Roger Kirwan is now owner and managing director of Foxcil, a specialist digital label producer on Sydney’s northern beaches. The company is predicated on the notion that small is beautiful.

Known here in Australia for roles including general manager of national operations for Geon, Kirwan’s origins are in New Zealand, where he began as a chartered accountant at PriceWaterhouseCoopers after graduating from Otago University.

Kirwan first made contact with manufacturing when he spent time in the UK as a contract accountant, and then used this experience as general manager of Mainguard Packaging, a large printer of flexible packaging, on his return to New Zealand. He has been moving in print’s orbit ever since.

“I just fell into print,” he says.

“I was working in the UK, and came across manufacturing best practice through accounting. I became fascinated by printing, how it is made and how it works.”

Following four years with Mainguard, Kirwan took on the position of general manager at Kiwi Labels, which lasted for about 15 years.

This was followed by a stint at Pacific Print, then with Geon as New Zealand general manager. He was co-opted to the company’s offices in Sydney as general manager, and ultimately as national operations manager.

So he has witnessed and experienced the ‘big end’ of printing, and especially labels and packaging.

“I enjoyed my time at Mainguard, but really enjoyed all aspects of Kiwi Labels, and was able to bring my flexographic experiences into a letterpress house,” he tells ProPrint.

“I worked with great people there, and it was an interesting time for the industry. Moving to the commercial print world and seeing how it works made me realise that there are still opportunities in labels.

“I have seen both the labels world and the commercial print world. I think the pain the commercial print world has gone through will happen in the labels space. There is a window open for digital labels, but it is already closing,” he says.

That pain includes overcapacity, with too many companies and a shifting market, he says.

He divides the print, and specifically the label market, into ‘big digital’ and ‘little digital’, which are quite separate in their ambitions and possibilities.

 “It is basically the same story as the effect of digital print on the offset space. Digital came in, with small players and bigger players with printers that eventually took it up to conventional print. Over time the market was flooded and prices dropped. That has started in the label market now, and prices will begin to drop there too.”

Small, but smart

Kirwan established Foxcil a little more than a year ago, with a mission to provide digital label and packaging products to both retail clients and the trade.

The company, based in Brookvale, was always intended to operate as a small busi­ness with around five full-time staff.

To assist him he hired a colleague from his Kiwi Labels days, Andrew Thomson, as general manager.

The pair worked well together at Kiwi Labels in Christchurch, says Kirwan, and would provide a solid base for the Foxcil start-up.

Kirwan told ProPrint at the time of the company’s opening, “Foxcil intends to be an internet based supplier of direct-to-consumer labels, stickers, and specialised packaging offerings, and as a supplier of high quality, digital self-adhesive labels and stickers to the print industry.

“The appointment of Andrew to this role will see a rapid ramp-up in the launch of Foxcil.”

More recently, he hired another colleague from his Geon days, Sonia Kushnir, as sales manager.

Now with Dan Steele assisting in print production and his wife Sarah in the office, the business boasts a staff of five.

It may be a far cry from Kirwan’s days at the printing behemoth that was Geon, where there was a cast of thousands, but no less effective for it, he says.

Big digital

Foxcil is a ‘big digital’ company, according to Kirwan, which is categorised by the potential of its digital engines for production capacity.

Foxcil presently uses a Xeikon 3030 narrow-web label press, kitted out with jumbo unwind and rewind, and a future 500mm wide capacity with a Smag e-cutt finishing line.

Kirwan says he was convinced by the efficiency of Xeikon presses when he was at Kiwi Labels, which took possession of the first Xeikon label press in the Australasian region about four years ago.

That decision was made, he says, because the company could see a genuine opportunity in digital labels, and was eventually proved correct.

He thinks Xeikon presses have several benefits, such as FDA approved toners for food packaging, finer print quality than competitors’ engines, the ability to add a strong hit of opaque white, and able to print on virtually any substrate.

“It also offers the model of paying for consumables rather paying for clicks,” he says.

Foxcil, while initially designed as a digital label supplier to both retail and trade, has settled into a role as largely a trade supplier, with a smattering of retail clients.

“We are essentially a trade printer for the industry,” he says.

“We do a lot of work for commercial printers who do not have the facility to produce labels. Less than five per cent of our work is retail work at the moment.”

To assist trade clients, Foxcil has developed what Kirwan and Kushnir call The Box, with a comprehensive sample pack of product types and substrates to demonstrate the company’s abilities. This is not just for their own benefit though; their trade clients are also provided with The Box for their own estimators and salespeople to take on the road, so they can develop their client base for digital labels – printed, of course, by Foxcil.

The Box is essentially an educational device, Kushnir points out. She says, “It gives our clients the ability to show what high quality, original digital labels can do for their own clients, so it is in their own interests to take it on the road and build sales with it.

“We are trying to educate the industry, and the industry’s clients, about the new opportunities that digital labels can provide. It surprises people that we can do one-point type with the Xeikon, and we can offer long runs up to about a million labels. A run of 100,000 A4 sheets can provide 800,000 labels, so we are converting commercial label jobs to digital.”

The company will remain a niche business; Kirwan says, “For very large volume label production, labels will stay with traditional suppliers, but we can offer turnaround times and differentiated products that they cannot offer. We can also work with them if they do not have digital capabilities.”

Digital label production using variable data processing also delivers new possibilities for labels. “There is a call for it coming through,” says Kirwan.

“A vast number of jobs will eventually be around variable data.”

Foxcil handles a quantity of point of sale work, and uses a Roland DG wide format printer for production of other products.

A digital future

“We will always be a digital producer. I have worked with both traditional and digital technologies, and I see our future in digital,” he says.

The company’s next investments will be in finishing upgrades, to provide more capacity and to diversify its product range even further. It recently upgraded its back office inventory, and Kirwan is pleased with its beefed up performance.

“There are more opportunities out there for us,” says Kushnir.

“We have a packaging model under development, which will be quite different to anything else available in the market.

Printed tape is another area we are building. We can personalise tape for packaging, wrapping and other uses.”