NorthAmerican Reproductions specialized in print-on-demand book and manuals for the educational, publishing and manufacturing markets and in an interview with PrintWeek, ArborOakland sales and marketing VP Don Cartwright said, "They have a couple of key accounts that are the bulk of their business and we will be continuing that."

Cartwright added: "The big advantage of this acquisition for us is their bindery business - they focus on extremely high page count, short-run work and so their bindery area featured a coil binder, a 30-station collator with saddle stitcher, a short-run perfect binder and a small folder. All this will allow us to round out our print-on-demand center so that we can have a separate workflow for the print-on-demand business than we have for our traditional print work."

Cartwright explained that in the past, ArborOakland had the ability to do digital print-on-demand, but had to then put that work into their offset bindery stream. "Now we have a total print-on-demand center that's self-sufficient," he said.

The NorthAmerican acquisition comes on the heels of ArborOakland's December purchase of Royal Oak, Michigan-based Tri-Color Photographic, which specializes in producing large-format digital POP, banners, floor displays and museum quality prints for the healthcare, retail, manufacturing, educational and advertising markets.

Continuing a recent trend in the US market, Cartwright noted that both NorthAmerican and Tri-Color were family-owned and run businesses that opted to sell in the face of a rapidly changing commercial printing landscape. "In both of them we kept most of the employees and in Tri-Color's case we kept every single employee, including the original owner," he said.

Despite the consolidation trend taking place in the North American market, Cartwright said the overall commercial printing business seems to be on the upswing after being flat for several years, "We do see a revival taking place but we also see a transformation of the industry from being strictly static ink on paper to an interactive, variable and being supplied through multiple channels" he noted.