Soyang Europe is enjoying success with some innovative printable floor and wall coverings that it has introduced to the UK market. Digital Printer paid the Accrington company a visit.
Though it started only a decade ago with just one man in Oldham with a credit card, selling banner materials produced in Asia, Soyang Europe can now claim an end-to-end range of digital printing media for all types of applications, a turnover approaching £8 million, and a staff of 14 people at its Accrington site, which has a 6500 square metre warehouse.
‘We sell material that goes onto anything from a small Mimaki right up to the Durst and Vutek machines,’ said managing director Mark Mashiter, who was that ‘one man in Oldham’. ‘We probably touch most printers in the country, and certainly in the grand format sector, because we keep coming up with new products. We are trying to lead rather than follow. We are giving them ideas about what they can do with equipment. We have a big input with some suppliers as well because we are feeding them so much information on areas that printers are trying to develop their business into.’
The company uses a strapline of ‘every surface covered’, and with comparatively recent additions to its portfolio such as G-Floor and Alumigraphics, it is living up to that suggestion. Floors and walls are all very much fair game for printers these days, and they are markets that are ripe with opportunity, according to Mr Mashiter.
He said: ‘Indoor decoration is now a massive part of the industry. That market is booming – retail environments are a nicer place to go into now, and there’s the home market. We’ve got 20 different products for wall coverings, including pre-pasted media, media that you have to apply paste to, self-adhesive, and three-metre wide. The indoor market is gathering so much momentum. If you see the HP stand at an exhibition, what are they talking about? It’s all Latex and all for indoor decoration. That’s why 15,000 machines have been sold worldwide, purely for doing wall coverings.’
Something special
While Soyang itself manufactures a great deal of material in China – from banners to mesh building wraps, backlit signs to semi-coated PVC, these are fairly commoditised products for the digital printing industry. People are looking for something a little more special these days, and there are also printable fabrics for solvent, UV, Latex and dye sublimation printing processes made by Soyang, augmented by its partnerships with manufacturers such as Better Life Technology in Kansas (makers of G-Floor), fellow US firm FloorSignage (Alumigraphics) and the Portuguese Endutex, which produces a range of eco-friendly textile materials, as well as front and backlits, meshes and blockouts.
Soyang Europe has already become the second largest seller of G-Floor, despite only starting as a distributor in February. It has exclusive distribution rights in Europe. G-Floor is a printable flooring product, about four years old, designed for both UV and solvent inks. It is extruded as a clear, flexible pure PVC product, and provides tremendous image protection, coming with a five year warranty. It is ideal for high traffic environments, and comes in a variety of embossings for different effects, such as wood grain, ceramic, and the circular patterned emboss ‘coin’.
Mr Mashiter pointed out that the fact that it is a reusable product means that it is ideal for companies that are running numerous exhibitions every year. It is not a product that will suit every printer, but for those who do look to work with it, he said the approach should be to ‘think commercial flooring’. He added: ‘That’s expensive so you’ve got to work back from the perceived value in that industry, don’t think digital print. You will end up with the architect specifying it, which is what you want.’
Soyang will be taking the substrate to FESPA next year, where it will exhibit it and Alumigraphics on a separate stand to the Soyang booth. Alumigraphics is ‘a really good product for wide format printers’, he said. It is a durable aluminium foil-based product that naturally conforms even to rough surfaces such as brick, concrete and asphalt. Any of the wide format printing methods can be used to print onto it, with the exception of dye sublimation. There are smooth and grip variants of the material.
‘With Alumigraphics, we see the potential being under-used spaces like car parks. It will go onto any surface, and the graphic looks like a painting. It will last for about 12 months, depending on the number of people that walk over it, but often it’s changed more regularly than that for another promotion.’
Soyang Europe holds about 1.3 million square metres of stock in Accrington, with an in-house slitting facility for converting rolls of material. The parent company in China has also invested heavily in a new textile production plant that will eventually cover 80,000 square metres.
