Two Versant 2100's Help Moveable Evolve with its Customers

Ten years ago, Toronto-based Moveable Inc. didn’t print annual reports. Rather, the firm focused on what Principal Joe Kotler calls typesetting services—precisely executing charts, tables and page designs for annual reports based upon concepts and sample pages created by designers.
Today, Moveable continues to provide these services—a still thriving vestige of the 30-employee firm’s founding in 1983 as a high-end typesetting studio—but now prints annual reports as well. The reason: as annual reports increasingly are viewed online, more print runs have dropped to the 500 to 2,000 range, the firm’s sweet spot.

Moveable broadened that sweet spot in Fall 2014 by installing the first two Xerox Versant 2100 Presses in Canada. “The beauty of the Versant is that the quality is so good, it allows us to produce a short run and not miss a beat,” Kotler said. “We might have a split run with 1,500 annual reports in English and 150 in French. We’ll do the French on the Versant, the English on our offset press. Our clients are just blown away, their look is so close.”
Printing, both digital and offset, now accounts for about 60 percent of Moveable’s annual revenue of C$4.5 million, with clients coming from “two worlds,” Kotler said: “a Who’s Who of large Canadian corporations like BMO, Barrick, Onex and Telus,” and the creative community of “quality-conscious and detail-oriented design studios and agencies.”
One key to the privately held firm’s success, Kotler said, “is providing a lot of complementary services under one roof.” Applications run the gamut: variable and static brochures, postcards, direct mail, business cards and book comps, complemented by fulfillment services, proofreading, typesetting, wide-format printing and image enhancement and retouching. A sister company, Moveable Online, provides web and mobile strategy and development.
Moveable’s reputation, according to Kotler, is built on “the emphasis we place on quality and service. Once someone is convinced to give us a try, our track record for retention is incredibly high.”

Quality is also a hallmark of the new Versant presses. “With the Versant 2100s, we have removed some barriers,” he said. “There were designers who were hesitant to throw some projects our way, because they didn’t like the fuser-oil sheen on the output from earlier generation digital presses. Now that’s been eliminated and our digital outputs are routinely mistaken for offset printing.”
The Versant’s Xerox-exclusive Ultra-HD Resolution—combining 2400 x 2400 dpi imaging with up to 1200 x 1200 x 10-bit RIP rendering to produce images with four times the resolution of industry-standard 8-bit technology—and the EFI Fiery Print Server, also contribute to the outstanding print quality. Other Versant 2100 advantages include 50 percent greater productivity as compared to Moveable’s previous press (100 ppm vs. 70 ppm), and a greater range of paper stock thickness, Kotler said.
Moveable’s printing revenue has been growing at a rate of 5 to 10 percent annually over the past 10 years. The latest growth spurt is from creatives won over by the Versant quality, as well as from more cost-effective short-run production of brochures and reports, and more short runs of business cards, helped by the wider range of stock types they can now accommodate.
Moveable has used Xerox digital presses exclusively since switching from a competitor’s products in the mid 1990s for a productivity advantage. “What’s kept us with Xerox all these years?” Kotler mused. “The service level is very important to us, and Xerox has a proven track record there. Xerox also has a track record of ongoing innovation. Their machines just keep getting better and better.”
And the Versant 2100 is the latest proof point.