SOURCE - The Target Report
We are inundated with printed images. While the steady decline of newspapers and other forms of print gives a general societal impression that print is a dying industry, the truth is that we are surrounded by more print in more places on more things than ever before. The use of printed images in our environment has proliferated. Vomela
Enabled by continual development of digital print technologies, almost everything we use has images printed on it in one form or another. Just about anything we can imagine being printed, can be printed, and is. Online ordering systems drive evermore printed editions of one. (For more see: The Target Report: On-Demand Print & Merch is BIG Business for Private Equity – November 2024.) In our malls and shopping centers, entire retail environments are created, and recreated, again and again, in short time, with the use of printed graphics. Cultural venues, such as museums, are rich with graphic displays that keep up with the times and changing exhibitions. Tall buildings are wrapped and draped. Vehicles of every sort carry branding and messages.
Private Equity Investors Believe in Print
About ten years ago, one of the leading partners in a well-known PE firm that invests in the lower end of the middle market told me that they would not even consider an investment in a company that provided marketing-related commercial print services. Too risky. Old technology. Messaging is moving online. No potential for meaningful returns.
Vomela
What a difference a decade makes. Print has evolved into a multi-faceted visual communication industry that eagerly applies graphics to almost every surface in any location, with incredible images, rendered in high fidelity, and in quick order. In January, that same PE firm, The Riverside Company, announced its investment in The Vomela Companies. The smart money has rediscovered print, or as it is now more accurately described: visual communications, or specialized graphic solutions, or visual solutions, and other such non-print monikers.
Visual Communications on the Move
The Vomela Companies, as a whole, represent an incredible range of printed graphic capabilities. The company’s slogan is “Big Ideas, Any Surface, Any Scale.” The company is now comprised of multiple divisions, with over 1,300 employees and more than 20 locations across North America.
Core to the company’s success over the past several decades has been its transportation group. The division prints and installs graphics on fleets of trucks, motorcoaches, trains, buses, delivery vans, and cars. Founded in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1947, Vomela enjoyed a close relationship for many years with the 3M company, specifically working together in the development of techniques to print on pressure sensitive vinyl stocks and die cut unique shapes for custom decal applications. According to company history, the 3M company was the major customer of Vomela and dominated its manufacturing capacity for two decades up to the early 1980’s. That relationship led Vomela into the fleet business, for which it provided decals for truck fleet marking as well as specialized decals for the automotive and motorcoach markets as an OEM supplier.
In concert with 3M, Vomela’s dedication to develop durable custom decals for the automotive manufacturers gave many cars a unique style that was only achievable by the application of printed graphics. There were, of course, the usual racing stripes and big bold lettering, but some decals went much further, became iconic emblems, and defined a brand.
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