a bit more

humbleness for the world as it is right now.

And it’s not easy for anyone, including printers,

the manufacturing industry and so on.

He then has one of his works of art,

he made it available to us and then dedicated it to the subject

– Covid19.

The Coronavirus, where the world is drifting apart,

and all the newspaper reports about it.

And he slightly manipulated that.

I’d have to get up, and then I could maybe go to our room no.2

and go get that.

That’d be fine, or what do you think?

Maybe we’ll just make an extra video of that.

I would be very happy about that,

where we could even broadcast the whole thing from your room.

The difficulty is always to catch on the screen,

so to speak, how beautiful print is.

I have some great printed material from you

and can hold it in the camera right now.

But you just don’t get anything out of it.

Remember, this came in the mail at the beginning of the year.

And you can see it’s reflective, and it’s a little shiny.

But you don’t really get that impression over the camera.

You have to pick it up.

And that’s probably the same with the artwork.

And if I understand it correctly,

Christian Nienhaus, he always has compositions where he paints

-with oil paint and collages at the same time.

And how did you implement that?

Just a very brief description in words?

Yes – that’s where our printing technology comes in. Of course.

The decisive factor here is the lito processing.

It is also possible that we are working on a lito for three to four

weeks.

So that means – for a poster we have three or four weeks to work on

it,

after it has been scanned perfectly before.

And then our work actually begins.

Because we emphasize that our product must look exactly like the

artwork.

This is a very, very important thing for us.

And so we then work with different techniques

to make sure that in the end we get a product that looks exactly like

the artwork.

And the artist also lives from it, not only from the original.

You can also purchase such things from him.

It’s really one to one as it was actually painted.

And as they say:

Do not make me broke.

Because it looks exactly like the original,

and that’s what we try to add with all our

professionalism and with our equipment,

which we have here in our houses.

This is very, very assorted in terms of color scheme.

It is coming from the silkscreen, it is from the idea, it is from the

perception.

We have media designers who also learned photography at the same time,

learned it properly and completed it.

They also studied at the same time and are media designers.

It starts with the idea that in the end it will look exactly as if you

had an original.

Yes.

And we can certainly do that in the next interview we

can present it here again.

It’ be our pleasure. I’d like to thank you very much for your time.

We’ve been chatting for almost 40 minutes now.

And then we’re at the limit where we say:

Better make it a second and third video.

But thank you very much for letting us dive into your world

in such a pleasant way.

And I think a discussion and a talk about print could not be more

inspiring.

I always say art is the highest form of communication.

If you can prove that renowned artists do what you can,

not only in print, but in creation, in the premedia field.

A very important thing.

Perhaps we can discuss it again at a later date.

Then these are the highest consecrations, so to speak.

And dear Günter Thomas, best regards to your charming wife

and your staff and colleagues.

From me on behalf of the INKISH team and yes…

…as you always say with you: Give hat?

Indeed.

Lots of love. All the best.

Thank you.

I was glad that without rehearsal, without question,

we both have have created a great piece of communication out of

nowhere.

Many thanks also to Mainz.

Are you sitting in Mainz right now?

I’m in Frankfurt, but I can wave to Gutenberg’s town,

it’s within sight, so to say.

Yes –

All my love, all the best to your dear wife, too.

And I don’t think it will be long before we meet again.

It was nice to see you again.

And because you – that’s the flip side,

always for me, and it’s not phishing for compliments,

have always been a great, super great companion.

We never need a trial.

As I said, we’ve always tried out everything to rock.

So once again, many, many thanks to you.

We hear, and we see – in this sense:

The return to the senses.

All the best.

Thanks a lot, dear Günter Thomas,

always called GT by everyone.

Dear viewers, I hope you had fun with this INKISH programme in German

for the German-speaking countries.

And I’m afraid we will meet again.

Bye and have a good time.

All the best.