Anthony Locicero, Associate editor03.10.21
Chip Smith, president of Marshall & Bruce – with the support of his brother, Dudley, VP and sales executive – recalibrated his Nashville business from primarily a commercial shop to a packaging producer.
Smith said he increased his nationwide base of clients in such industries like health and beauty, personal care, and office supply to 80% of his packaging and blister card output and maintained 20% of his commercial work.
Marshall & Bruce added a Koenig & Bauer Rapida 106 41-inch seven-color press – his fourth from the sheetfed offset press manufacturer.
“This new powerhouse press is supporting our growing packaging market and is giving us more output, more efficiency, and a broader degree of capabilities than we’ve had before,” said Smith. “In the past year, it has doubled our job productivity over our previous press because we’re able to run jobs through in one pass rather than two.
“The new Rapida 106 press is advancing our goal of providing better efficiency, productivity, and quality, as well as even faster turnaround and producing high-end critical color jobs,” Smith added. “With our packaging customers, we’re seeing shorter run lengths due to better inventory management and skew proliferation. An ongoing trend is toward more versions of a particular carton so we’re faced with needing to answer that challenge of faster makeready and improved efficiencies.”
