Farbendruck Weber, situated in Biel, Switzerland: Where top quality print products are produced which to 'appeal to the emotions'. By Kurt K Wolf
Lüscher adds to Swiss perfection
If you ask in Switzerland which offset printing company has a reputation for producing the very best printing quality for luxury goods such as watches, jewellery and fashion the answer will always be 'Farbendruck Weber'. Among the many factors contributing to this reputation is that Biel lies in the middle of the Swiss watch making industry and the company has specialised in this field for more than half a century.
The saying, 'Success has many fathers' proved once again to be true during my visit to Farbendruck Weber in Biel, where company president André Ducommun met me with his technical director Michel Masson.
It all began when Erich Weber realised he could make good money from top-quality watch catalogues and that excellent printing predicated outstanding reproduction. When his own printing works expanded he, therefore, took over two high-quality reproduction companies in Biel, Gravor SA and Actual SA. Both specialised in repro printing for watch, jewellery, fashion and photographic publications. Global marketing of the exclusive printing products gained Weber clients from all over the world, particularly France. André Ducommun commented, 'Biel as a city in which both French and German are spoken has the enormous advantage of allowing us to seem a German Swiss company to our German-speaking customers and a French Swiss one to those who speak French.' Over the last 30 years orders from the fashion capital Paris have constantly increased and the French couturiers became permanent customers together with the top Swiss watchmakers. After Erich Weber's death in 1993 the Weber family sold the three companies in 1999 to the French Partenaires Livres Group, which improved market access in France still further. The new owner combined Gravor, Actual and Farbendruck Weber into a holding company called Partenaires Edelweiss SA, run by André Ducommun.
Farbendruck Weber now has about 300 staff and generated turnover in 2001 of 65 million Euros, about 80 per cent of it for the export trade. As jobbing printers the company has no publishing house behind it and has to rely on printing and associated goods and services to maintain its position on the market. 'With a share capital of E13,5 million and our current cash flow we are comfortably placed on the market,' said André Ducommun of the solid foundation his company enjoys. 'Even so, we too must fight for every order these days.' He views state-of-the-art technology and high efficiency, as well as an international reputation as a quality printer and the large range of goods and services offered as reasons for the firm's success.
'Efficiency is the most important factor,' he added. 'We're not merely efficient when we use the latest technology. Our quality is famous and we need this technology to maintain both our quality and our cost leadership.'
Thanks to this efficiency Weber is nowadays successful in four different product fields - the printing of brochures, of catalogues, of newspapers and of books.
In the brochure printing field the company prints millions of brochures using web offset for large Swiss foodstuffs retailers such as Co-op and Migros, as well as department store chains such as Globus.
Four different types of catalogue are distinguished between in the catalogue printing field. Mail order and house catalogues for companies such as Canon, Hermes, Sunstore, VAC-Mode and parts of the large Veillon catalogue. Watch catalogues for top makes such as the Swatch Group which manufactures the world-famous Breguet, Blancplain, Omega, Longines, Tissot, Calvin Klein and Swatch ranges, Tag-Heuer and Cartier, to mention only the best known. Furniture catalogues for various clients and countries. Travel catalogues for Swiss and French companies, including all the catalogues for Frantour, the French market leader. In the newspaper field the company prints 20 periodicals of various kinds ranging from those for the general public to company internal publications such as that for the staff of the five-star Ritz Hotel in Paris and company magazines for the watch industry.
In the book-printing field the company prints luxury books such as the 400-page A5-size book on the history of the Cartier company bound in red-brown leather with gold embossed print and its own slipcase. For Dior the company printed a 120-page book of their handbag and leather ranges. Lacoste had its company history printed in book form by Edelweiss.
There are excellent reasons for Paris fashion houses to have their printed material produced in expensive Switzerland. One is that Weber offers single-source production, has bought only the best and most efficient machinery for decades and knows how to produce top-quality goods thanks to their experienced craftsmen.
