Digital BW, The Print

OK people, you lost me. What is it about the paper industry that people 
find so scary? If you know the entire chain from trees to the box of 
paper arriving at your desk, how does it benefit you?

The paper industry works like many market sectors - by contract 
manufacturing. You don't think that everyone who sells a brand of 
pineapple juice has their own factory do you? You don't think that every 
brand of motor oil comes from a separate factory do you? You don't think 
that your Lands' End shirts come from a Lands' End factory do you?

Paper making is by and large a batch process. You can make a batch in 
your bathroom - but not very much, and your batch-to-batch repeatability 
will be pretty bad. We have artists in my town that do just that - they 
make hand made paper and sell it as art. The *lack* of repeatability is 
what they are selling in large part.

This is problematic if you want to sell to a clientele who demands each 
roll or piece of paper is the same as the last one. If you want to sell 
a paper that is largely repeatable from batch to batch, and you want to 
sell it at a competitive price, you are going to have to automate a 
large part of the manufacturing process and make the batches fairly 
large. This takes a fair amount of expensive equipment, and takes a fair 
amount of space. Unless you are able to sell enough volume to keep this 
equipment running 24x7, you probably wouldn't make the investment.

Enter contract manufacturers. These people think they can invest in the 
plant and equipment required and make a profit. They do this by making 
paper for lots of different "manufacturers." The way it works is you 
come up with your recipe for a paper you want, and they use the recipe 
and make that paper for you. There are hundreds of variables in paper 
making, so it's a pretty safe bet that no one is going to duplicate your 
recipe. What you get from the contract manufacturer is a roll of paper 
(a "master roll") that's roughly 1.25m (49 in.) wide by 1.25m (49 in.) 
in diameter and weigh in the neighborhood of 5000 Kg ( 11,000 lbs.). 
Sizes vary depending on the manufacturing line and your requirements of 
course.

Now if you are going to sell paper to the inkjet market, this clearly 
isn't enough. So you take this roll of paper to another contract 
manufacturer and have them coat the paper with an inkjet receptive 
coating. This is a separate market all by itself. There are companies 
that make and sell coatings. There are consultants who act as liaisons 
matching papers and coatings for people. There are chemists who 
specialize in making coatings for hire. And of course you can design 
your own. So you bring the coating to the company with the coating 
machines, and they coat your substrate for you.

When you get done with that, you've got a master roll that's coated. 
Still not enough.

Now you have to convert that master roll into something that an inkjet 
printer can use, and you have to package it into nice pretty boxes with 
brand names and labels. This requires yet another contract manufacturer 
with more specialized machines, including slitters (work down the length 
of the roll) and cutters (work across the width of the roll). And of 
course sheet stackers and various packaging machines.

Now tell me -- what good will it do any of us to know who "actually 
made" the paper? You can't go to any of them directly and buy paper from 
them. First, they aren't equipped to deal with a retail market. Second, 
most of the manufacturing chain is selling a single value-add operation 
at a time. IOW, if you could buy it, it would be unfinished to the point 
where you couldn't use it. Third, the manufacturer who is retailing this 
paper to you can switch contracts at any time based on any number of 
factors. You can't know that any one factory is going to make your 
favorite paper at any point in time. Fourth, contract manufacturing 
firms changes hands from time to time, and deal factories back and forth.

Very few paper companies bother to be end-to-end manufacturers. Fewer 
still in the inkjet marketplace. So why the insistence that "knowing" 
will somehow benefit us in any way?

What you need to know is the company responsible for the brand, and 
their retailers who stock and ship the papers to you. These are the 
people who have to come up with a product that is desirable enough to 
capture some market share. These are the people who have to insure the 
quality of the product, and the batch-to-batch repeatability. These are 
the people who have to back the product and support their customers.

I don't see how knowing more than that is helpful. I'm sure someone will 
set me straight on that though ;-)
-- 
Bruce Watson