At Printing United in Orlando, Pat McGrew from INKISH meets with Mike Herold, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at EMT, to discuss the company’s transformation, new technology, and growing role in the print finishing market. Herold explains that while EMT has an 85-year legacy of engineering and manufacturing excellence, the company today operates with the energy and mindset of a startup. This combination of heritage and innovation, he says, allows EMT to build on its strengths while reshaping its product portfolio for the future of digital print finishing. Herold reflects on his own time with EMT, noting that Printing United 2025 marks his third show with the company. Since joining just over two years ago, he has helped lead EMT through a significant strategic shift—from being seen primarily as a custom engineering company to becoming a developer of scalable, standardized solutions for a broader market. The company’s reputation for durable, precise, and adaptable systems remains, but its focus has expanded to include products designed for general commercial and direct mail printing as well. At the center of this evolution is EMT’s new Vera cutting platform, unveiled at the show. Herold describes Vera as the embodiment of EMT’s “listening tour”—a process of gathering customer and partner feedback to design equipment that addresses real-world needs. The system combines EMT’s high-speed web handling expertise with a compact, powerful architecture capable of creasing, scoring, punching, pin-feeding, sheeting, chip cutting, and stacking — all within a small footprint. The Vera, he explains, represents a new chapter for EMT, moving the company beyond its transactional print roots into broader commercial and direct mail markets. Partnership and collaboration, Herold emphasizes, are key to EMT’s success. The booth features integrations with Horizon, SpencerMetrics, and other OEM partners, showcasing how EMT systems connect seamlessly within diverse production environments. He credits CEO Mohit Uber for fostering a transparent and open corporate culture that encourages strategic alliances and data sharing across the industry. EMT’s commitment to interoperability includes open data interfaces that allow customers and partners to access machine information for dashboards, performance analytics, and workflow optimization. Herold reports that the response to Vera at the show has been overwhelmingly positive. The booth achieved, in one day, the level of customer engagement and interaction the team had expected over three days, with visitors praising the machine’s reliability, usability, and performance. For Herold and the EMT team, this strong feedback validates their direction — combining 85 years of manufacturing expertise with a renewed focus on innovation, collaboration, and real-world application.