NO SIGNS OF STOPPING ▲David Carter, business development manager of DecTek Introduce yourself and your role at DecTek I’m David Carter and I look after the commercial management within the DecTek business. This takes me to all different areas of the business from manufacturing, right the way through to pricing strategy and some of the overall business strategy as well. And where did the name DecTek come from? So DecTek was born 20 years ago by the passion of our managing director Mike and it stands for Decal Technology. We started off as a resin doming business making resin domed labels and trophy inserts for a variety of markets so that’s how we started life. But we’ve grown to be rather more than that over the last few years. Can you give us a bit of an idea of the structure of the company? Yes, so DecTek is our umbrella brand, the manufacturing facility and the financial side of the business. Then we’ve got DecTek Trade Print which is our trade entity purely focused our on trade clients, and then we have Big Bang Print which is focused on our direct -to-end-user business. From a sales and marketing point of view, they’re entirely indepentent entities but we all share the same equipment portfolio in terms of our manufacturing capability. We’re very keen that our trade customers are kept completely separate and they’re not going to run into competition issues against our end-user business. It’s really important to us that commercial separation exists between the two parts. What services do you offer to a trade business that could be scaling back what they are producing in-house? Essentially the DecTek business has grown significantly in the last five years. As I said, we started as a doming resin business but we now have a massive capability. Everything from traditional paper printing, right the way through to packaging, right the way through to fabric printing, signage, pretty much anything you can think of on flat material, we can print to it and make something from it. We even have laser cutting ability within the business as well. So we are a one-stop-shop really for specialist print and for customers to be able to grow their portfolio. Where they might be selling a car wrapping portfolio to a company, that company will no doubt buy other print matter and materials, so that customer who’s supplying the wrap, can now supply all of that customer’s print requirements using our services. As well as being a solutions provider, a big part of what you do is consultancy. You’re not just an online shop front. Do you want to tell us a bit about that? Completely. Rather than being a faceless entity, we are real people and we’re here to help. We see ourselves a bit like the ‘A Team’ of print. If you can find us, which is relatively easy, we will come and help you to make your project a success and delight your customers. That’s what it’s all about. It’s creating really unique solutions that you can sell to your customers that are unique to your business and that gives you an edge rather than just selling standard ‘me too’ products that anyone can offer. Can you tell us about what some of the main focuses are for DecTek going into 2023? This coming year we’ll be increasing our capabilities. That’s some -thing we don’t stop doing. We’re constantly adding more equipment to our portfolio. So as an example of that, we’ve just taken delivery of a direct-to-garment printing 30 A company that shows no signs of slowing down any time soon, we caught up with David Carter, business development manager of DecTek to see what the focus will be for the business in 2023 and beyond email: news@printmonthly.co.uk March / April 2023 - Issue 341 Q & A / DAVID CARTER, DECTEK
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