Director Jean-François Perret gave me a guided tour of Gravor SA, sited across the road from Farbendruck Weber. The prepress works with 30 employees only sends part of its production to Weber and is very much a specialist in reproducing catalogues for watches, jewellery and fashion and photo books. Hard copy and coloured slides are digitised on Celsis 250 drum scanners, which still produce the highest possible quality. In the photo studio watches are photographed using a Sinar digital camera for use in the adverts of the large makers. 'We often take three separate pictures of the watch, the face and the crown and these are then joined together perfectly by our staff,' stated technical manager Jean-Pierre Bogni, revealing the secret behind the perfect enormous watch pictures used in coloured adverts in glossy magazines all over the world. The adverts produced by Gravor (and Actual) are no longer sent to agencies all over the world as film. Nowadays, they are digitally transmitted. Experts with decades of experience sit at 14 Mac workplaces; two Iris and one Polar proofing machine are used for proofing.
Clients seeking top quality printing want reproductions made at Gravor or Aktual. Clients often supply their own page data produced elsewhere for exact checking in the prepress stage, so that there are no unpleasant surprises when printing.
The prepress stage at Weber has five technical work preparation workplaces, two reject stations and eight Mac operators. The company uses Fuji Celebrant Workflow, which can deal with PostScript and PDF, as well as the French Tiff-It formats without difficulty. Five parallel RIP Stations ensure that the contract proofs on the Iris, the static proofs on the HP plotters and the plates on both Lüscher XPose! 160 computer-to-plate devices produce identical results. Patrick Savioz, prepress manager, praised Celebrant, 'As the workflow is page-oriented, we can correct or replace individual imposition pages and need only 15 minutes for a new plate.'
Farbendruck Weber was the world's first printing works to install two fully automatic Lüscher XPose! 160 plate setters with dual plate loading system in mid-2000. It replaced a Gerber system. The change was made, because the company wanted to switch to thermal technology and the Lüscher system was over twice as fast. Over 90 per cent of the plate volume now runs through the two XPose! 160 computer-to-plate as opposed to 30 per cent before the change. That's a total of 30000 plates annually, or an average 120 plates a day, produced by just three staff in two shifts.
The Fuji Brillia NH-NI is used, a negative plate able to produce millions of copies after burning in and, therefore, employed for all the printing machines. The XPose! 160 automatic machine consists of two computer-to-plate with an automatic plate loading system between them. The device loads a plate in the correct format from five cassettes, removes the intermediate paper, lifts the plate up using a cylinder and moves it into the XPose! 160. After exposure the device removes the plate and places it on a conveyor for development. From there, the plate moves through the pre-heat-station, the developing machine and finally to the exposure station. 'We bought the best solution available, the Lüscher XPose! with its unique design,' explained André Ducommun. 'The reliability of the inner drum, ground exactly circular and not subject to the problems associated with external drum computer-to-plate, together with the thermal laser exposure method bringing economical diodes very close to the plate are features of this device. It is at the same time one of the fastest on the market. The change to this CTP system saved a lot on costs, as well as improving makeready times and improving the quality.'
In the machine room four Roland printing machines are in use. One two-colour Roland 702, one four-colour Roland 704 and one new six-colour Roland 706 that has just been installed, all three with coating units, as well as a five-colour large-format Roland 905 with coating unit with a 1020 x 1420mm sheet size.
The company employs MAN Roland machines in the web offset field too. There are three 16-page Rotoman 2000 machines in the 630 x 965mm format in use, each with five double printing systems making them five-colour, so that special colours can be printed web offset. In addition there is a 48-page Lithoman 2048 machine with four double printing systems in the 1260 x 1460mm format. 'In choosing MAN Roland we not only have the best printing machinery available, but enormous flexibility in in-line production with glueing and folding, particularly in web offset printing - even with paper up to 170gsm,' said André Ducommun to justify his product loyalty.
Further processing is also done in-house. There are seven folding machines, four gather-stitching machines, four layer folding machines, two Müller Martini adhesive binding lines with up to 24 stations, three cutting lines and inkjet devices for address printing, numbering and postal management purposes. This means virtually everything printed can be processed in-house. The company co-operates with one of 15 group subsidiaries in France for book printing.
