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As our industry expands, those times and places when we all come together are increasingly valuable. Let’s have more of them. By Joan Grace, CEO of Printing Industries New Zealand

Whatever your reason for going to Pride In Print, its impact on the industry has been phenomenal. One night every year, this remarkably diverse industry comes together to appreciate the best in print. Design, pre-press, sheet fed, reel fed, paperboard packing, gravure, label, digital, screen and finishing companies, large and small, from small towns and big cities, servicing local and international markets – they are all at Pride In Print.

The range of submitted work – magazines, calendars, biscuit wrappings, wine labels, annual reports, packaging for beauty products and a lot more is staggering. But we are all engaged in printing, we are all placing an image on a substrate or supplying the materials to the make it possible. Pride In Print brings it all together for us.

I want Print NZ to be like that. I want it to bring the industry together. New technology is forever changing the way we work. New printing processes such as digital printing mean we are no longer the easily definable group we once were.

Taking a broad definition, the industry has close to 5,000 businesses employing 30,000 people with a turnover of $4.7 billion. Harnessing this economic might will give Print NZ the industrial and political clout it needs to be more effective.

In the last issue of Printer News I told you that Print NZ was preparing a business plan that would set out the goals it will focus on achieving over the next three to five years. Part of that plan involves broadening our membership to include any business that places an image on a substrate or supplies goods to such a business. With this new definition in mind we have set some targets that ultimately aim for a doubling of membership by the end of 2004.

But membership numbers won’t increase just because we want them to. Under the business plan Print NZ will be rejuvenating its services to make them both more relevant and easily accessible. We will start by providing greater business related services at a regional level. This will include seminars, business to business networking opportunities and social events. At a national level we will enhance and more widely promote the advocacy, research and promotion activities we undertake on behalf of the industry.

To increase our visibility within the industry and develop a close relationship with members we now have three staff responsible for recruiting new members and providing services to members throughout the country.

I have talked a lot about our diversity. But as businesses in print production we all face similar challenges. At some stage we all need to consider whether to invest in that new piece of equipment, whether to increase our customer base, whether to specialise or diversify. Strange as it may sound, we have a great deal of similarity in our diversity.

Pride In Print celebrates the diversity of the printing industry. Print NZ has to capture it.



Print New Zealand


Building a broad community of the printing & allied industries

Encouraging participation at every level

Actively assisting members companies to be "the best that they can be"

Leveraging the economic might of the broad community into political and industrial advantage