Soon after we started the Bindery Success Blog, I was discussing this new ‘blog’ stuff with a colleague of ours who owns a sizable trade bindery operation. He asked, “So, what are you going to do when you run out of stuff to talk about?” Well, nearly 200 Bindery Success Blog articles later there are still plenty of ideas in the pipeline.
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Rodrigo Castellanos of Offset Universal, a printing company with an extensive perfect binding and saddle stitching operation. Although his company focuses on publishing and printing books for direct clients, their bindery equipment capabilities led them to do trade bindery work for numerous printing companies throughout Mexico. He offers insight on ways to stay productive and competitive in our ever-changing industry especially with regard to the perfect binding aspect of the business.
Want to find out if your next interviewee for a bindery department opening is a good candidate? Try this experiment. Show them a piece of bindery equipment and briefly explain what it does. Then pause for a few moments and ask them, “What’s on your mind?” If they answer, “I was wondering what else I could do with it,” then you have a lifer who is perfect for bindery work.
My first day in the printing industry made me feel like I was one step closer to being a rock star. I had moved to New York City in the late 70’s, telling my parents I was going there to attend college. The real reason was that I wanted to join a rock-n-roll band, get a record deal and tour the world. You had to go to New York or LA to make that happen.
If you manage a post-press operation, you know how easy it is to be pulled every which way by the daily details of running, maintaining and scheduling a mix of bindery equipment. Throw in an equipment breakdown, a personnel issue, or a snow storm and your headaches multiply.
I’d wager that the real story of our work life isn’t in the bindery and printing jobs found on our resumes or posted on our LinkedIn profiles. What makes us who we are is more often found in those long-forgotten jobs we don’t bother to include. Other times it’s the story behind a job that carries the real meaning and lesson, often in ways we don’t expect.
Reading bindery equipment instruction manuals (or any manual for that matter!) can be a chore. It’s work to learn something new. For the writer of the manual, it’s often hard to clearly convey a task in the written word. And sometimes as readers, we find ourselves trying to understand pages that might be poorly translated from another language.
Many years ago as I was running a folding machine, I bent over to pick up the next lift of paper, only to discover that I had two different shoes on. Clearly this was a sign I was in a rut and it was time for a change!
When it comes to change, humans are an odd lot, and not just in the printing and bindery industry. Who among us has not, at some point in our lives, resisted a personal or professional change that was imposed upon us? Yet we know full well that the world, especially technology, is constantly and rapidly changing, mostly for the better.
There is nothing more frustrating and costly in the bindery than finishing up a beautiful job and having it rejected due to transit damage. This type of damage refers to those scratches, smudges, tears, offset pages, bent corners, dented edges or soiled product that happens during shipping. There are two popular misconceptions about packaging printed materials which when understood, will help you avoid costly damage to high-value printed material.