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North Star Printing Makes Bold Move into Short-Run Packaging Market with Varimatrix Diecutter

North Star Printing, a high-end catalog printer in Spanish Ford, UT has taken a giant step toward expanding its presence in the Salt Lake City-area market for short-run packaging with the installation of a Varimatrix 105 CS (cutting and stripping) die cutter from Heidelberg. The installation ends the company’s practice of outsourcing the majority of its packaging work, resulting in considerable annual savings for North Star.

“We were outsourcing the majority of our diecutting work,” Foster said. “Bringing it in-house likely will save us between $150,000 and $200,000 annually. It’s an opportunity we wanted to pursue aggressively because no one else in the Salt Lake City area is doing short-run packaging at the moment.”

The shift in focus came about, he explained, when North Star’s salespeople went to the company’s top 50 clients and asked them what they liked and didn’t like about North Star’s service, and discovered that many of them wanted to use North Star as a single source provider for their commercial and packaging work.

“We’ve refined our focus on short-run packaging for pharmaceutical, neutraceutical and multi-level marketing clients, for many of which we already do commercial printing,” said Neal Foster, company president.

A longtime Heidelberg customer and one of the most “Prinected” print shops in the nation, North Star installed a Speedmaster CD 74 5-color press with aqueous coater and Axis Control color measuring system in 2009 to take advantage of its numerous Prinect modules. With the renewed focus on packaging, the company plans to optimize its extensive Prinect workflow for packaging.